Thomas Edison during his lifetime and the 20th century was revered as the Wizard of Menlo Park, a brilliant inventor and visionary who is regarded as the most prolific inventor in American history. He started the first industrial research park, and under his labs developed some of the most significant inventions of modern history including the lightbulb, phonograph, microphone, fluoroscope, motion picture camera, rechargeable battery and many other notable inventions. He also set up one of the first electricity distribution systems and improved the telegraph. He is known for inventions in multiple fields all of which impact our lives significantly.
Nikola Tesla on the other hand, also invented a whole range of devices including wireless communication, mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, x-ray imaging etc but he is most well known for one invention in particular which is the AC induction motor which was the foundation that helped AC electricity get wider adoption.
During much of the 20th century Tesla was relatively obscure compared to the fame of Edison. Only in recent years in the 21st century has Tesla now become a much more famous inventor his name of course adorns one of the major car companies in the world, Tesla Motors. (Note that Tesla wasn’t completely obscure; he was friends with Mark Twain and was featured on TIME magazine for his 75 birthday)
Along with this newfound fame I find that many people have become ‘Tesla fanboys’ that constantly try to push this narrative that Edison was ‘Steve Jobs’ and Tesla was ‘Steve Wozniak’. That Edison wasn’t really an inventor but a marketer and an asshole that mistreated Tesla and somehow doesn’t deserve his fame and that Tesla was the ‘true’ engineer that deserves more credit and had all these great ideas but were overshadowed by Edison.
I think this may be an overreaction towards the fact that Tesla wasn’t as famous during the past century and died destitute. But I think this is also ignoring some inconvenient truths and distorting a bit of history.
First of all let’s get something out of the way: Edison and Tesla yes were rivals. This is because Edison’s company General Electric directly competed against Westinghouse Electric which backed Tesla. This is famously documented in the ‘War of Currents’ series of events where each tried to dismantle the other’s technology (GE pushing DC and Westinghouse pushing AC). I don’t think it was anything personal between Edison and Tesla just the fact that they were business rivals.
Secondly there’s an oft cited story that Tesla was screwed over by Edison when he worked for him in 1884. Thomas Edison himself offered $50,000 and then reneging on the deal, quipping “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor”. This is probably a false story and made up to cash in on the War of the Currents and business rivalry between the two. The company didn’t even have $50k on hand at the time (that was an enormous sum of money back then) and Tesla himself did not write anything about it in his diary, he merely wrote “Good By to the Edison Machine Works” in his diary. So this story is probably fake but widely spread and believed.
And that’s about the extent to which Tesla and Edison have been linked. They were not close, nor did they particularly hate each other and Tesla had the only negative comment in the obituary section about Edison when he passed away. That’s really about it. But this is not limited to Edison as Tesla often had negative things to say about many people. He dismissed Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity quite a bit too.
Historian W. Bernard Carlson notes Tesla may have met company founder Thomas Edison only a couple of times. One of those times was noted in Tesla’s autobiography where, after staying up all night repairing the damaged dynamos on the ocean liner SS Oregon, he ran into Batchelor and Edison, who made a quip about their “Parisian” being out all night. After Tesla told them he had been up all night fixing the Oregon, Edison commented to Batchelor that “this is a damned good man”.
People really blow up the rivalry between the two but the War of Currents was just one brief series of events in each others lives. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying ‘Edison was Jobs, Tesla was Wozniak’ that Tesla fanboys like to push. Edison was better at inventions that were more wide ranging, were more commercial and had more practical use. Edison yes was a better marketer. But I don’t think Tesla was ‘screwed over’ as much as people think. In fact his AC induction motor – his most famous invention – wasn’t even very practical at the beginning. He couldn’t even use it to power the streetcars in Pittsburgh which was a project he consulted on and Westinghouse ended up going with DC motors instead. That’s an epic fail.
During that year, Tesla worked in Pittsburgh, helping to create an alternating current system to power the city’s streetcars. He found it a frustrating period because of conflicts with the other Westinghouse engineers over how best to implement AC power. Between them, they settled on a 60-cycle AC system that Tesla proposed (to match the working frequency of Tesla’s motor), but they soon found that it would not work for streetcars, since Tesla’s induction motor could run only at a constant speed. They ended up using a DC traction motor instead
Tesla’s AC motor design needed to be improved by other engineers from Westinghouse and General Electric before actually being commercially viable.
And Tesla’s other ideas? Wardenclyffe tower? That was unfeasible and unplausible. Many scientists believe that his idea of global free wireless energy would never have worked because there’s simply not enough energy from his concept to be able to power anything industrial at those distances. His experiment at Colorado Springs worked because those were short distances and only used for a couple of light bulbs. But worldwide wireless power transmissions powering industrial machines? Nope that was never going to work and never feasible and he ended up just wasting JP Morgan’s money. After JP Morgan’s death Tesla wrote to Morgan’s son Jack, trying to get further funding for the project. And unlike Marconi, Tesla never believed in using radio waves for transmission and believed in outdated 19th century theories instead, so there’s no solid foundation for his idea to ever work.
His system was based more on 19th-century ideas of electrical conduction and telegraphy instead of the newer theories of electromagnetic waves, with an electrical charge being conducted through the ground and being returned through the air
His other discoveries like X-ray imaging and remote control he never tried to exploit commercially. The oscillators he invented he claimed could create ‘earthquakes’, and his ‘thought machine’ and ‘death ray’ towards the end of his life seem to me like the ramblings of a mad scientist. He even claimed he discovered a ‘unified field theory’ that other scientists like Albert Einstein of the time couldn’t even claim. He’s never had proof of any of these things working nor explained their mechanics behind them working coherently. Tesla seems to hype up a lot of his inventions but have little to show for them.
^ Tesla’s “Thought machine” an idea he had in the 1930s – he had no coherent or plausible explanation behind how this worked, but he loved to tell people about his crazy ideas at his dinner parties. This is what I mean by Edison’s ideas tend to be more practical than Tesla’s hence why he has far more commercial success than Tesla did.
I’m not trying to bash Nikola Tesla too much I think he’s a brilliant if extremely eccentric man (I mean he literally talked to pigeons daily during the last 2 decades of his life). But I do think that the ‘Nikola Tesla’ fanboys tend to overstate his importance online trying to hype him up to be this amazing genius with all sorts of great ideas – when the only commercial invention he ever had was the AC induction motor and even then it didn’t even work well until it was improved upon by other electrical engineers.
Edison on the other hand – call him what you want – but he was legit an inventor during his early days before eventually creating a research lab that he headed (so he’s not exactly Steve Jobs who didn’t code anything at all) and that research lab created some of the world’s most life changing commercial inventions. I don’t think all the Edison bashing I see online is fair to him either. I don’t know how much of an asshole he actually was (not that Tesla was nice to everybody either) but the objective fact was that more life changing commercial inventions came from Edison than from Tesla.
*note about Tesla not being nice, here’s some stories about him:
Tesla could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize clothing; on several occasions, Tesla directed a subordinate to go home and change her dress
So let’s not assume that ‘Edison bad Tesla good’ that I often see online ok? It’s not as clear cut as that.
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