So instead of one dumb guy founding Tesla and running it into the ground, TWO dumb guys gave everything over to another dumb guy to run it into the ground. Masterful gambit !
Unpopular opinion: Edison wasn’t nearly as bad as people are painting him to be.
Extra unpopular opinion: Musk is, very much, quite similar to Nikola Tesla, as he was an extravagant lunatic, that really liked talking about shit he had no idea about, a bitter loser that prefered playing the victim over accepting responsibility for his failures, and he also had fanboys that mindlessly gobbled up everything he said.
Edit: Hey, cowards, instead of just downvoting me, how about some of you try to help the one brave man that actually tried to prove me wrong, he seems to be bruised from falling flat on his face so many times
Inaccurate opinion more like it. Dude pulled Trump shit and just refused to pay people he owed. Tesla died in poverty while Edison owed him tens of thousands of dollars, sure he isn’t that bad… Its like saying Henry Ford wasn’t an absolute piece of shit.
Education Edison owed him 50k, roughly 1.2 million dollars in today’s metrics.
Several months after Edison employed him, Tesla announced that his work was successfully completed. When Tesla asked to be paid, however, Edison seemed astonished. He explained that the offer of $50,000 had been made in jest. “When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke,” Edison said. Shocked and disgusted, Tesla immediately resigned.
Not just a shitty person but a literal bigot that likely would have followed ford in aligning himself with Hitler, he simply didn’t live long enough and missed it but like 7 years.
I told you. In Tesla’s literal autobiography called “My Inventions”, full text of which you can find here.
I’ve got multiple sources who say the same
None of them are Tesla though. It’s all just a giant echo chamber all quoting each other, sometimes changing it slightly, but noone ever can be bothered to actually check the primary sources.
you’ve got “nuh uh” for a subject better you not I were alive to know first hand
Wha?
How is sourced PBS publication “a fucking pile of garbage”
It doesn’t seem to contain any sources whatsoever. They also say that “Tesla claimed” those things, yet they never say where or when he supposedly claimed that.
The link you sent doesn’t seem to contain anything, but it looks like it’s supposed to link to the magazine “Electrical Experimenter”, so I went ahead and checked its every 1919 issue. Couldn’t find what you’re claiming. In fact I couldn’t find anything negative about Edison at all. Curious.
The earliest source I could find of that claim is a book called “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla”, released in 1944, so a year after Tesla’s death, and it also doesn’t say where that quote is actually taken from. Interestingly, the author of this book claims that upon hearing the request for payment Edison said: “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor”. So quite different to what the PBS article claims. In fact, it seems like the newer the source, the more villainous and bigoted that alleged quote becomes.
You’re welcome to prove me wrong though. If you show an actual, trustworthy, primary source, I will change my mind.
What do you mean “not autobiography”? He literally wrote it.
It is.
My “Wha?” was meant to express that I have no idea what you’re talking about, as that sentence was absolutely unintelligible to me.
Your link doesn’t work for me, but it seems like you’re linking to the very quote I gave, just in the original magazine, not in the book. Why? You’re only proving me right in that Tesla never said it was Edison.
He literally didn’t. Read the author section, it was ghost written.
Ed:
Description
My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla is a book compiled and edited by Ben Johnston detailing the work of Nikola Tesla. The content was largely drawn from a series of articles that Nikola Tesla had written for Electrical Experimenter magazine in 1919, when he was 63 years old. Tesla’s personal account is divided into six chapters covering different periods of his life.
Notably been Johnston wasn’t born until 1927 and Tesla died in 1946 when the author was 16, they never even met.
“Compiled and edited” doesn’t mean written. He just took Tesla’s articles and put them in a book. The words are still Tesla’s. Like, what the hell are you on? You literally linked me one of those articles, and it’s in the literal description you just quoted, so you must know that.
I also don’t think you know what “ghost writing” means.
But most importantly you’re just arguing semantics at this point. Instead of addressing any of the actual points, you choose to argue whether Tesla’s words put into a book count as autobiography. It doesn’t matter. They’re Tesla’s words, and you know it because you literally linked to the place where he wrote them. The only reason you’d do this is if you could see you’re wrong, but were too stubborn and proud to admit it, so you try to derail the discussion by changing the subject. I will not allow that. If you still want to have this discussion, bring some actual points that are relevant, if not, that’s fine by me, but I will not wrestle you in mud.
No I did that so you’d see it was edited to be in a magazine then edited again to be in a book. Do you think many small circulation papers would be willing to slander one of the richest people in the planet at the time? No, seems unlikely right but they still left it written to be Edisons fault, the managing partner of Edison machine works was Edisons right hand man. It also includes that Edison told him he simply didn’t understand American pranks when he really had an oral contract quick is generally enforceable. Let’s also not muddy the waters but forgetting the reason I brought up the debt owed anyway, Edison was a piece of shit who said his favorite movie was birth of a nation…
Defend a shit person with your myopic shitty argument if you want but “I will not wrestle you” in mud.
Apparently Edison wasn’t even the first historical tech bro, but some French dude that eventually killed himself with his “own” invention. And the very first modern techbro was Steve Jobs, who gets cited more and more often as an influence as Elongated Muskrat is becoming more and more far-right.
Was Jobs really a techbro? I usually think of techbros as being fairly political/libertarian (or some interpretation of libertarianism, at any rate), while Jobs was afaik pretty apolitical.
Jobs was the same ilk, he just had better optics at that time. If he lived today, he’d sell out to whatever party they let him to outsource the manufacturing (and coding) to the cheapest possible country. Maybe he’d even double down on the whole AI thing.
Behind the bastards podcast did a four-part series on just how big of a piece of shit Steve Jobs was. We all knew that, but what I didn’t know especially was just how fucking stupid a lot of his business decisions were, coming from his enormous hubris.
A random person was just so upset that there was a post about a topic that they personally don’t care about, that they decided to whine about it in said post.
A lot of people care about cars. In some countries they are required to do anything.
Note that the lawsuit didn’t “determine”, it was settled out of court, so there was no determination of fact.
Instead the parties agreed to let Musk call himself a founder for undisclosed terms. Musk basically paid for people to let him use that title as part of the settlement.
This meme hurts me physically every time it gets reposted. It is not a complete picture of anything, it’s just easy to make people thoughtlessly accept stories if they shit on Elon, who to be clear deserves it. Those two guys were the first guys who started Tesla to bring the work of AC Propulsions to market. They are first and foremost tech millionaires (now quite likely billionaires) and do not deserve idolization either. The engineers of AC Propulsion ie Wally Rippel who also helped design the EV1 are the ones who actually made the technology happen.
The Tesla guys had the idea to put the tzero concept and tech into production shoved into a Lotus Elise and to market it to silicon valley investors as essentially a tech company. Elon was the main investor who went for it, also after speaking to AC Propulsion about putting the tzero into production. The rest is pretty well documented history of Elon being a huge asshole who accomplished very little if anything off his own merit while pushing out everyone around him.
But as far as “These are the real founders of Tesla” goes, the only things they did on their own was suggest AC Propulsions to put the tzero into production a bit sooner than Elon and deciding to create a tech startup to license the tzero technology and put it into a Lotus and style it as a tech company. If you want to inform people of the real heroes behind the electric car and Tesla, teach people about the tzero, AC Propulsion, Wally Rippel, and the other engineers who made the battery electric vehicle a feasible reality.
Perhaps, but the point stands that the specific thing called “Tesla” was founded by these guys, and Musk went through quite some headaches to be retconned as a founder of that thing, so it’s on point to drive it home that he wasn’t even that.
Fair point that “Tesla” isn’t really the great brains behind the original core tech, but that’s not the feather in the cap that Musk was going for, so it’s a bit moot toward the end of undermining his status of “founder” of Tesla.
More, “let’s shit on rich assholes that pretend to invent shit that they had nothing to do with.” Edison at least may have had one original thought with the incandescent light bulb filament, but even that one is debatable. Musk is just another rich fuck, like Edison, that has come along to buy and claim credit for tons of shit he never even tangentially thought of.
This meme isn’t about who invented the technology though. Everyone with 0.25 of a brain knows business majors break out in hives when they get that close to actual work. This meme is about who founded the Tesla Motor Corporation, and who demanded credit for having done so despite having done nothing except show up with gobs of money once their business strategy was already proven.
The business strategy wasn’t remotely proven though, it was still just an idea, no part of the car was designed yet. It was two people who had no idea how to design a car doing the groundwork to start a company working with Lotus and AC Propulsion and then a few months later it was three with Ian Wright lending some business work with the relationship between Lotus and AC Propulsion, then a few months later it was four with Elon who lent money and knew about as much about designing a car as the previous three, then a few months later it was five and they finally had a CTO at least.
As we know edison didn’t invent the light bulb and I found this article by reuters talking about Lewis Latimer who I presume is the black man the other comment is talking about
And just like Edison, Elon swooped in and bought up all their IP and took all the credit for their inventions/work.
Edison did it with Nikolas ideas when he was working for him, and now Elon did it with something that was named to honor the man.
Tesla gets shafted yet again.
I can’t help but wonder what he could have accomplished if someone, literally anyone had continued to fund him, and help him continue his efforts for the remainder of his natural life. Maybe we would be flying around in wirelessly powered personal vehicles. Who knows? But the ideas he had led to some of the most significant advances in technology for years. Pretty much our entire modern life is thanks to Tesla’s inventions, either directly or indirectly.
Even something as simple as AC electricity delivery… What a genius. Easily on the top of my list of best inventors.
His personal life and some of his opinions there may have been a bit problematic, but it would be difficult to deny that he was a brilliant inventor.
He was, but not due to his OCD. He just straight up hated women. A bit more so than every other man at the time. His autobiography gives his opinion. He hated women, especially if they wore pearls. Which may have been his mental illness flavoring the hate. He also fell in love with a pidgeon. Can’t really blame the fella. Pidgeons are very social animals. Best bird to have as a pet.
It’s incredible. Musk held all the aces, Tesla, SpaceX, Crypto (debatable). He was viewed as a pioneer, as a philanthropist. But it seems social media fucks up every one of us. Image Nixon, it would have been immensely insightful if we had social media back then EDIT: Nixon would have been a smart Trump, fuck that timeline
It really is incredible, the potential place in history he pissed away. But I guess you can’t end up a multi billionaire if you’re the type of person that knows when it’s OK to stop.
Yeah, there were a few people who knew better that were telling everyone, but no one listened and everyone in the world was lining up to kiss his ass. Putting him in various popular movies and shows as the greatest luminary of our time. While people who knew him were writing credible reports that he is just a very lucky douche who is also a giant megalomanic.
Can’t imagine being his first wife and having her experiences and sharing those experiences and the world seeming to gaslight her that he’s actually a brilliant flawless man.
Don’t forget Marconi, he was also a deeply screwed-up individual who betrayed many along the way and thus was undeserving of the Nobel Prize he did receive.
Marconi basically used the patent system to raid British research institutes, violating each and every gentleman’s agreement along the way. And he did it with money from the British postal or telegram offices, who he unceremoniously dumped on the eve of unveiling his wireless contraption.
And Ray Croc didn’t invent McDonald’s, but poured the foundation that McDonald’s is built on. I place Musk in a similar, although not entirely the same, category.
Reasonable minds feel free to disagree, but I’ve got to admit that I’m shocked to see the lemmy community rally around the defense of Ray Croc of all people.
My brain somehow read the title as “Tesla was the Elon Musk of his era,” and I got so mad for a split second that I think I may have an aneurysm to deal with in 5 years.
Yeah people are desperate to believe ‘Edison evil, Tesla jesus’ it’s so weird. I get that it was like a cool fact online twenty years ago but there have been so many actual historical documentaries showing how complex and interesting the real story was.
Truth is neither of them invented anything from scratch, - AC generators, motors (useless), transformers, and lights were in use before Tesla even began his big invention. He was a name in a long list of people who worked together understanding the newly emerging field of electronics - if Westinghouse or Barrington had made outrageous claims to allure conspiracy theories then they might have got the Tesla treatment by thy internet instead and we’d only hear of Tesla in the science museum while they’d be regarded at saintly heros of science.
I like Tesla but there are so many interesting stories
if Westinghouse or Barrington had made outrageous claims to allure conspiracy theories then they might have got the Tesla treatment by thy internet instead and we’d only hear of Tesla in the science museum
Hey now, you get to hear about Westinghouse plenty in the railroad museums. A variation of the Westinghouse brake design is still in use on modern trains to this day
electrocuting an elephant to death, and for no better reason than tabloid advertising, kind of stands out in the historical record
that’s not to say Edison was PURE EVIL, just that I always remember the elephant alongside the more humanizing factoids. [Once, he asked a math student to find the volume of a lightbulb. The student started doing all kinds of caliper measurements and geometry calculations. Edison just filled the bulb with sand and tipped it out into a measuring cup]
Except in realityit seems he was against the elephant being killed but said electrocution would be more humane than the hanging which had happened to ‘murderous mary’, his opinion being something the aspca also supported.
The assholes in this story are the themepark owners that upon being unable to sell Topsy decided to kill her as a spectacle to gain publicity, A previous attempt elsewhere to electrocute an elephant had failed so they also used other measures. They poisoned her. Electrocuted her and strangled her with a steam powered winch.
They did use locally supplied power from the Edson Co but this was because it was a decade after war of the currents and Edison was the main supplier of AC to NYC, they certainly weren’t trying to promote its danger. Plus he no longer owned that company, he’d sold to GE and it still used his name.
The Edison film company did film it but again no evidence the man himself was involved, they filmed short clips of specticals and news events which could be viewed in a slot machine. It’s upsetting but people were a lot less caring about animals back then, it wasn’t especially shocking that this happened or was recorded.
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