Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909

http://recombu.com/news/nikola-tesla-predicted-mobile-phones-in-1909_M11683.html

by vpdn • 16 years ago

81 40 16 years ago

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

Mobiles yes, but Tesla clearly seems to think (at least according to this article) that there will be no 'intermediaries', that the transmissions are 'station-to-station' (or peer-to-peer as we'd say nowadays) instead of the way the cell phone network actually works, with calls using fixed base stations plugged in to the trunk lines.

Station-to-station would indeed require transmission without loss, and power loss for a transmitter is roughly equivalent to the cube of the distance for an omni-directional antenna.

That doesn't diminish the power of this vision, but even Tesla had to abide by the laws of physics.

One 'Nathan B. Stubblefield' apparently holds a 1908 patent on a wireless telephone: http://www.google.com/patents?q=887357

10ren• 16 years ago

The article talks about wireless power transmission, which relates to your point. I think as a mathematically capable physicist, he would be well aware of the inverse cube law (volume of a sphere with distance). I wonder what he was thinking? Perhaps focussed radio, like a laser (raser? It'd still be a laser, just a non-visible frequency)

Also he didn't think of packet radio. But though extremely helpful, I'm not sure that it's absolutely necessary.

dionysiac• 16 years ago

Masers (microwaves) were actually developed before lasers were, and do work pretty well for power transmission (as these things go - still quite a loss). You have the problem of directionality and tracking, though.

westbywest• 16 years ago

Although this article is understandably scant on details, I gather from the blurb "millions of such instruments from a single station," that Tesla did anticipate some sort of transmission stations to relay the traffic of the wireless handsets.

Still, a big difference between this forecast and the present state of mobile wireless is that Tesla probably expected the subscribers' handset to draw power from the microwave transmissions themselves, rather than from batteries.

jcromartie• 16 years ago

Not to mention a global wireless Internet.

bitwize• 16 years ago

"In the same way any kind of picture, drawing, or print can be transferred from one place to another. It will be possible to operate millions of such instruments from a single station."

Apparently he also predicted botnets...

danh3• 16 years ago

I find this interesting, but not that impressive.

When I was about 5, I predicted the iPhone.

Well not exactly the iPhone, but I made a lot of drawings of a device with phone, computer with touchscreen, music player, etc., in roughly the iPhone form factor. Since I am very old, mobile phones at the time were back-breakingly huge, and I had not ever seen a touchscreen.

My "design" was a bit different, though. I though it would look cool to carry the device like a giant Dick Tracy-ish watch. And it needed a very small cassette-tape memory for the computer (that was the only kind I had seen).

I also made a lot of drawings of cars with jet motors. That particular vision has not worked out very well. Yet.

Retric• 16 years ago

For that 5 year old kid: http://www.madv8bike.com/id10.html ;-)

Thrust =2,450 lbs aprox 3,800 horsepower + after burner another 1200 horsepower

danh3• 16 years ago

Oh yes. That must be the future.

Or perhaps this, ever so slightly more practical, one: http://www.ronpatrickstuff.com

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

Man that looks both scary and a lot of fun at the same time.

WorkerBee• 16 years ago

Since I am very old, mobile phones at the time were back-breakingly huge

There were mobile phones when you were young. You are not old.

danh3• 16 years ago

Turns out mobile phones are really old (for some value of mobile):

"In 1910 Lars Magnus Ericsson installed a telephone in his car, although this was not a radio telephone. While travelling across the country, he would stop at a place where telephone lines were accessible and using a pair of long electric wires he could connect to the national telephone network."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

jarin2• 16 years ago

Today I am officially predicting a cure for cancer, personal spaceships, a grand unified theory, and a female president. I am a genius.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

Three out of four ain't bad...

rimantas• 16 years ago

Cool, future is already here, but unevenly distributed. We have already got one of four over there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalia_Grybauskait%C4%97

eru• 16 years ago

Germany doesn't have a female president, yet. But the Chancellor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel) has more power anyway.

ThomPete• 16 years ago

GUT is unlikely IMHO

amix3• 16 years ago

He didn't only predict it, he invented it and built it. Nikola Tesla is the co-inventor of radio, remote control and was a pioneer for wirelessly transfer of both data and electricity!

Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_control#History or 300 of his other inventions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_patents

jeffreyg• 16 years ago

more insightful then Heinrich Hertz:

When asked what comes after his discovery that Maxwell's radio waves exist, he replied 'Nothing, I guess'.

http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/HERTZ_BIO.html

ErrantX2• 16 years ago

Tesla probably needs accolade for his achievements (solution of all the AC transmission "problems" in one fell swoop etc.) more than for his predictions (every genius tends to make pretty accurate projections IMO).

He's generally forgotten (by the public) compared to Edison when his contribution was probably greater.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

Teslas biggest 'problem' is that the kooks have declared him to be their patron saint and are going all overboard in attributing all kinds of nonsense to him.

Tesla didn't help matters with the way he conducted (pun definitely not intended) himself and some of the experiments he did.

But I'll bet there isn't a scientist that wouldn't give up a significant amount of money to get their hands on that classified notebook just in case there is some hidden gem in there.

http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html

ErrantX2• 16 years ago

Well, yeh true. But at the time the main reason was he tore up the Westinghouse contract and died in relative obscurity/depression. Whereas Edison was a much more public figure.

In the later years after both their deaths many people (questioned) believed Edison had pioneered AC current (and as a result was responsible for the consumer electricity market) - none had really heard of Westinghouse/Tesla.

docgnome• 16 years ago

People forgot Tesla because he A) wasn't American and B) wasn't into electrocuting puppies, kittens and elephants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents#Edison.27s_publ...

emarcotte2• 16 years ago

Not sure why this is novel... mobile comunication has been possible for many years, cell phones didn't invent it. Walkie talkies, etc all existed long before cellular phones. In fact, I would argue walkie talkies are closer to what he was talking about since it didn't involve going to some cell tower. The two devices just communicate together.

jonknee• 16 years ago

Probably because this was written at the dawn of wireless communications--shortly after the invention of radio.

emarcotte2• 16 years ago

Sure, his idea is definitely interesting considering the time, but the article is not. Like I say, he didn't just predict mobile phones, he predicted mobile communication which has been possible much longer than the phone version.

gmurphy• 16 years ago

It feels just a little more novel when you consider just how late into last century sci-fi stories were getting written with little or no notion of universal mobile communication.

(Some excuses may be made on the grounds of story flow and building a comprehensible universe, but that's weak sci-fi).

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

It's novel because unlike us, Tesla was a product of a time when telegraph, telephone, radio and distributed electricity were still new. It's easy - even obvious - to note in retrospect how a disruptive technology or cluster of technologies plays out, in part because we are ourselves a product of the environment in which we grew up and formed our ideas about how things work.

By contrast, it's visionary to be able to understand the full implications of a new technology that disrupts the environment in which we formed our ideas. In Tesla's case, not only did he understand the implications of that technology, but he actually invented much of the technology himself.

It would be no less remarkable if Gutenberg invented the printing press and then used it to print tracts explaining how his press was going to undermine the Catholic Church's monopoly gatekeeper status and launch an explosion in the rate and density of accumulated human knowledge.

ivanzhao• 16 years ago

"The only new thing in the world is the history you don't know"

fhars• 16 years ago

Everybody was thinking about wireless telephony at the time:

http://books.google.com/books?as_q=wireless+telephony&nu...

amix3• 16 years ago

Nikola Tesla isn't only predicting wireless communication (which he calls a primitive usage of wireless technology), but wireless transfer of electricity - - one of his unfinished projects and something that we still don't have today. Read this passage once more:

"The attention of the world has been caught and held by the wireless telegraph, and yet this is a very primitive use of the the art. So far only electric waves have been used, which have been quickly damped out in their passage through the air. It is possible, however, to transmit electric currents of enormous power for thousands of miles without demising their energy."

Too bad he got screwed by Edison & company. I think the world would have looked a lot more different if Tesla had finished his work on wireless transfer of electricity.

Nikola Tesla is viewed as one of the co-inventors and pioneers of radio and this article clearly shows his vision and how far ahead he was of his time ( check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio ).

madmaze2• 16 years ago

this is why i honor tesla with a framed print of him, sitting in his lab, watching over my bed.

jarin2• 16 years ago

We do have wireless transfer of electricity, take a look at your electric toothbrush or Palm Pre charging puck.

amix3• 16 years ago

We don't have it on Tesla's scale. He wanted to transfer wirelessly enormous amounts of electricity and communication on a global scale. His idea resolved using Earth as part of a powerful type-two oscillator... Basically, his solution would have enabled a cheap and global distribution of electricity and communication.

"Using a global array of these magnifying transmitters, it was Tesla's plan to establish what he called the "World System", providing multi-channel global broadcasting, an array of secure wireless telecommunications services, and a long range aid to navigation, including means for the precise synchronization of clocks. In a more highly developed state he envisioned the World System would expand to include the wireless industrial transmission of electric power."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_tower - his unfinished project intended for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony, broadcasting, and to demonstrate the transmission of power without interconnecting wires.

I don't really think we can imagine what world Tesla saw or what solution he had in mind, but it's clear for us now that Tesla was correct in many of his assumptions regarding the Wardenclyffe tower, e.g.:

"Despite the ridicule he has been subjected to by scientists for many years, many of Tesla's ideas are being demonstrated to be essentially correct. For example he correctly predicted the existence of the ionosphere and electrical resonance of the Earth-atmosphere system. Resonance of the earth-ionosphere cavity with a fundamental frequency in the vicinity of 7.3 Hz was demonstrated in the 1950s as the Schumann resonance[37]. The latter phenomenon was named after Schumann, for although Tesla had detected a resonance of the Earth-atmosphere system, he was not taken seriously in his time.[38] Furthermore, Tesla appears to have excited a different terrestrial resonance mode with a fundamental frequency of 11.78 Hz."

madmaze2• 16 years ago

Tesla was a dreamer and an inventor. This is a rarely successful combination, most dreamers live too much in their dreams and fantasies to actually be a productive inventor, and inventors are too grounded by reality to really dream up something extremely special. But there are a few, like tesla or davinci that managed to take their dreams and put them on paper and try then try to make it reality

doki_pen• 16 years ago

I see some great predictions, but I bet he didn't predict goatse.

pavel_lishin• 16 years ago

His papers were confiscated.

smallhands• 16 years ago

We could have been ave living in a different world now have Tesla worked with Steve Job during his life time.

Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909

Related Stories