• hakase@lemm.ee
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    16 hours ago

    Should be really easy for you to produce some of this evidence that he was a monster then.

      • hakase@lemm.ee
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        14 hours ago

        That pop “article” is like 300 words long, contains almost no information whatsoever, and every bit of info it does contain is also fully spelled out in the video I linked - that Edison wasn’t a single-minded visionary, but rather a ridiculously hard worker who worked collectively with his employees to create inventions scientifically.

        The video also goes into detail about how he crafted a public persona to make sure his shop continued to have access to funding to keep up his inventing, and in any case, I’m not quite sure how that’s supposed to be the nail in the coffin for his reputation, since it was practically required for him to stay in business, and the inventions they came up with (or, better put, the ingenious, practical solutions to the problems they were trying to solve) were revolutionary.

        Nothing in that article impugns Edison’s name whatsoever - if anything, it fully supports the picture of Edison put forward by the video I linked.

        Also, Today I Found Out has a rating of “High - Least Biased” on Media Bias Fact Check https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/today-i-found-out/, so I think I’m just going to ignore your conspiracy-mongering about them.

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      It’s not exactly proof of character but it’s pretty easy to verify that Edison’s patent of DC Electricity was NOT novel or new as a concept but did allow him to create a monopoly and massively enrich himself while also increasing costs on the average person of his time.

      This is lended to by the fact that in children’s books and schools in the USA Edison was portrayed as some magical fictional character who tied a key to a kite to invent electricity. Clearly there is a campaign made to make him look like the hero he isn’t. Nah that was Franklin.

      But it doesn’t stop there, Edison had many patents that almost all built on the works of others going back decades, although I do think that he did more work than he stole on audio recording and transmitting, but he also patented the Telegraph like a hundred times even though the Cook and Wheatstone Electric Telegraph existed over 50 years earlier: a time before Edison was even born.

      He was an OK inventor but he was a cutthroat businessman.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        8 hours ago

        This is lended to by the fact that in children’s books and schools in the USA Edison was portrayed as some magical fictional character who tied a key to a kite to invent electricity.

        That story is associated with Benjamin Franklin.