Monday, June 11, 2012

Thomas Edison and Renewable Energy

Thomas Edison I am sure is one of the most interesting and influential Americans ever.  Everyone knows he invented the light bulb.  But he also had a number of other inventions, some of which were decades if not a whole century ahead of what the rest of the world was ready for.  For example, he was the first to invent a automatic electric vote-counting machine, which politicians thought would mess-up the entire democratic process.  Amazingly, most of Edison's education was self-taught.  He could not function well in traditional educational settings both because of his personality as well as being mostly deaf.  Edison, being the forward thinking and amazing inventor that he was, even foresaw problems we are having today with the environment.  Unfortunately, he was so ahead of his times that no one was able to really pick-up where he left off.  Him, being a father of modern electricity, it is amazing to see that he was able to think beyond extracting resources to produce electricity.  This was many decades before anyone seriously considered renewable energy as important or extraction of limited natural resources as a problem.  Here are some interesting quotes. 
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide…
“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power!
“I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
Thomas Edison, 1847-1931
Inventor of the incandescent light
Founder of Edison General Electric
Credited with 1,093 patents
  The picture, information, and quotes are from the above website.

2 comments:

  1. This quote is mirrored through out the green communities here, and we honor and live by it. Edison was ahead of his time and he was partially scorned for it, we must heed his warning and predictions now (we shoulda years ago) and do what we can to stop selfishly lavishing in the leisure of Americanism, AKA wastefully 'using' resources. The problem being that there is not enough production of the systems related to renewable energy, be it solar wind or hydro, because of low investments. The only way it'll grow, is if we buy, but we can't because its too expensive, then I guess we'll just be doomed, oh well.

    -Sharone Tal

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    1. It appears that things are changing, it may be too little to late though. I guess we will see over the coming years and decades.

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