Edison was better than Tesla in every way | Locklin on science
It’s super popular among modern tech weebs to lionize Nikola Tesla and not think about Edison at all beyond identifying him with pointy headed bosses. This is insanity. While it’s possible that Tesla was very much ignored until my teenage years, just like the 80s era Yugoslavian propaganda services said, it is certainly not the case that Tesla is getting insufficient credit in current year. He is now extremely overrated. Tesla was indeed a great electrical engineer and inventor. However he is presently overrated; Edison is now underrated. So is Westinghouse, but we’ll keep it to Edison here, especially since Edison is propped up as some kind of villain versus somehow more heroic, rather than simply more lame Tesla.
Tesla was a lone inventor mad scientist type. He had helpers, but by and large he was a one-man band. Indeed the parts of his genius which made it into production, more or less three phase motors, he was employed by Westinghouse as a single contributor. Three phase current was a work of creative genius, but it was also an obvious innovation of the time. This will make ignorant Tesla fanboys mad, but it’s absolutely the truth. Same idea was invented independently around the same time by at least four other men, none of whom had nationalistic-communist intelligence agencies doing PR for them later. Let us name them and remember their equally great deeds: John Hopkinson an Englishman of Great Britain, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky a Russian-Pole of the Russian empire, Galileo Ferrais a Sardinian of Italy, and Jonas Wenstrom a dwarf of Sweden. If Tesla had never lived, there were already four other guys who basically put the same mark on the world and achieved the same thing. In fact, all four mostly forgotten men are even more praiseworthy than Tesla, both as inventors and human beings.
Tesla is given all kinds of credit for shit he didn’t really do; radio, x-rays, wireless transmission of electricity. Sure he was tinkering in his lab and came across some weird things, but as an inventor he didn’t get them right, at all. He was definitely very bright; a polyglot, allegedly photographic memory and was in possession of a great deal of personal charisma and charm. He was also great with getting media attention and moved in the high society of his day. He was decent at most things he tried (games, etc), and led a volcel abstemious life.
