"He moved in very high circles," Seifer said.īut Tesla could also be haughty and was known to be a hygiene freak. He spoke several languages and counted writers Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, and naturalist John Muir as friends, according to Seifer. And despite his many patents and innovations, Tesla was destitute when he died in 1943.Īt the height of his career, Tesla was charismatic, urbane and witty. Tesla's inventions are the backbone of modern power and communication systems, but he faded into obscurity later in the 20th century, when most of his inventions were lost to history. "He invents modern innovation as we know it," DeGraaf said. By having multiple patents and inventions developing in parallel, Edison, in turn, ensured that his assistants had a stable financial situation to continue running experiments and fleshing out more designs. For instance, Edison got the idea for a moving picture camera, or kinetoscope from a talk by photographer Edward Muybridge, but then left most of the experimentation and prototyping to his assistant William Dickson and others. Morgan, became fed up with years of failure.Įdison's enduring legacy isn't a specific patent or technology, but his invention factories, which divided the innovation process into small tasks that were carried out by legions of workers, DeGraaf said. Unfortunately, Tesla's grand scheme failed when his financial backer, J.P. "Our entire mass communication system is based on Tesla's system," said Marc Seifer, author of "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," (Citadel Press, 2001). Tesla also spent years working on a system designed to wirelessly transmit voices, images and moving pictures - making him a futurist, and the true father of radio, telephone, cell phones and television. And his alternating-current motor and hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls- a first-of-its-kind power plant - truly electrified the world. In a shortsighted move, Edison dismissed Tesla's "impractical" idea of an alternating-current (AC) system of electric power transmission, instead promoting his simpler, but less efficient, direct-current (DC) system.īy contrast, Tesla's ideas were often more disruptive technologies that didn't have a built-in market demand. "If Edison hadn't invented those things, other people would have," DeGraaf told Live Science. Though the light bulb, the phonograph and moving pictures are touted as Edison's most important inventions, other people were already working on similar technologies, said Leonard DeGraaf, an archivist at Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey, and the author of "Edison and the Rise of Innovation" (Signature Press, 2013). (Of course, Edison had scores more assistants helping him devise inventions, and also bought some of his patents.) Tesla garnered less than 300 worldwide, according to a study published in 2006 at the Sixth International Symposium of Nikola Tesla. In the end, however, Edison held 1,093 patents, according to the Thomas Edison National Historic Park.
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"If you were going to laboratory and watch him at work, you'd find he'd have stuff all over the bench: wires and coils and various parts of inventions," Carlson said. In contrast, Edison was more of a sketcher and a tinkerer. "He really worked out his inventions in his imagination," Carlson told Live Science. This enabled him to accurately visualize intricate 3D objects, and as a result, he could build working prototypes using few preliminary drawings.
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Tesla had an eidetic memory, which meant he could very precisely recall images and objects. Bernard Carlson, the author of "Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age" (Princeton Press, 2013).įrom their starkly different personalities to their lasting legacies, here's how the two dueling inventors stack up. "They're different inventors, but you can't really say one is greater, because American society needs some Edisons and it needs some Teslas" said W.