Earth-2 #2: The smartest man in the world
Jul. 20th, 2012 11:47 am![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
superboyprime posting in ![[community profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
scans_daily
Okay, does anyone recall how James Robinson was going on on Twitter about how much he despised Thomas Edison and how it'd be a cool idea to somehow use him as a villain in Earth 2? I'm calling it now: Terry Sloan here is going to be Robinson's modern day Edison stand-in.
Also, the Flash's heroic debut:
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Date: 2012-07-20 07:08 pm (UTC)Seems likely.
(And I'm not an Edison fan either ^^)
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Date: 2012-07-20 07:13 pm (UTC)He is being rather upfront about his supervillainy, though, announcing that he's going to attack Mr .Terrific for potentially interfering with his goals in front of all those people.
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Date: 2012-07-20 08:27 pm (UTC)The man was a psychopath.
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Date: 2012-07-20 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 09:06 pm (UTC)That said, he did send Rasputin's ghost to assassinate Tesla.
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Date: 2012-07-20 09:10 pm (UTC)...If that makes sense. Jonah turned Edison down on the basis that he receives bounties for killing criminals occasionally, but he's not an assassin.
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Date: 2012-07-23 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-21 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 09:17 pm (UTC)He didn't really have any stick out moments like Alan Scott, Jay Garrick, Welsey Dodds or Ted Grant, but he was still cool in his own right. Besides one of the other main JSA members (Jay?) accidentally killing him while under Nazi mindcontrol.
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Date: 2012-07-20 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-21 06:13 am (UTC)As an example of what people thought of him after meeting or dealing with him in person is the joke that the reason why Hollywood is in California is that the filmmakers wanted to get as far away from Edison as possible.
Not in the least because he organised stealing films so he could collect the royalties for himself.
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Date: 2012-07-21 08:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-22 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-21 02:30 am (UTC)dude was basically a real life Lex Luthor.
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Date: 2012-07-21 06:50 am (UTC)A Summary of the War of the Currents
Date: 2012-07-21 06:36 am (UTC)Edison told Tesla that if he could do it, then he'll give him $10,000. So Tesla went away, invented it and came back, only for Edison to refuse to give him any money, telling him "you obviously don't understand the American sense of humour".
After this Tesla left Edison's company (Edison kept the AC generator though, as he had teams of inventors working for him developing stuff, which he then patented under his own name) to set up his own company. Where he was commissioned to make a hydroelectric generator from Niagra Falls, which he did. This also proved that Tesla's ideas behind AC generators worked, and began the first step on the road for his long term goal "free wireless electricity for the world".
Due to the infrastructure of the USA being built around substations centred on Edison's DC current, he wasn't going to stand around while his monopoly was being threatened by someone with a better system. So he had to resort to the only tactic he knew to remain on top. Namely: a muge misinformation campaign!
He started a propaganda campaign about how dangerous Tesla's AC currents were, and even used it to electrify numerous criminals and an elephant (who was a criminal, it squashed like six people on seperate occasions) to death to show how dangerous it was. He hired gangs of men to smash up Tesla's laboratories, he seized the opportunity to get newspapers to latch onto Tesla's "eccenricities" (the guy was possibly obsessive compulsive, a germophobe and possibly autistic) to brand him a dangerous mad scientist.
Who won the War of the Currents? Well Tesla eventually went bankrupt, due to him not having the business savvy of Edison, and his reputation was tarnished to the extent that no one would take him seriously any more. So Edison maintained his monopoly on the electrical infrastructure... that is, until someone after Edison's death independantly checked the difference between AC and DC and realised, "Hey, AC's better", which resulted in it being the form of current everyone uses now.
Now Tesla wasn't flawless in his genius (he rejected atomic theory and thought that electricity was an "aetheric fluid"), but at least he didn't go out of his way to squash his competitors.
It would have been like if in the 90s Bill Gates had run a ad campaign telling people how Apple computers eat people.
Re: A Summary of the War of the Currents
Date: 2012-07-21 06:50 am (UTC)Re: A Summary of the War of the Currents
Date: 2012-07-21 07:03 am (UTC)And I don't care if that Elephant was a killer, that was still a pretty despicable thing to do to an elephant.
Re: A Summary of the War of the Currents
Date: 2012-07-21 08:40 am (UTC)Re: A Summary of the War of the Currents
Date: 2012-07-21 01:26 pm (UTC)His earthquake machine was not something revolutionary, it was a resonance mechanism that was given bigger fame by rumour and gossip. His ideas for a death ray to destroy the moon were probably imagination or exaggeration. He was not one of those geniuses which we see on comic books which if he had lived we would be living in a world with robots and jetpacks nowadays, and he was not killed by a secret Illuminatii/Catholic/Whatever conspiracy.
He was a very clever scientist which gave us some very important steps in the incremental stepladder of scientific advancement.
PS: Nothing personal against the talk, but I've come across so many irrational Tesla fanboys across the internet that they've almost made me hate any mention of his accomplishments for fear of what speech might come afterwards.
Re: A Summary of the War of the Currents
Date: 2012-07-21 03:57 pm (UTC)http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstr
Re: A Summary of the War of the Currents
Date: 2012-07-21 04:09 pm (UTC)Specially because those people do not consider that he went through a period of insanity in his later life.
Re: A Summary of the War of the Currents
Date: 2012-07-22 04:24 am (UTC)He didn't, but you know -- only because he didn't think of it... ;-)
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Date: 2012-07-22 12:33 am (UTC)What makes it sting is that there are some really cool ideas here. But it's hard for me to read something written this dully.
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Date: 2012-07-23 07:43 am (UTC)Though I still find it very un-Jay Garrick-ysh. More like "what if Bart grew up under Jay's wing to become The Flash following his legacy, not Barry's"-kind of thing.