Argument About The Greatest Inventor: Thomas Edison Versus Nikola Tesla

Although Thomas Edison is known for several innovations (including the light bulb), he was also a successful businessman who was able to market and transform ideas into profitable businesses. Nikola Tesla was the other way around. Tesla was a pure inventor with less sense of business, he even worked for Edison and bring some new ideas to his work. In the following paragraphs, their career and life are discussed to find the difference between these two inventors.

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10 1856 in the territory of modern-day Croatia to his two Serbian parents. tesla grew up into a bright inquisitive yet eccentric child who found himself fascinated by the world around him. Tesla once tried to fly by jumping off the roof of a barn while holding on to an umbrella he devised a bug-powered motor using June bucks but had to abort his experiment after a friend decided to eat some of the bugs. Tesla once attempted to generate electricity by revving to cats together which resulted in two very mad cats. On June 6 1884 Tesla arrived in the United States he was hired by Thomas Edison to do basic electrical engineering but moved up to redesigning the direct current generators that ran Edison’s business. Edison offered Tesla $50,000 or about 1.1 million dollars in today’s currency to make these improvements. after completing this assignment Tesla asked about the payment for his work Edison didn’t pay out the money he claimed that he wasn’t serious about the payment that Tesla didn’t understand American humor. Tesla eventually left Edison’s company and partnered with George Westinghouse in 1888 to commercialize his system of alternating current the problem here is that alternating current competed with the direct current which Thomas Edison built his entire monopoly. on thus begun the War of the currents Edison started a massive smear campaign against Tesla an alternating current trying to scare people away from using it he spread false information about it. lobbied against its use and went so far as to electrocute a circus elephant in public basically Edison was a jerk direct-current had plenty of its own faults it was a cause of death of countless children and created numerous house fires also the maximum reach of direct current was about two miles which meant a substation had to be built to continue the current. to this day they would still be building substations if they were going to get electricity across the US Tesla’s alternating current could go for hundreds of miles lights running on alternate currents were bright white unlike dull yellow lights running on direct currents eventually Edison had to give in to the demands of the people and had to go with alternating current. Tesla’s influence spreads much further than electricity he had over 700 patents and came up with ideas such as robots spark plug the electric art land an x-ray device bladeless turbines wireless communication laser technology on lights remote control cellular communicator ad an electrical bath to remove germs radar and much more. Tesla died from heart failure in a room of the New York hotel on January 7 1943 despite his fame and influence on the world he died with significant debts and all alone, while Edison is known as the inventor of the century Tesla’s only acknowledged as a paragraph in today’s history books forgotten and unappreciated thus ends the story of Nikola Tesla genius and inventor.

Thomas Edison was born in Milan Ohio on February 11th, 1847. he didn’t learn to talk until he was almost four years old and in school he often daydreamed and was labeled as mentally slow by his teacher because of these comments young Edison’s mother took him out of school and homeschooled him in 1854. his family moved to Port Huron Michigan Edison sold candy and newspapers on trains, he became a telegraph operator after saving the daughter a station agent from an oncoming train he moved to Louisville Kentucky in 1866 and became an employee of Western Union starting in 1872 Edison worked on the quadruplex telegraph system it allowed telegraph to send and receive four signals at the same time on the same wire. Edison system wasn’t a new invention but an improvement on the duplex system created by Moses V farmer and Joseph Stearns Edison’s first invention was a phonograph in 1877 many people today incorrectly associate the phonograph with a record player Edison’s device recorded sound out of cylinders and was geared as a recorder for the voice, not for recording and playing back music, it was the gramophone that recorded the discs and became the record player that we know today it did not invent the first electric light balls he invented the first commercially practical incandescent light. Edison bought the patent on what was probably the first invented light bulb later he came across Joseph Wilson Swan who had developed and patented a working light bulb. Edison made Swan a partner and eventually bought him and his patent out giving him full ownership of the patent Edison patented a system for electrical distribution in 1880 in order to capitalize on his electric lamps.

It is in use direct current to power his system which had its limitations and when these limitations were made public Edison launched a propaganda campaign to convince people of the superiority of direct current. this war of the currents as it was called brought in the involvement of Nikola Tesla an inventor and rival of Edison who had created the alternating current power generator. alternating current eventually proved to be a better system of transmitting power in 1888 Edison started working on inventing a motion the picture camera, Edison passed on the work of creating the camera to one of his assistants Edison himself had very little involvement in the invention and May 20th, 1891 the Kinetoscope and the kinetograph were revealed moving images were taken with the kinetograph and shown through a peephole on the Kinetoscope.

some of the things that Edison filmed with this early motion picture camera included a man doing tricks on a single gear bike and two cats boxing with each other one of the lesser-known ideas of Edison was concrete furniture it came from a failed attempt at making concrete houses, Edison useful was supposedly a lightweight foam concrete to manufacture various home furnishing. it isn’t shipped out some of those furnishings to put them on display but they arrived broken up this cause Edison to close down his line of concrete. creations for good many today consider Edison to have been an atheist but this is not true Edison had spiritual and religious beliefs that were mixed between pantheism and deism. Thomas Edison never really invented major breakthroughs he took credit for the inventions of others most of his patents were modifications to already existing ideas. Edison was however a very good businessman and use his business skills to improve on current ideas instead of inventing new ones. Edison died of complications of diabetes on October 18th, 1931 while there are lesser-known inventors who have done greater things in Edison and are more deserving of the praises and rewards are given to him. there was no doubt that he certainly had an impact on the world so in the history of Thomas Edison’s

I think this type of competitive spirit drives us forward. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla are two different types of inventors. Edison was a businessman at heart. You had to dig into the nuts and bolts of whatever it was. you were invented so that you could make it into a commercial, marketable product. Edison’s breakthrough was to conceive of this as not just the light bulb, but as a system. Nikola Tesla developed technologies for the transmission of alternating current electricity which brought electrical power to households. He brought to light wireless communication information, which is part of the foundation for how we communicate on a global basis now today.

Who was the greatest inventor, Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla? And I have to say, neither because as inventors they were so different. Tesla and Edison, in the energy space, are just two great inventors. And what we’re seeing is just another huge wave of technology in lighting so electric motors. If Nikola Tesla is known at all, it is because his former boss, Thomas Edison, was one-up early in his career as he perfected the system that would become the backbone of our electrical transmission systems. This was after Edison recruited Tesla in 1884 to work for him, and soon afterward Tesla was tasked with fully redesigning direct current generators to make them more efficient. Several important inventions have been attributed to Thomas Edison, including perfecting the light bulb technology, as well as developing the phonograph and the motion picture. In fact, the name of Thomas Edison is on 1,093 U.S. patents, while Tesla has to his credit just over 300 patents. Nevertheless, this is somewhat due to the fact that Edison established the first laboratory for scientific engineering in which he was able to channel the work of others to create new technologies. The big difference between the two came down to the fact that Edison turned his inventions into commercial successes, while many of Tesla’s innovations were either marketed by others or simply theories that were never sold out. Edison is regarded as a brilliant inventor and entrepreneur, while Tesla has been associated with more of the mad scientist type in many cases.