Was Thomas Edison's influence good or bad?

Answer 1

Depends on how you define, "negative impact."

Edison was a vigorous, sometimes ruthless, businessman, and his efforts to maintain a monopolistic hold on technologies he thought were "his" (electrical distribution and movie making, for example) probably delayed non-Edison ideas from flourishing for a few years. The "Battle of the Currents" is an example of how Edison fought to maintain control, and thus delayed the implementation of AC power. However, in most cases, popular demand simply overcame Edison's efforts.

Edison was quite proud of the fact that he never worked on any weapons.

Answer 2

In my opinion, Edison contributed greatly to the technology of Western Civilization and of that there can be little doubt. He was also able to pick up on the ideas of other lone inventors with undeveloped ideas, further perfect them and then successfully market them to a fascinated public. Edison became a "name", like RCA or Sony is now, and the press waited for each and every invention, also contributing greatly to their success.

However Edison was also a rather ruthless and unscrupulous businessman, and borrowed from the cutthroat business ethos of his time, a la the Robber Barons. Once one of his inventions became marketable he actively promoted it to the world and just as actively suppressed any competitors in the market, by spreading false rumors about his opposition's inventions and promoting his own over the competitors. He drove many competitors out of business. While this is not unusual in and of itself, the degree to which he badgered, sued and harassed his competitors was rather extraordinary, He was dogged in their pursuit both personally and by means of legal and political harassments. By all accounts, Thomas Edison was a wierd and often very unpleasant and egomaniacal individual.

He was also among the first to hire, and frankly exploit, intellectual workers and used their talents to create "his" inventions. Edison would come up with an idea and then turn his lab full of creative inventors on the idea, which when perfected he would then claim solely as his own. Edison was one of the first corporate IP exploiters to force his employees to sign away any rights to their participation or contributions to successful marketing of their own inventions.

One example of this was his treatment of the much more educated and talented Nikola Tesla, who outshone Edison in his own lab. When he arrived from Croatia, Edison hired Tesla to work on Edison's inventions. Tesla improved many of them and like the rest of Edison's workers was granted only a paycheck. When Tesla began work on improving Edison's DC motors, Edison promised him a $50,000 bonus when the work was completed. Tesla then successfully completed the motor project. When he went to Edison to collect his bonus, Edison sneered that Tesla didn't understand the complex nuances of American humor, and refused to pay Tesla the bonus he promised.

Tesla promptly quit the Edison exploitation factory. The two were bitter enemies for the rest of their lives, quite rightly in my opinion. When Tesla invented the far superior AC electrical system, the AC/DC "current wars" began, with Edison and his marketing department keeping up a relentless attack on AC as being deadlier, dangerous, and unsuitable for use by civilized society. The problem, which Edison no doubt knew, was that the AC system Tesla and Westinghouse perfected was a vastly superior and considerably more efficient method of transmission and distribution and could transmit power over great distances, while Edison's DC system could only effectively serve much smaller areas.

There are some good books in the library about both Tesla and Edison, too many to list here, and a good search of the internet will bring up many examples.