Thomas Edison vs Three Teslas in a Trenchcoat

by Coraline Ada Ehmke

In her talk at RubyConf 2019, Coraline Ada Ehmke explores the adversarial relationship between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla as a metaphor for the challenges developers face when adopting new technologies in an organizational context. She emphasizes the importance of balance between existing, stable technologies and the lure of new, untested tools.

Several key points emerge from the presentation:

Introduction of Key Figures: Ehmke introduces Thomas Edison, an advocate of direct current (DC), who developed many famous inventions and established the first large-scale power systems in the U.S., contrasted with Nikola Tesla, a proponent of alternating current (AC), whose innovative designs ultimately led to the widespread adoption of AC systems.
War of the Currents: She discusses the historical conflict between Edison and Tesla regarding their respective technologies; despite Edison's initial dominance, Tesla's AC eventually proved superior for efficient long-distance power distribution.
Cultural Misconceptions: Ehmke challenges the myth of the ‘lone genius’ in innovation, illustrating how both Edison and Tesla relied on teams and partnerships for their successes, thus encouraging developers to value collaboration and shared creativity in their projects.
Technology Adoption Strategies: She provides a framework for responsibly adopting new technologies within organizations by assessing the following:
- The necessity of the new technology relative to the current business need.
- The potential impact on existing systems and teams.
- A decision-making matrix for evaluating technologies based on adoption difficulty and utility.
Balancing Innovation with Stability: Ehmke emphasizes that developers oscillate between being like Edison, the practical executor, and Tesla, the innovative thinker. Recognizing this spectrum can help individuals and teams navigate technology choices more effectively.
Experimentation and Collaboration: The talk concludes with recommendations for testing new technologies through structured experimentation with clear objectives, ensuring that developers can adapt as needed while minimizing disruption to existing projects.

Overall, Ehmke’s insights encourage developers to find a collaborative balance between practicality and innovation when experimenting with new technologies, drawing lessons from the historical context of Edison and Tesla's rivalry.

In conclusion, as organizations grow more complex, developers must manage the risks and rewards of new technologies thoughtfully while leveraging teamwork and shared knowledge to create innovations that are both effective and responsible.

00:00:12.180 I'm going to go ahead and get started. I have seen the rumors on Twitter, and I can honestly tell you the answer is no, I did not write this talk to win a bet.

00:00:18.820 The bet was that I would get a $500 steak dinner if I won, and to win, I had to figure out how to bring the story of the electrocution of an elephant to a Ruby conference. The elephant part is true; it's relevant, and you'll see. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke, and I have 25 years of software development experience.

00:00:33.640 I'm currently serving as an architect at a company called Stitch Fix. I am co-authoring a book called 'A Compassionate Coder.' I am also an open-source troublemaker. This year, I got into trouble by releasing my own ethical open-source license called the Hippocratic License, and I've also launched the Ethical Source Definition. I am fighting to give us as developers control over how our software is being used.

00:01:10.869 If you're interested in the license, visit harm.dev, and if you're interested in the Ethical Source Definition, visit ethicalsource.dev. I have a special treat for you: if you tweet about this talk and @mention me, you'll be entered into a contest. Tweet something that you learned from the talk, and I will pick the best answer to receive a giant Nikola Tesla bobblehead with a glow-in-the-dark lightbulb in his hand.

00:01:54.399 Let's meet our heroes. Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 and was an American inventor credited with the invention of the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the first practical light bulb. He registered over a thousand patents in his lifetime, and he was what I call a direct current fanboy.

00:02:12.430 Edison invested the money he made from his early patents into what he called the invention factory, which was a facility in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He staffed it with physicists, mechanics, engineers, and machinists. Edison's first patent was for an electrographic vote recorder in 1869.

00:02:45.840 The problem he was trying to solve was that voting in a legislature takes a long time, so he thought he could improve it with automation. A man named Jewett Roberts bought the patent for $100 and tried to sell it to Washington, but Washington, D.C. was not in favor of making the voting process any more efficient than it was, as they wanted to make time for wheeling and dealing and filibusters. So, young Edison's vote recorder was sent to the political graveyard.

00:03:16.200 Nikola Tesla was born in 1856. He studied engineering and physics but dropped out, just like me, and died penniless in obscurity in New York City at the age of 86. He was rediscovered in the 90s and became somewhat of a folk hero. He was an alternating current aficionado.

00:03:44.710 Tesla worked from various labs in New York City throughout the 1890s to the 1900s. This is a photograph of a lab he built in Colorado Springs in 1899 to study the conductive power of low-pressure air. He was attempting to invent a way to send power through the air.

00:04:08.390 Tesla applied for his first patent, an electric arc lamp, in 1884, immediately after leaving Edison's company and founding the Tesla Light and Manufacturing Company. We're going to talk a little bit about the War of the Currents, but first we need to understand something about generators.

00:04:34.820 In 1831, Michael Faraday discovered the operating principle of electromagnetic generators, later called Faraday's Law. This principle states that an electromotive force is generated in an electric conductor subject to varying magnetic flux, specifically, when a wire moves through a magnetic field. Faraday built the first electromagnetic generator, called a Faraday disk, using a rotating copper disc placed between the poles of a magnet, producing a small DC voltage.

00:05:11.990 That same year, a man named Hippolyte Pixii improved the generator by using a wire-wound horseshoe with extra coils of the conductor, generating more current. However, his generator was AC, which was considered a major flaw at the time. William Cook and Charles Wheatstone were a pair of inventors who gained reputation by improving the telegraph. They also made an important advancement in generators by replacing permanent magnets with battery-powered electromagnets in 1845.

00:05:46.280 By the 1860s, their type of generator was common. The first practical generator capable of powering electric devices was called the Gram machine, created by Z.T. Graham, a Belgian inventor. He started selling these as engines in the 1870s, and a demonstration of arc lighting took place at the 1878 Paris Exposition, igniting a steep sell-off of gas utility stocks.

00:06:10.970 The world was waking up to the potential of electric power, which brings us to the War of the Currents. Edison stubbornly held onto the idea that direct current was the best way to deliver electrical power to the world, while Tesla believed in the superiority of alternating current.

00:06:38.240 The War of the Currents raged for nearly twenty years. The first large-scale power station in America was Edison's Pearl Street Station in New York City, which began operating in 1882. The station had six 200-horsepower dynamos, each powered by a separate steam engine. It supplied 100-volt electricity to 285 customers, powering 400 electric lamps.

00:07:09.430 However, Edison's direct current generators were terribly inefficient and couldn't deliver power over distances of more than a few city blocks. In order to light New York City with Edison's generators, there would need to be a power station every five or six blocks.

00:07:34.030 In 1884, at the suggestion of a friend, Edison hired Nikola Tesla to improve his DC generators and offered a reward of $50,000, which in modern terms is about 1.2 million dollars. Even though Tesla believed that DC generators had no future, he needed the work. He did indeed improve the DC generator significantly.

00:08:02.890 When he went to claim his reward, Edison laughed and said, 'My friend, you don't understand American humor. I never intended to give you $50,000 for this work.' Tesla was devastated and had to resort to digging ditches and doing odd jobs to raise enough money to start his own company, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing.

00:08:48.700 He attempted to find a better way to generate alternating current and developed the steam-powered reciprocating electricity generator. Steam was forced through the bottom of the oscillator and rushed out through a series of ports, which pushed a piston up and down. This was connected to an armature with a magnet on it, and this magnet vibrated at high speed, producing an alternating magnetic field.

00:09:19.870 This induced alternating current in the wire coils, eliminating the complicated parts of a steam engine generator. However, no one was interested in his invention. Tesla's work was saved from obscurity when it caught the attention of engineers at Westinghouse Electric, who invited Tesla to participate in the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

00:09:53.340 At the exposition, they had a lot of space in a building devoted to electrical exhibits. Westinghouse won the bid to light the Exposition with alternating current, marking a key event in the history of AC power and demonstrating to the American public the viability and safety of AC.

00:10:28.090 By 1902, 61% of generating capacity in the U.S. was AC, and this increased to 95% by 1917. AC proved to be effective at delivering power over long distances, making it possible to connect different stations and balance the loads between them.

00:10:56.470 The War of the Currents was won through a partnership between Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. Edison, who finally admitted defeat, shifted his focus to other inventions.

00:11:17.900 Today, the world consumes an estimated 157.5 petawatt hours of power, and electricity is responsible for 10 percent of the world's GDP. I mentioned at the beginning an elephant, and there's a term in French that I won't attempt to pronounce. It literally translates to 'the spirit of the staircase.'

00:11:48.600 In 1773, the French philosopher Denis Diderot was at a dinner party where someone insulted him, leaving him speechless and ruining his evening. When he finally left to go home and was descending stairs, he came up with the perfect retort and felt frustrated, wishing he had thought of it earlier to defend himself.

00:12:06.650 Edison had one of these spirit of the staircase moments as well. He demonstrated this in a 1903 film called 'Electrocuting an Elephant.' For the past 15 years, he had been experimenting with electricity as a humane way to put animals down, and this method was generally accepted by animal rights activists of the time.

00:12:43.900 The elephant in question was Topsy, a circus elephant who had killed a spectator who deserved it for putting out a cigar on her trunk. Topsy had also attacked several handlers, leading the circus to decide that she was too much of a liability and needed to be put down.

00:13:10.400 The event was captured and released by Edison's film company as a 74-second silent film in 1903, marking the first time death was captured on any kind of camera. Edison's film shows the euthanization of Topsy at an under-construction fairground in Coney Island. When promoting the film, Edison emphasized that AC current was used to electrocute the elephant.

00:13:58.320 He could not let it go. A friend of mine, Max, pointed out that if you have to murder an elephant publicly to make your point, you're likely on the wrong side of whatever argument you're trying to make.

00:14:32.920 Both Edison and Tesla are portrayed in history as lone geniuses churning out inventions, but this notion of the lone genius is a relatively recent concept arising from the Enlightenment of the 18th century. In previous centuries, invention was acknowledged as a collaborative process built on the historical work of other scientists.

00:15:05.470 When Britain enacted the first copyright law in 1710, it gave credence to the idea of inventors as the originators and owners of their ideas. Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber wrote in her 1987 book, 'Shakespeare's Ghostwriters,' that during the Romantic era, the cult of the genius emerged.

00:15:41.540 Shakespeare is often held up as a prime example, despite ample evidence that he borrowed heavily from other poets and playwrights, collaborating extensively. In his book 'The Powers of Two,' author Joshua Shenk explores the role of partnership in collaboration, emphasizing that successful collaboration extends beyond widely acknowledged duos like the Wright Brothers and the Curies.

00:16:19.520 Success arises from creative and innovative relationships, which may be collaborative or adversarial, but always have an undeniable interpersonal component. Edison, as I mentioned, got his start making improvements in telegraphy, selling his patents and leveraging that to build a company.

00:16:58.109 His invention factory employed muckers, the physicists, mechanics, and engineers responsible for generating the hundreds of patents credited to Edison. However, the muckers didn't achieve wide commercial success initially, discovering that tying an invention to Edison's name garnered a better audience response.

00:17:32.400 They liked the idea of a lone genius producing technological marvels. Francis Jehl, one of Edison's long-time assistants, even stated that Edison is, in truth, a collective noun. Tesla often worked alone throughout his career, failing to achieve initial success without the support and business acumen of people like Westinghouse.

00:18:00.440 Throughout history, we see many examples of collaboration. Alan Turing would not have been successful without the many uncredited women who worked on decoding German encryption. Ada Lovelace needed Charles Babbage; without his mechanical computer, her programs would have nowhere to run.

00:18:27.100 Steve Jobs is lionized for revolutionizing the personal computer, but he relied heavily on his partnership with Steve Wozniak. Shenk concludes that working relationships are the fundamental engine of the creative process.

00:19:01.660 So, what does all of this have to do with software development? A paper titled 'Human Cumulative Culture,' published by researchers in cognitive evolution and biology at the University of St. Andrews, explores the unequivocally cumulative nature of complex human advancement.

00:19:35.550 It describes how the transmission of knowledge leads to traits that are more complex than any single individual could develop on their own, resulting in what they call the ratcheting effects on technological capabilities. The authors argue that understanding the progress of human endeavors is only possible by examining social processes.

00:20:07.270 They describe pro-social behaviors, which encompass a broad range of altruistic and reciprocal actions intended to benefit others or society as a whole. These include altruism, obeying rules, acting on our values, and, most importantly, practicing empathy.

00:20:40.430 As developers, we feel good about our code when it’s new, but with the exception of test-driven development enthusiasts, we might be less enthusiastic about things like writing tests, documentation, and proof that our code works. This is evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of empty README files on GitHub.

00:21:24.440 If you are part of a project that is innovative and beneficial to society, that helps you get through the boring work. Successful software requires collaboration with stakeholders, fellow coders, designers, technical writers, managers, and of course, end users.

00:22:01.050 Even in the open-source world, we are often motivated by satisfying a need we have ourselves. Projects don’t typically succeed without the assistance of others, collaborating in the codebase, writing documentation, giving talks, or even writing books.

00:22:36.710 I believe that each and every one of us alternates on a spectrum between the raw creative power of Tesla and the practical, methodical approach of Edison. So, which one are you?

00:23:06.440 A Tesla developer prefers to work alone, solving complex problems in really creative ways. They may not enjoy writing tests or documentation and may work in bursts of energy followed by long periods of low productivity. The Edison developer, on the other hand, loves pair programming, applies architectural patterns to their work, writes comprehensive issue descriptions, and maintains a steady production velocity.

00:23:58.960 When you reflect on where you fall on the Tesla-Edison scale, you may aspire to be more like one or the other, or recognize that you oscillate between these extremes depending on the circumstances, which is the ideal. The best developers I know are able to navigate between being a Tesla and Edison as the situation demands to effectively resolve the task at hand.

00:24:41.300 If you identify more with Edison, you are probably practical and good at execution, though resistant to change. Make use of your practical tendencies, learn from failures, embrace teamwork, and seek to make radical ideas successful. If you identify more with Tesla, don’t let people tell you that your ideas won’t work or are impractical; find a way to persevere, believe in yourself, and build partnerships to bring your ideas to life.

00:25:27.180 In our workplaces, we often have existing technology platforms and standard stacks. Yet, we can be attracted to new frameworks, technologies, or languages, and it's essential to approach these additions responsibly. To innovate responsibly with technology in the workplace, evaluate the need for new technology, test it through experimentation, and follow a decision-making matrix to ensure its adoption.

00:26:31.680 First, evaluate the need. Ask yourself questions like: Why is this new problem a priority? What makes it different from what you faced when you chose your current stack? Tie it to a business need; if you can’t connect it to a business issue, you likely won’t get buy-in from stakeholders. Be explicit about why your current approach is ineffective and what has changed.

00:27:20.580 Consider what kind of effort will be required to solve the new problem. You can categorize effort into two types: strengthening efforts, which involve reengineering or process changes to make older technology work for new tasks, and growth efforts, where new technologies are utilized to solve problems.

00:28:02.390 Both categories have their pitfalls. Strengthening efforts may lead you to be like Edison, trying to improve an outdated generator, while growth efforts may result in unsalable inventions like those Tesla created. To help guide the decision to incorporate new technology, I created a technology adoption matrix with axes for adoption and utility.

00:29:01.660 This tool encompasses questions such as: Does the new technology fit within existing processes? Will other developers find it easy to learn? Is there documentation available? Has prior art been shared or can it be learned? Are there responses to queries on platforms like Stack Overflow? Does it offer more flexibility than current tools? What is the security story and overall cost?

00:29:46.540 Once you establish the usefulness, you can ask: Does the technology enhance our teams' performance? Does it positively affect stability and reliability? Is it well-maintained and does it have an active user base? Does it solve the problem more effectively than our existing tools? Use this matrix to aid in your decision-making.

00:30:22.920 In the first quadrant, you will find technologies that are hard to adopt but provide limited utility, which you can reject outright. Easy-to-adopt solutions with limited capacity might be useful for learning opportunities, while technologies that are useful but hard to adopt might be candidates for future adoption.

00:30:46.680 Finally, the explorer quadrant contains technologies that are both easy to adopt and applicable across various use cases. These can proceed to experimentation for evolving solutions in a framework of pragmatic innovation and creativity.

00:31:14.750 When experimenting, ensure you can clearly articulate the problem. If you can't define it well, you likely don't understand it adequately. Your experiments should have minimal impact on other systems, establishing boundaries so that you're only testing what needs to be tested.

00:31:44.360 Set clear success criteria upfront in case you fall in love with the new technology during the process, losing sight of the pragmatic approach that would likely be most successful. Timebox your experiments and have a rollback plan ready so that if you are on a deadline, you can revert if needed. Empowering engineering cultures offer flexibility and collaborative problem-solving, but we need to be thoughtful about changes that may affect our colleagues.

00:32:33.800 You can use the RACI framework—Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed—to identify the scope of the change. If the change primarily affects your team, it's easier to manage. If it's a broader change impacting the engineering organization, consider all the decision-makers and stakeholders involved.

00:33:05.800 Seek consultations from senior engineers across your organization, considering the impact of your change on operations and security. Ensure the broader engineering organization is informed as it will affect them. Personally, I often struggle with the desire to reach consensus, wanting everyone to agree that my idea is the best solution.

00:33:40.250 Feedback from others helps validate my instincts. However, lacking full consensus doesn't mean that your idea lacks merit. Don't be afraid to make decisions, even when everyone doesn’t agree.

00:34:02.580 Final thoughts: To be successful, we can't simply be an Edison or a Tesla. We need to find balance. If we stubbornly cling to our own ideas and ignore conflicting evidence, we risk being left behind, like Edison. Conversely, failing to partner with those who complement our ingenuity may lead us to develop solutions that no one wants.

00:34:36.500 Edison made practical solutions while Tesla tackled impossible problems. As I mentioned, the best developers oscillate between these extremes. If you're pondering your alignment, you'll have Nikola Tesla on one shoulder with devil horns and Ada Lovelace on the other with a halo.

00:34:59.550 Much of the content from this talk was condensed from a blog post I wrote, which you can find on my blog at coralinada.com/blog. Thank you for being my audience today!

00:35:20.290 I also want to highlight that I have a plethora of stickers here, so please come up and grab one. If you have questions for me, feel free to approach me. You can find me on Twitter at CoralineADA and my website at coralinada.codes.

00:35:36.260 If you're interested in ethical open-source discussions, check out ethicalsource.dev. I'm also setting up a Birds of a Feather session to discuss how we can bring ethics to the open-source world. Thank you!