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          Tesla, Edison, and who actually fought the War of Currents?
                                        
I used to think Thomas Edison [1] was a self-aggrandizing business man who
took the credit for the inventions his employees made, and Nikola Tesla [2]
was the real deal—a genius inventor who was actually responsible for most of
our technology based on electricity. But now? Having watched the 4½ hour long
video “Most Everything You Know About Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison is
Probably Wrong [3]” (and yes, it's four and a half hours long!) I'm not so
sure my assessment is correct. The long video goes deep into the history of
Tesla, Edison, and the War of the Currents [4] where it wasn't Tesla vs.
Edison, but Westinghouse (the company) vs. Edison (the copmany).

Tesla might have been a genius, but not all this theories about physics and
electronics were correct and later in life he went a bit … crazy … to say the
least (he fell in love with a pidgeon and said he created incredible
inventions without having actually … you know … built the incredible
inventions). And Edison might have been a self-aggrandizing business man, but
he credited his team and oftem times, his team didn't invent the technology,
but improved upon existing designs (to the point where he learned 6,000 ways
not to build a lightbulb).

And the whole thing about Edison electrocuting an elephant (or at least
animals) to show how dangerous alternating current was? Eh … not exactly. And
he did not invent the electric chair.

Yes, it's a long video, but if you are interested at all in Tesla and/or
Edison, it's worth the time to watch. It got me to rethink how I think about
Tesla and Edison.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl1YpHV2Xf0
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents

Email author at sean@conman.org