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Edison Screw
First introduced: 1909
While it sounds like an excellent band name, or perhaps a dubious cocktail, the Edison Screw, first introduced 100 years ago, refers to the standardized threading found in lighting fixtures (and the companion screw cap found on virtually all consumer light bulbs). At the turn of the century, the spread of household electricity and electric lighting brought a bewildering array of proprietary light-bulb and socket sizes from competing manufacturers. In an attempt to reassure customers and boost sales, General Electric Edison (yes, that Edison) hit upon the idea of standardizing everything, and did so under a massive marketing campaign with its new line of Mazda lightbulbs (in fact, GE still owns the trademark to that name, which came from the Persian word for god). The plan worked after other manufacturers quickly adopted those standards (and paid licensing fees, naturally), and nearly 100 years later, we still bask in the warm glow of E26 light bulbs.
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Comments
5
Subscribe to commentsAdonnaNov 11th 2008 7:03PM
What does everyone think of the PSP ?
egloskerryNov 12th 2008 2:47AM
My PS2 was actually my first DVD player.
Dan DailyNov 12th 2008 7:06AM
The PS2 is the reason DVD's went mainstream??? What world do you live on? Only 2% of game console owners use them to play movies. That's why the PS3 isn't going to do it for blue ray and that's also why Microsoft never included the HDDVD player on the X box. I thought this was quite common knowledge.
CarneyNov 13th 2008 9:40AM
Actually Blu-ray prices and adoption are doing very well compared to DVD at comparable stages in their lifecycle.
Both the columnist and Dan Daily are mistaken; the PS3 will do for Blu-ray what the PS2 did for DVD - mainstream the technology. Soon it will be everywhere and inescapable, and all the skeptics will buy Blu-ray players and movies and conveniently forget the FUD they traded.
Bonus: I remember websites in the mid 90s predicting DVD would fail because encoding all that content into MPEG-2 was simply too time consuming and difficult. They went into insane detail, marshalling tons of numbers, charts, pictures, and lots of blocks of text. Oops.
You can't stop progress.
RobNov 16th 2008 11:51PM
This guy is so off-base. The PS2 did not make DVD players mainstream, in fact, DVD players were already well adopted before the PS2 came out. However, the PS3 and Blu-Ray is a different story. The price of a PS3 is the same as a Blu-Ray player, so most people are buying a PS3 as a 2 for 1 special. PS3 will definately take blu-ray mainstream. And why buy a boring blu-ray player when you get a PS3 that will come with free software updates for life, versus a stangnant blu-ray device that could be outdated (think BDLIVE, the original blu-ray players can't do BDLIVE).