[twayt]

I find your statement about the Edison quote disingenuous. I did some reading about the origin of the quote and it isn’t as cut and dry as you seem to claim.

Also, the quote is meaningful because Edison said it, not because the quote has merit in and of itself.

It’s inspiring because someone of Edison’s acclaim attributed his success to hard work. Anyone else could have said it and it wouldn’t have been a meaningful quote because they weren’t as successful as him.

Note that my statement doesn’t presuppose that he was successful solely due to his own efforts or that he isn’t a fraud etc. But rather that the significance of the quote relies on his perception as being successful in the public eye.

[motbus3]

Edison and his company are a complex topic. Many have pointed in the past that they have been discredited for the participation and Thomas name appeared are sole inventor. Although they were employees of his company, and the patent would belong to Edison he (seemingly) made sure to disappear with any registries of their participation.

Of course, this could be words of the envious, but it is notable that more recent events such the system that led the creation of IBM Watson had their creator/inventor kicked out of IBM and his name erased from company registries. They only admitted their participation many years afterwards.

Edison sabotaged Tela's efforts by doing public safety demonstration, only to steal his ideas later down the line.

It is hard for me to trust a man who burnt an elephant

[sparky_z]

You may be relieved to know that Edison never killed an elephant. The elephant's owners killed it and held a barbaric public event. Employees of the Edison Film Company filmed the event, as a sort of early newsreel (one among many around that time), which is how Edison's name got associated with it. But Edison himself was completely uninvolved, and his company did nothing to bring the event about. The notion that this was some sort of public demonstration against DC current is a complete myth. For one thing, it took place a decade after the war of the currents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocuting_an_Elephant?wpro...

[derbOac]

Not to undermine your clarifying the truth, it's worth pointing out some of the confusion about that episode probably stems from some of what transpired during the war of the currents. The reason people falsely remembered it as a demonstration against AC is probably in part because it resembled things done in demonstration against AC:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_P._Brown

In other words, not elephants, but other animals.

[joemazerino]

Damn, that is morbid.

[twayt]

Did you just completely ignore the basis of my comment and instead specifically respond to what I explicitly explained was not the point I was making?