Hi, welcome back to Pods with Nick and James. My name's Nick, this is James.
Hi there.
Today's topic was my decision and we've gone at this a little bit of a different angle.
So the topic today is Edison versus Tesla, not necessarily versus in an aggressive or competitive sense, but what was the difference between the two?
The way that we've gone about this is I tasked James with researching Thomas Edison and took it upon myself to investigate Tesla.
So what were your thoughts after the, I mean you just mentioned that you read a book about Edison. What were your thoughts on Thomas Edison?
Well, it did interest me that he was from reasonably humble origins, but not completely.
I mean, I'm thinking he was either autistic or ADHD, but that's kind of like just a very modernized sort of view on it, but his behavior was not that of a regular child, if I'm honest with you.
He was incredibly successful and in many ways was a, you know what, the weird thing is I think what I've learned from this, the book that I read was The Story of Thomas A. Edison by Francis M. Perry.
And it is a short book, but it did cover the major points of his life and I consider Thomas Edison to be more of an innovator than an inventor.
An inventor like invents like an entirely new object. What Thomas Edison did was he improved the shit out of, sorry actually, okay if you need to cut that bit, cut that bit.
He improved the heck out of so many different devices and on so many occasions multiple devices multiple times to the point where he just made a lot of technology better.
And he didn't just do that through his team, he would, he'd often get his hands dirty doing it and that's something that was respectable about him.
How did you find Tesla? What was his kind of origin?
I've always had a bit of a fascination with Tesla. I saw him as, for quite a long time listening to the, to the stereotype and the noise around him.
I felt like he was quite a silenced genius and he was certainly was more of the inventor from what you're saying than, than Edison was. He did design things. He would like see things in his head and then make it happen.
And a quote from him is that he has never failed to make a vision of his become a reality.
As in like he would see it in his head and exactly what he saw in his head he would make work, even to the point where he barely ever wrote anything down, which was also part of his downfall.
But yeah, I mean, he's an incredible bloke. I'll start with a bit of his background, shall I? I mean, Tesla was as much as he finished in America.
He was born in modern day Croatia, what was at the time Serbia. So he was Serbian American from a town called Smiljan.
He was born on the 10th of July in 1856. A really incredible thing about him is he had, he had invention as part of his upbringing.
Like his mother would invent little household objects to make her life a bit easier around the house. And that kind of inspired him into inventing his own things. So it was all part of his nature.
That's interesting because that's, although that's not part of Thomas Edison's background, that is something that Thomas Edison did.
So it sounds like his mother was an innovator in the way that she went about making little bits and pieces, which made everyday tasks easier.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he had that as like influence for quite a lot of his youth. But at the age of five, he unfortunately watched his brother fall from a horse and he sustained injuries, which would later kill him.
And this would haunt Tesla for the rest of his life. And it was something that he never truly recovered from. I mean, at the age of five to witness that would be quite traumatic, I should imagine.
Yeah, that's exactly it. Like you're... Yeah, it's so difficult to tell how deep hurt goes. And sometimes people are able to just move on and all too often though, it stops people fully.
Or, you know, just creates a scar which just stays with that person forever. And it's impossible for anyone outside to know just how it's going to, you know, how much it's going to hurt a person.
Yeah, I mean, we've discussed this in the past, like trauma as a child, it's not something that you can cope with. Your brain doesn't know. You're underdeveloped, your brain doesn't know how to cope with that. So it just does.
And quite often you find that 20 years down the line, things aren't mentally right with you as an individual because of the trauma that you experienced as a child. There's nothing that you did necessarily wrong.
It's just that you experienced something traumatic before you were prepared to do so. There's something else about him as a child, which I thought was absolutely different and certainly set him apart from the norm.
He would experience visions, along with like flashes of light. And these visions would go on to become some of his inventions like when he was having these visions, he would see something and then he would devise how to interpret that vision in a way that then he would design something from that.
I mean, that does happen. Like people have visions, whether that's inspiration or revelation.
It does happen. I remember another figure from the early 90s. I can't, this is really annoying, but I can't remember her name, but there was a black female inventor who invented a certain hair tonic after she literally had a dream of the exact formula that she would use that would work.
And it worked reasonably well for its time, which, you know, or at least for her to be able to sell it and then not get chased out of town a month later.
Yeah, like people, you know, it's interesting that different people invent in different ways, but it does sound like Tesla was literally, from what you've described there, a visionary. That's probably one of the defining features, whereas with Edison, it was trial and error.
Massively trial and error the entire time. And like it was, with Edison, it was trial and error and just refusal to give up. Like I'm going to be honest with you, he seems incredibly obsessive, if not borderline sociopathic at times.
But the really weird thing is it seems to be that way, but without the, without some of the nastiness, he just literally would.
Stubborn and wouldn't give up.
Yeah, just he just wouldn't give up and he just kept on.
Advising different ways to work around the kinks and problems until eventually you add what he had for. I tell you what, do you want to, should we, I realised, perhaps we should have talked about this a little bit before.
Do you want to, if I start a timer, do you want to give five minutes on the life of Tesla, then I'll give five minutes on the life of Edison, then we'll start maybe talking a little bit about like comparing and contrasting the two.
Yeah, I mean, be fair, I have just given five minutes on Tesla's upbringing.
Okay, shall I?
Aside from that, I mean, obviously there was the main life of Tesla, but I think we should go on.
When did Tesla get to the States? Like when, because if he was born in Croatia, obviously he must have come over at some point. I'm assuming by boat as that was the, that was the main way at the time. But yeah, like when did he arrive in the States?
1884.
1884. He worked as an electrician and telegraph drafter in Europe.
And then he moved to the US.
Interesting. Okay, so Edison worked on the telegraph as well and that's like a lot. Okay.
There's a parallel there.
All right, cool. Well, I'll go.
Hold on.
Do you know who, do you know, so when he moved to the US, he worked with someone for a year.
Did he work with Edison?
Was it, okay, let me go through some of the companies here. Was it
was it Western Union?
I don't know what company he worked with Edison for a year with. However, he worked directly with Edison, improving a number of his inventions.
However, when Tesla left, Tesla left because Edison was working towards direct current and Tesla's inspiration and ideas were leading him down the road of alternating current.
He felt like there was more traction with alternating current and therefore left Edison's office to branch off in his own direction.
That is the thing, like although Edison was reasonably good to his employees, once Edison had an idea in his head, like all too often, a lot of his patents came out of these sessions where Edison would go, right lads, we've got a problem.
No one's going home until we get this sorted.
And like they're ordering food or whatever.
And he'd be there himself. It's not like he told people to do stuff and then buggered off and left.
But nobody was getting out of Edison's office until they'd figured out around the problem.
Yeah, I mean, there's there's whispers that Tesla left after Edison refused to pay Tesla for an improvement he made to one of his DC dynamos.
But that's hearsay and there's no real evidence or sustained evidence behind it.
But you get this kind of narrative with Edison, where he either underpaid or didn't pay for people's works in his inventions.
The weird thing is Edison wasn't necessarily, he wasn't obsessed with money, but he was careful with how he spent it.
The weird thing about Edison is that he actually didn't ever dress in fancy clothes or and it was only during his second marriage that he even bought a fancy home for his family to live in.
A lot of the time he was just very careful with his money. And I can imagine if he didn't feel that somebody's contribution was more than other members of their team, even if it clearly was.
I can see him being a man of opinion and sometimes not paying people like necessarily what they deserved, which in a way is a massive shame because Edison was made rich because companies, rather than doing what they do now,
like the Western Union company, Telegraph company at one point, asked Edison how much he wanted for his inventions.
And Edison went, I don't know how much this is worth, how much you willing to pay me?
The companies gave him $40,000 and that was when he started hiring a huge number of staff to help him with his inventions.
But it's interesting that he had been the benefactor of companies admitting someone else's his own brilliance, yet he couldn't necessarily admit it of other people, it seems.
But I'll just quickly go through Edison. Edison was born nine years earlier than Tesla in a village called Milan in Ohio.
It was along the river. His mother was a schoolteacher who ended up homeschooling Edison because the local schoolteachers thought he was slow.
His dad was a roofer, weirdly, and used to just kind of, yeah, had a small company himself.
Weirdly, Edison, despite receiving a little bit of education, started selling papers on a train at the age of 12, becoming a train boy.
He did quite well at it and he also understood the importance of desirability of a product.
At one point, the Civil War was going on at this point and a battle had taken place and there were papers with details of the battle.
Edison telegraphed all of the towns along the way that the train was going to go to let them know that a great battle had been fought, but left out all of the rest of the information, knowing that rumors would spread.
Everyone would want to know what happened and at that point, Edison bought all of the papers so that he could sell them.
He did that on credit and the person who sold them to him on credit let him do that because Edison had said what he'd done.
Now, although this is a great business move, it does show a real disregard, if I'm honest with you, for, I guess, I don't know, or a disregard for what could happen.
You could argue that spreading news about a battle in order to profit from it is arguably inciting public panic.
I thought it was a smart move and the fact that a 12-year-old boy did it is brilliant and he's clearly an entrepreneur, but a little bit questionable.
After he'd started doing really well selling papers, he actually set up shop printing his own paper on the train that he works.
There were some freight cars, some of them were only half-filled, so he set up a printing press and produced his own paper.
It was called the Grand Trunk Herald and it was mostly phisically. He later moved on from that one to one later called Paul Pry.
Interestingly, although he most of the time wrote positively, there were a couple of times when he did call people out on the way that they were.
One of the people that he'd called out at the age of 15 saw Edison just going about his business and because he was alone, beat the shit out of him because he'd written some stuff which he disagreed with.
I think that Edison stopped going into journalism at that point, but it does show that it's not like he was entirely protected all his life and did pay for his mistakes at some times.
At one point, Edison saved a kid on the railway tracks and that's how he received his training as a telegrapher.
Apparently, this kid was playing on the tracks. Edison jumped onto the tracks and pulled him off right before a train hit him.
The father of the kid was so thankful to Edison that he taught him how to become a telegrapher.
Weird enough, when Edison was becoming a telegrapher, he would often build his own tools to interact with machines.
He would do this at a gunsmith store. He'd just literally go in and tinker with some of the tools and make little improvements to them which is pretty impressive.
Although he read a fair amount, Edison often said that he often didn't find what he was looking for in books.
He always preferred to interact with the real thing. It's interesting that he moved to Boston at the age of 21 in circa 1868.
It was at the Boston Public Library which helped him massively with his learning.
He went to New York to seek out his fortune but weirdly he couldn't get employed at the New York Telegraph office.
It took him a fair amount of time to find work and it was only when there was a problem with one of the telegraph machines.
He went in to the office, introduced himself as an electrician, was able to fix the machine for one of these telegraph companies.
He was then employed as a consultant for $300 a month which was absolutely massive.
Back then a regular telegrapher made $25 a month and that was considered a pretty cushy job.
It's interesting that Edison went from train boy to part-time inventor on the train.
Some of his chemicals spilled over and set the thing on fire. The conductor threw off the experiment, then all of Edison's alchemical supplies, then the printing press, then Edison himself.
He survived, dusted himself off and got back to it.
He wrote later in a later copy of the paper that the conductor had a scare.
I don't blame him for what he did. I thought that was fairly good-natured.
It's interesting that Edison's rise to fame happened fairly early on in his life.
Although he kept on inventing things like the phonograph, the modern movie camera, he made so many improvements to the telegraph whilst that was still a viable technology.
It's almost a shame that it seems like Edison really peaked in his youth and he kept on working on things and kept on inventing things.
Nothing really sticks out more than his improvements he made to the telegraph and the fact that he kept on patterning things all the time.
It's interesting.
The phonograph is also really interesting that he did make something which could record sounds.
The man clearly was a genius, but the whole Edison invented the light bulb thing is...
Even by admission of the book, he didn't invent the light bulb. He made a practical and usable version of the light bulb.
People had been using light bulbs which short out after producing a brief flash for years and everybody knew that you could make a filament wire glow bright.
He just found the right ingredients to make it work. Although he did so at great expense to himself. He spent a huge amount of his fortune sending his assistants to different countries in order to find the right mineral deposits to get it to work.
Edison's life seems to be quite good. There were times when he underpaid people, but apparently he was fairly well thought of by his employers because he never asked people to do stuff that he wasn't willing to do himself.
But he was obsessive and would work through nights so he didn't necessarily understand why other people wouldn't want to.
Interesting guy. A lot of respect for him, but there does seem to be a slight lack of empathy and humanism in him. Although I do respect that he didn't just take his 40,000 and say, right, well, I'm set for life.
He did reinvest it. He did keep inventing things. He did keep trying to improve things and he did pay people a fair-ish wage even if he did, if I'm honest with you, not give them the credit they're due when they excelled.
To be fair, the book I read goes mildly into the debacle between him and Tesla. It says that they did have a disagreement and that there was a publicity battle between the two, which the papers latched onto.
Edison being the more, well, if I'm honest with you, Edison being a kind of a boy journalist kind of had more of an advantage in that stage.
What happened there? I imagine Tesla's story focuses more on that.
I mean, Tesla was humble, I think is the right term. For example, Edison and Tesla never fell out. They didn't dislike each other. The rivalry was heavily publicized in order to paint a picture one way or the other.
Of course, Tesla not being native American meant that he was at a natural disadvantage. However, Edison quite often would come to Tesla's conventions.
And although Edison didn't go in like the limelight, he wouldn't deliberately go to try and steal Tesla's thunder. On a number of occasions, Tesla saw him at the back of the room and pointed out the fact he was there and even spoke so highly of him that Edison got a standing ovation from Tesla's own audience.
That's interesting because Edison hated that sort of stuff. There was one point where Edison was offered a meal and he said, I can think of no worse way to spend my time than with self-glorification.
Maybe that is the whole reason Tesla did it. It was kind of a teeth-grated backhanded.
Yeah, make him a little bit uncomfortable.
You don't know, do you? You read it on the surface as though that was a really selfless gesture. But when you know a bit more about Edison, and I imagine Tesla did know a bit more about Edison, maybe it could have been a different perspective.
Irrespective, I don't think Tesla ever saw Edison as a threat to his inventions. I think in the same kind of context that Messi and Ronaldo being around at the same time maybe caused them both to perform better.
Maybe it was the same kind of scenario with Tesla and Edison. The fact they both existed at the same time drove them to try to do the next big thing.
Tesla had a hand in inventing his own lights. I don't know if you know that. He had a hand in inventing the neon lamps, neon signs.
He had, I think it was 1893, if I can try to skim back over my notes, Chicago's World Fair, he had neon signs that were unique designs with written words. It was one of the first times this was ever seen.
People loved it, wanted more of these written word neon signs everywhere.
But he also designed a usable black light through shining, or shooting electricity through both gas and chemical constitution of his own invention.
Pretty cool. That is pretty cool. His own UV light, his own blue light, sorry, black light. Usable.
Yeah, neon signs were another big one of his, as I said, fluorescent lamps. Although he didn't design them directly, he certainly did blast electricity through gases to see how they reacted.
One of the by-products was that it glows. That's essentially what you get with fluorescent tubes, isn't it?
Well, that's it. Although tungsten lighting is, I don't know, there's been several changes to that recently.
It's amazing to think that people back then, this was a time when gas lamps were being used. So it's not like when it was dark, it was just dark.
But there were severe problems with gas lamps and it would have cost a fair amount to use them. So although the cities were places where there was light, it wasn't light everywhere.
And it's, I'm trying to think of the right wording here. Yeah, you know, it's hard to imagine a world where when the sun goes down, you're all of a sudden very limited with what you can do.
Yeah, I mean, it was all gas lamps, wasn't it? All the streetlights were gas lamps and like your homes had like gas lanterns. Like it wasn't the norm to have electrical lighting throughout at the flick of a switch.
Well, absolutely. And it didn't, even though it was invented in the 1880s, it's still, it's not like this thing was invented and then everyone woke up and had it.
No. It took years to standardise it, didn't it? That's it. That's it.
Okay, well, I think, when did, when did Tesla, when did Tesla die? I wonder which one of our two people outlived the other here.
You know, the story of Tesla's death is actually quite sad, but he died at 86. 86 years old would have made it.
1942?
Okay, so he actually-
Yeah, 1942.
Okay, so he did outlive Edison by 11 years.
Yeah, maybe he died three years older than Edison then.
Yeah.
Given that Edison was eight years his senior.
Okay, Edison was born in 1847.
Oh, nine years. Nine years his senior.
Yeah.
Okay, that's interesting. Okay, so Tesla came over to America. He was part, sounds like he was very much part of the same scene.
I'm assuming that his laboratory was in New York as well or in New Jersey.
Where was the Wardenfell Tower? I didn't actually, I can't actually remember where that was. So one of his main laboratories was the Wardenfell Tower.
Sorry, the Wardenclyffe Tower. Idiot. Wardenclyffe Tower was in Long Island in New York.
Okay.
And the Wardenclyffe Tower was like one of his biggest inventions and one of his biggest visions. Part of the reason, it's actually also part of the reason why he stopped inventing.
That's a very sad story.
As part of that story, as part of that pitch, I actually put down a list of his funders because a lot of the reason why he stopped inventing was because his funders stopped funding him.
Which I don't think was the same with Edison.
I think a lot of people decided to go with Edison's inventions instead of Tesla's because of Tesla's vision.
Yeah.
That's okay. That's, yeah, I will admit, although, although a lot of, a lot of, Tesla, not Tesla, sorry.
Edison kept going. He kept on creating bits and pieces and although the light bulb was his largest commercial success and what, it was something like the quadruplex telegraph, which allowed four signals to be sent out along a single wire,
rather than the one signal, which is what he started with originally.
Like, it's, yeah, like, Edison, Edison was not hard up.
Like what he, he was a workaholic for sure. And he might have had to let people go. But by the end of his life, he had a beautiful house.
He had everything at the very least that he needed. And although he spent, you know, not every, by no means, not every single one of his inventions was a success.
He, he could just keep going, you know, like he, he had the money to keep trying to invent and he could always just let people go.
If, yeah, if that's what kind of was, was needed.
He did, he did like, he did move things. He did move things down over time. Like, you know, there are times when he had 300 people. There are times when he had more than that.
There are times when he had, you know, a small, a small and advanced team. There's times when he had like loads of people and then had, you know, managers under him who would then manage large teams.
But he, he was never in a place where he was penniless after, after he'd done the $40,000. Like he was always, he always had enough to at least try.
There were times that he went into debt for sure. But yeah, he was, he was always able to kind of like patent something, make enough money, get some royalties from an old idea and move on to the next thing, you know.
Why did, like when, when did Tesla's luck completely dry up for him? Like what sort of time period are we talking here and what did Tesla do when he stopped inventing?
He just declined. His health declined. He, I mean, for example, he spent the last 10 years of his life living in the New Yorker Hotel, penniless, feeding the birds on crack, literally lived on a diet of milk and crackers for 10 years before he died.
He was found by one of the hotel staff at 86 years old on the day he died, completely alone.
Is that why a lot of the pictures of him are of this incredibly gaunt, white haired figure?
Yeah, exactly that. He was ragged and worn when he was, when he died.
So it kind of went wrong for him when he, with the people that were funding him, because for example, one of his biggest funders was JP Morgan.
Do you know who JP Morgan is?
The name sounds incredibly familiar, but I can't pretend to know who it is.
Well, at the time when JP Morgan was funding Nikola Tesla, JP Morgan just, he just, he had this concept of making thousands off of Nikola Tesla.
And this is because he owned the biggest copper mine in the North America.
So he had this idea of I'm going to be pumping out all of the wires, all of the machines, and I'm going to make all of the money off this technology.
Now, Tesla let JP Morgan in on Tesla's vision, and Tesla's vision was that he wanted to create wireless energy.
His Wardenclyffe Tower was a almost like a massive, I don't know if you've ever seen a Tesla coil.
Is it the thing with a metal ball on the top?
And does it have some rings going around the outside of it?
Yeah, and it kind of creates like electricity sparks and stuff that fly off.
Yeah.
Okay.
It was kind of like a giant Tesla coil, but the idea of it was that he would be able to transmit and receive energy through the upper atmosphere.
And anywhere you had one of these Wardenclyffe Towers, you would be able to download, for lack of a better term, energy.
Completely free.
And send it anywhere.
And JP Morgan went, no, and pulled his funding.
Yeah, because if you own the copper mines, yeah, it kind of it goes against your interest to invest in.
Exactly.
And as much as like at the time, at the time, the amount of energy that he was able to send or receive, should we say, was minimal.
The guy was an utter genius.
And I mean, we'll never know exactly how far he could have taken that technology.
The concept should have been at least looked into.
But it would never, even nowadays, it would never be investigated because it's not a concept that I don't think our infrastructure could cope with it now.
Let alone, I mean, you go back to when the Wardenclyffe Tower was was built.
1901, yeah, 1901, it was opened, but there was nothing like the amount of pylons and satellites and whatnot else and signals and radio waves and everything that we've got going around the upper atmosphere now.
I don't think you could be using the upper atmosphere as a conduit for electricity in the way that Tesla intended.
Who knows what world we could be living in if Tesla had a great gain, the momentum and not Edison.
Essentially, I put a lot of Edison's success down to the fact that people could make money off of his inventions.
He was incredibly dependable.
Like the weird thing is, is that he was always looking for the next step and always achieving that next step, you know.
Yeah, but I think a lot of the things that he was able to invent were things that were armable and consumable, like product.
Something that somebody could include in multiple different objects and then sell.
Whereas with Tesla, his idea was about freedom from the consume, you know.
As you know, Tesla came up with the first concept for what we essentially have today in our mobile devices.
He conceived being able to send and receive telegraph and voice transmissions through radio waves to his Wardenclyffe Tower
and then send that via radio frequencies to devices that you held in your hand, which you would then see or hear through being able to decipher that radio information.
He essentially created the, or at least conceived, what we see now in like mobile internet and mobile phones back in 1900.
That is incredible. That's fantastic.
He also, this is something, the patent office refused to patent something because they were like, it's inconceivable, you can't do that.
He designed a boat which he said to the patent office, I will control this boat only by using radio waves.
And the patent office went, rubbish, you can't do it, not going to happen.
So he did a convention where he showed this boat off completely unmanned. So you think about the amount of things that he created in this one invention, right?
He created remote control.
He created essentially the first drone ever to be created.
He created the first unmanned boat and later, of course, that would turn into like radio control cars, radio, even like radio frequency transmitters for
phones and even for the infrared devices that were used for like TV controls and stuff like that.
It was all included in the same thing.
Incredible stuff. The fact that he was able to run like move motors and status and stuff like that by radio frequency at the time was inconceivable, but he did it.
He was so beyond this like before his time.
Okay, so it sounds like the different like it sounds very much like Edison was an innovator.
Tesla was a visionary.
Edison was Edison stuff was marketable.
Whereas Tesla's stuff was just out of this world.
That's interesting.
That's really
I hate the idea of somebody just giving up on their dreams and then just living, you know, just surviving until
I mean, you can barely say he was living. He was just alive. That's all he was doing.
I mean, some of the things I mean, I'm literally going through a list of inventions because I wanted to cherry pick some.
There's so many things that he invented that you're like, what? That's incredible.
He invented something called shadow graphs, which is essentially the first ever X-ray.
Using like a glass tube, he took a picture of a foot with a shoe on and
it was the first time anybody had seen through an object in a picture.
Okay.
What was that because I know that I know that Mary Curie did.
It was listed as the first person to invent like X-rays and stuff.
Or yeah, to kind of start the 1895.
No, no, 1895 was when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays.
However.
I'm just skimming back over my notes.
It was about the same time Tesla had research, which was destroyed in a fire in his lab, the same fire which burnt down the research on radio.
But it was all based around what he called shadow graphs, which was essentially his own version of X-rays.
But it was around about the same time that Röntgen published his findings.
So it sounds like he literally.
Yeah, just missed out on the same thing with the radio.
Like the guy that Marconi wasn't it that was entitled with the first patent for a long wave radio, a long distance radio rather.
However, a lot of stuff that was included now, I know it's OK within a patent a patent to cite other patents.
So if you include other people's technology in your device, you can patent it as long as you cite the patents from the technology that you've included within your device.
Tesla, he had invented something called a what's it called magnifying transmitter, which was included in this radio frequency device.
But he also designed his own circuitry and completely standalone circuits, which go alongside with this magnifying transmitter, along with loads of oscillators and things like that that were there to boost the signal.
But through the use of loads of Tesla's own devices, Marconi was able to transmit a signal across the Atlantic in in 1904.
And as a result, the patent office reversed their their agreement that they would not patent Marconi's radio transmitter and decided to give him the transmitter and therefore Marconi is listed as the inventor of radio.
Interesting. I do like that nowadays there is a movement in the scientific community never to name something after people as just something that's been noticed is that it's never the individual.
Who discovers something, it's always a team. Yeah, and there's, you know, and like, and because of that, for example, even in the Calvin cycle is the basic name for it.
But there's, I think it's like the Calvin Brown cycle or the Calvin some, and it's just like they just kept on adding names to it to the point where the scientific community is just kind of going, you know what?
It's really hard to credit an individual without devaluing the work of others. So it's.
Yeah, the only time that the only time that that's OK is with with the hydrogen bomb Oppenheimer took credit and everybody else for. Yep, that was you. Bye.
Yeah. Yeah.
Which is also kind of fair enough.
Yeah, I mean, you think about obviously Bill Gates created the operating system for the original Windows machine using a lot of the code from Linux.
Hmm.
So essentially like stealing the code, Steve Jobs basically did the same thing.
Neither of them were.
Like innocent of the exact same.
In fractions, everybody has to rely on the knowledge of other people in order to innovate in your own way.
In the modern day, it's so hard to be individual with your own thought.
You've got to give credit to where your knowledge came from.
It's OK to say, I learned this through this person and this person who obviously learned it through this person, this person, etc.
And so on and so on it goes.
I just innovated that knowledge and thought about it in this way.
And that's what sets me apart.
Yeah, that.
That is genuinely the thing.
It.
Tesla would have been taught to be an electrician when he worked in Europe.
Somebody would have taught him the basics of electric electrical engineering.
He can't he can't even take all the credit for his inventions, because without that background,
he would never had the foundation to conceive the ideas that he did.
And it's the same with Edison.
Without that telegraph, taking the time to teach him,
he would never have the background to get himself in a position where he could start tinkering and innovating in the way that he did.
No, it's a it's a fair point and it is something to consider like so much of what we.
I don't know. We all live in the comfort provided by other people in multiple ways and anything that you produce.
Will be isn't a alone effort.
We use the tools built by other people, this whole our society is a is a group effort.
I think it's still good that there are people out there still making little jumps forward and sometimes big jumps forwards.
And I'm glad that we've had this conversation about Edison and Tesla both making huge jumps in their fields.
At a time when the world really was changing.
Like the railroad was the most advanced thing at the time of Edison's birth.
By the time by the time of his death, they were moving on.
They were moving away from biplanes.
I just. Yeah, I don't know.
Like information technology is coming on massively.
But I do find it interesting that there were such innovations to do with engineering back then.
And now it was getting wasn't it?
Yeah, it's a boom.
It all seems to be getting more, more micro.
It seems to be.
Yeah, it all seems to be algorithms and.
Kind of smaller technology now rather than the big.
Physical stuff as that.
As that does cost a lot.
Yeah, I think the the stuff that I can't the the the technologies that I can't abide in.
The world where we are now.
Is the technology that is specifically designed to grab your attention.
Maintain that hold.
And never let go.
Because it's a form of manipulation.
It's.
Yeah, exactly that is just it's creating.
It's not even creating.
It's it's.
Malleating and molding individuals into complete zombies.
Like there's nobody modern.
I think about what and I really do start to feel like an old man when I start talking like this.
I think about what it was like for me as a kid.
Phones were exciting.
Having a mobile phone was a luxury.
If you had a mobile you.
With a cool kid and.
Not everybody had one so you you had to go and knock on someone's door to go find out if they were about.
And as a result you spent so much time outside of your house.
Doing things.
With your friends at the park climbing trees hurting yourself.
Rolling around on the floor doing crazy things.
Things that kids.
Of this generation.
Wouldn't even think think twice about they spend the time in their rooms on their devices.
And by having a conversation with kids in this in this generation you get single word answers all the time.
How was your day?
Good.
And I mean maybe that's just because I am an old man and they don't I don't have any interest in talking to me.
And I feel like if I was talking to them through a device they'd engage.
That's an interesting point.
If I waved a twenty pound note in front of my kids right now they wouldn't even look twice at it.
I don't think they'd even understand.
No they would.
That's a lie.
I mean we get to the point where kids don't even understand what a twenty pound note is.
I don't think we're quite there yet.
I mean you could wave a cheque in front of your kids.
Yeah they wouldn't.
They wouldn't.
What was that?
To be fair one of the kids.
One of the kids.
Uncles.
Actually gives them their birthday money in cheque still.
And they get it and they're like mommy it's one of these paper things.
And like mom has to take it to grandad who then pays it into the savings account.
And they're like as far as they're concerned they never see that money because it goes into the savings account.
What the hell is this paper thing that I get given instead of like pound notes.
I mean in a way that's a massive shame because I'm sure the guy's being generous in his own way.
Yeah absolutely.
I don't think they undermine the generosity of the gift but it's still completely conceived differently to ten pound note they get given.
Hmm.
Well I've.
I mean I've run out of things to say about Edison at this point and I'm really sorry listeners I'm incredibly tired.
But I'm glad that we've covered this like I really do feel guilty about not researching more the other inventions that happened during this time because although Edison and Tesla came up with a great number of things to do with.
Well a great number of electrical inventions there were there was a huge amount of innovation.
At this time and things really did.
Like the world.
The world's constantly changing but it just when you think about the solid staples of the technology which still exists today.
There are still light bulbs.
There are still phones.
There are movie cameras like these things.
These inventions really change the world.
Whereas, AI maybe it is changing the world, and we haven't seen like what it where it's going yet, but a lot of the apps, a lot of the little steps forwards that happen nowadays.
Just don't really seem to necessarily go anywhere.
I don't know what are your thoughts on that.
I don't I think there are so many innovations nowadays, but I think there's such.
So much attention is taken away from that by the frequency of like the new release, the new thing.
That's exactly the same as the last thing that the excitement of it is almost lost.
You look at, for example, just take the iPhone, for example, what are we on the iPhone 16 Pro now versus like 2000 and.
I think I was what 21.
16 years ago.
Yeah, it was present in my sense.
16 years ago.
2008, you had the first iPhone, maybe 2007.
That if you think about the individual leap between the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone.
That's a massive leap.
But do you feel like it's such a drastic leap when you've gone from model to model all the way through?
Would you just feel like it's the iPhone?
I mean, you just feel like it's the iPhone.
It's lost that sense of wow, hasn't it?
And they try to make it wow.
But when you're releasing models every year, because that's your quota, you have to believe there's laws against making
indisposable products because of the effect it may have on the economy.
I think we discussed that in one of the previous.
Podcasts when we were definitely touched upon Planned Ops lessons.
Yeah, exactly.
And yeah, there's literally laws and acts that have been passed, which is that demand that companies add expiry dates to their products
and make them break so that new products have to be bought so the economy can continue to work.
That wasn't even conceived in 1900, like 1880 when Edison and Tesla was beginning this road of revolution.
Their inventions were designed for longevity, even if I can remember my granddad telling me about fixing his own TV.
The bulb went in his TV, so he went to the TV shop and he bought a new bulb and then he fixed his TV.
Could you do that with your TV now?
No, no, no, I mean, I think not even close.
I don't even think somebody with a degree in that sort of technology could at least not with the tools that they would have to hand in a home.
No, exactly.
I mean, I replace screens on some phones, but even some phones, I mean, my daughter's phone.
You need a vacuum to replace the screen on it.
I don't have a three thousand pound machine to replace the screen on her phone.
So I can't replace the screen on my phone.
Apple are a big one for you have to have their technology to fix their devices and you have to get that technology from them, which you can lease from them.
And then you have to buy.
You can't have a stock of Apple parts to replace things.
You have to buy them as you need them from Apple and they're provided to you with serial numbers and you can't replace like internal parts of a like an Apple Mac Pro, say, without discussing it with Apple because there's certain serial numbers that need to be associated with your device.
Otherwise, the device won't work at all.
I mean, they've shot themselves in the foot there so that what I realize what they're doing is they're controlling the market and forcing you to go to them directly and making it incredibly difficult, but not impossible.
So no one can say that it's impossible to fix an iPhone, but they have made it very difficult from what you've described there.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, there was there's an act that's been that's been attempted to be passed called the right to repair, which I'm a big advocate for.
And essentially is exactly that yearly like the reason iPhones have had to go over to the USB C charges is because iPhones were heavily contributing to a waste in their charges.
They had proprietary charges, right?
All devices now have to charge via USB C because what you've done is you've created a centralized singular charge cable.
One of the biggest problems for 30 years with phones has been everybody's created their own charge cable.
Can you remember growing up when you had a mobile phone?
If you had a Nokia, you had to have a Nokia charger to charge your phone.
Yeah. Yeah.
And you had a Samsung charger and you had a Sony Ericsson charger and you had all these different devices with their own unique charger.
You couldn't use one plug on another.
Very rare that you had a phone that you could use across multiple devices.
Whereas nowadays they have to have a USB C charging cable on all devices because of the amount of waste that was created through these charges.
It's through the charging cables.
It's unreal.
And they're aiming for like a lot of parts to be generalized in order to allow like the interchange of parts to be able to replace them as and when you need with a generic off the shelf part.
That's the aim with right to repair is to make everything a lot more self repairable.
And Apple have tried to circumvent that by allowing has to be their technology.
It has to be from them.
But you can do it.
You can do it as long as you're higher parts from us and you buy the parts from us and you get them when you need them and you don't you don't have a stock of them.
Yeah.
Anyway, right over.
That's what I mean. I think that is generally the difference between Edison and the way Edison was received.
I don't think it was Edison as an individual, but I think the way that Edison was received and farmed himself was in a very consumer friendly way.
And Tesla was very much.
It was harder to harvest his inventions in the way that they did Edison's.
So when you have two great minds and one of them is easier to harvest and the other one's not what you're going to do.
Learn to well, yeah.
Well, you're just you're going to go for the easier option.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, I think we're going to leave it there for tonight.
Thank you very much for taking part, James, as always.
And listeners, thank you very much for sticking with us to the end.
From me, it's good night.
And from James, good night.
Thank you.