Do we like Thomas Edison?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A towering inventor with nothing harmful found about people, held back by hard-nosed business tactics and a contested Tesla story.
Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, and his family moved to Michigan when he was seven. He barely went to school: his mother, a former teacher, taught him at home and he fell in love with reading. At 12 he was selling fruit and newspapers on trains and even printing his own paper on a moving carriage.
At 15 he was a travelling telegrapher, and a big break came from improving the stock ticker. By 1876 he'd set up his Menlo Park lab, and in 1877 he recorded the first words on his phonograph. From 1878 he worked on the electric light and the power system to run it, and he ended up with 1,093 patents. Genuinely, that's a life's work.
The mess is the Current War. Edison backed direct current while Tesla's AC patents, sold to Westinghouse, were better for long-distance power. Mental Floss reports Edison ran a smear campaign against AC and helped New York build its first electric chair using a Westinghouse AC generator, before accepting AC by the mid-1890s. How hands-on he was is argued over by historians, so take the villain version with a pinch of salt.
Then there's Tesla. In his autobiography Tesla says he was promised $50,000 for improving Edison's DC generators, made 24 upgrades, and was offered a $10 raise instead, so he quit. Mental Floss notes that is Tesla's account, and that it's unclear whether Edison himself or another manager made the promise. It's a one-sided story, so call it alleged.
Edison's film business was also hardball. Far Out reports his company recreated and sold a copy of Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon, which reportedly drained Méliès's earnings. Edison founded the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, a patent trust the article says tried to stop filmmakers working without his approval. The 1915 US ruling said a patent holder can't use a patent as a weapon against rivals, and that opened the field for other filmmakers.
On the harm test, I searched for anything he said or did against LGBTQ+ people, women, people of colour or migrants, and for climate or conspiracy slides, and found nothing in sources I could open. That's a gap, not a clean bill: he died in 1931 and I couldn't read much on his personal attitudes. Nothing recent either: no news on him lately beyond America 250 birthday commemorations.