incandescent with rage
incandescent with rage
Or, really just some disorganized yelling about Thomas Edison.
Hello, friends!
First, if you live in the US and Canada, Let the Dead Bury the Dead is now available in paperback at booksellers near you! As a paperback girlie myself, I love that my sophomore baby is now out there in a more-affordable, easier-to-throw-in-your-bag-and-bring-on-the-train format. If you’ve been waiting to give this alternate-history 19th-century Russian fairy-tale-inspired novel a try, let this be your sign!
Second, if you don’t live in the US and Canada, I’m working hard with my agent to make my current books available to you in some shape, form, or fashion as well. Hopefully movement on that soon! Unless you personally know the chairman of the Frankfurt Book Fair, in which case, let ‘em know the people are asking.
Third, this is a short newsletter this week! The reason for that is that I’m losing my mind. My “having a busy week” has now become “having a busy three and a half months.” I’m sending this newsletter from breakfast at a three-day work conference, and I meant to draft it fully on Saturday but instead had a surprise 9am meeting and then spent five hours physically wrestling my cat to take her to the vet for her vaccines. (She—somehow—punched the vet through full sedation when they vaccinated her. “It was honestly impressive,” said the vet tech.)
So instead of a full medium-well-researched narrative this week, please enjoy this list I knocked out in an hour on Sunday afternoon…
10 Reasons Everyone Hates Thomas Edison So Very, Very Much and Are Frankly Right to Do So
Edison is a frequent request for this newsletter, but I don’t want to spend time thinking about him too in-depth because a) he annoys me, and b) most of the reliable sources about him are just long lists of inventions that are as much fun to read as the bibliography of a book about screwdrivers.
So as a compromise, let’s do a quick run-through of some of the reasons Thomas Edison is a no-good dirty rotten pig-stealing great-great-dickhead.
1. He Didn’t Even Invent the Lightbulb!
If you know one fact about Thomas Edison, it’s probably that he invented the lightbulb. Well, surprise, buddy! Turns out you know zero facts about Thomas Edison!
The first moderately effective incandescent lightbulb was invented in 1840 by British scientist Warren de la Rue, and even before that there were people coming up with lightbulb-adjacent items since the late 1700s. Edison didn’t get his patent until 1880. It wasn’t for the idea of a lightbulb; it was for a lightbulb that was cheaper and more efficient. And even that was probably some guy named William E. Sawyer’s idea.
So fuck off with the “inventor of the lightbulb” bullshit. You made a better mousetrap, you did not invent the concept of mice.
Edison got sued in 1883 for stealing Sawyer’s lightbulb patent concept, to which Edison replied by…giving the lawyer trying to sue him a job at the Edison Electric Light Company. As you do.
2. He Didn’t Actually Invent… A Lot of Things, Actually!
“What about the phonograph?” you ask. Nah, that was Edison’s employee John Kruesi. “The X-Ray machine?” Nope, that was German scientist Wilhelm Rontgen. “The voice recorder?” By now, you’re catching on: nope, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.
Edison did invent many things, and he improved on many others, and he marketed the ever-loving shit out of all of them, which is really where most of his genius was. But this man was not sitting in a laboratory pulling modern inventions out of the ether like a magician at a children’s birthday party. Don’t let anybody at the Henry Ford Museum tell you otherwise.
3. HE MURDERED A MAN??? [citation needed]
Edison is also credited with inventing the motion picture, but did you know that not only is that not true, but he maybe assassinated the guy who did????
Ahem. To clarify before I relate the anecdote:
Thomas Edison probably didn’t actually assassinate Louis Le Prince, the guy who invented the motion picture. There is, however, a historical conspiracy theory that Thomas Edison assassinated Louis Le Prince, and I’m obsessed with it. Furthermore, as you know, I gravitate toward the most scandalous explanation for any historical fact, so if it’s an option on the table, I’m going to fucking consider it.
Anyway. Louis Le Prince was a French inventor who had been working on motion picture technology. He loaded up his suitcase in 1890 with all of his technology and headed off to England to secure a patent for it…and was mysteriously never seen again. In his absence, Edison patented the technology himself. Le Prince’s family went on to try to sue Edison, but Le Prince’s son was mysteriously shot to death during the trial.
I’m not saying I believe Thomas Edison killed an entire family to make his fortune in Hollywood. I’m just saying. Think about it.
4. He Was Close Friends with Henry Ford.
Enough said. If you see a man who will go on to receive a medal of honor from the literal German Nazi Party and say “yes yes I want to go golfing with that man,” I offer a hearty historical fuck-you in your direction.
5. He Was a Member of the Theosophical Society.
This actually isn’t a dig against Edison, but I am legally obligated to call out every time a historical dirtbag is involved in the insane supernatural religious cult run by serial liar and pretend-telekinesis-practitioner Helena Blavatsky and her invisible racist Indian friend.
It doesn’t show great judgment on his part, although I do have to concede, if I was alive at the same time as Helena Blavatsky I would have joined her cult also, just to know.
6. He Electrocuted an Elephant.
First of all, why the fuck are so many historical dirtbags famous for doing shitty things to elephants. (Examples one, two, three, four.) An elephant has never hurt someone who didn’t deserve it. I hope Edison is spending eternity being trampled by the entire herd of elephants from The Jungle Book in hell.
But seriously. The story.
You’ve all probably heard about the feud between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, right? They were both big-shot inventors who did things with electrical currents. (Every engineering major in the audience is currently screaming facts at me, but I refuse to learn details.) Anyway, Tesla was in favor of AC power, which today is generally accepted to be more efficient and effective. Edison, who used DC power, didn’t want Tesla and his fancy new ideas taking over any of his market share.
So what this douche canoe did was run a smear campaign against Tesla by showing how dangerous AC power was…by electrocuting animals to death. Including people’s pets. And an elephant named Topsy minding its own business. Which he filmed. Presumably using the technology he stole from the Frenchman he assassinated.
Newsflash: any technology is dangerous if you deliberately electrocute someone with it, you colossal green bean casserole.
7. He Was Weird About Milk.
Edison was a notorious fad dieter, and in the last years of his life, his diet consisted of “a pint of milk every three hours.”
There’s something deeply sociopathic about this, and frankly it unnerves me. I will not be elaborating.
8. His Last Breath Is in a Museum.
To be fair to Edison, probably this isn’t his fault. If weirdos do stuff with my artifacts after I die, I want it on record that it has nothing to do with me. But there’s a test tube at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan that allegedly has Thomas Edison’s dying breath inside it, and that makes me hate him so much more.
9. He Nicknamed His First Two Children “Dot” and “Dash.” You Know. Like the Telegraph.
It just seems weird to me that Elon Musk is obsessed with Nikola Tesla when Thomas Edison was out here stealing ideas and naming his kids random punctuation marks, that’s all.
10. It Was All Goddamn Marketing.
At his height at his workshop in Menlo Park, Edison was turning out 400 patents a year. He explicitly committed to turning out a new invention every 10 days.
I’m just saying, if anyone tells you they write 400 books a year, you’re gonna ask the natural follow-up question, “how good are the books?”
No one has an original idea every 10 days, and no one has 400 incredible new ideas every year. What people can do is browse around for existing inventions to slightly tweak, adjust, and make nominally different enough to patent, while farming out the big ideas to other people and then taking credit for them in the end.
I’m not saying Thomas Edison was the ChatGPT of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I am saying that if Edison was alive today, there would be a new patent coming out tomorrow for a version of ChatGPT that used 4% less electricity and also killed elephants.
Anyway, that’s all for this time, my friends! I did even less research than I usually do for this story, so if you have corrections or additions, please, by all means, continue yelling about Edison in the comments.
Until next time, be well, and if you’re currently considering a baby name that involves multiple pieces of punctuation please take a good long look at your historical precedents before you move forward,
-Allison
...you colossal green bean casserole...
No more lightbulbs for me, because I won’t buy something allegedly invented by a dirt bag plagiarist. I’m going to start using whale oil lamps instead.