Yes, just about everything Inman wrote about Nikola Tesla is pretty much true. Taking Edison down, however, is an unfunny joke. Edison DID pretty much invent the incandescent light bulb, at least he invented the first one that worked. There had been carbon arc lamps before him, and possibly some other kinds of electric lights but his incandescent lamp was unique. He also managed to invent the phonograph, the carbon microphone (before Edison, the microphone was a couple of wires touching and untouching), and a host of other things. He was, however, at heart, an entrepreneur, something that many today are referring to as "job creators," while others call them "bosses." Take your pick, depending on your politics. George Westinghouse was cut from pretty much the same cloth as Edison and it was while working for Westinghouse that Nikola Tesla developed alternating current. A part of the joke is, direct current, which Edison espoused, requires a generator that's sort of "gimmicked" in order to create it. By simplifying the generator, it produces alternating current. That's harder to explain than it should be and I won't even try, but I think the DC generator was invented first and it required polarized wiring with a larger wire for the higher voltage and a smaller wire for the ground side of the current. Anyhow, Edison and Westinghouse fought tooth and nail over which form of current was superior and one of Edison's arguments was indeed that alternating current was superior for electrocuting people, and I think the first electric chairs used it (as well as all succeeding electric chairs), and that's the reason for Edison's rather nasty habit of collecting cats and dogs for experiments. Edison had his faults, and they may have been many, but he was a great inventor with very little education but a vivid imagination, and he left a legacy of products that led us into the 20th century. Oh yes, BTW, he didn't know it, but he also invented the vacuum tube, that allowed radio and television to become our most powerful mass communication tools, until they began to be replaced by semiconductors in the 1960s (the transistor was invented in 1948 but it didn't find its way into television sets until the late 1960s. Small transistor radios became available in the 1950s but tubes were still the amplifiers of choice until well into the 1960s). -- Thanx, *Ray *