Jones Beene wrote:
... not to mention, how many scumbags have been good inventors in the past - Edison comes to mind. Edison was both genius, and the egotistical fool who electrocuted several elephants in a vain and silly attempt to show that Tesla's AC was too dangerous to use in a home.
I never heard about elephants. But actually, Edison had a valid point. AC is more dangerous than DC. If cold fusion home generators ever become common I predict they will be DC because it is less likely to electrocute people. My favorite Edison AC story is that he advocated killing prisoners by electrocution and he wanted people to call this "Westinghouseing" prisoners. The guy was a PR genius!
(Incidentally, why anyone back in 1890 ever imagined that electrocution is a humane method of killing people I do not understand. I suppose it was new and futuristic and people thought it must be somehow better.)
Benjamin Franklin was the first person to electrocute large animals. He tried to knock off a turkey and almost killed himself instead. His description of the event is hysterical. Franklin was a far more important scientist and discoverer than people nowadays realize.
Edison was a jerk in many ways, but many of his faults were a product of his time and common to other people. He was a "sharp" businessman, in the lingo of the times. He liked to cheat people. He never paid for anything he could finagle for free. He ordered the world's best vacuum pump from the University of Connecticut and as far as anyone knows he never paid for it. Apparently they found a large stack of increasingly irate letters from the University in Edison's "files," which consisted of a large chaotic pile of unpaid bills, unopened letters, and so on. As Robert Cringely pointed out, Bill Gates also loves to arrange business deals in which he ends up getting lots of stuff for free while the vendor goes out of business.
Even the Wright brothers, who were two of the most intellectually honest people in history, engaged in 19th-century "sharp" business practices that left a bad taste in people's mouths.
Edison was a complicated person. See Robert Conot, "A Streak of Luck." - Jed
