Thomas Edison text message story: Who owns the lightbulb emoji?
A short, funny Slack-style chat starring Thomas Edison (1847 to 1931), American inventor and businessman, with his rival Nikola Tesla. Two famous inventors arguing about who owns a symbol is exactly the argument that real patent fights are made of, only with an emoji.
Read the chat
- Thomas Edison: #general reminder: the lightbulb emoji is mine
- Nikola Tesla: nothing in the emoji list says that
- Thomas Edison: I invented the lightbulb
- Nikola Tesla: you improved a lightbulb. others had one before you
- Thomas Edison: improved is a strong word. I MADE it practical
- Nikola Tesla: and I made the current that lights it
- Thomas Edison: can we not do the current thing in public
- Nikola Tesla: sending a lightning bolt emoji. that one is mine
Free to try, no account needed until you export.
Who was Thomas Edison?
- He held over a thousand US patents, and his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was called an invention factory.
- His team developed a practical, long-lasting electric light bulb in 1879.
- He and Nikola Tesla ended up on opposite sides of the "war of the currents" over how to send electricity to homes.
The chat is invented. Thomas Edison never sent these messages, and the story is labelled as fiction wherever it appears.
How this chat is built
It runs 8 messages between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Thomas Edison writes 4 of them. The longest line is “you improved a lightbulb. others had one before you” (Nikola Tesla) and the shortest is “I invented the lightbulb” (Thomas Edison). The word “lightbulb” comes back 3 times, which is where the rhythm of the joke comes from. It closes on “sending a lightning bolt emoji. that one is mine” from Nikola Tesla.
It is shown in the Slack look , one of the Slack-style chat tools. In the editor you can switch it to any other look and the whole conversation follows.