The Myth of the Edison-Tesla Spirit Phone Rivalry
In an interview with B.C. Forbes in 1920, Thomas Edison said he hoped to build a device to communicate with the dead. Contrary to claims made in books, articles, and YouTube videos, there’s no evidence Edison took this idea from Nikola Tesla, nor that the two inventors were in competition to devise a so-called spirit phone.
I’ve written a novel titled The Spirit Phone, based on Thomas Edison’s reputed attempt to build a device to speak with the dead. Edison appears as a supporting character, but the protagonists are occultist Aleister Crowley and inventor Nikola Tesla.
Like just about anyone else who’s written a book, I promote mine on social media. When I posted about my novel one day in August 2022, the following comments were made regarding the title device:
“That was teslas invention [sic]”
“Who did Thomas Edison steal the idea for a spirit phone from?”
Here is a similar example, from a post made in February 2023:
Commenter: “Thomas Edison stole his work from Tesla [sic]”
Me: “What technology or invention do you consider Edison to have stolen from Tesla?”
Commenter: “Everything E Edison was a bum Tesla did not believe in selling energy Edison did so the wealthy let Edison steal from Tesla its all about profit.Read a book on it you may learn something [sic]”
These weren’t the only times I’d encountered the notion that Thomas Edison stole the idea for the spirit phone from Nikola Tesla. Besides being false, it’s one aspect of a larger trend toward demonizing Edison as a grifter who stole others’ work and cheated Tesla, who is increasingly regarded as a sort of secular demigod who invented everything under the sun. This includes the making of memes such as, “If you’re driving a Tesla and it gets stolen, is it now called an ‘Edison?’”
The false dichotomy: Edison the grifter vs. Saint Nikola
Edison and Tesla were both brilliant innovators with very different inventive styles and worldviews, and there may be no two modern historical figures with more misinformation thrown around regarding their relationship. Perhaps it is in itself not a matter of great import, but believing meme-fueled narratives with no regard for evidence is a problem that goes beyond what we think of Edison or Tesla, and can affect the living as well as our view of the dead. It’s also a really bad idea if one wishes to strive toward a proper grasp of history.
A broad look at this entire Edison vs. Tesla mythology is beyond the scope of this article, but there is a concise and informative post by Robyn Bennis on the website Gate Scientific. It is pointed out, for example, that despite the oft-repeated claim that Edison cheated Tesla out of a promised $50,000 bonus, there is no mention of this in Tesla’s diary at the time. (When the story does eventually appear in Tesla’s autobiography, nearly 35 years later, he claims it was the manager of Edison’s Manhattan machine works, not Edison, who had promised the bonus.)
So, I will here focus on a single aspect of this false Edison-Tesla narrative: the untenable argument that Thomas Edison was in competition with Nikola Tesla to build a device to contact the dead. Like many such notions, it has its grains of truth.
Roots of the Tesla spirit phone myth: “something mysterious, not to say supernatural”
Here is a quote by Nikola Tesla from the year 1901:
My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me.
This quote has been used to claim that Nikola Tesla came up with the idea of inventing a device to speak with the dead before Edison, who allegedly got the idea from Tesla. While the quote itself is genuine, such a conclusion regarding it is untenable, as will be seen below.
That Edison said he wanted to invent a means to contact the dead is beyond dispute: He plainly stated this in an interview conducted by B.C. Forbes for the October 1920 issue of The American Magazine.
I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities who have left this earth to communicate with us…I hope to be able to finish it before very many months pass.
This interview has been cited at various times since then, including in 2019 on the website of Forbes, the magazine B.C. Forbes founded. Edison was also interviewed for the 30 October 1920 issue of Scientific American, for which he provided a more detailed yet basic description: a kind of “valve” that would magnify communicative efforts by spirits the way a powerhouse magnifies motive force, so that “the slightest effort which it intercepts will be magnified many times.” Edison’s stated purpose was to provide a reliable form of equipment for psychical research, which in 1920 had not yet been completely abandoned by the mainstream scientific community. As he states in the interview:
I am not promising communication with those who have passed out of this life. I merely state that I am giving the psychic investigators an apparatus which may help them in their work, just as optical experts have given the microscope to the medical world.
To whatever extent his research progressed, and whatever his caveats as to how well it might work, Thomas Edison’s explicitly stated intention to invent a device to communicate with the dead is a matter of public record.
There is, however, not a shred of credible evidence to support the existence of an attempted “Tesla spirit phone” or “spirit radio,” as it has also been called, nor even any claim by Tesla that he was trying to invent such technology. For instance, while examples of a so-called “Tesla spirit radio” can be found online, it’s basically a crystal radio in a jar, plugged into a computer. Even if one attributes this technology to Tesla, there is no record of him claiming he had used it to contact ghosts.
What did Tesla have to say about the afterlife?
In his 2015 doctoral dissertation on Tesla’s development of remote control technology, historian Kendall Milar Thompson cites a 1907 New York World article in which Tesla is quoted as speculating on the possibility of determining the weight of the human soul, which had recently been attempted by scientists:
First, he [Tesla] ridiculed that attempt, saying it was “altogether too absurd for discussion” and that “an aggregation of impressions, thoughts and feelings have no materiality.” But then, as with much of his interest in psychical research, he evaluated the practicality of their experiment and explained that the researchers did not utilize a “fit instrument” for weighing the human soul. (p. 88)
Pre-1920 (the year Edison was interviewed by Forbes), this is as close as Tesla came to proposing anything like a “spirit phone,” and it was about determining the weight of the soul, not devising a means of communicating with the dead. (And even then, it was in response to a query from journalists, not an announcement of his own research.)
In 1926, six years after Edison’s spirit phone claim, Tesla was quoted by The Lima News of Lima, Ohio:
“As for myself, I have read thousands of volumes of literature and thought for years in the hope that I might get some kind of evidence to show that death is not the end. But all in vain. To me the universe is simply a marvelous mechanism, and the most complex forms of human life, as human beings, are nothing else but automatic engines, controlled by external influence.”
According to John J. O’Neill’s 1944 Tesla biography Prodigal Genius, this is what Tesla termed his “meat machine” concept of human nature.
One evening as Tesla and the author [John J. O’Neill] sat in the lobby of the Hotel Governor Clinton, the inventor discussed his meat-machine theory. It was a materialistic philosophy typical of the Victorian era. We are, he held, composed of only those things which are identified in the test tube and weighed in the balance. We have only those properties which we receive from the atoms of which our bodies are constructed. Our experiences, which we call life, are a complex mixture of the responses of our component atoms to the external forces of our environment. (p. 261)
When O’Neill objected to this, asserting that Tesla’s genius was proof that we are not all simply material automatons controlled by environment, Tesla wouldn’t budge.
“But we are all meat machines,” replied Tesla, “and it happens that I am a much more sensitive machine than other people and I receive impressions to which they are inert, and I can both understand and interpret these impressions. I am simply a finer automaton than others,” he insisted. (p.261)
This is not the sort of worldview one would expect from someone convinced he had devised a means to contact the spirit world.
In the 1926 Lima News interview, Tesla also claimed he’d tried (and failed) to scientifically prove reincarnation. However, he didn’t describe this attempt as a communications device, nor did he claim that Edison had “cribbed” it from him:
“I have searched during many years for some process or means to test the possibility of future existence by scientific experiment, and I have devised one, which, to my great disappointment, has failed. But perhaps some more skillful experimenter might succeed if I suggest to him the course. To put it briefly, it is this:
“Our bodies are composed of molecules of various elements, harmoniously united. Do these molecules retain any after-effect when the body is dissolved? To ascertain this take, say, two molecules of hydrogen from the body of an individual and also one molecule of oxygen. Furthermore, provide another molecule of oxygen taken from some other body. Now place the two molecules of hydrogen so they can combine with the oxygen, and if they prefer that molecule of oxygen with which they were previously united, then reincarnation is proved. For, though it may take ages and ages, ultimately the molecules which constituted that body will get together again, just as in a vast city individuals from a distant land finally meet and establish close contact.”
Compare the above to Edison’s statement in his “spirit phone” interview with B.C. Forbes six years earlier:
Take our own bodies. I believe they are composed of myriads and myriads of infinitesimally small individuals, each in itself a unit of life…and that these infinitesimally small units live forever. (p. 11)
While Tesla speaks of molecules and Edison speaks of “infinitesimally small units of life,” the concepts aren’t so dissimilar: organized microscopic entities with the ability to stay together by volition. The keys points are that in the public record, Edison’s idea was first, and unlike Edison, Tesla makes no mention of a means of establishing communication with the dead. Moreover, Tesla’s publicly expressed view on the afterlife was ambivalent at best. This contradicts the notion that he was ever convinced he’d attained contact with ghosts by using technology, or was even attempting to do so.
The Internet takes notice
Even so, the idea of an Edison-Tesla spirit phone feud has gained some traction on the Internet. Some relevant quotes:
Some, like Tesla himself, believed that it [the “Tesla Spirit Radio”] had the power to pick up on supernatural forces. (Gizmodo)
[O]ne of Edison’s biggest influences to build a spirit phone was his rivalry with his former associate, Tesla. (HuffPost)
When Edison learned that Tesla thought his inventions might be used to get in touch with another plane, he wanted in on the action. (Mental Floss)
The latter two quotes are from articles on a book describing the alleged Edison-Tesla spirit phone rivalry; more on this later.
This belief is also featured in a number of online videos, such as “Tesla’s Technology to Talk with Spirits of the Dead” on the popular YouTube channel The Why Files. This video more or less encapsulates the overall “Tesla spirit phone” myth, so I’ll refer to it extensively here.
The content of the video, hosted by self-described “Head Nerd in Charge” Andrew Gentile, ties the supposed spirit phone race into the famous Edison vs. Tesla (or Edison vs. Westinghouse & Tesla) rivalry known as The War of the Currents. A quote from the video:
Tesla’s more versatile alternating current eventually beat Edison’s direct current. And this was Tesla’s biggest victory over his former boss, and one that Edison would never forgive or forget. So when Tesla claimed he’d invented a device that could tune into the spirit world, Edison wanted in on the action, and Tesla called his device a “spirit radio.” Edison’s was called a “ghost phone.” (00:01:04–00:01:26)
Let’s not delve into the relatively minor point that “spirit phone,” not “ghost phone,” is the common term for Edison’s purported device. (Edison himself never gave a name for it.) With the caveat that the video is entertaining and well-produced, there’s no evidence presented of any claim by Tesla, spoken or written, that he had invented or tried to invent “a device that could tune into the spirit world.” If Tesla really said he was doing this, there should be at least a single sourced quote to the effect of, “I’m trying to build a device to talk with ghosts.” But there’s nothing (as of this writing). No citation from an article, book, or interview, not even a quote from someone claiming to have heard it from Tesla over dinner at Delmonico’s.
There is a demonstration of a present-day “Tesla spirit radio” and URLs linking to assembly instructions. Provisionally, I’ll accept that it’s based on Tesla’s design, but that’s not the same thing as Tesla either intending or claiming spirit communication (which definitely was not demonstrated in any of the clips shown, but feel free to watch the video and decide for yourself).
Had Edison taken the spirit phone idea from Tesla, then Tesla would have said so
The complete absence of any public “spirit phone/spirit radio” claim is an important point regarding a man such as Tesla. Over the course of his professional life, he publicly asserted that Einstein’s theory of relativity was wrong, that electrons did not exist, and that he had developed a super weapon that would make conventional war obsolete, the so-called death ray (called by Tesla “teleforce”). Tesla also didn’t hesitate to bring a lawsuit against the Marconi Company in 1915, asserting that Guglielmo Marconi had infringed upon his patents, essentially stealing his idea to invent radio. If Tesla was neither shy about making extraordinary claims about science and technology, nor hesitant to get litigious when he felt put upon, he would have had no reason to be silent if he was convinced Edison was playing copycat in attempting to develop a device to contact the dead, even if it didn’t constitute an actual patent violation. Yet after Edison announced his spirit phone idea in 1920, there is not a single documented instance of Tesla saying anything remotely resembling, “Edison’s spirit phone? I thought of that first.” If anything, Tesla was silent on the matter, apparently indifferent to the idea. (What Tesla was very interested in was using technology to contact other planets, and there have been attempts to spin this into a Tesla spirit phone claim, as will be seen below.)
Also covered in the Why Files video is an alleged Edison spirit phone experiment in 1920, which was originally described in the October 1933 issue of the magazine Modern Mechanix and Inventions. (There seems no digital copy available online, but there is a highly informative post about the Edison spirit phone by paranormal blogger Sarah Chumacero which includes images from the original article.) Though interesting, the Modern Mechanix article is simply an anecdote with no evidence. None among the “small group of scientists” supposedly present are named, for example.
Correctly noted in the Why Files video is the fact that the spirit phone concept has been downplayed in Edison’s legacy. This is despite the fact that Edison mentions his idea of a technological means of communicating with the dead in the final chapter of the first edition of his posthumously published memoirs, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948). Titled “The Realms Beyond,” this chapter was redacted from all subsequent editions of the book, and there is to my knowledge no definitive statement as to why this happened. When I inquired with the book’s original publisher, the Philosophical Library, I was told that they did not have records going back to 1948, the year of the book’s publication. It was also noted that the book’s editor, Philosophical Library founder Dagobert D. Runes (1902–1982), had passed away many years before.
Why was the spirit phone chapter excised from Edison’s memoirs?
This is pure speculation on my part, but I think it’s possible that Edison’s estate requested the chapter’s omission because it was considered embarrassing to associate his name with purported paranormal phenomena. By 1948, the more or less mainstream respectability of spiritualism and similar beliefs had passed, probably having peaked in the early 1920s, and wouldn’t come into the mainstream again until the New Age movement of the 1970s.
Tesla thought he’d found ET, not Caspar
Now, then, let us get back to the 1901 Tesla quote cited earlier, in which he describes an impression of “something mysterious, not to say supernatural” in the course of encountering what he later surmised were “intelligently controlled signals.” Doesn’t it prove that Tesla believed he’d attained contact with the dead by technological means?
Actually, it doesn’t. In the situation Tesla describes, he was briefly spooked, but concluded he had received communication from extraterrestrials, not ghosts. This fact is often downplayed or goes unmentioned when this quote is spun out of context to claim the existence of a Tesla spirit phone project.
The quote is from an article by Tesla which appeared in the 9 February 1901 issue of Collier’s Weekly. He describes electromagnetic phenomena detected in Colorado in 1899 during his experiments with wireless energy transmission. A digital reproduction of the original can be viewed on The Internet Archive. I encourage you to have a look, read the quote in context, and decide for yourself whether Tesla ever seriously believed he had contacted ghosts. The title of the article is “Talking with the Planets” (not “Talking with the Spirits”), another point often omitted in claims that Tesla believed he’d contacted dead people. Tesla describes unexpected electromagnetic signals of some kind, and a brief moment of superstitious nervousness, but then postulates that he has become “the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.”
As for what Tesla actually heard, in his book Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, W. Bernard Carlson notes an experiment in 1996 using a receiver constructed with the same features as the one Tesla used. A natural 10 kHz radio transmission from Jupiter’s moon Io was detected, “a series of beeps similar to what Tesla reported hearing in 1899” (p. 277). It has also been suggested that Tesla might have picked up a transmission from Guglielmo Marconi’s radio experiments in Europe, but one question is whether Marconi’s transmissions at the time were powerful enough to reach Colorado.
The spinning of Tesla’s quote from this article has been a key point in the “Tesla spirit phone” claims, and it obscures his true accomplishment: While it is very unlikely he heard intelligent extraterrestrial signals, his experiment anticipated the advent of radio astronomy and SETI by decades. This has much more import for the development of later science and technology than purported devices to communicate with ghosts.
The Woozle Effect: Tesla, spirit phones, MIBs, and alien invasions
As far as I can tell, the earliest published claim that Tesla and Edison were in any sense “spirit phone rivals” is a book titled The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla by Tim Swartz, first published in 2000. Let’s look at some passages from the 2011 edition (page 61).
It has been widely written that Edison and his assistant, Dr. Miller Hutchinson [sic], were seriously at work building a machine to achieve spirit communication. Tesla wrote in his journals that Thomas Edison had heard from other engineers that Tesla had been receiving mysterious voices and sounds over radio frequencies that were not conducive for the broadcasting of the human voice.
While it’s true that Edison claimed in 1920 that he was working on a device to contact the dead, no evidence is presented here to support the idea that Miller Reese Hutchison, an electrical engineer and long-time Edison associate, was involved. There is no mention of Hutchison in Edison’s 1920 interview with B.C. Forbes, nor in the later-excised final chapter of Edison’s memoirs. (Then there is the question of whether Edison was seriously trying to produce a spirit phone, as there are no known extant plans, notes, or equipment.)
Moreover, “it has been widely written” doesn’t mean “demonstrated as true.” It has been widely written, for example, that Orson Welles’s 1938 radio production of H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds sparked widespread panic across the US, but historians have presented compelling evidence that this is a myth.
Besides, where and by whom has this been “widely written?” Swartz provides no references or citations which could allow the reader to understand the source of this information. There is also no quoted text or date of Tesla’s alleged journal entry describing Edison having “heard from other engineers” about Tesla’s radio experiments, even if one infers it as evidence of Edison attempting to steal Tesla’s thunder or interpreting Tesla’s work as communication with the dead. (The reasons offered for this will be described below.) Next paragraph:
Edison, who publicly mocked Tesla and his experiments, privately believed that Tesla had managed to find the correct frequency to enable communication with the spirits of the dead. Edison was determined to discover Tesla’s secret, and be the first to get the “Spirit Phone” on the market.
Like the paragraph quoted before it, this is a claim with no citation or source to back it up. When and where did Edison ever say or write such a thing? As for “publicly mocking Tesla and his experiments,” while the two inventors didn’t see eye to eye on many things, experts on both Tesla and Edison tend to agree that overall, there was mutual respect between them. Moving along:
In his diary, Dr. Miller Hutchinson [sic] wrote: “Edison and I are convinced that in the fields of psychic research will yet be discovered facts that will prove of greater significance to the thinking of the human race than all the inventions we have ever made in the field of electricity.”
Hutchison may well have written such a passage in his diary, but it seems to be cited and sourced nowhere, beyond simply being repeated online on various blogs and websites. And even if the quote is genuine, all Hutchison states is that he and Edison think psychical research will yield great results, not that he and Edison are engaged in any such research, including to build a spirit phone. Next paragraph:
Edison failed to live long enough to succeed with his ill-gotten idea to best Tesla. Tesla simply noted in his journal that Edison was trying to use his patents to talk with specters. Edison thought that Tesla could listen to spirits, Tesla considered that he was hearing people from other planets — the voices could have been the same, they may have just changed their stories to fit the belief system of the listener.
To be fair, Swartz points out that Tesla assumed he was hearing extraterrestrials, not ghosts, as others have since claimed. However, as with the previous reference to Tesla’s journal entries, there is no quoted text, no date, no information on where the original journal is archived, and no indication as to whether a digital image exists. In other words, it is a claim with no evidence presented to support it. Note also how the whole thing is framed as Edison’s “ill-gotten idea to best Tesla” and “publicly mocking Tesla” yet trying to steal his idea. Which of Tesla’s patents Edison was supposedly using to attempt spirit contact is also not specified.
In Chapter 1 of Lost Journals (page 11), Swartz claims that Tesla’s “lost journals,” or at least a portion of them, were obtained by accident by a man named Dale Alfrey (the existence of whom I have been unable to verify). Alfrey purportedly bought them, contained in four boxes, on impulse at the 1976 estate sale in Newark, New Jersey of a Manhattan bookseller named Michael P. Bornes. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1, page 12:
These lost journals revealed that in 1899, while in Colorado Springs, Tesla intercepted communications from extraterrestrial beings who were secretly controlling mankind. These creatures were slowly preparing humans for eventual conquest and domination, using a program that had been in place since the creation of humankind, but was now accelerating due to Earth’s increased scientific awareness.
Later in this chapter (pages 14–16), it is said that in 1997, Men in Black (the mysterious figures of UFO folklore, as opposed to the movie characters based upon them) came to Alfrey’s home and took all the journals as well as all the journal content he had transferred to computer disks. This, in effect, is the reason given as to why there are no originals or scans of these journal entries, including of the spirit phone-related material: The Men in Black took everything away in order to prevent humanity from learning of an impending extraterrestrial conquest.
Another book claiming an Edison-Tesla spirit phone rivalry is Edison vs. Tesla: the Battle Over Their Last Invention by Joel Martin and William J. Birnes. Published in 2017 and cited in both the Mental Floss and HuffPost articles noted above, it seems to be the most recent inspiration for the Edison vs. Tesla spirit phone claims found online. The book cites the same Tesla quote from the 1901 Collier’s Weekly article noted above as well as content from the above-cited The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla by Tim Swartz, who authored Edison vs. Tesla’s preface. As in his own book, Swartz takes care to note that in the Collier’s article, Tesla concludes that he had detected aliens rather than ghosts, though he also implies that Tesla (whatever his own interpretation) may have been the first person to detect what is known by paranormal researchers as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), alleged ghostly voices detected by electronic means.
Here is a quote from Martin and Birnes’s book Edison vs. Tesla (ebook edition, pages 196–197):
In the Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla [by Tim Swartz], Edison is quoted by his rival as having “privately believed that Tesla had managed to find the correct frequency to enable communication with spirits of the dead.” [Endnote link to a citation of Swartz’s book.] Edison was determined to discover Tesla’s secret and be the first to get the spirit phone on the market. Tesla also believed that Edison was able to communicate with the dead and wrote in his journals that “Thomas Edison had heard from other engineers that Tesla had been receiving mysterious voices and sounds over radio frequencies that were not conducive for the broadcasting of the human voice.” [Endnote link to a citation of Swartz’s book.]
Following this paragraph (on page 197), Martin and Birnes state the following about Edison’s employee Miller Reese Hutchison: “Edison and his assistant, Dr. Miller Hutchinson [sic], aggressively began to research the mechanics of a device to communicate with the dead…”
Next, let’s take a look at a couple of quotes from the previously mentioned Mental Floss article, which includes Edison vs. Tesla as a source:
Though they would likely never admit it, the two men [Edison and Tesla] shared several similarities. Both were eccentric, egotistical, and obsessive workers. They also both dabbled in using technology to talk to ghosts…
…When Edison learned that Tesla thought his inventions might be used to get in touch with another plane, he wanted in on the action.
The Mental Floss article bases the above statements on the book Edison vs. Tesla, which has no evidence to back these claims up except the book The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla, which has no evidence in the form of citations or references to primary sources because supposedly, the Men in Black took all the evidence away to facilitate an impending alien invasion. Yet, amazingly, in regard to Edison vs. Tesla, one reviewer has expressed the opinion that “The authors do their due diligence to prove that both men [Edison and Tesla] actually worked on such a device by researching the later journals of both men.”
This is a phenomenon known as the Woozle effect, also known as evidence by citation, by which a chain of citation leads back to an original source which itself has little or nothing in the form of a reliable evidence base.
The bigger picture: demonizing Edison, canonizing Tesla
So, why is the Edison vs. Tesla spirit phone rivalry so often referred to as if it were factual? I think one reason is its appeal for those who are convinced that Tesla single-handedly conceived of or invented virtually all important modern-day technology, and who are positive Edison was a hack who plagiarized Tesla. Naturally, they are also convinced that Edison could never have thought of such an idea as the spirit phone on his own. Of course, this reasoning goes, Edison must have gotten the idea from Tesla, the true original thinker. But there is simply no credible reason to believe this is true. While I’d be happy to be corrected, I can find no record of anyone before Edison’s “spirit phone statement” in 1920 proposing anything like a spirit phone. (Though there were some proposals and claims soon afterward.)
The spirit phone was an outside-the-box notion for 1920, and Edison thought of it first, even if he made no serious attempt to follow up on it. This is simply unacceptable in the worldview of those buying into the simplistic “Tesla good visionary/Edison evil hack” narrative, and evidence doesn’t enter into the equation.
Such a viewpoint ignores the facts of Edison’s accomplishments. For example, in assembling teams to get things done instead of attacking problems solo, he literally invented the modern industrial research laboratory. Like the spirit phone, this was an outside-the-box idea. But unlike the spirit phone, it set a standard for inventive innovation which has been carried forward into the present day.
While some have accused him of plagiarism in devising his incandescent lamp, Edison’s successful approach was in fact the opposite of other 19th century inventors in key respects, notably his use of a high-resistance filament rather than the low-resistance filaments favored by his rivals. Besides his light bulb, Edison was granted well over 1000 patents in his lifetime, a record unmatched until the present century. The idea that such a thing could be accomplished through serial plagiarism, however cleverly executed, strains credulity well beyond the breaking point.
However important (or not) one considers the debate over the respective legacies of Edison and Tesla, the fact remains that uncritical belief in narrative-affirming articles, videos, and memes is never a good idea. While Edison is beyond caring about whether we slag him online, such an approach can also lead to living people being unfairly demonized, with technology facilitating the temptation toward kneejerk reactions and unreasoned attacks. Let’s try not to let the Internet do our thinking for us. I think that’s something both Edison and Tesla would heartily approve of.
About me:
I was born in New York and live in Kanagawa, Japan. In my debut novel The Spirit Phone, Aleister Crowley and Nikola Tesla confront the enigma of Thomas Edison’s phone to contact with the dead. The Spirit Phone was published by BHC Press in November 2022, with the ebook edition reaching #16 in the Barnes & Noble Bestseller Rankings in April 2023. The audiobook of The Spirit Phone, narrated by two-time Emmy winner Daniel Penz, was released in June 2023.
My short fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Suspense Magazine, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, Ragazine, and The Stray Branch. I’ve written articles for Kyoto Journal, PopMatters, The Japan Times, Japan Today, Rain Taxi, and Metropolis. I’m an associate professor of English at Showa Women’s University in Tokyo. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
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