Last week, my great and good friend Chris sent me a link to this Oatmeal comic.
Now, I love Chris like a brother (especially since he and the lovely and talented Mrs. Chris took me out for a steak dinner last week as well, and thanks again, guys) but this comic bugged me for several reasons.
One that I pointed out to Chris is that “the only thing Edison truly pioneered was d’baggery” is wrong. Edison did a great deal of leading edge work on telegraph systems; the money to build Menlo Park came from that work. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet
Anyway, Chris is a great admirer of Telsa, and a great friend of mine, and I don’t like arguing with people who feed me, so I let sleeping dogs lie.
I was pretty surprised, though, when the Y Combinator newsfeed showed me this article from Forbes: “Nikola Tesla Wasn’t God And Thomas Edison Wasn’t The Devil”, which takes on the assertions in the Oatmeal comic and debunks many of them. Knapp’s comment “Because every narrative needs a villain, right?” particularly struck home with me, for reasons that have nothing to do with Edison and Tesla and everything to do with recent events in the blogosphere.
The Oatmeal has come back with a response to the Forbes article as well, should you care to follow the discussion that far down the rabbit hole.