After many delays and a last-minute approval, SpaceX appears ready to conduct Starship's first orbital test flight. The next-generation rocket is now expected to launch from Boca Chica, Texas at 9:20AM Eastern with a livestream already available through the company's YouTube channel (below). While conditions are generally favorable, there are backup launch windows on Tuesday and Wednesday.

This is the first time SpaceX is launching a fully integrated Starship system with a Super Heavy booster underneath to get the main vehicle into orbit. The combination is about 394 feet tall, or taller than the Saturn V rocket. While both Starship and the booster are designed to be reusable, both will splash into the sea during the test.

There's no guarantee of success. In a Twitter Spaces chat on Sunday, Elon Musk told fans to "set your expectations low." Don't be surprised if something goes awry, in other words. Instead, this test is more about collecting data to improve future boosted Starship flights.

A successful test is crucial both for SpaceX's long-term plans, including lunar tourism, as well as NASA's exploration plans. The Artemis Moon landings beginning in December 2025 will use Starship to take crews from an orbiting Gateway station to the lunar surface. While those won't depend on a booster, NASA needs to know that Starship is reliable before these crewed missions can go forward.

It was after a particularly grueling session with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that I started to wonder: When did developers stop putting cheats into their games to help the less talented among us get through the tricky bits? When I was a kid, a little bit of Up Down Left Right A and Start together, and a little older, a little /~noclip saved me no end of bother. These days, if you look for cheats for any modern game online, the best you’ll get is to be sassily told to “git gud.”

Sorry, a little context: I play games, but I’m not a Gamer, or a Nintendo Person, so in 2023 I resolved to remedy this. So many discussions at work fly past me because while I’ve heard of Cliff Bleszinski and Hironobu Sakaguchi, I couldn’t tell you their oeuvre without Googling. Part of my self-education was to watch every Zero Punctuation compilation to speedrun the last decade of games development. Another part was to seek out some classic games that I’d never played through ignorance, weakness, or my own stupid fault.

The first step on this journey only required me to go to the bookshelves in my living room, ironically. I bought my Pokémon Go-loving wife a Nintendo Switch at the start of 2020 so she could play Let’s Go Pikachu!. Not long after, a friend handed me their copy of Breath of the Wild and said I should give it a play. But it’s been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, as I subconsciously resisted the urge to give it a go. This, I’ll admit, is because I’ve always had the notion that Nintendo games are Hard Work.

And that was my belief up until a month ago, when I thought I’d better try Breath of the Wild before Tears of the Kingdom came out. I figured I’d give it half an hour, the smallest of toes dipped into the world, so that I could say I’d tried and that it wasn’t for me. And before you can say “I need to be up at seven in the morning for work,” it was long past midnight. Since then, Breath of the Wild has consumed my every waking moment. It is, without a doubt, one of the most engrossing and immersive games I have ever played, despite my frustrations.

Nintendo

It’s why I felt compelled to write this, because I want to spread the gospel to non-gamers who might feel similarly like they’ve missed the bus. Especially since we can hope that the older game might fall in price as people seek out its replacement. Or, given the current situation with Nintendo persistently keeping the prices of its older first-party games high, at least it won’t get any more expensive. But, to undermine my own argument, I’d say that if Tears of the Kingdom is half as good as Breath of the Wild, it’ll probably be the first game that’s worth the $70 fee Nintendo’s trying to push consumers into accepting.

Despite its age (it is from 2017, after all), Breath of the Wild feels cutting-edge, and part of that is how deep it is. When I started playing, I worried that it would be yet another soulless open-world grind-a-thon, a feeling not soothed by the presence of Far Cry-esque towers you need to conquer to open up areas of the map. But the one thing that this game has that sets it apart from its genre-mates is a level of curation that continues to surprise me.

It plays out on a sprawling map, but it never feels like you’re traversing through an empty void. The density of what’s available means that, despite spending a month or so covering just half of Hyrule (I’ve only recently reached Goron City), I never stop finding new stuff. And there are some assets that have been reused, like the standard template for enemy camps, but you never feel that they’ve been copy-pasted to pad out the space. This Hyrule feels hand-made, with every detail sweated beyond any player’s comprehension.

Even a philistine like me can appreciate the level of craft, not just in its layout, but how it has been built. Take the chemistry engine, which seems like such a simple idea you wonder why it hasn’t been a part of open worlds forever. By giving each material its own properties, you can take advantage of more than just weight physics to help you solve puzzles. Thanks to YouTube, once I understood how Shock Traps worked, I was able to start making real progress in the shrine quests that put you face to face with a particularly murderous killbot.

And the game’s critical path is left so completely wide open as to almost not matter at all, giving you total freedom. Rather than giving you a set series of missions, you unlock the main quest line after the first hour, and then can tackle it in any way you wish. I’ve seen more than a few Straight To Ganon speed runs where expert players take a bare-footed Link to defeat the title’s big bad within minutes of being able to leave the tutorial area. I love, too, how the landscape gently nudges you toward the safer areas where you can level up before you’re let loose on the harsher climates of, say, Death Mountain.

Nintendo

This works so well that when you’ve gotten a little way along you start picking up weapons that aren’t total garbage. Recently, I was cornered by a Guardian Stalker, very much a one-hit kill villain you can only ever hope of running out of view from. But, trapped in the North Lomei Labyrinth, I had no option but to try and fight without dying. And I managed to hack off its legs, one by one, until it flopped on its side, unable to shoot me with its laser. The feeling of exhilaration and satisfaction after so many deaths, was one for the ages. You don’t need to git gud in the grindy sense, you just need to spend enough time in the world to gently, naturally evolve how you play the game until things get easy.

And this is when I realized there was a good reason developers don’t put cheats into their games any more. Because a good title, like Breath of the Wild, rarely prescribes how you navigate and solve its world. If you’re not a fighter, you can devote your energies to stealthily circumnavigating your foes. When you grasp the game’s physics engine, you can use a well-placed remote bomb to send a venom-spitting Lizalfo hurtling down the side of a cliff. The only thing I can’t do yet is take on a Lynel – the game’s super-tough mini-boss – and not get rinsed, because I’m not sure I’ll ever learn the art of parrying.

Now, that may be deficiency enough that I never actually finish the game, since that’s rarely an impediment to getting to the fun bits. Take the shrine quests, which (mostly) offer the most enjoyable physics puzzles since Portal, give or take the aforementioned combat trials. Part of this is because the puzzles can be hard but are never unfairly-formatted, and there’s almost always a solution that’ll come to mind if you just walk around for long enough. The fact there’s no time limit or villain trying to force you to hurry up helps matters considerably.

I have gripes, but they’re all mostly nitpicks. The Switch’s hardware limitations means that the game’s draw distance can sometimes be a problem. If you’re looking for a spot out of sight of enemies to land your glider on, it can only be once you’re inches from the ground that it’ll finally render a camouflaged Lizalfo. And Nintendo’s policy of never being entirely open with the player to encourage experimentation means you’ll need to have some YouTube tutorial channels bookmarked to help you navigate some of the more baffling bits.

Simon Parkin’s essay about Breath of the Wild in The New Yorker quoted original series creator Shigeru Miyamoto, who described Hyrule as a “miniature garden you can put into a drawer and revisit any time you like.” And this speaks to something I’ve found about the game, that it’s less of a video game and more of a place that you can choose to visit. This vast, pastoral paradise, which you can roam around on foot, climbing mountains or on horseback. A land only spoiled by the regular appearance of a zombified enemy crawling up out of the ground to ruin your reverie.

In a way, as much as I enjoyed having No Man’s Sky as my lockdown game of 2020, I wish I’d been braver and tried Zelda back then. I’d have rather spent time inside Miyamoto’s miniature garden, now lovingly tended by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and Eiji Aonuma. And I think I’m going to have to try and get this finished as quickly as possible so that I’m ready to continue my journey in Tears of the Kingdom.

Two weeks ago, Netflix confirmed it was taking a rare opportunity to livestream Love Is Blind's season 4 reunion. However, when the time came, what was an exciting prospect became a source of frustration as technical difficulties led to canceling the reality dating show's real-time viewing.  

At first, subscribers were told there would only a few minutes of delay, but Netflix finally pulled the plug after over an hour. The streaming service soon tweeted an apology: "To everyone who stayed up late, woke up early, gave up their Sunday afternoon… we are incredibly sorry that the Love Is Blind Live Reunion did not turn out as we had planned. We're filming it now and we'll have it on Netflix as soon as humanly possible. Again, thank you and sorry."

The show is incredibly popular, with Nieman reporting it was 2022's eighth most streamed original show. The reunion, hosted by real-life couple Nick and Vanessa Lachey, checks back in with Love Is Blind contestants months after filming has finished. If you're not familiar with it's premise, the show follows 30 men and women who date each other over 10 days from inside pods that prevent them from seeing each other. The idea: Avoid letting any physical aspects weigh in on how they feel. All in all, it made sense for Netflix to choose Love Is Blind for a livestream but the streaming service just couldn't hold up the technical end of the bargain.

Frustrated users responded with calls for Netflix to lower its subscription prices and to resume shipping DVDs as it was more their "speed." Other brands got in on the fun — if you can call it that — with Paramount+ tweeting that it was "pouring one out" for Netflix's social team and Tile asking if Netflix lost the remote and offering to send a tracker. 

Early in the morning, Netflix tweeted an update alongside a photo of the Love Is Blind cast with a "promise" that the reunion will be available to stream today at 3PM ET. 

This was only Netflix's second attempt at live-streaming, with Chris Rock's comedy special Selective Outrage airing live in March. Netflix also owns the rights to stream the Screen Actor Guild Awards live on its platform in 2024. We'll have to wait and see how the company's next attempt goes. 

Accused of leaking classified documents, Jack Teixeira was charged after a quick investigation focused on his digital trail. The New York Times' investigative journalism team identified Teixeira by finding an Instagram account mentioned in his Steam profile. That, in turn, showed photos of the granite kitchen countertop and floor tiles visible in the leaks. The suspect hasn't yet entered a plea and will face a hearing on April 19th. The charges against him carry a maximum combined sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

Teixeira allegedly began sharing the documents on a Minecraft-oriented Discord server in late 2022. He supposedly didn't intend to act as a whistleblower, but the content eventually spread to other Discord servers as well as 4chan and Telegram.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories you might have missed

Elon Musk has created his own artificial intelligence company

Parler's new owner immediately took the social network offline

Remembering Virginia Norwood, the ‘mother’ of NASA’s Landsat program

Hitting the Books: Why nobody knows Hiram Maxim, inventor of the incandescent lightbulb

Instagram redesigns the Reels editor to make it easier to use

Montana is about to become the first state to ban TikTok

The state passed a bill that requires app stores to block the service.

Montana is to become the first state to ban TikTok. The state’s legislature passed a bill requiring app stores to block the app in the state. The bill passed 54 to 43 and will now head to Republican Governor Greg Gianforte, who previously banned the app from state-owned devices. The ban is slated to go into effect in 2024, though it will likely face legal challenges well before then. Like federal lawmakers, the Montana bill claims TikTok’s ties to ByteDance puts US users' personal data at risk because the company could be compelled to turn over information to the Chinese government.

Continue reading.

Is Apple prepping a 15-inch MacBook Air?

It's expected to feature an M2 chip.

According to Bloomberg, Apple recently began testing a 15-inch laptop to ensure its compatibility with third-party App Store apps, something the company does in the lead-up to the release of a new device. Developer logs reportedly show a machine with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU, along with 8GB of RAM. Those specs suggest the 15-inch MacBook Air, referred to as Mac 15.3 in the logs, will ship with an M2 chipset, not Apple’s next-generation chip.

Continue reading.

‘Horizon Burning Shores’ launch trailer teases the franchise’s biggest boss fight

The DLC arrives next week.

Sony

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is a DLC chapter that continues Aloy’s story. Ahead of its launch, a new trailer offers a fresh look at the Burning Shores, a volcanic archipelago once home to Los Angeles. We also get a closer look at a Metal Devil boss fight – which looks huge. In fact, that battle is one reason Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores won’t be available on PlayStation 4, even though you can play the original game on Sony’s last generation console. Game Director Mathijs de Jonge said: “The cityscape ruins of LA and its surroundings are highly detailed and require a lot of processing power as well as fast streaming technology to run properly.”

Continue reading.

German artist refuses award after his AI image wins photography prize

The artist said: 'AI is not photography.'

Boris Eldagsen

An AI-generated photo called The Electrician by Boris Eldagsen took first prize in the Creative category at the recent World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards — despite not being taken by a camera. Eldagsen subsequently refused the award, saying "AI is not photography. I applied to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not." Eldagsen explained he used his experience as a photographer to create the prize-winning image, acting as a director of the process with the AI generators as "co-creators." Although photography inspired the work, he said the point of the submission is it’s not photography.

Continue reading.

Sega is buying Rovio, the Finnish video-game company best known for creating Angry Birds, in a €706 million (~$776 million) deal. Though a slew of existing Sega games are available on iOS and Android, like Sonic the Hedgehog, the company is looking to "accelerate its expansion" into mobile gaming.   

Buying Rovio will give Sega access to Beacon, its "high-level experience" platform designed to improve and simplify game design, monetization and maintenance. Basically, its the accelerator Sega is looking for to bring it's current and future titles into the big leagues of mobile gaming. "I feel blessed to be able to announce such a transaction with Rovio, a company that owns Angry Birds, which is loved across the world, and home to many skilled employees that support the company’s industry leading mobile game development and operating capabilities," Haruki Satomi, President and CEO of Sega Sammy, said in a statement. 

Angry Birds truly was the definition of a "phenomenon." There was a time in the early 2010s when if you asked someone if they were playing Angry Birds, almost everyone said yes. In early 2014, Rovio said the Angry Birds series had surpassed two billion downloads, with 200 million playing the games each month.

Its popularity has certainly dipped in the years since, but that's not to say Angry Birds disappeared from the world's consciousness (Rovio has over five billion downloads). A 2015 movie inspired by the game grossed just under $347 million worldwide, though 2019's 'The Angry Birds Movie 2' dipped to $147.8 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Just last year, Angry Birds returned to the App Store for 99 cents as Rovio Classics: Angry Birds.

Rovio has yet to produce anything close to the success of Angry Birds but, with the deal expected to close "during the third quarter of 2023," it'll be interesting to see what comes next.

There's some controversy in the photography world as an AI-generated image won a major prize at a prestigious competition, PetaPixel has reported. An piece called The Electrician by Boris Eldagsen took first prize in the Creative category at the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards — despite not being taken by a camera. Eldagsen subsequently refused the award, saying "AI is not photography. I applied... to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not."

Eldagsen's image is part of a series called PSEUDOMNESIA: Fake Memories, designed to evoke a photographic style of the 1940s. However, they are in reality "fake memories of a past, that never existed, that no one photographed. These images were imagined by language and re-edited more between 20 to 40 times through AI image generators, combining ‘inpainting’, ‘outpainting’, and ‘prompt whispering’ techniques."

In a blog, Eldagsen explained that he used his experience as a photographer to create the prize-winning image, acting as a director of the process with the AI generators as "co-creators." Although the work is inspired by photography, he said that the point of the submission is that it is not photography. "Participating in open calls, I want to speed up the process of the Award organizers to become aware of this difference and create separate competitions for AI-generated images," he said.

Eldagsen subsequently declined the prize. “Thank you for selecting my image and making this a historic moment, as it is the first AI-generated image to win in a prestigious international photography competition,” he wrote. “How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it? AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.”

Shortly thereafter, the photo was stripped from the show and competition website and organizers have yet to comment on the matter. Edalgsen actually traveled to London to attend the ceremony and even got up on stage (uninvited) to read a statement in person. 

It's not clear if the organizers knew the work was AI-generated or not (Eldagsen said he told them it was). In any case, rather than shrinking from the situation, they should be embracing it. AI-generated art has entered the culture in a huge way over the past year, with AI winning both photo and art competitions over the past few months. Eldagsen's piece is bound to create conversations about how to handle it, particularly when it encroaches into traditional mediums. 

When Rode began offering gaming-specific audio equipment at the end of last year, two of the three products the company announced, the XDM-100 and XCM-50, repurposed existing designs. Its newest Rode X device, the Streamer X, offers something different. It combines an audio interface with an external capture card.

You can connect XLR and line-level microphones and headsets to the Streamer X, with a built-in Rode Revolution preamp offering all the power you need. At the same time, the device can capture and stream footage at 4K and 30 frames per second or 2K at 60 frames per second. It also offers video passthrough at up to 4K and 60 frames per second or 2K and 120 frames per second.

The front of the console features a set of four customizable buttons you can set up to trigger specific sounds and actions on your computer. A pair of USB-C connections allow you to connect the Streamer X to two separate PCs at the same time. Out of the box, the device is fully compatible with Rode’s suite of software tools, including Unify, Rode Central and Rode Connect.

Rode

Separately, Rode also announced the Rodecaster Duo, a new audio interface that brings together all of the features found in the company’s Rodecaster Pro II but puts them into a more compact package. That means it should be able to drive even the most power-hungry mics without the need for an in-line signal booster, and offer Bluetooth connectivity for audio monitoring. Rode did not announce pricing details for the Streamer X and Rodecaster Duo, but said both devices would arrive in the coming weeks. Engadget has reached out to the company for more information, and we’ll update this article when we hear back from it.

Facing renewed competition from Microsoft and OpenAI, Google is reportedly “racing” to build an “all-new” AI-powered search engine. According to The New York Times, the company is in the early stages of creating a search service that will attempt to anticipate what you want from it in hopes of offering “a far more personalized experience.” The project has “no clear timetable.” However, knowing that Google is also developing a suite of new AI features for its existing search engine under the codename “Magi.”

Among the features Google is developing is a chatbot that can answer software engineering questions and generate code snippets. The company has also experimented with a feature that would allow people to search for music through a chatbot conversation. According to The Times, the company has assigned more than 160 employees to the redesign.

Other new additions “in various stages of development” include a Chrome feature dubbed "Searchalong." It would allow a chatbot to scan the webpage you’re reading to offer contextual information. For example, if you were looking for a place to stay on Airbnb, you could ask the chatbot to tell you what to see and do near your planned accommodations. “GIFI” and “Tivoli Tutor,” another pair of experimental features, would allow users to prompt Google Image Search to generate images and converse with a chatbot to learn a new language. It’s worth noting many of these are features that Google has either demoed in the past or exist on other platforms like Duolingo. For instance, image generation is already available in Slides.

Google reportedly plans to announce Magi next month before introducing additional new features sometime in the fall. That timing suggests the project will make an appearance at I/O 2023. The company plans to offer Magi’s features to one million people in the US before expanding availability to 30 million users by the end of the year.

“We’ve been bringing AI to Google Search for years to not only dramatically improve the quality of our results, but also introduce entirely new ways to search, such as Lens and multisearch,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget when asked about the report. “We’ve done so in a responsible and helpful way that maintains the high bar we set for delivering quality information. Not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited about bringing new AI-powered features to Search, and will share more details soon.”

Underscoring the importance of Magi for Google, Samsung reportedly told the company last month it was considering making Bing the default search on its devices. The declaration reportedly sent Google into a “panic.” The company’s search agreement with Samsung is worth approximately $3 billion annually. This year, its lucrative search agreement with Apple, the subject of frequent antitrust scrutiny, is also up for renewal.

One of the most notorious ransomware gangs appears to have recently begun targeting Mac computers for the first time. In a series of tweets spotted by 9to5Mac, a group of security researchers known as the MalwareHunterTeam said on Saturday they recently found evidence of a Lockbit ransomware build designed to compromise macOS devices. As far as the group is aware, Saturday’s announcement marks the first public notice that Lockbit’s ransomware could be used against Apple computers, though it appears the gang has offered that capability since last fall.

“I think this is the first time one of the major ransomware players has taken aim at Apple’s OS,” security analyst Brett Callow said, pointing to the significance of the disclosure. As 9to5Mac notes, the LockBit gang has historically focused on Windows, Linux and virtual host machines. The reason being those operating systems are overwhelmingly used by the businesses the group’s partners target. For those who don’t know, the Lockbit gang runs what’s known as a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation. The group doesn’t directly involve itself in the business of extracting ransoms from businesses. What it does do is build and maintain the malware affiliates can pay to use against an organization. According to an indictment the US Department of Justice unsealed last fall, LockBit is “one of the most active and destructive ransomware variants in the world." As of late 2022, the software has infected the computer systems of at least 1,000 victims, including a Holiday Inn hotel in Turkey. It’s believed the gang’s partners have claimed tens of millions of dollars from victims.

One detail that's often omitted from modern founders myths is whether or not said scion of capitalist success actually invented the thing they're famous for inventing. Just like Elon Musk didn't invent electric vehicles so much as be the first to successfully market them to the American public, Thomas Edison's contributions to the advent of electrified lighting too might be overstated. In the excerpt below from his latest book, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans, Dr. Bill Hammack, YouTube's "The Engineer Guy," recounts the tale of Hiram Maxim, an irrepressible engineer and inventor whose novel filament production method would have made him a household name — had Edison not reportedly made "a clean steal" of his revolutionary technology.   

Sourcebooks Inc

Excerpted from The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans by Bill Hammack, PhD. © 2023 by Bill Hammack, PhD. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.

In November 1880, the reading room of the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company, located in the basement of one of the first skyscrapers, glowed with the light of a four-bulb chandelier and six bulbs in fixtures spaced along the walls. An observer characterized this electric light as “very much like that of a first-class oil lamp, steadier than gas, and of a yellow, clear pleasant quality” — nothing like the “ghastly blue” of a “flickering” arc light, nor was there the odor of burning gas; instead, the room’s atmosphere “remain[ed] perfectly cool and sweet.” His only complaint was that the bulbs flickered slightly with every stroke of the engine that powered the generator. This first commercial installation, a spectacular achievement, featured no bulbs manufactured by Thomas Edison, although he had proudly announced his invention of the light bulb only a few months earlier to great press attention. The bulbs at the Mercantile Company were those of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, a company driven forward by their irrepressible and energetic engineer, Hiram Maxim. Edison called Maxim’s bulb “a clean steal” of his lamp. Yet Maxim had seventeen patents on incandescent lamps, and his company controlled the patents of several other inventors, also contemporary to Edison. Maxim thought of himself as the inventor of the commercial light bulb. “Every time I put up a light,” he complained, “a crowd would gather, everyone asking, ‘Is it Edison’s?’” This so irritated Maxim, who noted that Edison at the time “had never made a lamp,” that he considering killing “on the spot” the next person to ask him “Is it Edison’s?”

That the first commercialized light bulbs were not Edison’s surprises because we love stories of sole inventors whose spark of inspiration revolutionized the world. They give us narratives that are neat, tidy, and digestible but incomplete. These stories hide the engineering method; they bury the creativity of engineers, smooth over struggles, and sanitize choices that reflect cultural norms. Perhaps no story persists more than Edison and his light bulb, yet Edison was the tail end of a long list of light bulb innovators in a process of invention similar to that of the steam turbine in the next century.

In the forty years before Edison’s first successful prototype, at least twenty people presented, patented, and demonstrated incandescent lamps—using electricity to heat a filament until it glowed. The first recorded attempt was in 1838 (almost a decade before Edison’s birth) by a Belgian inventor whose bulb used a strip of carbon as a filament. A fair assessment of history would call these men inventors of the light bulb comparable to Edison, especially in a world where Edison, the so-called inventor of the incandescent light bulb, was forty years late to the idea of incandescent lighting. But unlike with Edison, we don’t remember the names of these men, because most of their bulbs burned for only a few seconds. They had the necessary but thankless job of creating links in a chain of incremental advances that didn’t yet produce an applicable or reproducible solution to the problem of darkness, which so far could only be dispelled with fire, until Edison created one of the links that did, transforming from method into narrative. Although Edison and his bulb end that length of the chain of innovators, his link was no more an exercise or example of the engineering method than those that came before; it only overcame a circumstantial threshold of usefulness.

In 1878, Edison focused the energy of his staff at the bustling Menlo Park Research Laboratory on finding a long-lasting filament for the incandescent light bulb. The staff worked to the rhythms of Edison, “the central originating and guiding mind and personality,” as one worker noted, describing work there as “a strenuous but joyful life for all physically, mentally, and emotionally.” Edison set the tone with long work hours into the night. He often napped on the workbenches in Menlo Park and ate sparingly in increments of small snacks he thought were better for digestion, although for his workers, he had brought in, often at midnight, hamper baskets loaded with hot dinners of meat, vegetables, dessert, and coffee. But when Edison stood, stretched, hitched up his waistband, and sauntered away, all knew that dinner was over and work should resume.

In the late 1870s, Edison and his staff produced bulbs that looked much like a modern bulb: a glass envelope fastened to a wooden base covered with copper strips, and, at its center, a thin, long, delicate spiral of platinum. Yet these bulbs failed. Some yielded light as bright as a small bundle of today’s Christmas lights for a few hours, but most burned out quickly. As Edison learned, the temperature for the incandescence of platinum wire was near that of its melting point—any fluctuations in the current and the platinum would melt. Edison and his team tested an astonishing array of materials, by some count sixteen hundred types. They tested metals like platinum, iridium, ruthenium, chromium, aluminum, tungsten, molybdenum, palladium, manganese, and titanium; elements that sometimes behaved like metals, including silicon and boron; then a grab bag of materials—cork, wax, celluloid, and the hair from his employees’ beards. After these, his team moved to slivers of wood, broom corn, and paper. Tissue paper covered with lampblack and tar and rolled into a rod glowed astonishingly well and for a good amount of time. Edison refined this idea by “carbonizing” cotton thread, heating it without oxygen until the length of thread was blackened throughout. From this thread, he formed a long filament. On October 21, 1879, a bulb with a filament of this thread, with all the air removed from the glass enclosure, burned for more than half a day. They were approaching the beginning of the commercial light bulb.

Seven months after that bit of carbonized thread showed promise, they tried a piece of bamboo: a six-inch strip burned for three hours and twenty-four minutes at seventy-one candlepower (about the brightness of a standard sixty-watt bulb today). “The best lamp ever yet made,” an Edison associate noted, “here from vegetable Carbon.” From there, Edison’s team tested two hundred species of bamboo until they found a variety that was the best for manufacturing carbon filaments, grown near Yawata, Japan, where Edison is still celebrated with a street named “Edison-dori,” a bust of Edison in the town center, and, near a shrine, a large monument dedicated to Edison. With his specialized bamboo supply and method of manufacturing in place, Edison was ready to light the world, but Hiram Maxim beat him out of the gate.

Maxim’s bulbs, installed at the Equitable Life Building, out-classed Edison’s. “They have a rich golden tint, resembling that of a wax taper,” said one reporter. Another noted that Maxim “has invented a lamp which surpasses, I believe, even Edison’s dreams.” When comparing the lamps, reporters noted that Edison’s had lower brightness than Maxim's, or, when of the same intensity as Maxim’s, they burned out in only a few hours. By Maxim’s own estimate, the filaments in his bulbs could last forty days. The dimness and shorter life of Edison’s bulbs were the same thing: Edison’s bulbs could not tolerate as much current as Maxim’s, so if run at the same current, Edison’s bulbs would burn out quickly, and to make them last longer, Edison’s were run at a lower current and thus were dimmer.

That Maxim could achieve this was unbelievable to Edison’s staff—an outraged member of the Menlo Park staff ranted that it must be apparent to “any sane person that” Maxim’s bulb must be “but a copy” of Edison’s. Surely, thought Edison’s employees, only a well-oiled machine like that of Menlo Park could produce a light bulb. Inside Menlo Park, glassblowers, machinists, engineers, chemists, and physicists churned out inventions like appliances on an assembly line, while Maxim’s ham-handed U.S. Electric Lighting Company struggled to find enough resources to survive; employees thought it likely to shut at any minute, and even its own president described it as “helpless.” Their technical expertise was so low that they could not figure out, as one employee later noted, what “size wire would carry a certain number of lamps without overheating,” adding that “a number of mysterious fires about this time were probably the fruits of our ignorance.” Compared with Edison’s factory-line Menlo Park model, Maxim’s method of invention seemed scattershot.

Maxim was the classic American tinkerer, once describing himself as a “chronic inventor.” Although self-taught—one biographer describes him as “semiliterate”—over his lifetime, he invented an astonishing array of tools and toys. Maxim developed methods to separate metals from their ores, instruments to measure wind velocities, vacuum cleaners, novelty items that produced “illusionary effects”—a rotating sphere with concave paraboloidal floor, mirrors, and a bicycle track, presumably to create the illusion of riding a bike long distances—gear to prevent the rolling of ships, riveting machines, feed water check valves, steam generators, wheels for railroads and tramways, an inhaler to treat bronchitis, boot and shoe heel protectors, hair curling irons, a method for demagnetizing watches, a type of pneumatic tire, a coffee substitute, a method for extinguishing fires in theaters, and most surprising of all, new advertising methods—a rotating sign that works “even in very light airs.” And near the end of his life, he invented the world’s first successful machine gun.

Maxim’s contribution to the light bulb was to improve the manufacture of filaments. Filaments, whether of bamboo or cardboard, as in Maxim’s case, were converted to carbon by heating at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen until the cellulose in the material broke down, leaving a hard carbon skeleton, but uneven carbonization caused thinner sections to become much hotter when lit with an electrical current and burn out more quickly. Maxim’s insight was to place a carbonized filament into a hydrocarbon atmosphere, then pass through it an electrical current that heated the filament to a bright red. The thinner and hotter parts of the filament would break down the vaporous hydrocarbon surrounding them and deposit pure carbon on the filament, building up layers of carbon on the thinner parts and resulting in a filament of uniform thickness and greater life span. As Maxim gloated, “it is absolutely impossible by mechanical means to make a carbon filament that is of uniform resistance” without his patented method, adding that Edison “had to use my process or give up the job.”

Maxim’s attitude was prompted by the rivalry that burned between the many engineers competing in a world eager for the magic of electrical lighting, but it also shows us the problem with crediting any individual with the complete “invention” of any technology. We tend to tell the stories of inventors who, through their unique intellect and drive, produce an equally unique marvel at the climax of a story with a beginning, middle, and end. That is often how this book has told it, out of deference to individual humans’ need to relate to the stories of other individual humans. But the engineering method is uninterested in this “great men” historical framework. It cares only about the accumulated knowledge, heuristics, rules of thumb, intuition, and anything else that drives problems in the direction of solutions as fast as possible, the sum of which, even for a single solution, is beyond unthinkable for a lone person to create themselves. This web of information is so vast, incomprehensibly vast, so we make it comprehensible and moving by telling the stories of individual inventors, even if this distorts the unknowable true web of invention.

Maxim is likely unrecognized as an inventor today because he lacked Edison’s agile self-promotion and because, in a sense, Edison “won” and thus told the story of the light bulb’s invention. But did Edison “invent” a light bulb when his company produced a brilliantly glowing but short-lived electric light? Perhaps. When we think of an invented technology, we typically imply technology that not only exists but is reproducible in a way that can fulfill the needs of those whose problem it solves. That is, it can be manufactured or mass-produced. A handful of working light bulbs in the late 1800s is a marvel, but it doesn’t light the world. In this sense, the invention of the light bulb was a decades-long process of incremental changes to create a filament that can be manufactured reliably and extended beyond Edison and Maxim alone. To tell only a “great man” story hides the contributions of others who were essential to a technology’s development. We can see that in the evolution of the manufacturing techniques of Maxim’s light bulbs: he had on staff an artistic draftsman turned engineer whose contributions to reliable manufacturing have long been overlooked.