Please don't get your history from The Oatmeal. If you want to read a real account of what Edison actually did, the opening chapters of this classic are great:
This is also why I usually ignore news I hear about Nikola Tesla. That Oatmeal comic, aside from the fact that it's just immature and nasty, I believe kicked off a weird kind of Tesla fanboy-ism which just seems useless.
I believe The Oatmeal comic was a symptom and not necessarily the cause. It certainly kicked it up another level, but the fanboyism started building a few years earlier with the growing success of the car company followed by the movie The Prestige and the Drunk History episode on Tesla.
> Mr. Inman [author of The Oatmeal], like many comedians seems to be fundamentally unhappy and finds an outlet through humor. Oddly enough his behavior is similar to Tesla's in that he reacts in a nasty fashion if someone challenges his ideas
Yikes, got a less biased source? It's 2017, it's sad the emotional feud between Tesla and Edison continues like this.
Wow, the full text of that paragraph is even worse:
> Interestingly enough one of the largest sources of exaggerated Tesla history in the last few years was a cartoonist (Mr. Inman) who runs the website "The Oatmeal". A cartoonist (a guy with no engineering, legal or historian background) born in 1982 on the wrong side of the continent felt the liberty of making passionate statements about New York's electrical history based on crap he read on the internet. After a Forbes article by Alex Knapp about the myths of Tesla inspired by this Edison Tech Center article came out, the cartoonist attacks Knapp in the arrogant and cynical style typically demonstrated by the worst of US-born Millennials. Mr. Inman, like many comedians seems to be fundamentally unhappy and finds an outlet through humor. Oddly enough his behavior is similar to Tesla's in that he reacts in a nasty fashion if someone challenges his ideas, even when they mean well.
You're cherrypicking the part of the document that addresses the comic and I do agree the tone could be more professional, but it a fairly serious rebuke of some pretty terrible claims. Ironically, when Hawkings, Linus, Dawkins, Hitchens, etc use the same tone, the tech community seems to not have any problems with it. The factual aspects of this page are pretty good and I'm hard pressed to find any issue here historically. I'm something of a amateur Edison-era historian, love this period, and feel that if we want to properly honor history and the lives of the people who more or less helped build the modern world, then we should be honest about the facts and park the fanboyism.
I do feel they gloss over the elephant electrocution and even by standards of that time was a bit shocking, even if there were almost no animal welfare laws. To be fair to Edison's group, this PR stunt was tasteless, but the elephant was already sentenced to death. My understanding is the alternative would have been a grisly shooting with an elephant gun which is far less humane than electrocution.
Again, the Oatmeal comic is pretty poor representation of the period. I understand its popular and ties in with Tesla fandom and an over-represented demographic on the web, but I think those honest about knowing what these men did should dismiss it and dig into more academic sources. This period is so exciting and interesting, its a shame a lot of youngsters grow up with a simple minded 'Tesla vs Edison' narrative which is such a stupid oversimplification of an amazing and progressive period in US history.
> A cartoonist (a guy with no engineering, legal or historian background) born in 1982 on the wrong side of the continent
> cynical style typically demonstrated by the worst of US-born Millennials
> Disclaimer: The works below are the opinion of the author and not the official viewpoint of the Edison Tech Center
That's enough for me to forget this whole article. I'm not buying all the "facts" in The Oatmeal's comic either, but wow, when you have to lash out at someone for being a young cartoonist living in Seattle...
Why not? A wide and impressionable audience now understands this part of history as interpreted by an internet celebrity.
The ability to publish misinformation on the internet far outscales the ability of anybody to refute it. At some point you have to filter out the noise by appraising the source. If that means dismissing inflammatory history lessons from young cartoonists in Seattle, or dismissing medical advice from has-been Playboy models on the basis that neither group knows what the hell they're talking about, then so be it.
So we should take the word of a random "author" who didn't even bother to publish his name and credentials over Inman simply because this guy blasted Inman for being a Millennial? That's just as wrong as accepting some dumb comic as the authority on history.
This guy, whoever he is, goes on about "crap on the Internet" then cites a 3rd of his sources from the Internet, four of those being Wikipedia. Even better, half his non-Internet based sources are museums -- no further information provided. His sources are mostly unverifiable crap, then he stoops to an ad hominem. It's garbage.
Its published by the Edison Tech Center which is a non-profit in Schenectady, NY. It doesn't need to publish on a more granular level of authorship. I guess it would be nice, but its own editorial policies are what they are and not outside of norms. I don't complain about the Economist doing the same, for example.
>His sources are mostly unverifiable crap
There is a source list at the end of the article.
Sources:
-Electrification in Western Society 1880-1930. by Thomas Parke Hughes.1993 (book)
-Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany
-Historisches Museum, Frankfurt Germany
-The General Electric Story - A Hall of Electrical History Publication.1999 (book)
-Archives of the Schenectady Museum: William Stanley files, E.W. Rice Jr. Files
-Great Barrington Historical Society
-Hawkins Electrical Guides (book series)
-Men and Volts. by John Winthrop Hammond. 1941(book)
-Folsom Powerhouse Museum. Folsom, California
-Biography of Elihu Thomson, prepared by E.W. Rice Jr.
-Archives of the Edison Tech Center: Rice Family Archives
-Almost Edison: How William Sawyer and Others Lost the Race to Electrification. by Donald Scott McPartland. 2006
Internet Sources:
-MIT website: Inventor of the Week" William Stanley
-IEEE Global History Network: Milestones: Alternating Current Electrification 1886
> So we should take the word of a random "author" who didn't even bother to publish his name and credentials over Inman simply because this guy blasted Inman for being a Millennial?
No. I'm not saying anyone should "just" believe either party over the other.
For all of Inman's bold assertions, he cites no sources whatsoever-- not even random crap on the internet-- and ends his comic with an appeal to vandalize Wikipedia to support his argument.
Without knowing anything about ETC, from an objective standpoint, I agree with ETC's assertion that Inman isn't qualified to be publishing unsubstantiated claims about anything related to a dead man's character or accomplishments.
> I agree with ETC's assertion that Inman isn't qualified to be publishing unsubstantiated claims about anything related to a dead man's character or accomplishments.
He's an entertainer and comedian, not a bastion for everlasting factual histories of the world...
I seriously feel that a large percentage of commenters on HN need to step back a bit and be less rigid in their assessment of society around them.
I would say the "why not" comes down not to why not dispute it but why dispute it in the way it was done, by insulting Inman for being from the west coast, for being young, for being unhappy, etc. Rather than insult him for perpetuating untruths, the author instead tosses out weird demographic and geographic insults.
It reminds me of the saying attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, "Smart people talk about ideas. Mediocre people talk about things or events. Stupid people talk about people." Speaking about specific people denigrates a conversation. A discussion will always be more interesting and enlightening and overall useful if instead aimed at ideas or even slightly abstracted.
While all of that may be absolutely true, the title of the group of that source doesn't instill confidence as unbiased historians. It makes me wonder if they're promoting team edison. Can anyone recommend a better source?
About the only way you can gather some semblance of "historical truth" or "historical facts" about either Edison or Tesla would be to read as many biographies and books about both men, both contemporary accounts, auto-biographical accounts, and later historical treatises.
In short - read everything you can about both individuals - their life, their history, their accomplishments, and their rivalry thru the years.
At one time, I was more on the "fanboy" side of things with Tesla; for years, from about 1992 or so (long before the Oatmeal piece, and certainly before "The Prestige" was published), I collected many books and anything else I could get my hands on about Tesla. Prior to that, as a teenager, I had heard about him thru histories of Edison - mainly in connection to the "Tesla Coil" as well.
But I had neglected Edison. At some point, many years later I decided that having only a one-sided view of things wasn't right, and started collecting and reading things on and about Edison.
What I discovered was ultimately, neither man could be claimed to be "all that" and both were products of their times. Both had their greatnesses, and both had their lows. I consider both men to have made many contributions, but they also had plenty of faults. I also consider it one of those "historical tragedies" that the two men became bitter rivals, rather than working together. I believe that Edison could have gone so much further with Tesla's guidance and temperament as an engineer and scientist (Tesla being more of a theoretical scientist before an engineer, and Edison being more an experimentalist engineer before a scientist). I often wonder what would have happened if Edison and Tesla had explored the "Edison Effect" - the world would probably not be the same today, certainly.
He accuses Tesla of stealing the three phase AC motor from Ferrari and being a business-minded promoter with absolutely no evidence and contrary to almost everything we know about Tesla
That article is much worse than anything The Oatmeal has ever written or done, and seems mostly fueled by spite
