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Thomas Edison was one of the greatest inventors of all time - or was he? Most people think Edison was the inventor of the light bulb, but that doesn't seem to be the case, which begs the question, "Who truly invented the light bulb?" There is a lot of contention over famous stolen inventions, and unfortunately it's impossible to not bring up Edison when it comes to the subject.
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The name Thomas Edison conjures up titles like Genius, Mastermind, and Invention Thief
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The history books tell us Edison was one of the greatest inventors of all time, creating such important inventions as the light bulb, the movie camera, and the phonograph
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But the list of things Edison swiped from other inventors is just as long
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How do we know what stories are real and which were stolen valor? Well, today we're telling you about all the things Thomas Edison didn't actually invent
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but took credit for anyway. Let's turn on the light switch and shed some light on Edison
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Photographers Joseph Nyssephor Nyeeps and Louis Daguerre spent their lives capturing still-life
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images and innovating new ways to take pictures. Nyeeps is credited with developing heliographic
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images, the process of which made the earliest surviving photograph in 1826, and Daguerre created
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the aptly named Daguerreotype process, one of the first publicly available photographic
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processes ever. So when Edison saw their success, he said to himself, why not me? And then he
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remembered he had absolutely no knowledge of photography nor the intricate work of processing
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photographs, which are gaps in expertise that make inventing photography incredibly difficult
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But that wasn't going to stop Edison from building on Yips's and Daguerre's work in order to create
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a motion picture camera, something that had already been developed by inventor Edward Muybridge
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in 1877. Remember that film loop of the horse rider from Jordan Peele's 2022 thriller Nope
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That's a real film, and it was all Muybridge, who was also ripped off in Edison's quote-unquote
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process. Edison's free-flowing borrowing of ideas eventually became the Kinetoscope, a single-serving motion picture viewer with a cabinet and peephole. Though most of the work
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on this new device was carried out by Edison's assistant, William Dixon, good old Tommy is still
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credited not only with inventing the kinetoscope, but with pioneering the motion picture industry as
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a whole. Pics or it didn't happen, Thomas. Preferably, pics that create the illusion
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of motion when placed in a sequential 24 frames per second timeline
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The light bulb is arguably Thomas Edison most famous invention But in reality the creation of the light bulb was a group effort spanning several decades So why the heck was Edison allowed to slap his name on it
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As early as 1800, strides were being made in Italy and England toward bringing the light bulb to life
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Alessandro Volta and Humphrey Davy were two early pioneers in generating electric arcs
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which broke down gases to produce a visible discharge for public lighting
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Forty years later, Warren De La Rue and William Edwards State began updating those electric ideas
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integrating vacuum tubes and light coils in order to generate and keep lights burning
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Then for the next two decades, British scientist Joseph Swan developed a bulb with a carbon filament
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similar to the bulbs we use today. Finally, Edison got his hands on the thing in the 1870s and added his own touches
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claiming full, single-minded credit for the entire invention. It's almost as if he waltzed in and finished a puzzle that everyone else had been working on
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then bragged about how great his puzzle was. He'd be the worst escape room partner
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Edison and Swan would eventually team up after a lengthy legal struggle over patent infringement
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But what should have elevated the light bulb project only exacerbated the competition
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after Edison designed over 3,000 models of a light bulb between 1879 and 1880
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That lab must have required sunglasses. Eventually, Edison and his entire scientific team were granted a patent for a bulb that could burn more than 1,200 hours
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But once again, Edison was the one who ended up receiving sole credit. Now we're just wondering what popped up over people's heads when they had an idea before 1879
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The sun, I guess? Where would we be without batteries? We'd be tethered to electrical outlets five or six feet from the wall
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That's where we'd be. And nobody wants that future. To rescue us from the shackles of the electrical cord
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someone needed to invent a way to store energy portably. And that man was not Thomas Edison
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although he worked tirelessly to make you believe that he did. The first storage battery was invented decades before Edison even got into the portable energy game
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Alessandro Volta, previously mentioned as a lightbulb maestro, also invented what we now know as the storage battery as early as 1800 But to give the appropriate credit where credit is due Edison was good at identifying an opportunity and striking while the iron was hot And by the last
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decades of the 19th century, nothing was hotter than automobiles. Anyone who's ever been stuck
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in an East Coast snowstorm with a car that won't turn over already knows what Edison had to figure
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out for himself. Automobiles need batteries. They're a fairly crucial ingredient to this
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particular soup. Edison experimented heavily with nickel-iron alkaline storage, but was too slow to
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invent one in time for the contemporarily bustling automobile industry. Instead, his batteries were
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used for industrial purposes, putting the electric car industry behind by at least 100 years
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We're only just now catching up. If only we'd had a battery that could hold a charge
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And now, as a palate cleanser, here's an invention Edison wanted nothing to do with
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X-rays. Why would the infamous glory hog suddenly be shy about attaching his name to one of the most significant technologies in modern history
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Well, for lack of a better word, he was scared. Let's face it, X-rays are a little scary
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Particularly in the 19th century, when the average person didn't understand anything about radiation or X-rays
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beyond this machine can show you skeletons. The two hottest inventors at the time
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Nikola Tesla and Edison himself, had their own thoughts on x-rays. The technology had been around
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since the 1895 Nobel Prize-winning invention from German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, but the two bad boys of invention
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disagreed on how it should be used. Tesla wanted to use the tech as radar
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for monitoring submarines, a practical application, and also submarines don't have skeletons
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so using x-rays on them would be much less scary. Edison, on the other hand, looked down his nose at the technology and patted himself on the back
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saying he was, quote, proud of the fact that he never invented weapons to kill
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That's right, he also bragged about not inventing stuff, which is a thing we didn't know you could do
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After Rondgen's discovery, many other scientists and doctors went to work on experimenting with how X-ray technology could be used
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Edison's own assistant, Clarence Daly, worked with a ton of X-rays throughout his career and tragically developed skin cancer as a result
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After Daly passed away in 1904 Edison decided he was done with radiation stating I am afraid of radium and polonium too and I don want to monkey with them Luckily this didn give him any ideas for radioactive monkeys
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Wax paper is non-stick, resistant to moisture, and makes a funny sound if you blow on it in
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the right way. Is there anything it can't do? It is believed that wax paper was most
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likely invented in 1851 by French artist and photographer Gustave Legret. We can't be sure
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about the exact date, but we can be sure that Edison had nothing to do with it, even if popular
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history says differently. Legret used a dry, waxy paper in his photography process, improving on the
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process of developing paper negatives by making the paper more receptive to fine detail. And in
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the early 1890s, Edison decided he would also do that, using the paper with his electric pen as a
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stencil for copying documents, hoping to find success in markets like legal firms, insurance
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companies, and other workers that seemed to have a great deal of reduplication. His electric pen
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ended up being loud, powered by messy acidic batteries, and all but unusable, making it a rare
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unsuccessful creation for the Edison man. As he himself put it rather bluntly, the chief objection
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comes from clerks who do not want to use it. When Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic
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induction in 1831, the production of an electromagnetic force, or EMF, through a
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conductor in a magnetic field paved the way for the creation of the electric generator
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a portable power system for all your late 19th century needs. By the 1870s, you could have your
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own electric generator, something which Edison saw and then immediately wanted. Edison's lifelong
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battle between alternating and direct current reared its head in the electric generator game as well
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Edison favored his dynamo, or direct current powered generator, which he built with assistants
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Charles Batchelor and Francis Robbins Upton. So when Nikola Tesla invented his alternating current
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generator in 1888, using lower voltage and safer electricity, Faraday's revolutionary invention
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just became another rivalry between the two celebrity inventors. Edison may have ultimately won out in the US
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but in Tesla's defense, he may have been distracted making clones of Hugh Jackman at the time