The recent obsession people have with Tesla is, I believe, largely attributable to that Oatmeal guy, who has printed any number of stories about Tesla that are utter nonsense. Hamilton, Ontario, a big city just outside Toronto, actually had a bunch of nerds pester them so much they named a street “Nikola Tesla Boulevard” despite the fact that Tesla had nothing at all to do with Hamilton.
Tesla is today regarding as a brilliant inventor who was undone by lacking the kind of business and PR acumen Edison et al. did. In fact, Tesla invented nothing, and got famous largely because he was pretty good at PR, albeit not a good businessman.
Incidentally, as to Thomas Edison, he was absolutely one of the most important humans who ever lived, and I’d have to say he was legitimately an “inventor” even if his method of invention involved hiring smart people. Not a scientist, really.
Edison, is, obviously, comparable to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates; he understood what people wanted even if the people didn’t know it yet, and knew where technology might reasonably be able to deliver on that.
For all the three things Edison is most known for, electric light, sound recording, and moving pictures, there was plenty of prior work on all of them, and even designs which “worked” for a very limited definition of the term, but it took Edison to be tenacious enough to take one design all the way.
For example, electrical incandescent light existed before Edison, but it was a novelty because nobody knew what to make the filament out of. Edison ground away at the problem for years before figuring it out, and then he ground away at the problem of expanding an electrical distribution system beyond a lab and electrifying a whole neighborhood of New York City.
Edison is the best possible example of the idea that ideas are a dime a dozen, but execution and follow-through are pure gold.
You’re the one who said ranking was the only relevant way to determine being overrated, not me. So, if you have no ranking, how do you know he’s overrated?
Personally, I think it isn’t possible to rank scientists. They can only be rated qualitatively (while some quantitative evidence is useful of course in establishing their quality). In that regard, Hawking was a high-end scientist as evidenced by his decades of scientific contribution. The general public thinks he was a high-end scientist. It seems to me he’s rated about right. And of course, the academic community certainly values and has valued his work according to its quality.
How about Farley Mowat of “Never Cry Wolf” fame? It was definitely presented as hard scientific research but the details got a lot of skepticism behind the scenes.
In the field of under-rated, going to mention a name which most here know… and, as far as astronomers go, can be considered famous… but I still think that his discoveries put him in the realm of Newton, Einstein, and Galileo, for he saw what everyone else was seeing, but, like them, he just looked at it a different way:
Edwin Hubble
The man answered so many questions mankind has plagued itself with since our earliest days it’s kinda funny just listing them:
What is our place in the universe? Orbiting a puny star in an insignificant galaxy. Hell, we’re not even close to the center of the galaxy.
Does the universe have a beginning? Yes. NEXT!
Are the lights in the sky stars or clusters of stars? Yes.
How are we unique? We’re not. We’re really not.
Is the universe made out of all the same stuff? My spectrums say so.
Hubble did not answer any of those questions, as far as I know. Where did you get the idea he did?
Hubble’s biggest discovery was to establish that the universe is expanding. But expanding does not mean the universe has a beginning. The Steady State theory has an expanding universe that has no beginning, for example.
John von Neumann and his role in defining computer architecture. He was asked to read a draft of a paper by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly and give his opinion on it. The person who asked him to do that was a military guy who had funded the first Eckert-Mauchly project to make a digital computer. The draft of the report was published with one author, John von Neumann. I think that most intro computer science books refer to his groundbreaking work as defining computer architecture, yet it was just Eckert and Mauchly’s architecture. I’ve gotten into message board arguments that von Neumann is the one responsible for defining computer architecture. Note that von Neumann did nothing to clear that up. I don’t know the rest of von Neumann’s work, but his credit for computer architecture is totally unfounded.
I have seen that said. These days there is so much legwork to be done that only a team can manage it.
And how often does a person of the caliber of an Einstein emerge? Does a larger world population means more chance of a super-brain popping up? Or just let the Chinese tinker with CRISPR for a couple of generations?
It’s a very interesting world-view that considers long-distance transmission of electricity to be “nothing.”
Edison was adamant that DC electricity could and would power the nation, until Tesla demonstrated very convincingly that AC was the superior choice.
Or what about wireless transmission? Every time you use WI-fi internet, cell phone service, radio, etc., you are confirming Tesla’s grasp of the great promise of wireless transmission.
Yes. Similarly, steam engines existed before James Watt, but Watt came up with several important innovations. I think Gutenberg also built on contemporary inventions. And there had been a number of partially-successful airplanes before December 17, 1903. Yet Edison, Watt, Gutenberg and the Wrights were all certainly very talented and very influential inventors. (And don’t forget Matthew Boulton, Watt’s very talented business partner.)
I’ve read mild criticisms of Stephen Jay Gould which are similar to those regarding Sagan and Tyson, although my impression was that in Sagan’s case it may have been because of his personality.
As a Joe Public non-scientist, I always liked all three of them although Tyson does seem a little bit showbiz lightweight at times.
Woah, mate, tell that to the pioneers of the industrial revolution! There were some incredible engineers in the 18th and 19th centuries, long before Edison saw his first birthday.
I didn’t say there were no great engineers or scientists. I pointed out Joseph Henry in particular who was the giant whose shoulders were stood on by so many, including Edison. I said there were very few people who were great scientists and engineers at that time, and I think that describes the situation well, it was a relatively small number of people who created the modern world,
No, Crafter-Man’s correct. Technically, you can transmit information by transmitting power but practically speaking, nobody does that. If you’re transmitting energy to be used as power, you want to do it as narrowly as possible. It would be insane to try to simply broadcast enough energy to go everywhere with the knowledge that less than one percent of it would ever be received and used. You can broadcast information this way because it uses far less energy.
To use a common example, you can transmit enough energy to send signals to your cellphone but you can’t transmit enough energy to power your cellphone. That’s why you need a battery.
But Tesla claimed he could do it. He thought he could transmit enough power to enable people to run their washer, their dryer, their refrigerator, their oven, their TV, their computer. etc all off of power from the air. You would just turn on the appliance and it would tap into this universal flow of energy that was being broadcast everywhere.
And that’s nuts. The amount of energy you’d have to broadcast to do this would be insane.
Franklin has been called underrated so much she is now overrated. Watson and Crick needed her data to make their discovery but she had the data much longer than they did, was working to the same goal and yet they discovered it before she did.