Two giants of American invention. Every North American kid learns about them in school. What they didn’t tell me (and I wonder if this is now included in elementary education or, more likely not) was about their “dark” sides. Apparently Mr. Edison actually stole his ideas for the development of electricity from Nikola Tesla, was extremely quarrelsome, and never bathed. Mr. Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Co. and the inventor of the modern factories of mass production of complex goods, was a fascist and Nazi sympathizer.

The Serbian Croatian man who immigrated to the US, invented electricity, and had his discovery stolen and commodified by Thomas Edison.