Edison did a lot of trial and error using teams to try different apsects unil they got a workable solution. Tesla was a genius up there with Einstein. He did everything mostly in his head including the final design. He told the builders and machinists the dimensions instead of writing them down. He built the machines and ran them mentally before they were constructed. He wasn’t the trial and error nor the team developer Edison was. If J.P. Morgan hadn’t interfered with Westinghouse and Tesla, it’s hard to say what inventions may have come out of Tesla’s head. For that alone J.P. Morgan deserves to be scorned.
Westinghouse needs a mention for his inventions. In the end Westinghouse and Tesla proved AC was far superior to DC that Edison advocated by building large scale sysems. Edison used dirty tricks to derail AC power to no avail.
The article ponders what, exactly, Edison invented vs. what he took credit for, but I posit that his most important invention of all was the “idea factory”, a.k.a. R&D as an actual organized effort by teams. Without this, we would still be relying on lone wolves, dreamers and crackpots for advancements, which nowadays would be impossible, given the high costs for incremental advancement.