Thomas Edison

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Edison can't wait for the photographer to piss off.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), "The Wizard of Menlo Park", was an American inventor.

Contents

[edit] Early life, education

For all but 3 months he was homeschooled, being taught by his mother. A childhood bout with Scarlet fever left him with partial deafness.

[edit] Inventions and patents

Apart from the phonograph, most of his inventions were improvements and adaptations of existing products, although this should not detract from the fact that he brought, for instance, the incandescent light bulb from being a laboratory device to commercial viability.

Edison's major rivals, during the late 19th century, were George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, who had once been an associate of Edison. In the so-called "War of Currents", Edison favoured using DC-based systems, arguing that DC was safer than the more powerful AC systems which Westinghouse and Tesla were developing. Ultimately AC came to be used much more widely, though Edison remains a more famous figure than his adversaries, due to inventions and his business successes.

[edit] Religion

Edison was accused of being an atheist for the following remark, though it seems more likely that he was either a deist or an agnostic:

"Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love—He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us—nature did it all—not the gods of the religions."[1]
"So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake ... Religion is all bunk." [2]

He did not believe in an eternal soul or afterlife:

" ...it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made." [3]

He was opposed to violence:

"I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill."

Edison's philosophy of nonviolence extended to animals as well, about which he stated:

"Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."

Hilariously, these two quotes seem to be outright lies as Edison promoted use of the electric chair and once killed a restrained elephant to demonstrate that Tesla's idea of using alternating current was dangerous. Obviously rivalry came before kindness.

His final words are often taken as a sign that he had a vision of the next world:

"It is very beautiful over there."

Edison had been lapsing in and out of consciousness during his final hours, and was in a bed near a window. According to his wife, he glanced out the window and commented on the view.[4] [5]

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. October 2, 1910, interview in the New York Times Magazine
  2. What on Earth is an Atheist! (1972) by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, p. 251
  3. Israel, Paul (2000). Edison: A Life of Invention. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0471362700.
  4. http://www.digital-karma.org/society-and-culture/famous-peoples-last-words
  5. In an ironic note, Edison's wife signaled to the press of his death by turning a light on, not off, in a window of the house.
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