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[MAY 6,
2004]
One of the
hallmarks of greatness is having an award named after you. A number
of well-known inventors have achieved this honor.
Three famous people whose names
are synonymous with inventions each have an interesting bit of irony
attached to their awards. The three people profiled here are Thomas
Edison, Alfred Nobel and Rube Goldberg.
Thomas Edison and the Edison Medal
Nikola Tesla was born in 1856
in Croatia, which was then a part of Yugoslavia. Tesla was a genius
in two brand-new industries -- radio and electricity -- and
inventing seemed to run in his family, as his mother invented
household appliances.
Tesla went to work for Thomas
Edison for a year in 1883, but he and Edison had a long-running feud
with over which type of electrical current was superior -- Edison's
DC (direct current) or Tesla's AC (alternating current). Edison had
invested heavily in his DC current and he did his best to discredit
Tesla, even going so far as electrocuting animals -- ranging in size
from a dog to an elephant -- to try to convince the public that AC
electricity was more dangerous than DC power.
Tesla's AC eventually won out
over Edison's DC, and Tesla was awarded the prestigious Edison Medal
in 1917. Despite winning this award, he never received the proper
recognition or respect during his lifetime. He did have an award
named for him, though. The Nikola Tesla Award has been presented by
the Institute of Electrical Engineers annually since 1976.
This genius inventor who held
more than 700 patents in the United States and Europe died broke
despite being one of the greatest electrical and radio pioneers who
ever lived. Like the proverbial starving artist, Tesla's genius
wasn't fully recognized until after his death.
Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Peace Prize
The person whose name is
attached to one of mankind's greatest awards is Alfred Nobel. The
Nobel Prizes are in five classifications: physics, chemistry,
physiology and medicine, literature, and peace.
Nobel was a Swedish chemist and
inventor born in 1833, the same year that his father went bankrupt.
His father, also an inventor, left home to escape debtor's prison.
After one of Alfred's factories blew up in 1864, killing five
people, including his younger brother, he was tagged with the
unfortunate nickname of "The Merchant of Death." Another factory
blew up two years later.
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The irony of Nobel's story is
that the invention that funded the Nobel Prizes he established was…
dynamite. Alfred, who never married, was a pacifist who didn't want
a legacy associated with death. After he died in 1896, nearly all of
his wealth went to the establishment of the five Nobel Prizes.
The so-called "Merchant of
Death" was able to secure a positive legacy for himself with the
establishment of the awards that bear his name.
Rube Goldberg and the Reuben Award
Rube Goldberg went to college
to fulfill his father's ambition of his son becoming an engineer.
When Rube realized that an engineering career wasn't what he wanted,
he turned to what he really loved doing -- drawing. His engineering
background wasn't wasted on his new career, though, as the drawings
of his fictional character Professor Lucifer Butts made him a
celebrity and helped assure his place in history. Goldberg earned a
Pulitzer Prize in 1948.
The irony of Rube's story is
that Rube, whose name is synonymous with inventions, never invented
anything himself. So what is a "Rube Goldberg invention"?
It's a drawing of an elaborate
scheme that shows 10 or more steps to accomplish a simple task. The
award named in Rube Goldberg's honor is the National Cartoonists
Society's Reuben Award, which is given out annually to the year's
top cartoonist. Goldberg was the society's first president. There
are also a number of Rube Goldberg Machine contests conducted each
year, usually among engineering students, in which the challenge is
to design a machine that uses the most complex process to complete a
simple task.
The
images of Edison, Tesla, Nobel and Goldberg have all appeared on
postage stamps, although Edison's first stamp could not contain his
image because of the U.S. Postal Service's policy of not showing
living individuals on stamps.
[Paul
Niemann]
"Invention Mysteries" is written each
week by Paul Niemann. He can be reached at
niemann7@inventionmysteries.com.
© Copyright Paul Niemann 2004
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