This is what a young thief and con man looks like.
A con man and a thief? Are you sure this isn't Elon Musk?
I'm sure there's always been stupid people. But with the emergence of social media in recent times, you actually get to see firsthand exactly how dumb and gullible some truly are…
General electric and Edison ruined Nicola Tesla. History is always written by the victors regardless of whether they are thieving psychopaths or not.
So much rancor for the man! As a boy he was my hero. Working on the Grand Trunk railroad on the baggage car. His chemicals starting the fire and the conductor throwing him off. It was all so brave.
Probably thinking about how he can take credit for other people's ideas.
Thinking about profit his own selfishness and screwing the rest of the world.
I bet he stole the camera for that picture too
Show me the picture of Thomas Edison as a girl too!
For people who believe everything "The Oatmeal" claims about Edison and Tesla
Edison's ideas came from a think tank. It's safe to say he "stole" from a wide variety of people.
Teddy he sure did
Quiet.....Bet most of you thought Tesla was just a car and had to Google to learn otherwise
A hero renowned for his infamy as grand thief of someone else's genius.
That face you make when you know you can steal well.
The smiling face of a future con man, before he became a thug and a thief.
What a smarmy looking little shitbird.
Probably stole that outfit.
Sweet favorite boy of the banksters.
He looks radiant in this photo
Would he be anything else?
He dreamed of 'Westinghousing' an elephant.
someone should’ve punched the kid in the face
I was just about to say that.
He later claimed to have invented the scarf.
And Bell may have been a thief as well.
"Here I go stealin' again"
What s bright spark
He got old young.
Original mugshot.
As opposed to a girl
Bully.
Lookie that lil thief
Legendary!
Looks like Oliver
Dodgy lil prick
Relative of yours?
Wanker
A thief and a crook
Stop hating
of course! 😂😂😂😂
Look at that smile. What a piece of garbage
BLOGGER'S NOTE. I needed a laugh, and I got one. I have always hated pompous assholes who steal other people's ideas for their own glory, so this actually made me laugh out loud. I'd have to include on the list Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and (yes!) Walt Disney. My generation would have been horrified to see these comments. My generation was full of shit. Everyone disses comments sections, but in this case I think they're right on the money.
Boyhood photo of Thomas Edison Comments(from The Vintage News)
This is what a young theif and con man looks like.
A con man and a thief? Are you sure this isn't Elon Musk?
I'm sure there's always been stupid people. But with the emergence of social media in recent times, you actually get to see firsthand exactly how dumb and gullible some truly are…
General electric and Edison ruined Nicola Tesla. History is always written by the victors regardless of whether they are thieving psychopaths or not.
So much rancor for the man! As a boy he was my hero. Working on the Grand Trunk railroad on the baggage car. His chemicals starting the fire and the conductor throwing him off. It was all so brave.
Probably thinking about how he can take credit for other people's ideas.
Thinking about profit his own selfishness and screwing the rest of the world.
I bet he stole the camera for that picture too
Show me the picture of Thomas Edison as a girl too!
For people who believe everything "The Oatmeal" claims about Edison and Tesla
Edison's ideas came from a think tank. It's safe to say he "stole" from a wide variety of people.
Teddy he sure did
Quiet.....Bet most of you thought Tesla was just a car and had to Google to learn otherwise
A hero renowned for his infamy as grand thief of someone else's genius.
That face you make when you know you can steal well.
The smiling face of a future con man, before he became a thug and a thief.
What a smarmy looking little shitbird.
Probably stole that outfit.
Sweet favorite boy of the banksters.
He looks radiant in this photo
Would he be anything else?
He dreamed of 'Westinghousing' an elephant.
someone should’ve punched the kid in the face
I was just about to say that.
He later claimed to have invented the scarf.
And Bell may have been a thief as well.
"Here I go stealin' again"
What s bright spark
He got old young.
Original mugshot.
As opposed to a girl
Bully.
Lookie that lil thief
Legendary!
Looks like Oliver
Dodgy lil prick
Relative of yours?
Wanker
A thief and a crook
Stop hating
of course! 😂😂😂😂
Look at that smile. What a piece of garbage
BLOGGER'S NOTE. I needed a laugh, and I got one. I have always hated pompous assholes who steal other people's ideas for their own glory, so this actually made me laugh out loud. I'd have to include on the list Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and (yes!) Walt Disney. My generation would have been horrified to see these comments. My generation was full of shit. Everyone disses comments sections, but in this case I think they're right on the money.
OK, so this might just look like a whole lot of jerky animations of a guy sneezing. And it is. But if you look at each of them, they're not the same: the frames are combined and recombined in slightly different ways. It started off as something like this - a contact sheet, with five frames per row endlessly repeating.
These are still frames from a very short (like, three seconds) film that Edison made in 1894. It's sometimes called Fred Ott's Sneeze, maybe because it depicts Fred Ott sneezing. Stuck a feather up his nose, or huffed that sneezing powder the fetishists use on YouTube. When I see something like this, I have a mad desire to make it move again, to resuscitate the guy who's been dead for a hundred years, and turn his frame-frozen sneeze back into motion. To do that, I had to cut the frames in the contact sheet into little squares, re-assemble them into some semblance of film, then run them through my gif program. As you can see, it worked fairly well. Blown up like this, Fred looks eerily realistic, even though I was working with only five frames:
Meanwhile, I found a Library of Congress video of the original, three-seconds-long masterpiece of cinema. Frankly, I think my animations look better.
This is just one of those back-into-it-sideways pieces. I don't even know exactly how I found it, but I stumbled across a bizarre poem about a herring.
Was it a kid's poem? I don't know, but it was full of repetition, and didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The original had been in French.
The name Charles Cros came up.
Or did it happen another way? I've been on yet another of my Edison-cylinder-inspired hunts on YouTube. There are now exactly one billion, give or take a million, posted there, unlike the first time I hunted for them in 2003 (for my novel Bus People, "now showing on a blog near you!"). Did I stumble onto Cros and his strange story of near-greatness while trying to dig up stuff about early recording technology?
Everyone knows Edison scooped other people's ideas by patenting them before anyone else (I mean people less savvy in the ways of business, or just less ruthless/arrogant, or more ethical than Edison). Cros was one of the contributors to the technology that eventually led to the phonograph, to which he gave the delightful name paleophone. The name reminds me of that song Telephone to Glory: "you can talk to Jesus on his Royal Telephone" - something that connects you to another time and dimension of reality.
Alas, the paleophone was not to be. It never really got off the drawing board. I think a lot of people contributed to the invention of sound recording, not the least of whom was Emile Berliner, whose disc system (grooves on one side only!) eventually usurped Edison's unwieldy wax cylinder as the accepted format.
Anyway, this guy Cros, whom I had never heard of up 'til now, sounds more like a surrealist/Dada artist than an inventor. I've lifted this little piece from a site (link above! I'm being more conscientious about posting links to originals now, though I assume that if anyone actually read this blog, I'd be in trouble for it anyway) which tells it in fewer words than I ever could. It leaves a multitude of questions unanswered, for example, why did Cros only live to be 44? And to be honest, I don't want to look it up.
The kipper poem - the herring - the RED herring, some people call it - is supposed to have some sort of hidden meaning. Cros wrote a lot of other poems besides, but I don't have time for them here.
In 1877, Thomas Edison, the famous inventor, self-publicist and notorious elephant assassin invented a sound reproduction audio contraption called the phonograph. Or did he? Was it perhaps - as some claim - the poet, inventor, surrealist and visionary Charles Hortensius Emile Cros that gave the world this new invention in sound recreation? Charles Cros was born 1st October 1844. A precocious boy, at the age of 16 he was teaching Hebrew and Sanscrit, and two years later was a Professor of Chemistry.
His imagination and genius for invention was unstoppable. At the Universal Exhibition of 1867 he presented his automatic telegraph system. He proposed a solution to the problem of processing photographs in colour. And on 30 April 1877 he delivered to the French Academy of Sciences a sealed envelope containing a document describing a procedure for the‘registering and reproduction of phenomena perceived by the ear’. He gave his invention the poetic name of Paleophone - Voice of the Past. Poetry, indeed, was in his soul. He was friends with Paul Verlaine, and with Arthur Rimbaud, who Verlaine once shot with a revolver in a moment of drunkenness. He rubbed shoulders with Manet, Renoir and Sarah Bernhardt. And in one of his surreal and visionary moments, he became convinced of the existence of large cities on Mars and Venus, and tried to persuade the French government to construct a parabolic mirror in order to communication with our extra-terrestrial brothers and sisters.
But it was his Paleophone that most preoccupied him. He tried to find financial backers, but without success. On 10 October 1877, an article in a publication La Semaine du clergére named the invention 'the Phonograph'. But rumours were circulating that the famous Edison was also developing a system for recording sounds. Did he see the article in La Semaine du clergé? That modern-day Repository of All Human Knowledge, Wikipedia, says not. But Charles was taking no chances. He rushed to the Academy of Sciences and requested that they open at once the sealed envelope in order to make public his indisputable claim to the invention. The envelope was duly opened on 8 December. But sadly it was two days too late, for the great Thomas had already given the first public demonstration of the recording of a human voice. Then on 17 December Edison registered his patent.
In the years that followed Charles became more immersed in his poetry. He gave public readings of his poems, and many decades after his death in 1888, one of his verses, Sidonie a plus d’un amant, was recorded by screen icon and tireless campaigner for animal rights (elephants included) Brigitte Bardot.
Le hareng saur
Il était un grand mur blanc – nu, nu, nu,
Contre le mur une échelle – haute, haute, haute,
Et, par terre, un hareng saur – sec, sec, sec.
Il vient, tenant dans ses mains – sales, sales, sales,
Un marteau lourd, un grand clou – pointu, pointu, pointu,
Un peloton de ficelle – gros, gros, gros.
Alors il monte à l’échelle – haute, haute, haute,
Et plante le clou pointu – toc, toc, toc,
Tout en haut du grand mur blanc – nu, nu, nu.
Il laisse aller le marteau – qui tombe, qui tombe, qui tombe,
Attache au clou la ficelle – longue, longue, longue,
Et, au bout, le hareng saur – sec, sec, sec.
Il redescend de l’échelle – haute, haute, haute,
L’emporte avec le marteau – lourd, lourd, lourd,
Et puis, il s’en va ailleurs – loin, loin, loin.
Et, depuis, le hareng saur – sec, sec, sec,
Au bout de cette ficelle – longue, longue, longue,
Très lentement se balance – toujours, toujours, toujours.
J’ai composé cette histoire – simple, simple, simple,
Pour mettre en fureur les gens – graves, graves, graves,
Et amuser les enfants – petits, petits, petits.
The Smoked Herring
Once upon a time there was a big white wall — bare, bare, bare,
Against the wall there stood a ladder — high, high, high,
And on the ground a smoked herring — dry, dry, dry,
He comes, holding in his hands — dirty, dirty, dirty,
A heavy hammer and a big nail — sharp, sharp, sharp,
A ball of string — big, big, big,
Then he climbs the ladder — high, high, high,
And drives the sharp nail — tock, tock, tock,
Way up on the big white wall — bare, bare, bare,
He drops the hammer — down, down, down,
To the nail he fastens a string — long, long, long,
And, at the end, the smoked herring — dry, dry, dry,
He comes down the ladder — high, high, high,
He picks up the hammer — heavy, heavy, heavy,
And goes off somewhere — far, far, far,
And ever afterwards the smoked herring — dry, dry, dry,
At the end of that string — long, long, long,
Very slowly sways — forever and ever and ever.
I made up this story — silly, silly, silly,
To infuriate the squares — solemn, solemn, solemn,
And to amuse the children — little, little, little.
An obsession I return to over and over again is the creepiness of dolls, rivalled only by the creepiness of clowns. Both are meant to bring joy and pleasure to small children (or rather "children of all ages!", as they say at the circus). Come to that, circuses are pretty creepy too, or at least the circuses I saw as a kid: tawdry is a better word, with sad elephants, bad smells and clowns who had probably seen better days and likely fuelled themselves from a flask. This is the first video I've found with a complete set of Edison Talking Doll recordings. Or, at least, I fervently pray it is a complete set and I won't find any more. God only knows where they got them, as I would've thought the wax cylinders would have melted down by now.
The dolls had a most un-cuddly steel body with holes in it to concentrate the "audio". I think either the crank or the cylinder broke down almost immediately. Did this freak out kids? It might have filled them with wonder. Even some of the stranger dolls from the 1960s were seen as completely charming, like the one who had different facial expressions when you wrenched her arm around (and what was her name, anyway?), or the one who said creepy things like, "I can see in the dark" and "I wish we were twins".
"Doll" has taken on a whole new meaning. When I first heard about "reborns", they were dolls with realistic-looking arms and legs and head, and a cloth body like a conventional vinyl doll. And they were vinyl. Originally, you just took a vinyl doll and mucked around with it until it looked more-or-less real.
Soon the dollmakers upped the ante, placing beating hearts in these things, heaters, voice recordings so they'd cry and coo, and even the capacity to wet and (I think) poop. Jesus, you might as well just have yourself a real kid!
But soon that wasn't enough, either. I began to see dolls molded out of silicone, one-piecers I mean, their limbs jiggling like a rubber frog's. These were so "lifelike" they scared the hell out of me. One of these might run as high as $10,000.00, though I just found this one on eBay: 5h left (Today 5:06PM) From China Soft Brown Hair Full Silicone Vinyl Reborn Baby Dolls Lifelike Newborn Baby Doll $1.99 0 bids Though it's described here as "full silicone", I have a feeling it's the kind of doll you might find at a dollar store: "Mo-o-o-o-o-m, can I have that doll?" "Oh, okay. It's only worth a couple of bucks."
I have weird feelings about these dolls. I honestly do. After watching a number of "Kaylee's Morning Routine" videos, which made me gasp, I began to wonder what it would be like to own a doll so real-looking that cops broke the glass in hot car windows to rescue them. (Doll owners are not above such pranks and love freaking people out while shopping at Walmart, sometimes casually abandoning them in the ladies' room.) I even. . . no, I didn't, but yes, I DID look at some of them, decided they weren't worth my while and that you needed to pay five grand to get a really good one.
Now I wonder what I was thinking of. Getting a cat seemed to rescue me from such thoughts. I didn't realize I was at such a low point. At least the cat is real. If you watch their YouTube videos, the collectors cannot understand why anyone would find their obsession creepy. "Full-body silicone" seems to be the Cadillac of these never-born, never-dead things, quickly replacing those clunky old cloth-bodies that can't even be bathed. This rarefied cult strikes me as stereotyped and largely misunderstood. Wikipedia says reborns are owned almost exclusively by elderly women who at some point suffered the loss of a child, but that's simply not true. Nearly all the videos I've seen are of women in their 20s and 30s, and quite a few of them are teenagers. I can only assume that they just like having them around to feed, dress, bathe and take on "outings", and collect them obsessively. Elaborate, thrill-packed box-opening ceremonies abound on YouTube, each one packed with as much fun and excitement as a baby shower. These are actually entertaining to watch: though the disaster openings ("ohhhhh noooooo, his head is warped. . .") are even more fun.
I keep thinking of a chant we had in school: "Rubber baby-buggy bumpers". You had to say it ten times fast, or something, though I am not sure why.
POSTSCRIPT (there's always one of those!): I found this weird little entry in Wikipedia, which gets just about everything wrong about reborn dolls:
A reborn doll is a manufactured skin doll that has been transformed to resemble a human infant with as much realism as possible. The process of creating a reborn doll is referred to as reborning and the doll artists are referred to as reborners. Reborn dolls are also known as Bodo dolls or unliving dolls.
I've scoured the internet and found NO reference to "Bodo dolls", though I did find "Bobo dolls". These are the roly-poly clown things that bounce back up when you push them over. For some reason, all sorts of scientific experiments have been done on these that don't interest me at all. "Unliving" isn't easy to find either, except on really creepy sites that have nothing to do with these dolls.
And then there's this:
Social issues and reactions
The overwhelming majority of reborn customers are older women. Many women collect reborns as they would a non-reborn doll, whilst others purchase them to fill a void of a lost child and may treat reborns as living babies. Media features and public receptions have used such adjectives as "creepy" to describe the reborns. This can be explained by the uncanny valley hypothesis. This states that as objects become more lifelike they gain an increasing empathetic response, until a certain point at which the response changes to repulsion. Department stores have refused to stock the dolls because of this reaction, claiming they are too lifelike.
I don't know if I have seen any "older women" on the YouTube videos, if older means 60s or 70s. Many of them are less than half my age. Wikipedia makes no reference at all to the "full-body silicone" doll which is all the rage now. This information is at least ten years out of date. Wiki is mostly put together by guys in their 20s, the ones that live in Mom's basement and really don't get out much, or do much of anything except steal each other's research.
As for department stores not selling them because they are "too lifelike", it's more likely they don't sell them because of the price factor. Really good ones cost hundreds or even many thousands of dollars. Unless they bolted them to the shelves (hmmmmm. . . ), they could stand to lose a lot through shoplifting. Picture it: reborn kidnappers wearing maternity coats sneaking into the toy department and smuggling the little blighters out past the store alarms.
BTW, I'd be interested to see if there is any feuding between "old-school" cloth-bodied reborners and the newer, full-body-silicone crowd. I have never seen a video of a conventional reborn which could be bent and twisted and slung around like this. Nor do they have realistic genitals, a detail which squicks out even some of the most die-hard collectors. That hunk of quivering pink silicone looks EXACTLY like a real baby, folks, and that is exactly what makes it so creepy.
Bodo, anyone?
Damn, I thought I was finished! But I just had a horrible thought. These dolls are molded, right? HOW DO THEY MAKE THE MOLDS? The only method I can think of is to make a plaster cast of a baby. How else could they make it that realistic, down to those last minute bumps of scarlet prickly heat?
Dear God. This is worse than the squawky, distorted, Night of the Living Dead Edison doll recordings! I found some instructions for making a silicone, baby, but I find them kind of hard to believe. Nevertheless, in the interests of science, I will share them with you:
There is one way to do a full mold for a full silicone baby, and I have been researching this, but haven’t done it yet.
You start off by drawing a line through the center of the baby, around its head, fingers, toes.
Then you take some white clay and put it on the bottom of the mold, and pack it into the center lines all around the baby.
You take a flat brush and dampen it and go around the edges making sure the clay is sealed.
Cut off excess on sides to not be wasteful with product.
Take the end of a sharpie with the lid on it, and make holes around the baby, which will be the center holes that hold the mold together. You can even put the round nuts around it if you want to.
Close the mold, and mix the dragon skin, or silicone you are using for the mold, and add flocking for the color you want the mold to be.
Pour the product into the mold covering the baby half that you can see.
Let it cure.
Cut the mold open and remove the clay and any loose silicone that is dangling.
Clean all of the clay off.
Turn the baby over and roll up a clay hole maker to put into the center for the pour hole.
Cover the remainder of the baby.
Let cure.
Remove. It comes apart, but you can pour the baby into the pour hole.
Make sure to Tap tap tap to get all of the air bubbles out, because you don’t want those. It will waste your silicone product. Also turn to cover every nook and cranny.
They just keep on unearthing these unearthly sounds from the past, recorded on everything from warm candle wax to mucilage applied to cereal box cardboard. Of course we know all about that Au Clair de la Lune breakthrough going back to 1860, a "recording" etched on soot-covered paper with a stylus and never intended to be played back. But nowadays it seems we can play back anything. It's like Pogo: Albert the Alligator would open a closet door, bellow "Wheeeee-hawken" or something like that, slam the door, then next time anyone opened the closet his voice would come booming out again.
I love the name VOLTA LABS: it reminds me of old Frankenstein movies and mad scientists with their hair all fuzzed up. Sudden explosions and weird sounds from who-knows-where. "He's ali-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ive!!", and all that. Well, you have to admit these voices from the past do seem to be raising the dead.
For some reason early sound creeps me out way more than early photography/movies. We hear in the womb, long before we can see. Alfred Hitchcock once famously said that the shower scene in Psycho was terrifying mainly because of the relentlessly repeated sound of the knife entering Janet Leigh's flesh. Not to mention the shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek of the sound track.
I have no doubt they're going to keep finding these things now, old discs and stuff locked away in dusty drawers that no one paid any attention to before. Scientists are notorious for being competitive. "My discovery is better than your discovery, nyahh nyahh nyahh." The Volta Labs recordings weren't done earlier than the Au Clair de la Lune stuff (more like 1880), but they're still significant for representing the endless experiments these fellows had to go through to try to get it right.
As soon as somebody did, who knows who, some lackey who was paid 50 cents a week, Edison snarfed it up and got it patented under his name the same day. Which is how he became the Greatest Inventor in Human History.
Funny how many of these early technological researchers were French. Going back to the Montgolfier brothers and their hot air balloons, which enabled "man" to fly long before the good-ol' American Wright brothers, we had the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies doing all sorts of phantasmagorical things with early film. And Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville (whose name would fill a whole disc back then), singing the third verse of Au Clair de la Lune in a wavery, creepy voice that could be played at two speeds, both of them unsettling.
I always think these things are hoaxes. In fact, I had a lot of doubt about Martinville because I couldn't see any physical evidence that computers had extracted that sound from what amounted to an old piece of tar paper that had been folded up in a drawer for 150 years.
Twenty years ago or thereabouts, I heard about a hoax perpetrated on the readers of a classical music magazine. I even heard the recording myself: a CD transcript of "Chopin playing the minute waltz", recorded in 1840 or thereabouts on a revolving drum and stylus. On black sooty paper. Just like the Au Clair thing. It'd been buried in the fellow's garden somewhere, then unearthed during construction in Paris. At some point someone saw the catalogue number on the disc: 123456hahaha, and the jig was up.
People still don't get the fact that "minute" refers to the other meaning of minute: small. Miniature. Petite. NOT played in a minute, like Liberace with the big vulgar clock ticking audibly away on the side of his piano. With either the clock slowed down, or the piece vastly abridged.
Pretty soon you'll be able to snatch atoms out of the air and play them back like fireflies. It's all going too fast for me. But I like to see how all this started, and I love it when I find something like this. Volta Labs! Paging Dr. Frankenstein.
This thing looks like it was recorded on a circular saw that had seen too much hard use. The only good thing about it is its brevity. But just what the hell were these guys trying to do?
😂
