Happy birthday, Nikola Tesla: thanks for the electricity

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/10/tesla-electricity-inventor-birthday-anniversary

by ftse • 17 years ago

16 7 17 years ago

guardian.co.uk

dejan3• 17 years ago

Jesus! The comments are terrible! They made Tesla as if he was crazy, stupid, mad...

Most of them heard about him from the movies. I guess that is what you get when you are not looking into making the world's biggest companies, but into contributing the society. No one will hear about you.

In Tesla's museum in Belgrade, his notes are absolutely stunning. He invented the radio (later development leading to TV), remote control (tele-commanding a boat model), generator and polyphase AC... It is interesting to note the work that is leading towards the revolution Einstein is known for.. Tesla was a mean hundreds of years before his own time, and while moving towards the final "theory of relativity", his work suddenly stops, and is being scratched off. He never was an inventor of weapons, and it is claimed that he knew where such invention could lead. After all, what good did Einstein do? Millions killed, and devastating nuclear waste from energy extractions.

The only war-kind of invention was the EM shield that could protect a whole country from attacks, and he was proposing it to the Serbian king in Belgrade.

Basically he is behind everything we geeks care about today. Yet, he is considered "American"??? Until his last day he was loyal to the king, the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians later to be Yugoslavia. He was not born in Austro-Hungaria, as the region was invaded by them at the time after the lengthy wars, later to evolve in the WWI. He was a Serbo-Croatian.

Americans used him, stole all of his patents and made an image of him in public as a crazy man. Not a monument or anything until much later at Niagara through the efforts of the Yugoslavian immigrants in the US.

I want to high school in the US (senior year). Not one single person knew who he was, and everyone thinks Edison invented "electricity." Not much to complain actually, they also don't know who Alessandro Volta is, speaking of US education.

Thank God we've all heard of P Diddy.

dchest• 17 years ago

I agree with many points of your comment. However, here are a few excerpts from the Wikipedia article on Tesla:

On weapons:

At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing his work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma, and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents.[102] One document stated that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]".

On health:

Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder,[93] and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three.

dejan3• 17 years ago

I am aware of this story. However, if you were to take a look into what he was writing about (as mentioned in some of the left notes), you'd see such claims are just plain silly. If he were to build a weapon, the history would have taken a different shape.

The health, yes that is a fact, he was "weird", but show me a great mind that wasn't - Mozart, Beethoven? However, he didn't hurt anybody, unlike Edison, who invented the electric chair "just for fun."

Thus, I wouldn't trust anything US and War departments says. They knew he was capable of a lot of stuff, so they normally seized everything.

Thus, you have to understand that such claims that he was working on some kind of "weapon" were coming only from the government of the US. If I were Tesla, I would have been going crazy myself - everything stolen, no credit, no name, no money, no support and publicity of crazy scientist - this was of course a great plot to demoralize and ruin credibility of Tesla and takeover his patents, since no one would support or fund "a crazy guy". Edison was taking the credit for his work for years before.

You know the US govt credibility? The same guys who said that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, that socialism and communism were the same as witchcraft while adopting all the systems, that broke Yugoslavia apart, that Serbs were doing mass killing of Albanians in Kosovo, bombed Serbia, with depleted uranium and cassette bombs, schools and hospitals, passenger trains, biggest factory of cigarettes (later bought by Philip Morris for $1), and of course denied everything...The list is long, and this is only my perspective, there are many others.

Since the Kennedy assassination, US has been the most corrupted country and non-democratic in the world, so I wouldn't trust what they say about the greatest scientist of our time. For the name of God, they've named a corner after him, yet have done everything to "fight immigration" while they have become what they are because of the immigrants.

Sorry for the rant, the topic is just distasteful once you gather a lot of facts. Also, encyclopedias are not really based on facts, but on what majority agrees (public opinion), and you have to keep in mind he was left as a "mad scientist" in the public eyes.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

> After all, what good did Einstein do? Millions killed, and devastating nuclear waste from energy extractions.

This is a bit off-topic, but how many people do you know who have been "devastated" by spent nuclear fuel? There's not very much of it (by volume, anyway) and it pretty much just sits there in heavy containers, waiting for us to recycle it. In contrast, we actually inhale the waste produced by burning coal and oil and natural gas.

It's galling that a post praising Tesla, someone who fought Edison's misinformation about AC power, would also repeat misinformation about nuclear energy.

(Oh, and Tesla? I hope you won't mind if I favor high-voltage DC for long-distance high-capacity transmission lines. It really does have some serious advantages these days.)

dejan3• 17 years ago

Truly it is off-topic.

Yes I do indeed. Wanna visit south of Italy around Naples? Or maybe residents of Grdelica, south of Serbia?

The waste is exported to other countries to deal with or just dropped on them through "bombing" or buried under the ground. Inform yourself or go for a road trip with a geiger counter. The volume is not what really matters. Nuclear waste isn't recyclable.

Misinformation?

Yes you are right. I also think A. Graham Bell was an idiot not using a cell phone instead, as well Morse not using binary codes. =)

I think you should visit the building behind the second out of the two identical Tesla seated statues (first one being in Niagara).

Bjoern• 17 years ago

We owe Nikola Tesla a lot. He was a genius and is one of my inspirations. If you don't know so much about him, see this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1LqxG49DLk

Wireless power was one of his ideas and we are still only scratching the surface of that. There are so many more...

poolboyz• 17 years ago

Belated happy birthday Mr. Tesla

Happy birthday, Nikola Tesla: thanks for the electricity

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