Wizard of Menlo Park

Modern civilization, to a large degree, depends upon its ability to operate the myriad of high tech gadgets and industrial infrastructure that has evolved over the ages. The question of how to make electricity was answered long ago. Thomas Edison achieved the first practical method for delivering electricity in the late nineteenth century. He built, with the aid of his many unsung employees, the first commercial power station from the ground up. He constructed huge dynamos and laid underground wiring. The guy knew how to make electricity. One thing that he didn’t know how to do was to give a fellow inventor and genius his due. Perhaps the fact that he had on his very own payroll the gentleman that was to shape the eventual future of modern industrial power standards concerned him less than feeding the myth of his own fame as the Wizard of Menlo Park. Nicola Tesla also knew how to make electricity. His concentration on Alternating Current over Edison’s Direct Current method carried the day and himself to fame in his own right. What works the two inventors might have accomplished together had Edison realized and supported the talents of his upstart employee will remain a great loss to science.