this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Thomas Edison wishes he could have been this successful in ruining the name of Nikola Tesla.
I remember looking this up awhile ago but there doesn’t seem to any animosity between the two. This misunderstanding seems to have started from a decades later biography on Tesla that assumed that an unnamed manger Tesla mentioned in his autobiography was Edison. This unnamed manger seems to have hated Tesla but it couldn’t be Edison because during this time period Edison was grieving the death of this wife so he was spending less time at his company and his position was wrong. Also, the dramatization of the current wars seems to have also contributed to this misunderstanding when ultimately it was just two companies, Edison and Westinghouse, competing over a standard. It didn’t really last that long and certain events were also misattributed to the current wars like the electrocutions of Topsy the Elephant. When that event happened about 10 years after the current wars ended. It involved with an animal rights organization that thought hanging Topsy was inhumane way to kill him so they thought electrocution would be the more humane way.
Why kill an elephant in the first place?
Funny enough Defunctland talked about Topsy in his Coney Island episode. Pretty much the new owner, after doing an expensive renovation, couldn’t afford Topsy and probably had trouble selling Topsy because of controversy of the elephant killing a spectator in the past.
RIP Topsy