Edison's Medicine

Today is Thomas Edison's 164th birthday. I just saw him the other day and he doesn't look a day over 125.

As happens every year, the mainstream media spends the day giving a quickie overview of Edison's alleged accomplishments. This year I think it's time I played Devil's Advocate and present a differing view of history.

To be sure, Edison was a great man in his own twisted way and did achieve many things in his lifetime. But he owes many of his achievements to the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla invented the alternating current system of electricity that has become such a benchmark standard in America, people forget there could be any other kind.

But in 1882, it was not so. All our nation's electricity came from Edison's direct current system, and when Tesla popped up with the safer and superior alternating current, Edison - eager to protect his own interests - used every smear tactic at his disposal to generate negative PR for it. Edison paid local children to catch stray dogs and bring them to him (many people's pets were no doubt seized by these overeager kids). In showy circus-like press conferences and demonstrations, he would electrocute these poor dogs before everyone's eyes to "prove" the dangers of alternating current.

(In so doing, Edison stole credit for yet another invention: the electric chair. For his anti-Tesla dog-killing shows, he enlisted two of his employees - Harold P. Brown and Arthur Kennelly - to come up with the apparatus that would electrocute the puppies. Because Brown and Kennelly worked for Edison, and because Edison promoted the device as his own, the development of the electric chair still continues to be falsely credited to Edison in some publications to this day.)

Not satisfied with the pet executions, Edison upped the ante. On January 4, 1903, he arranged a public spectacle in which Topsy, an elephant from the Forepaugh Circus at Coney Island's Luna Park, was electrocuted by Edison's lackies to demonstrate that Tesla's AC was so dangerous, it could kill an elephant. What the crowd of gawkers didn't know was that Edison had already arranged that Topsy be fed carrots laced with potassium cyanide, to ensure that she wouldn't live.

He made a film of the event, and showed it around the nation as part of his scare campaign against Tesla's AC.

Edison was not a terribly bright man when it came to science, and he could not even begin to wrap his head around how Tesla's mysterious alternating current worked. Says Wikipedia: "Edison was a brute-force experimenter, but was no mathematician. AC cannot be properly understood or exploited without a substantial understanding of mathematics and mathematical physics, which Tesla possessed."

Tesla had originally been working for Edison, but gradually came to realize that Edison was stealing his ideas and patenting them. The final straw was when Edison promised Tesla $50,000 if he could work the bugs out of Edison's inefficient dynamo. After a year of hard work, Tesla succeeded in improving the dynamo. When Tesla humbly showed up at Edison's office to inquire when he would receive his fifty grand, Edison reportedly shrugged and said: "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor".


Tesla and many other inventors had already invented the light bulb, or light bulb-like creations, long before Edison claimed credit for it and unveiled his own version in Kentucky at the Southern Exposition of 1883. If we regard the definition of a light bulb as "a vacuum tube that lights up", then consider the Geissler Tube, the Crookes Tube, and the works of Hiram Maxim.

It's generally accepted now that Joseph Wilson Swan is the actual inventor of Edison's bulb. Wikipedia again: "In America, Edison had been working on copies of the original light bulb patented by Swan, trying to make them more efficient. Though Swan had beaten him to this goal, Edison obtained patents in America for a fairly direct copy of the Swan light, and started an advertising campaign which claimed that he was the real inventor. Swan, who was less interested in making money from the invention, agreed that Edison could sell the lights in America while he retained the rights in Britain."

But really, it all goes back to Sir Humphrey Davy, who invented the first incandescent light in 1802, by passing direct electrical current through a thin strip of platinum. In 1809, Davy also created the first arc lamp by making a electrical connection between two carbon charcoal rods connected to a 2000-cell battery. But by the time American citizens flocked to Kentucky in 1883 to witness the unveiling of Edison's electric lights, history was ready to forget or ignore all who had come before.


Interestingly, years before the Expo, Edison had actually lived in Louisville circa 1866-1867. It's said he lived in a shotgun duplex on East Washington Street in what is now Butchertown. Today the Thomas Edison House operates in Butchertown as a museum and tribute to the man. However, it should be noted that there's actually no hard evidence that this house is the exact one that Mr. Edison lived in, even though the historical marker sign out front definitively states it as being so.

Birth of a Light Bulb

One from our retro-living blog Revelation Awaits An Appointed Time:


Some sources, like this one, state that Thomas Edison's light bulb was first demonstrated for the public in Louisville, at the Southern Exposition of 1883.

But other sources, such as this one, says the public first saw Edison's light bulb in a demonstration in his Menlo Park laboratory, December 31, 1879. So which is correct?


They're both correct. Although a few fortunate Jersey citizens first saw Edison's incandescent bulb in his informal sneak-peek laboratory demo of 1879, the first official ready-for-the-world unveiling of the product came in 1883 in Kentucky.

Prior to Edison's alleged "invention", however, vacuum tubes that lit up already existed, since as the Geissler Tube and the Crookes Tube. Joseph Wilson Swan is generally regarded today as the true inventor of Edison's own light bulb, as it was his British patents a year prior that Edison virtually copied verbatim for his own American version. Swan and Edison later buried the hatchet and joined forces, jointly starting up the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company.

Additionally, Edison was beset with lawsuits from Hiram Maxim, who also laid claim to being inventor of the lightbulb. According to the book Edison's Electric Light by Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, there were at least 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Swan and Edison.

Edison merely repurposed the pre-existing idea for commercial purposes, to maximize the amount of light such tubes generated and thus replace gaslight. But even then, his own assistant Nikola Tesla (image below) outdid him and invented the fluorescent light, which was a far superior product.



Sir Humphry Davy invented the first incandescent light in 1802, by passing direct electrical current through a thin strip of platinum. In 1809, Davy also created the first arc lamp by making a electrical connection between two carbon charcoal rods connected to a 2000-cell battery. James Bowman Lindsay created very effective incandescent lamps in 1835, but chose not to pursue the invention, focusing instead on wireless telegraphy.

But by the time American citizens flocked to Kentucky in 1883 to witness the unveiling of Edison's electric lights, history was ready to ignore all who had come before.