Re: xkcd: CrowdStrike

Your Name  <YourName@YourISP.com> wrote:

On 2024-08-04 03:14:42 +0000, Lynn McGuire said:

Thomas Edison tried over 8,000 materials before he found the right
element for the first light bulb.

>
Edison didn't create the lightbulb. At best he used the work of others
before him, at worst he stole the idea. Nobody really know for sure.
What is known is that Edison's "demonstration" of his lightbulb is
known to be highly dubuious - he purposely ended the deomnstration just
before he knew the filament would burn out.

This is entirely true, and Edison was a marketing genius, but he still
deserves a lot of credit for the trial and error testing to find a way to
make a reliable carbon filament.  Everybody knew carbon was a likely
material, lots of people had made short-lived lamps, but nobody had
figured out how to make a reliable carbon filament.

Joseph Swan may well be the real creator of the lightbulb we have used
in homes for years. He critised Edison's demonstration and eventually
the two "worked together".

Swan patented a carbon filament before Edison did, but his filament wasn't
as good as Edison's was.

Both the Edison and Swan lamps were very very expensive to make because of
the time involved in evacuating them, until an Italian fellow, whom I want
to call Malagnini, devised a method for largescale evacuation of a lot of
bulbs simultaneously.

Neither Edison nor Swan figured out about pressurizing the bulb with an
inert atmosphere, which leads to far more reliable bulbs.  (And of course
forty years later folks worked out how to draw tungsten into wire and then
everything changed completely, making the Ediswan patents meaningless.)

Musk is the most successful rocket launcher ever.  He just had his
first failure in over several years of weekly launches.

>
Musk's rocket and cars work despite him, not because of him. They are
the work of hundreds of people - he does nothing except supply the
money and spout off his big mouth.

In some ways that's how Edison worked too.  Edison was no engineer, and
he had minimal mathematical skills.  But he knew what people needed and
he thought of ways to get them, and he got funding to develop them and to
hire people who could.

Musk is kind of an obnoxious bozo, but check out Edison's advertisements
for his "Tone tests" for his talking machines if you want to see something
even crazier than Musk's marketing.  (And they are even crazier when you
realize Edison was profoundly deaf and really had no idea how his machines
sounded himself.)
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."