Nikola Tesla

[ygolo]

brilliant man! very amazing! it makes me angry that during my early school years they only emphasized edison and mentioned nothing of nikola. through my own efforts, i learned of nikola. its odd to hate someone that is long dead but i kinda hate thomas edison for stealing credit.

I think Tesla is getting credit now for being imaginative and brilliant. It would have been better if he got more credit while still alive. I wonder sometimes how different the world would be today, if more of his project ideas were financed.

Edison was one of my heroes when I was a child, but as I found out more about his style and sources of success, I came to find him far less admirable. As a young inventor, I think, he truly was a great man, but as an older "entrepreneur", he was more of a scoundrel. But I am finding this sort of thing to be true more generally than with just Edison.

The pattern seems to be:
1) A great technical mind leads to going into business
2) Loose morals and lack of scruples are used to create business success
3) The conscience coming into play, later in life, is used to turn business success to philanthropic causes or attempts to move humanity forward

History seems to glaze over the second part of these stories because they are unsavory, and don't really exemplify what we want children to aspire to emulate. I think a large reason why people like Faraday and Tesla didn't become more acknowledged in their own times was that they were easier to take advantage of, while people like Edison were more willing to take advantage. (Faraday, in fact, refused many positions that would have given him more prestige.)

Many go uncredited for the large part.
Faraday i find an excellent example of this, Faraday also appeals to me on a personal level, being a highly principled man, a man of values.

Have you read The Chemical History of a Candle?

 

[Ism]

I recently read a wicked infographic on him by the author of The Oatmeal. It was very informative and I felt pretty bad (understatement) for him towards the end. Hallucinations? Isolation? Lack of recognition?

Man.

 

[Norexan]

World changer. Too much ahead of its time and therefore attacked by mainstream science that days and even now from closed-minded people.