"In 1899, Thomas Edison filmed some very contemporary looking bike tricks."

You spend your life railing against the "there is nothing new under the sun" ideology and then something like this comes along.

from 1899

lolling @ the always impressive "fall repeatedly off of bike, sometimes painfully onto a chair" trick

Is this the only thread ilx has to appreciate Thomas Edison? Dude invented everything.

Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.

NDB, just recorded music, electric cars, light bulbs, and motion pictures.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Edison_and_phonograph_edit1.jpg/476px-Edison_and_phonograph_edit1.jpg

This is rather unfortunate, though:

As part of this campaign, Edison's employees publicly electrocuted animals to demonstrate the dangers of AC;[44][45] alternating electric currents are slightly more dangerous in that frequencies near 60 Hz have a markedly greater potential for inducing fatal "cardiac fibrillation" than do direct currents.[46] On one of the more notable occasions, in 1903, Edison's workers electrocuted Topsy the elephant at Luna Park, near Coney Island, after she had killed several men and her owners wanted her put to death.[47] His company filmed the electrocution.

I do like this though:

In an October 2, 1910, interview in the New York Times Magazine, Edison stated:

Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.[74]

Anyway, Thomas Edison.