Pronounciation of "Waring"

[arbilab]

Edison is widely considered a great inventor but what he really was was a technological P.T. Barnum, a marketing hustler. For all the things he's known for--light bulbs, phonographs, moving pictures--he took (stole) existing inventions, repackaged and promoted them. He actually invented two things. One was extremely useful, the carbon telephone microphone which made Bell's invention practical, otherwise you couldn't have talked to anyone but your next-door neighbor. The other was the media event.

Edison pushed DC for two reasons. One, the dynamo had been around long enough where it was royalty free. He didn't have to pay anyone, just make them. Two, DC requires a generating stations roughly as close as any two Starbucks in a metro, or 1-mile radius, so he stood to sell a LOT of stations. Duhh, never figured out that huge AC stations sold for the same multiple, but there was still that royalty thing. BTW, Tesla let Westinghouse slide on his royalty payments. But he definitely wouldn't have done that for Edison, who screwed him out of a promised $50,000 bonus for solving a problem. (That's right, Tesla at one time worked for Edison.)

Edison wasn't a genius, he was a hosebag. An industrial charlatan before it became a demographic.

 

[supersuds]

That's a considerable exaggeration. Edison was wrong, in the end, about DC power distribution, although there were reasonable grounds for thinking it was the best way to go in the early years. Like a lot of us do, he made up his mind and refused to be swayed by new evidence!

 

Nobody had invented a reproducing phonograph before he did; nor were any of the numerous attempts to make a practical incandescent light bulb really successful before he worked out the high-resistance, low-voltage carbon filament (it had widely been assumed that the filament should be of low resistance.)

 

To say that he didn't deserve all the credit he was given for many years should not obscure his real accomplishments.

 

[arbilab]

It was an editorial exaggeration for emphasis. But Edison was a 'genius' in the same sense Ron Popiel was.

Phonograph was an extrapolation of Morse's repeating telegraph. Motion pictures was an extrapolation of Edward Muybridge; Edison "invented" a vending machine for them. He cobbled materials and process for resistance lighting, but to my way of thinking that doesn't count as "invention". He just paid a bunch of lab assistants a dollar a week to go through every possible combination.

He refused to sell Westinghouse/Tesla bulbs for the 1893 World Fair. Took Tesla about 24 hours to circumvent his lightbulb patent and make his own.

Nikola Tesla was an inventor. Thomas Edison was a salesman.

 

[tomturbomatic]

Post 527076

Did any of you listen to the song in the link? Did you have the volume up enough to hear the steam locomotive's whistle at the beginning of the song? The sound was so much more beautiful than the air horns on diesel locomotives.

Thank you also for the link because there was a link to another song, The Happy Wanderer, a song I remember from my childhood. We heard it on the radio and mom bought me the 45.

 

[sudsmaster]

Interesting thread drift into Edison and DC.

I remember reading, 10 or 20 years ago, that DC current was staging a comeback for certain types of power transmission. Turns out it can be more efficient that AC for transmitting large amounts of power. Something to do with how AC induces a magnetic field while DC may not. I think. Also that with AC, the electrons are always moving at the frequency, whereas in DC they are only moving in the direction of the power transfer (or away, depending on how you sign things).

Others here will be more up to date on the subject.

 

[arbilab]

Yes, I ran across HVDC discussion, only read it once so can't remember 'everything'. High-capacity solid state inverters and rectifiers make it possible. It's still AC going in and AC coming out but transmission is DC.

Two things that destabilize transmission lines are power factor and line inductance, and DC has neither of those. May have other advantages, can't recall.

Edison could have stretched his range using motor-generator sets as transformers and transmission lines running several kV, but think of the maintenance liability of having a 2kV/100V MG every few power poles. By the time a crew got finished rebuilding a subdivision it would be time to start over.

 

[supersuds]

HVDC is useful mainly where transmission is in one direction without a lot of line taps, or where the AC grids aren't synchronized -- for instance, the eastern US and Quebec are asynchronous. It also has advantages underwater.

"Phonograph was an extrapolation of Morse's repeating telegraph. Motion pictures was an extrapolation of Edward Muybridge; Edison "invented" a vending machine for them. He cobbled materials and process for resistance lighting, but to my way of thinking that doesn't count as 'invention.'"

By that standard, the digital computer you are using was no big deal, because it was just an extension of the Hollerith punched card system of the 1890s, which was just an extension of a player piano roll. Sheesh.

 

[peterh770]

Poor Poor Pitiful Me

Well, I met a girl in West Hollywood
I ain't naming names
She really worked me over good
She was just like Jesse James
She really worked me over good
She was a credit to her gender
She put me through some changes, Lord
Sort of like a Waring blender

~Warren Zevon (also covered by Linda Ronstat and Terri Clark)

 

[petek]

Edisons lightbulb

In 1875, Edison purchased half of a Toronto medical electrician's patent to further his own research. That researcher was named James Woodward.

Woodward and a colleague by the name of Mathew Evans, described in the patent as a "Gentleman" but in reality a hotel keeper, filed a patent for the Woodward and Evan's Light on July 24, 1874.

Working at the Morrison's Brass Foundry on Adelaide St. West in Toronto, they built the first lamp with a shaped rod of carbon held between electrodes in an glass bulb filled with nitrogen.

Woodward and Evans were treated as cranks and subject to much public ridicule. "Who needs a glowing piece of metal!!" They attempted, with very little success, to form a company to raise money to refine and market their invention. (Where is the federal government when you really need them?)

In 1876, Woodward obtained a U.S. patent on his electric lamp and, in 1879, Edison considered it sufficiently important to completely buy out the patent from Woodward, Evans, and all their Canadian partners. Woodward sold a share of his Canadian patent to Thomas Edison in 1885.

Thus the electric light bulb became American.

 

[arbilab]

Petek, would make me wrong about 'stealing' the light bulb so I'll take that back on speculation it can be verified. Just because he stole 3 known times doesn't mean he stole EVERYthing.

====================
...digital computer was no big deal...... sheesh
====================

You forgot the Jacquard Loom and the Babbage Engine, the abacus and the Antikythera Mechanism. The evolution of the computer I'm writing on was much more one of process than of practice. And no one person presumes having "invented" the computer. In the light of this, I feel you wasted a perfectly-good 'sheesh'.

 

[supersuds]

The Woodward light bulb had a thick carbon filament.  As I said, many people experimented with light bulbs before Edison; he's the one who made it and the system practical.

 

Arbilab, every inventor builds on every other inventor. I think this is an interesting subject, but I'm not really into taking extreme positions for effect, and in view of your statement that that that is what you're doing, I'll let the matter rest there.

http://home.frognet.net/~ejcov/evans.html

 

[arbilab]

I simply believe that Nikola Tesla was the true genius of the era, and it pisses me off that everyone knows Edison (thinks they do) but scarcely anyone knows Tesla. I am not a scholar of either, layman at best, so I can't give you statistics to make the point more tangible.

 

[kenwashesmonday]

Tesla also had some hairbrained ideas that do not work. As he got older he became downright looney.

Edison is a hero because he was self taught. He was a real "working man's inventor". He was very clever, but he certainly was not highly educated. The products his factory put out were very well built, often overbuilt.

Ken D.

 

[toggleswitch]

I'd say the reason Edison is so revered is that he was a really bad student(think Aspergers, dyslexia, ADHD, etc.) However his mind was sharp and he did not think in a linear pattern.

His genius overshadowed his other "disabilities"

He was probably one of those people was was quite a bit "OFF" , but as well all know that tends to flow with "genius".

 

[arbilab]

Edison had the Electric Pencil (even Popiel couldn't have sold it) and a talking doll which was much too fragile for a child's toy.

Tesla went to Howard Hughes Land. The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future. Even so, FBI/DOD felt compelled to confiscate all his memoirs upon his death, without due process.