[GonzoGOP]

That Leonardo da Vinci made the list and Isambard Kingdom Brunel didn't tells me they have their priorities wrong. Leonardo da Vinci’s designs were advanced, but he never got most of them to work. Brunel may have been ahead of his time, but all of his stuff worked. It may not have made money, but from an engineering perspective it always worked. Finall there is the low ranking of Edision. His stuff was advanced, worked and made tons of money.

[meatloaf]

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 Antiyuppie]

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.