Nouw said:
I thought Thomas Edison copied everyone's ideas. Damn it school education and internet clashing!
It's hip to bash Edison because he's American, especially nowadays.
The bottom line is that a lot of really smart people from that time period all tended to travel in the same circles. Edison was pretty much the elite of the group, but worked with a lot of people, and there has been a tendency nowadays to say he stole from the people he worked with rather than doing anything of his own... which is kind of contridictory because if that was actually true he never would have retained the contacts he had. People at that time were all heavily interested in the business aspects of things and "races to the patent office" were not uncommon. Edison wound up being credited for so much because he really was that good and a lot of the people claimed to have been the actual innovators were more along the lines of assistants to him.
The thing is that Edison is used as one of the "go to" guys for the arguement that the US pretty much invented/created the modern world, something a lot of the world takes exception to, especially given how relatively recent he was. It's one thing to speak about someone like Davinci whose ideas are now quaint, than someone whose stuff still forms a direct backbone of what we use today.
It also doesn't help that a lot of the great modern minds were more or less chased out of their home countries and came to the US where they were better appreciated due to the enviroment we presented. Scotland (I believe) tries to claim Alexander Graham Bell for example because he was born there, but they pretty much ran him out and he did all of his stuff in Canada (who also tries to claim him) and the US. Of course he also shows something of the mentality because one of the big contreversies over the phone was how he wanted to submit things to both the US and British Patent office but needed to do it in Britan first because of how they wouldn't accept a patent already on record in another country (where the US would allow you to multi-patent). It's been a long time, so I could have some of the details there wrong... but it's fairly interesting.
At any rate the two biggest innovators of the period are probably Edison and Tesla. Both of whom had some very good ideas, and their business relationship DOES raise some interesting questions. In the end though a lot of the Pro-Tesla crowd seems to overlook that Tesla was almost dysfunctionally insane, believing in doing things like unleashing psychic power with pyramid shaped headwear and such. People tend to point to his good ideas, but tend to also want to overlook where he actually directed a lot of his energy. That said his work on direct current, even as a collaberator, alone makes him one of the biggest innovators in history.
Steve Jobs really doesn't belong on the list, he's AN innovator, but not one of the biggest.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates deserve credit for developing a usable computer operating system which made computer approachable to the average person. All comments about other "tech guys" aside it always comes down to those two in discussing whether or not Bill invented MS DOS or stole it from Steve, an arguement which goes back to things like HiDOS from the Apple II.
