beautifulspam wrote:
Aeroz:
While I understand the impulse of groups whom society relegates to marginal lives to demand the recognition, respect, and rights due to them in part by mining history for examples of "our kind" getting over, making good, and contributing brilliantly to science, technology and the arts, I feel that this impulse is by definition defensive, and as such a tendency to excess will be a near certainty.
Blacks and women, for instance, are right to insist on greater recognition of the accomplishments of wollstonecraft, curie, du bois, carver, williams and so on, but when defensive identity politics cross the line into insisting on the superiority of ones own "kind," the stupidities of afro-centrism and difference feminism (in some forms) are the unfortunate result.
Aspergians are no more immune to this temptation than any other marginalized group. I understand that you want recognition for your kind, but there really is no reason to believe that Da Vinci was an Aspergian, and indeed even a cursory examination of his life and work yields much that contradicts your claim.
I hate to say it, but I have to agree. Edison, in a lot of ways, wasn't an inventor. He DID have other people working for him, etc... He didn't think some things through and, when caught, he tried to discredit the other method. In wikipedia it speaks of a bit of truth OFTEN forgotten in the lore of Edison:
Quote:
Nearly all of Edison's patents were utility patents, which were protected for a 17 year period and included inventions or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or chemical in nature. About a dozen were design patents, which protect an ornamental design for up to a 14 year period. Like most patents, the inventions he described were improvements over prior art. The phonograph patent, on the other hand, was unprecedented as the first device to record and reproduce sounds.[18] Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the first commercially practical incandescent light. Several designs had already been developed by earlier inventors including the patent he purchased from Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, Moses G. Farmer,[19] Joseph Swan, James Bowman Lindsay, William Sawyer, Sir Humphry Davy, and Heinrich Göbel. Some of these early bulbs had such flaws as extremely short life, high expense to produce, and high current draw, making them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially. In 1878, Edison applied the term filament to the element of glowing wire carrying the current, although English inventor Joseph Swan had used the term prior to this. Edison took the features of these earlier designs and set his workers to the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. By 1879, he had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum,
That covers, among other things, the fact that edison did NOT invent the lightbulb! HECK, it is hard to believe that people didn't try a high temperature metal, like tungsten, earlier. It is ALSO amazing that nobody tried a vacum before. I mean it IS well known, and has been for HUNDREDS of years that OXIdation weakens metal. It has ALSO been known for HUNDREDS of years that AIR is required for fire, and helps conduct heat. So creating a vacum is a likely solution. Of course, creating a real vacum in a case like that is difficult, so who knows how edison got credited with it. Of course, you CAN always just replace oxygen with something that won't be a problem.
Electric lighting was used before Edison. They used carbon-arc lighting. Before that there were lanterns with natural gas that would heat a little piece of lime until it glowed giving off light. That is how the expression "limelight" came about.
23 Nov 2007, 7:37 am
