New Edisons? Was: [OT] Simple math considered physics

[Ric Werme]

> From: Jim Kuzdrall

>    I believe it was Jean Jacques Rousseau who concluded a letter to a 
> friend saying, "I am sorry this letter is so long, but I did not have 
> time to write a shorter one."  (Did I get that attribution right?)

I'm not sure, but that quote is in Strunk & White's "Elements of Style."
Design it, get it working, optimize it, then release it.  Code, prose,
electronics, it's all the same.  :-)

> On Friday 23 November 2007 23:56, Ben Scott wrote:
> > On Nov 23, 2007 9:47 PM, Ric Werme <ewerme at comcast.net> wrote:
> > >  No More Edisons?
> >
> >   I find sweet irony in the tone of this essay, given that it was
> > re-posted in a forum whose nominal focus is an operating system
> > created by an upstart college kid.  :-)
> 
>     Good counterpoint!  Considering that ideas and concepts are of more 
> lasting value than material "inventions", a future vantage point may 
> see Linus' contribution as more important than Edison's inventions.
> 
>     Try this on for an idea:  Linus' lasting contribution may be 
> the concept of collaborative, open technical development using the Web 
> or some other egalitarian communication medium.
>
>     Linus seemed to realize: 1) people willingly contribute work when 
> the result will benefit all equally; 2) the Web can find the interested 
> and capable people from a worldwide pool.
>
>     I will go on a limb and predict that this will be a model for many 
> significant developments in the future - and certainly not at all 
> restricted to the Linux operating system or software.

Of Edison's many inventions that aren't in the public consciousness,
he gets a lot of credit for creating corporate R&D.  I'm sure there
was a lot of interplay with Henry Ford (one of Edison's closest friends
and inventor, or at least enhancer, of the assembly line.)
[See http://www.nps.gov/edis but the web site isn't very good.  A visit to
West Orange NJ is well worth a stop if you're traveling through the NYC
area.]

I've also been meaning RSN to write a web page about when various Edison
inventions have been replaced/supplanted/improved.  This is worth including.

> From: "Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com>

>   Let us also not forget that progress, even in Edison's day, does not
> occur in a vacuum.  Edison was not the first to work on electrical
> generation, or incandescent lighting, or transcription of sound.  He
> refined prior research and ideas into working concepts that scaled to
> commercial production.
> 
>   I do not mean to diminish his work by pointing this out.  I come up
> with ideas all day long, but they never leave the realm of
> imagination.  It takes real work, and a particular kind of genius, to
> translate ideas into success.  Nobody remembers the people who got to
> America before Chris Columbus.

Being 3/4ths Swedish, I'd be happy argue with that, but Columbus was the
person to make colonization stick, so he deserves the credit.  Of
course, the residents at the time may argue with that, but
you can't please everyone.

>   Edison's work in electrical generation and distribution, in
> particular, is a fascinating study.  His original designs used DC, and
> could not scale to wide-area distribution.  George Westinghouse, his
> chief competitor, was the one promoting AC and tiered voltage
> distribution.  As part of Edison's effort to counter the competition,
> he funded the creation of the electric chair, and advocated the term
> "Westinghoused" over "electrocuted".

If anything "patent wars" then were more extreme than they are now.
I read one claim that Edison that most of the profit from incandescent
lamps went to fight patent infringment battles in court.  Edison did
admit to one of the Westinghouse family late in his life that AC was
a better system, but that may have been after Tesla's death.  (Tesla
worked for Edison briefly and left in disgust at Edison's work methods.
Edison was an inventor and entrepreneur, Tesla was a scientist/theoretician.
Tesla invented multiphase AC and Westinghouse capitalized on it.)

Other people at the time didn't fare much better, I recently found an
interesting collections of electronics history, see
http://www.ccrane.com/library/tesla.03.19.03.aspx which mentions
"it wasn't until 1943, the year of his death, that the US Supreme Court
recognized Tesla, not Marconi, as the inventor of radio."  Also,
http://www.ccrane.com/library/fm-invention.09.09.02.aspx for an account
of how the inventor of FM radio faired vs. RCA and Lee DeForrest.

>   I wonder if Edison might well have more in common today with Bill
> Gates than Linus Torvalds: Edison was not just a smart guy and hard
> worker, he also had the business savvy to turn his work into big
> commercial success.

On lesson Edison learned early on was there was no point in inventing
something if there was no market for it.  Like Gates, he focused on
the market.  On the other hand, I've seen Gates' early BASIC interpreter,
I wouldn't hire him as a programmer....

One reason why DEC no longer exists is because it was headed by an
engineer.  DEC's best customers were technologically savvy, they didn't
sell well to IBM's customers and DEC's attempts to protect their business
by not entering the nascent personal computer helped lead to their
downfall.

Unfortunately, while there is a market for technical excellence, the
market for "good enough" is much, much bigger and that may make it more
cost effective than the "better" option.

> From: Jim Kuzdrall <gnhlug at intrel.com>

> On Saturday 24 November 2007 23:47, Ben Scott wrote:

> >   A2: It was Richard Stallman who codified and popularized the
> > concept of "Free Software"...
> 
>     I talked to Stallman several times in the early 1980s, and his 
> concept of "free software" always got me angry.

I met him once in the 1970s when he crashed a DECUS (DEC User Society)
meeting to push his editing macros for TECO.  He offended anyone
who listened by insisting if we didn't use emacs our productivity
would suck.  I listened to him a couple years ago at a FOSS meeting
at Franklin Pierce Law Center where he interrupted the person
introducing him after being praised as a member of the Open Source
movement instead of the Free Software movement.  At least he's one
of the most consistent people I've met.  :-)

>     My feeling too, but I didn't want to trample on Ric's hero by 
> bringing up the complaints of his contemporaries of financial 
> chicanery, idea "appropriation", or unsophisticated, unguided, brute 
> force experimentation.  (Boy, that does sound like Gates!)

Edison's West Orange lab stockroom has a rather amazing collection of
stuff.  The whale baleen was one of the items tested for use as a
filament.  A lot of the complaints about Edison come from people who lost
out to Edison's unfair (hardnosed? aggressive?) tactics and have a certain
amount of sour grapes and jealousy.  I think Gates has the edge on
"financial chicanery and idea appropriation".  Some of the complaints
benefitting from other's work includes that of his employees.  However
some of those employees were remarkably devoted to him and never felt they
were taken advantage of.  I suspect Edison provided the motivation for
them to accomplish things they could never do without his inspiration.
One thing that really struck me about the West Orange Lab is how quickly
everything stopped after Edison's death.  I don't think the Park Service
had to work very hard to "restore" much of the space.

>     Yes, Edison was a fortuitous bundle of attributes.  Back to Ric's 
> original point, how do we encourage that good fortune to happen again 
> or more often.
> 
>     To bring it back on topic, should the "board" be looking more to 
> nurturing the youth in technological values than getting Linux 
> installed on many computers (which may be better achieved by Novell, 
> Red Hat, etc.).  Linux is a valuable tool for not only exploring 
> software concepts, but also calculating the speed of baseballs and 
> other physical curiosities.  High school, Boy Scouts, 4-H, YMCA 
> presentations?

One thing I always expected someone to create is a PC based electronics
lab.  Around 1990 it would have been a board plugged into printer port
that had latchable registers (with LEDs), a few clock sources, and a
proto-board area for DIP ICs.  Addons would be things like A-D and D-A
convertors, various motors, etc.  Software would be a gwbasic starting
point to send and read data from the board.

These days I guess Python, USB, perhaps a PIC micro, motion sensor,
camera, etc., but key things like lighting LEDs, making noise, and running
motors would remain key things.  My work on printers in the 1980s involved
all that and it was mostly more fun OS internals work.

I'm embarrassed to admit I have a R/W head from an old VCR that has a
three phase motor and I've never hooked it up to anything more exciting
than a battery.  It should be easy to write a Python program to do things
like seeing how slowly I can make it spin or using it to aim a red laser
pointer.  Unfortunately, my daughter was never interested in such things,
so I never had a good enough reason to create such a device.

Manipulating the world is so much more motivating than pushing pixels
around a screen!

       -Ric