Thomas Edison = Bill Gates?

Ok, I want to find out if what I'm reading is accurate. I'm reading a book on Tessla named Tessla, a Modern Sorcerer. It starts out setting up Tessla, and then Edison, for the conflict that is about to ensue.

Now it's the Edison setup that I find disturbing, so I'm going to state it here, and people can let me know if the information in this book is accurate, or if they were trying to paint Edison as a villan to get the point across.

First, it states that Edison never bathed or took off his clothes, including durring congigal visits to his wife. It also says he had very little knowlege of math, and his way of experimenting was to just try everything under the sun. This caused him to have some of the highest research costs ever.

Then we come to the sinister Edison. It also states in the book that he would steal people's pattents, and try to change one thing in it to beat that person to the market. A little more creative then Bill Gates, but still along the same lines. Steal people's technology and pass it off as your own.

So is this an accurate depiction of Edison (there's a lot more slamming of him in the book), or is the book taking a lot of liberties? And if it's true, why are our schoolkids not being taught this?

Yeah, thats pretty much true.

The reason we don't demonise him to school kids is cause he did invent a LOT of the stuff we use today.

Edison even ran smear campaigns against Tesla. He published a book talking about how AC current was evil just so people would use his DC instead of Tesla's AC.

If you wanna teach kids that cheating, lying, and stealing will make them rich and famous inventors, i'd tell them the truth, if you'd rather just say "Edison invented the lightbulb" you'll probably get a better reaction from thier parents.

But what the book's been saying so far is that Edison didn't really invent anything. He just stole it and added something to it. Then he marketed it better then the other guys. Of course he'd market it better, though, because he had no scruples.

Aye, what a tragedy that our culture promotes Edison and demotes a true hero like Tesla

He did invent some stuff, some he did just modify.

Tesla was hands down a better inventor and scientist then Edison was. I never realised that wasn't common knowledge actualy.

Common knowlege for those of us who know about Tessla, but our high schools (at least as of 6 years ago) don't even touch on him, just Edison. That's probably a lot more related to politics then revisionist history. Edison was American, Tessla was from the evil USSR. (Granted, he came from Russia before the USSR was even around, it did become the USSR). But now, after the curtain has come down, I don't see why we would do something like that.

Tesla was a genius, a superb mathmatician and a pragmatic inventor.

Edison had above average intelligence and was a "researcher". Edison "fell into" his inventions by hashing through other peoples idea's and through a process of trial and error came up with some credible discoveries of his own. But Edison used the frame work of other peoples idea's to base his research on.

By far Tesla was much more "evolved" then Edison.

yep. all i know of tesla i learned on my own. i remember a brief mention of him in AP physics, but edison was glorified since like 3rd grade.