10 Times Well-Loved Scientists Were Total Jerks
3. Thomas Edison - Pirating Movies
Right, so everybody by now surely knows about the War of the Currents - a crazy battle for electrical supremacy between the likes of Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse (things got pretty messy).
And now a fair few people know about that time Edison electrocuted an elephant to try and prove a point? Incidentally, this is generally thought to be an urban myth arising from the fact that Edison's film company was there to simply video it. Which brings us on to the time when Edison was a total jerk.
In the early 1900s, Edison paid a photographer working with revolutionary film Le Voyage dans la Lune, to hand over the films so that he could copy it and distribute it himself. Edison offered no compensation to the film's director, Georges Méliès, who was almost bankrupted by the incident as Edison undercut him at every turn, decimating the film's income.
Not satisfied with bare faced piracy, Edison then set about gaining the monopoly on the film industry in the United States and Europe. As president of the Motion Picture Patents Company, Edison demanded that Méliès provide him with 1000 feet of film per week, forcing him to make 58 films to fill his quota and essentially working Méliès out of the industry and ultimately ending his career.
The more we find out about this guy, the less we like him.