How would you mess with Thomas Edison's head?...

Silly question time....

assuming time travel was a possibility, and you were going back in time to meet the "father of the light bulb", Thomas Alva Edison, what flashlights would you take with you to "mess with his head", and why?

lets say the temporal destination is a couple days before Edison unveils the light bulb to the public

here's what i'd take....

Fenix E1; start off small, both in size and output, 11 lumens may be small to us, but i'd imagine Edison would be amazed at the amount of light coming from such a tiny package

Arc AAA-P; for it's exceptional runtime

Fenix L0P; to have that amount of light come from such a tiny package would be amazing, and since it's the same physical size as the E1, it'd be even more impressive

it'd be illogical to bring an L1P/L2P/L1T/L2T if youve brought an L0P, all you get is a marginal brightness increase, 2 level output, and a longer runtime on these lights, the basic functionality is the same

SureFire G2 W/ P61 HOLA; amazing for two reasons, high quality plastic (Nitrolon) construction, and blindingly bright light in a small package

SureFire M6 Guardian W/ HOLA; retina-melting brightness in a relatively compact package

Thor spotlight; raw power at the expense of runtime

i may also bring a Maglite, basically for the focusing feature, we know it's meaningless, but it seems to impress the "normals"

batteries would be rechargables for those that can take it, and take a solar charger as well....

these would be a "thank you" gift to the inventor of illumination devices, when i return to the present, i'd leave those lights for him to experiment with...

I'd also warn him about the dangers inherent in Lithium primary cells so he doesn't wind up injuring himself and screwing up the time/space continuim (any more than *I* just did by giving him modern illumination tools, that is )

wonder how that would change the state of modern flashlights...

so, what lights would *you* use to freak out Edison?

Simply call him a fraud and be done with it. Edison did not invent the light bulb, he actually copied a design that had been unveiled over a decade earlier in the UK by a man named James Swan. And electric light bulbs had been around for close to a half century before Swan patented his bulb in 1878 in the UK, (Edison patented it a year later in the U.S.)

One of the more original patents that Edison did have was on the electric chair. Seems that he held the patent to a DC power version of the chair and Westinghouse held a patent on an AC powered one. As we all know, Westinghouse's version won out.

As one the owner of DC power company, I'm sure he would have appreciated flashlights. The name of that company was later changed to General Electric.

MacTech said:

Silly question time....

assuming time travel was a possibility, and you were going back in time to meet the "father of the light bulb", Thomas Alva Edison, what flashlights would you take with you to "mess with his head", and why?

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I wouldn't. I'd bring a computer.

Light bulbs existed well before Edison, and he bought most of the technology for his. What he fathered was a way to give enough power to a city to make electricity worth using for average people.

But even then, anything I'd bring back would use AC, which was Tesla's thing...

A video IPOD, possibly with some porno movies on it and some Bose QC2 headphones.

Edison obviously had a scientific mind, and would thus have an easier time embracing your relics "from the future."

But just think how much fun you could have on the street tormenting ordinary citizens of the day with our little "Satanic tubes of light."

A video IPOD, possibly with some porno movies on it and some Bose QC2 headphones.

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lol, yeah, you could also stick some hard-core techno and a bit of that grunting thrash metal stuff on there and tell him that it was considered to be the "classical music" of the 21st century.

CFU

I would tell him and JP Morgan not to screw over Tesla.

Brighteyez said:

Simply call him a fraud and be done with it. Edison did not invent the light bulb, he actually copied a design that had been unveiled over a decade earlier in the UK by a man named James Swan. And electric light bulbs had been around for close to a half century before Swan patented his bulb in 1878 in the UK, (Edison patented it a year later in the U.S.)

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Edison produced the first practical light bulb:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the first commercially practical incandescent light. Several designs had already been developed by earlier inventors including the patent he purchased from Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, Moses G. Farmer,[4] Joseph Swan, James Bowman Lindsay, William Sawyer, Humphry Davy, and Heinrich Göbel. They all had such flaws as extremely short life, high expense to produce, and high current draw, making them little more than laboratory curiosities. In 1878, Edison applied the term filament to the element of glowing wire carrying the current, although English inventor Joseph Swan had used the term prior to this. Edison took the features of these earlier designs and set his workers to the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. By 1879, he had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While the earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions dating back to a demonstration of a glowing wire by Alessandro Volta in 1800, Edison concentrated on commercial application and was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs and creating a complete system for the generation and distribution of electricity.

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It's not that he's a fraud, it's that people in popular culture hear quotations and bits of trivia through word of mouth, and eventually the original meaning is lost. Everything from Moore's law to the "people only use X percent of their brains" phrase have been horribly twisted from their original meanings.

I used to think of Newton as someone who came up with a few great insights (like the apple and 3 laws of motion...) and not much more, like an ordinary guy.

Then early in my engineering career, I had to find a computationally efficient algorithm for predicting Earth satellite orbits (when computers were slow and expensive to run). After research, I found a parametric equation form which was by far the most efficient, and it happened to be from Newton's original work. That piece of math stunning with it's elegance and depth, and I realized he did all this without the benefit of ever having taken a course in the subject as he was the inventor of calculus (along with Leibnitz).

So these guys (and maybe Edison included) are fricking geniuses, NOT like you and me. If you showed one of them a piece of our future, I bet they would have integrated it real fast and come up with insights beyond our own very quickly.

Einstein would probably have explained to you that either you or he had to be imaginary as time travel was not possible, and considering the consistency and uniqueness of your products, he would no doubt have concluded that he was the imaginary one, and vanished! Unless you bought crappy flashlights to show him, in which case you would have vanished.

I'd rather have shown Louis XIV some Viagara. THAT would have gotten me some friends in high places, I bet...

I would tell him that one of our presidents had informed the confused American public that..."thats not sex". Just so he understands that we, in the future, have a better grip on reality. Then I guess I would show him pictures of differant Surefire lights...on a HD TV. See just how impressed he is...with the lights.

Ken

I'd take him for a ride in my personal flying saucer over to Three Mile Island, then warp over to Chernobyl and give him a quick overview of the effects of high electrical demand due to inefficient incandescent lighting.

Before dropping him back at the graveyard, I'd give him a three or four hour demo of the internet, email and web browsing.

I would take a battery-powered electroluminescent light - a really thin one - and ask him to touch it while it was running. I would also take my Q3 as well as one of those LED scrolling badges. Oh, and a 3-chip color-changing LED.

Not to mess with his head, just to see his reactions.

If they would have had our LED technology that long ago, I wonder where it would have advanced over all this time. I'd give him some Surefire luxeon and incandescent flashlights as gifts.

Jeff

Someday in the future, there could be a discussion just like this where some future flashaholics ponder what it must have been like in the early days of LED development, and what would happen if they could travel back in time and show their modern lights to us. In terms of LED development, we're currently living in the "Thomas Edison era."

PhotonWrangler said:

Someday in the future, there could be a discussion just like this where some future flashaholics ponder what it must have been like in the early days of LED development, and what would happen if they could travel back in time and show their modern lights to us. In terms of LED development, we're currently living in the "Thomas Edison era."

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I'd bring my "Headlight Intergral X2".
Imagine how thoes 21st century bums would react to a flashlight surgically installed in your forehead, powered by your own body metabolism with an 80 kL (kilo-lumen) adjustable beam automatically adjusted by input nerve signals direct from your eyes.
:huh:

monobeg said:

I'd bring my "Headlight Intergral X2".
Imagine how thoes 21st century bums would react to a flashlight surgically installed in your forehead, powered by your own body metabolism with an 80 kL (kilo-lumen) adjustable beam automatically adjusted by input nerve signals direct from your eyes.
:huh:

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Cool. How many lumens per calorie? :huh:

PhotonWrangler said:

Cool. How many lumens per calorie? :huh:

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A glass of milk will power it for a week. A BigMac should set you up for life.

I'd get the man a bunch of HIDs & LEDs to play with and reverse engineer, tell him to stop muckin' around with that silly incan stuff and focus on HID & LED and let 100 years of evolution do the rest

its a little different than whats been suggested but I would bring him schematics for a machine to draw a vacum (for that annoying bit of tungsten that likes to burn up when you put current through it ). I'd also bring him tables with detailed information about the output and power requirements of different types of bulbs aswell as much information I could carry on CCL's, LED's, HID bulbs, and modern incan.

I think all of this data would be cool for him to playwith, maybe a "forever flashlight" or two aswell. I'm sure he'd have fun with that.

and just for a kick I'd bring him a fourpack of redbull