Wealth - Public Figures

Thomas Alva Edison

February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931

• inventor and businessman

• critic, competitor and former employer of Nikola Tesla

• Close friend of fellow Michiganer Henry Ford

• commercial enemy of George Westinghouse (proponent of alternating current)

  Mula Moon + Chandra in tanu-bhava-1

  Ketu in bhava-4 - rarely at home, usually out doing Rahu's public high visibility roles

• Two marriages; Father of six

• the first industrial research lab

• quadruplex telegraph (1874)

birth date-place from www.astrodatabank.com

Birth time rectified

• John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

• Marla Maples Trump

• Emperor Hirohito of Japan (b. 1901)

• Mary Baker Eddy

"... a shrewd and capable character - an organizer,

• who is able to handle people

• and make them serve his needs through tact and diplomacy.

A politician.

An orator who is capable of swaying his audiences

• yet who is not sincere

• but may even be unfaithful to his constituents

• and ungrateful and unappreciative of favors received if the occasion arises.

The type of person who, while one is still in his presence, holds one spellbound;

• but who when he leaves, also leaves a lurking distrust behind him.

Extremely clever and capable."

As a child, Edison suffered profound hearing loss from scarlet fever and repeated ear infections (L-6 Shukra in 3 = ears). He was criticized by his only teacher for having a wandering mind (Mula Chandra; Ketu in 4 = school).

Perhaps sensing that her son would not flourish unless his mind could roam, his mother allowed him to leave school and she personally taught him to read. Thanks to the US public library system started by Benjamin Franklin, young Edison (having no school assignments) read whatever interested him. He preferred natural philosophy and boy's adventure fiction.

Although never completely deaf, Edison enjoyed significant hearing loss and was throughout adult life severely hard of hearing. Edison's father and his son Charles also were almost deaf. Edison said that his deafness was a great help in life in that it helped him concentrate on his reading or his work without distraction from ambient noice.

He was also a lifetime type-2 diabetic (Guru in 6 in a rashi of sweet Shukra, drishti of Rahu to 6).

As an adult, Edison became a proponent of Maria Montessori's educational principles which emphasize active touch and sight in preference to passive listening.

Edison built a great fortune via talking to the investor class. Although Edison was a practicing engineer in his own right, he did not strictly invent most of the Edison-labeled products.

Rather, Edison was possessed of a commercial genius that enabled him to discuss, describe, and explain the ideas and models of numerous other electrical inventors of the time -- and shape these into marketable (Kumbha) products that strategically connected to the emerging electrical grid (10th navamsha = Kumbha).

Edison was better at the consumer electrical product level of knowledge (e.g., light bulbs) than he was at understanding the grid level of the larger industrial electrical systems.

Although Edison and his investors made a tremendous amount of money from the sale of electrical consumer products, their short-term-profit (Budha) orientation continued to anger and upset his legendary adversary the systems-designer Nikola Tesla.

Aggressive and emotionally self-oriented (Mangala and Chandra in Mula lagna) Edison was particularly shrewd and skillful at the legal (Makara Budha) process of obtaining patent protection for emerging designs, often achieving a legal patent for designs that he neither originated nor collaborated.

Edison was known as a hard-driving, competitive businessman and demanding research lab manager. He was respected but not well liked -- not by his legendary adversaries Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, and not even by his children.

Hundreds of technical engineers, working in his lab and elsewhere, contributed to the realization of the inventions attributed to him. But Edison was not one to share attribution. A number of the inventions that he claimed were quite arguably created by other inventors. However, Edison understood the power of a patent and fought many bitterly litigious court battles to win intellectual property rights. By shrewd business sense he developed "Edison" into a prestigious brand name associated with his personal electrical genius.

Edison was a highly innovative applied electrical engineer rather than an inventor in the abstract sense. He lived at a time of tremendous technological creativity - the so-called "Second Industrial Revolution" when many of the machines already developed during the industrial revolution were adapted to run on electrical power, and a variety of electrical fields came to be understood and exploited. He was in many ways in the right place at the right time.

His genius was framed in practical terms: he captured inventions that others had manifest in experimental conditions. Then, he (and his hundreds of engineer employees) designed improvements that would transform a research-proven idea into a commercially viable product.

For example, Thomas Edison did not invent the light-bulb. There were dozens of working prototype light bulbs in existence during Edison's time, and most working scientists knew about the research. Edison's genius to take this existing idea, along with existing lab procedures, and make it work in mass-production.

Finally, Edison's genius was grounded in the pervasive concept of "system". He designed and sold complete electrical systems, from the giant industrial power-plant down to the individual light bulbs. He and his employees designed devices that worked only with his trademark DC current. Thus he (and his shareholders) were operating in the world of large-scale infrastructure utilities development where labor was cheap, the profits were truly stupendous.

Edison's genius was as much in the marketing as in the engineering. He developed partnerships with numerous European ventures all bearing the name "Edison" to to sell his Edison-brand electrical devices.

However perhaps his greatest skill was negotiating with monied investors to receive funding for his large and diverse laboratory operations. Compared with his adversary Tesla who often did not or could not receive investment funding, Edison was nearly always able to get the stock-sales capitalization that he needed.

• espoused non-violence including toward animals

• death-penalty electrocutions

• public killing of animals for business competition

Edison was not attached to any conventional religious practice, but as a public figure he was often quizzed on those matters of orthodox theology which were socially defining in his day. He claimed to believe in the creative power of nature, in which he detected a designing but utterly non-compassionate intelligence guiding all known life. He was called an atheist by some, but denied that label.

Edison also advocated non-violence as the only viable approach to social progress, and was publically proud of the fact that his inventions included no weaponry. He asserted that non-violent ethics included a policy of non-harm toward animals.

Yet, in his aggressive defamation campaign against AC power, Edison authorized the showcase electrocution of dogs, cats, and even an errant elephant, in order to convince the public that AC current was dangerous to life. Motivated originally by sheer commercial competition, Edison became engaged in the national campaign to electrocute criminals sentenced to death penalty, to the extent that he helped design the killing chairs and testified before Congress on their utility for the purpose.

from wikipedia Edison: The day after Edison died, the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla who was quoted as saying:

"He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. [...] His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90% of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. " signed, Nikola Tesla