Another one for the lexicon: deerstalker

 

A deerstalker is a belief which is:

1. Held by the general public;
2. Discounted by the moderately well-informed;
3. Known to be true by experts.

The name comes from the hunting cap worn by Sherlock Holmes in the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.

While it is true that Sherlock Holmes, a generally well-dressed upper-class English gentleman, would not go about the streets of London wearing a deerstalker any more than an American outdoorsman would wear his Elmer Fudd hunting cap to a fine restaurant, he would wear one when appropriate, such as when out in the country and at least once on what we would call a stakeout in London. He was routinely depicted as wearing a deerstalker in the original illustrations, and at least once, Doyle included a description of the hat in the stories. He did not use the specific term but that was the type of apparel he was clearly describing.

What brought this to mind was the deep dive I've been doing into the technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly the impact of Thomas Alva Edison.

While the popular conception is that Edison was the greatest inventor of his time, it has become fashionable to be dismissive of this view. Bring up Edison's huge and hugely influential list of patents, and you will probably have someone inform you that he actually invented very little—if anything. He was just an administrator who took credit for the work of other researchers, much in the way that Walt Disney's signature used to appear on every piece of art involving characters owned by the studio.

I was always a bit skeptical of the "Edison didn't really do anything" school of thought—after all, he was only able to put together a team because of early inventions like the quadruplex telegraph—but it wasn't until I did some serious reading that I realized how completely wrong this take was.

Because of the way Edison worked, and because of the enormous scrutiny he was under both during his life and posthumously, we have a remarkably detailed and accurate picture of the process behind all of his patents and behind those innovations—like his improvements on X-ray equipment—that he refused to patent to make them more widely available. We can go from the initial sketches in his notebooks, follow along through the detailed records of each iteration and refinement of an idea, and read the contemporary accounts and the memoirs of the researchers who were working alongside him.

With very few exceptions, Edison had the original idea, set up the research project to develop it, and supervised—and frequently personally conducted—the experiments needed for each iteration. With the caveat that, given the fever pitch of research at the time, there were almost always so many brilliant researchers pursuing any promising notion that it was generally impossible to say exactly who truly invented what, Edison's body of work is very probably unequaled. And even that is dwarfed by the impact his model for organized, large-scale research has had. 

1. Edison was the greatest inventor of the 19th Century

2. Edison was just an administrator and promoter

3. Edison was the greatest inventor of the 19th Century