Jew World Order

EDISON – The 100,000 residents of this Middlesex County town might be distressed to hear that its namesake – an all-around knave and idiot – stole credit for inventions, smeared his competitors and killed his assistant in a stunning act of scientific ineptitude that typified his fraudulent career.

After all, Thomas Alva Edison’s likeness and inventions appear in the town council’s chambers, on its library cards, and on signs that welcome visitors to the place that used to be called Raritan, to the place that Thomas Edison himself called “the prettiest in all of New Jersey.”

So what are Edisonians to make of a recent resurgence in anti-Edison propaganda – most notably on a website called The Oatmeal, but also in the uncritical media attention that has surrounded it – that shines a harsh light on their town’s most famous former resident? The comic posits a potentially devastating thesis: Thomas Edison was no pioneer, and took every opportunity to ruin his contemporary, Nikola Tesla, a true visionary whom history has shamefully forgotten.

Well, the good news is, if the academics are to be believed, residents needn’t hang their heads in shame or look for a figure more worthy of tribute.

That’s because the comic, according to historians who have written biographies on Edison and Tesla, is wildly unfair and often inaccurate.

“There is an unbelieveable amount of misinformation and misunderstanding out there, especially by those who are sort of Tesla advocates,” said Paul Israel, who wrote a biography of Edison and is the editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University. “And part of the problem is that even if you provide them with evidence to the contrary, if it doesn’t agree with what they already know, what they know is right and everything else is wrong.”

OK. But wait. He’s an Edison biographer. What about writers who have delved into the life of Tesla, the man whom Edison, it is alleged, so frequently wronged?

“I think (Edison) had real skin in the geek game,” said Bernard Carlson, who spent a dozen years researching Tesla for a biography that will come out in April called “Tesla: The Inventor of the Electrical Age.” “The Oatmeal suggests he never had a creative idea in a day in his life. The fallacy is problematic.”

Said Marc Seifer, who wrote “Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla“: “I think it’s unfair to portray Edison as simply Tesla’s enemy and that they didn’t like each other. There was a mutual respect.”

That’s three historians, footnotes and all. And yet maybe the only person that could convince Tesla advocates that Edison wasn’t evil is Tesla himself.

A bust of Thomas Edison at the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park in Edison. Edison’s bust also appears in the Town Council’s chambers. By Brian Amaral/NJ.com

What did Edison’s supposed rival, the man held up as a paragon of righteousness in contrast to Edison’s treachery, say about him?

Tesla is quoted in Seifer’s biography as criticizing some of Edison’s methods, saying he’d test every specimen in a haystack instead of using theory and calculation to find the needle, but remarked of Edison: “I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries… and felt that most of my life had been squandered.”

That’s the same Tesla that’s depicted in an Oatmeal comic riding a giant cat, firing some sort of futuristic weapon at a fleeing Edison.

The comic, created by Matthew Inman, has captured the popular imagination to such an extent that this reporter, who moved to the area from upstate New York, was called a traitor to the world of geekdom for relocating to a town that was named after a charlatan. There’s always been a controversy about Edison and Tesla and their respective legacies, but in recent years – fittingly, because of advances in technology wrought by the Internet – the legend has spread.

Indeed, the comic has helped raise more than $1 million to acquire land for a Tesla museum on Long Island. The initiative received widespread, mostly fawning news coverage.

Other than a write-up in Forbes, there’s been little scrutiny of some of the major flaws in Inman’s comic.

Israel and Carlson expanded on some of those flaws, and a brief overview is presented here, for Edisonians and non-Edisonians alike.

Edison was, indeed, a prolific inventor

The central argument in the comic – and its main flaw, historians say – is that Edison wasn’t a “geek,” but rather a CEO interested only in the pursuit of money.

“Edison did not invent the light bulb, he improved on the ideas of 22 other men who pioneered the light bulb before him,” the comic says. “Edison simply figured out how to sell the light bulb.”

Paul Israel, who has studied millions of Edison’s papers, strongly disagrees with the suggestion that Edison was merely a CEO, and not a “geek” – used here as a compliment.

In the foreground, utility wires made possible by Nikola Tesla’s AC breakthrough. In the background, a tower commemorating Thomas Edison’s lightbulb on Christie Street in the township. Brian Amaral/NJ.com

“This notion (The Oatmeal) has in there that Tesla was a geek and Edison wasn’t is completely absurd,” Israel says. “Anybody who’s spent any time in the Edison notebooks would know that’s complete and utter nonsense.”

Putting aside for a moment his 1,093 U.S. patents – a record that stood for decades – Edison also basically invented the modern process of research and development, Israel says. That happened in Raritan, now called Edison Township.

“Edison was the one guy who could basically invent a better bulb, and figure out how to develop the companies and the distribution system you would need to get that product out there and in everyday life,” Carlson says.

He also invented the phonograph, a machine that recorded and played back sounds. Perhaps the iPod generation would react with a collective “Meh,” but in the 19th century, it earned Edison the moniker “the wizard of Menlo Park.”

Edison wasn’t a killer

The Oatmeal also accuses Edison of killing his assistant, Clarence Dally, by exposing him to harmful X-rays, and of torturing animals in an attempt to ruin his competitors.

Dally did indeed die from X-ray exposure, but Israel argues that you can’t blame Edison for that. Dally wasn’t just Edison’s assistant; he was the chief X-ray experimenter in Edison’s lab.

“To say that Edison killed Dally is just nonsense,” Israel says. “There were a lot of early X-ray experimenters damaged by the fact that they were experimenting with X-rays.”

It’s true that Edison testified in New York about how alternating current electricity could be used to kill prisoners, but he later regretted it, Israel said, and was an opponent of the death penalty.

Edison’s history with animals is admittedly complicated, but in some instances it’s also exaggerated. There’s no proof, for example, that Edison was involved in snatching household pets from neighborhoods near his invention factory to electrocute them in a bid to smear Tesla’s emerging electric technology, Carlson says.

“Edison himself did not electrocute puppies,” says Carlson. “Edison probably didn’t even necessarily know they were electrocuting puppies.”

Israel, on the other hand, says that Edison’s team was electrocuting mostly dogs, and that’s it’s “conceivable” that a few household pets who had gotten loose got zapped.

“It’s highly plausible that that happened,” Israel says. “But I don’t know. There’s no way for anybody to know. That’s entirely conceivable.”

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap? Not so much

Most of the mythology surrounding the relationship between Edison and Tesla revolves around the war of the currents. Edison believed that direct current was the best way to transmit electricity. Tesla, on the other hand, had developed an alternating current motor that helped send it over much longer distances, for much less money, than direct current.

Edison, believing that AC was dangerous, stuck with DC. More than a century later, AC is the dominant technology in transmitting electricity, thanks in no small part to Tesla’s landmark invention and the fact that Edison’s concerns were unfounded. The computer with which you may be reading this article is able to function because of both AC and DC currents, so it’s not as if DC is a relic of the past. But Edison was wrong about the dangers of AC.

“I’m perfectly willing to admit that he was wrong about some stuff,” says Israel. “He was a really amazing inventor and innovator. He was very bad at dealing with more mature phases of the industry. He was stubborn and tended not to be flexible, especially if it was a challenge to the dominance of the technology he invented.”

Thomas Edison, left, and Nikola Tesla.

But did Edison hinder the progress of AC to protect his investments in DC? Or did he really believe that alternating current was dangerous? Israel prefers to believe that Edison was acting in good faith.

The mythologized Edison rarely acts in good faith. There’s the Oatmeal-relayed anecdote that Edison offered Tesla the modern equivalent of $1 million to improve on his direct-current system when Tesla was working for Edison. Tesla finished the task, but Edison never paid up, explaining to his Serbian employee that he didn’t understand “American humor.”

It’s a myth. The encounter didn’t actually happen, Israel says. (In fact, when one of Tesla’s labs burned down in 1895, Edison offered Tesla workspace in New Jersey, according to Seifer.)

Carlson seems to object less to the historical and scientific errors and more to the notion that geeks are virtuous and businessmen are, to make family-friendly a commonly used Oatmeal epithet, feminine hygiene products.

Carlson rejects that dichotomy. Edison was a shrewd businessman; one of his companies is a forerunner of General Electric. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Edison was also a tinkerer whose sketches Carlson said can be compared to Da Vinci’s. Carlson understands that his view of Edison and Tesla, grounded as it is in 12 years of research for his book on the latter, might not square with the beliefs of Tesla’s most passionate supporters.

“I decided years ago, early on in this project, I could tell you a coherent story about Tesla, get that done, or spend the rest of my life trying to disprove myths,” Carlson says. “My vision with Tesla fans is, you have your Tesla, let me have my Tesla.”

Kathleen Carlucci shows off some of the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park exhibits earlier in February. Brian Amaral/NJ.com

And just who is Carlson’s Tesla?

“There probably was no one before or since who had that real ability to engage the imagination and get people to think about the tremendous possibilities for electrical technologies,” Carlson says. “Edison was saying, ‘It’s a lightbulb, deal with it.’ Tesla was saying, ‘It’s a whole new world.’”

Inman – the Oatmeal, as it were – acknowledges some of the Forbes’ articles criticisms, but defends the overall thesis.

“I’m a comedian and I speak in hyperbole,” wrote Inman, who did not respond to requests for an interview. “If you sharpshoot my work you will find that I exaggerate for the sake of comedy.”

But it becomes problematic, Israel says, when it’s taken at face value, and problematic, too, if misinformation is the genesis of a museum.

After all, if the Tesla museum can get off the ground, it will have Inman’s comic to thank.

“One does wonder what the interpretation of that museum is going to be,” says Israel. “Presumably, a lot of people are going to assume that that’s the story that’s going to be told there. I don’t know how seriously they want to deal with the actual history, as opposed to the mythology.”

A museum of his own

Jane Alcorn didn’t know much about Tesla until she found out that she lived down the street from his former lab on Long Island, called Wardenclyffe. She says Edison gets more credit than he deserves for his inventions. Inman’s comic, she said, tells the truth, but with “emphasis,” and exaggeration and hyperbole.

As to what the museum will look like if it gets off the ground, Alcorn says: “It’s a Tesla museum. Our bias is going to be Tesla. I think Tesla deserves the recognition he’s beginning to get. Edison certainly had the PR that made him the household name. Now it’s Tesla’s turn.”

To be sure, Edison’s name is still more widely recognized than Tesla’s, despite the recent uptick. And Edison already has a museum in America, right here in Middlesex County, where his invention factory operated from 1875 to 1882. On a recent Saturday, kids piled into the remarkably small building, filled with Edison’s inventions, standing in the shadow of the much more formidable Edison tower that looms outside. At the top of the tower, incandescent lights once burned. They’ll soon be replaced with LEDs, a radically different technology from the one that Edison pioneered. That’s technology for you.

Edison aficionados are sometimes exasperated about the recent portrayals. Often, though, they understand why the story has resonated.

“People always like to have a bad guy and a good guy,” said Kathleen Carlucci, the director of interpretation at the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park.

Says Ted Latham, a board member and former educator: “That’s how you raise a million dollars.”

The museum in Edison where Latham and Carlucci spent their Saturday recently manages to get quite a bit of material into such a small space, but the Internet is exponentially more vast.

“This guy has apparently gotten a lot of people interested in what he says,” Israel laments. “And people unfortunately tend to treat anything that they see on the Internet as true.