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In Reply to: RE: Another scientist would discover electricity, just a little later. posted by carcass93 on March 03, 2011 at 09:52:55
Agreed.
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.
Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931"
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
Cute quote, but then there's "I can hire mathematicians at $15 a week but they can't hire me." - Thomas Edison
Which reminds me of a story my 7th grade science teacher told us. It seems that Edison had given a light bulb to a mathematician and asked him to make an accurate calculation of its volume. The next day, the mathemetician returned and confessed that he'd been unable to do so. Edison took the bulb, filled it with water, and poured the contents into a graduated beaker.
Cute quote, but then there's "I can hire mathematicians at $15 a week but they can't hire me." - Thomas Edison
All of which proves that Edison was more a businessman than anything else. However, when it comes to simultaneous invention the situation is the same with mathematicians. There are many examples, e.g. the invention of calculus by Newton and Leibniz.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Agree entirely about simultaneous invention. Not so much about Edison! He unquestionably had creative genius, along with his well-known appetite for work. He himself said that he saw money as a metric of his success. But there are a lot of very successful suits who could never have invented the phonograph, and a lot of mathematicians, as well. In fact, almost nobody could have invented the phonograph just then, although, per your point, it would have happened eventually since the time was ripe owing to a propitious confluence of basic knowledge and technology. One fellow had even recorded sound on disks coated with carbon black, although there was then no way to play it back.
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