Thomas Edison: Enlighten Yourselves

Thomas Alva Edison was an inventor and businessman who is credited with the most important inventions of our lives. One of those, of course, is the light bulb which lately has come across major controversy.

Edison was less of an inventor and more of a "Invention Prophet". Meaning that other inventors created innovative and world changing devices but didn't have the vision for them like Thomas did. And by "vision" I meant money. (Get it? Invention "Profit")

A list from List verse intros the critique on Edison very well by stating:

Back in 1875, two men named Woodward and Evans designed a primitive lightbulb which they patented, but they were never able to make the money to experiment with it properly and come up with a good, working prototype. Around the same time period, another man named Joseph Swan was also working on a lightbulb. That was when Edison entered the story...

While multiple people were working on something similar, and he bought the rights to the idea, Edison and his researchers still spent years in the laboratory in order to make the lightbulb into something worth using. Edison did not invent the lightbulb, but for all practical purposes he was the first to make one that lasted long enough to be used.

This brings us to an interesting crossroads when it comes to inventions. Who's the true owner of an invention if one person originated the idea, and another made it practical? Well,  Edison very much so wanted to keep the light bulb in the family. Edison did, however, make light bulbs home ready and safe. If light bulbs were a gun, Thomas invented the safety catch and blank ammunition so that it wouldn't kill people.

Speaking of killing people, Thomas may have done that, too. However, he also stole that idea from someone else. It's seriously a fascinating story that I will summarize for y'all.

This article by Times is where I found this.

In the late 1800's when being progressive was valuing your wife over your favorite horse, the battle for the invention of the motion picture camera was ensuing. A French inventor formally known as Le Prince (pictured below)

This is Le Prince, but if it wasn't could you even tell? Everyone pre-1930 looked like this. Including women. 

Is "credited" with being the lost inventor of the film industry. After a couple failed partnerships he moved to New York and acquired his first patent for a motion picture camera. In fact, he's the first person to film anything in human history which was a horse and carriage going down a busy street. Now that Sarah Jessica Parker and her family where immortalized in film,  Le Prince has a breakthrough so big the Kool Aid man killed himself in shame. (You guessed it, he poured one out for the dead homies and then poured himself out) We can only speculate at this discovery because this is where shit gets weird.

Le Prince told his friends in Paris to expect him and great news in a couple months, as he was traveling back to his homeland.  He boarded a train and was never seen again.

Now the inventor formally known as alive was gone and his inventions along with him, he hadn't gone public with his findings yet. He was assumed missing because, and get this, at the time, a missing person was only considered "dead" after seven years. Seven years? Well, by that logic my Dad has died 3 times. This is important because patents legally get tricky when someone dies, but if someone is "missing" that allows another party to piggyback on their invention until the person is "found". Guess who steps in? Thomas Alva Call Me the Space Cowboy or Maurice Edison swoops in again with his money.

This time his money took the shape of lawyers who won the first years of cases easily. Until a Le Prince family attorney named Adlophe (with a "ph" because he is cool like that) dug deeply into the case and his work would build the foundation for the decision being reversed years later.

Sadly, all that digging was his own grave and before he even saw the fruits of his labor he was found dead in his house. Ruled a suicide by hunting rifle to side of head. Except the scene was more staged than a Mel Gibson apology with a few less holes in it.

There's no historical evidence that Thomas Edison orchestrated this murders but he seemed to benefit very nicely from their occurrence.

His most attributed quote comes to mind, "I didn't fail 2,000 times, I found out that if I kill the people that have the inventions I want credit for and if I have enough money, then years from now people's children will be lied to about how cool I was in 3rd grade History."

Decades later and that quote still resonates with me.

Till next time!