Everything You Know About Edison and Tesla is Mostly Wrong

The first 500 people to use my link will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare - https://skl.sh/todayifoundout12231 If you’ve spent any time on the interwebs there are three almost universal facts you’re going to come across. Nikola Tesla was a God among mortals, Thomas Edison was a patent thief charlatan who we only remember today because of how he stole other people’s ideas, including Tesla’s. And, third, X is a horrible renaming of Twitter and Elon Musk should seriously rethink his decision making paradigm. And yet, up until relatively recently, Nikola Tesla was something of a footnote in popular history, Thomas Edison was considered one of the most prolific inventors ever, the 19th century’s answer to DaVinci, and X was an objectively useless letter of the alphabet. Seriously. It doesn’t need to exist. And neither does Q or C. But going back to Thomas Edison, as historian Keith Nier once very aptly noted, "He is actually one of the least well known of all famous people, and much of what everybody thinks they know about him is no more reliable than a fairy tale." And let me tell you, there is a reason this video is so long as Mr. Nier absolutely nailed it. Also because his life was an insanely interesting story. So, today we are going to cut through all the misinformation and do an ultra deep dive into the real story of Thomas Edison- whether he was really one of history’s ultimate creatives, or just someone who was really, really good at taking credit for other people’s work. In all this we are also going look at the various stories surrounding Nicholas Tesla and Edison, which, on this one. Just to cut to the chase, basically everything you’ve probably ever read about the supposed feud between those two is quite provably false. There was no feud. And not only did Edison not take any patents from Tesla, he actually allowed Tesla to patent things he came up with when working on projects at his job for Edison, even though this wasn’t typical, then or now, and it’s not really clear why Edison did this in Tesla’s case. But because Edison allowed this, via the sale of some of these, it allowed Tesla to crack on on his own. So much more on all this later! Because as much as there is an insane amount of misinformation about Edison, there’s just as much misinformation out there on Tesla. Stay tuned because we are going to clear that right up. So let’s clear it all up, shall we? Author: Daven Hiskey Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Chapters: 0:00 Intro 3:41 No School No Problem 5:57 A 12 Year Old On a Mission and His First Business 10:52 You’ll Put Your Eye Out (Early Experiments) 13:30 Relentless Optimism 16:42 The Life You Save May Be Your Own 20:05 Whoopsadoodle 22:37 First Inventions and a Life Lesson 25:48 Making a Million Dollars By Keeping His Mouth Shut 30:54 A Kid in a Candy Shop and Making the Next Great Invention 32:59 His Actual Greatest Invention 35:18 Making the Telephone Commercially Viable 37:05 Did He Actually Invent “Hello”? 39:27 Inventing the First Device to Play Back Recorded Sound 43:10 The Wizard of Menlo Park 45:29 The Real Story of the Lightbulb 53:48 His Accidental Invention That Massively Changed the World That Nobody Talks About 56:36 More Power Mister Scott!!! 57:56 A Death and an Adorably Nerdy Marriage Proposal 1:03:12 The Future of Inventing 1:05:58 The Motion Picture 1:09:03 A Major Mistake 1:10:54 Electric Cars 1:15:02 Stepping Back 1:16:35 WWI and the Myth of Tesla and Radar 1:18:46 Do No Harm and More WWI 1:21:10 His Last Work and Death 1:22:20 The Edison / Tesla Myths 1:28:03 The Tesla / War of the Currents Myth 1:31:10 The Truth About Tesla’s Involvement in the War of the Currents 1:34:07 What Did Tesla and Edison Think of Each Other? 1:36:21 A Genius Among Us 1:39:12 Stealing Work? 1:42:15 The Face of a Brand 1:43:50 Working Style and What Did Edison’s Workers Think of Him? 1:47:05 Work Environment 1:51:10 Stealing Ideas? (Part 2) 1:53:25 Patents and a Ruthless Businessman? 1:58:42 The Truth About the Animal Killings 1:59:27 The Elephant Killing Myth 2:02:47 The Real Story of the War of the Currents 2:07:27 The Truth About the X-Ray 2:09:59 Back to the Truth About the War of the Currents, the Animal Killings, and the Electric Chair 2:16:28 Summing Up the Animal Killing Thing 2:18:02 Summing Up Everything 2:21:34 Bonus Fact This video is #sponsored by Skillshare.