Posted on 10/07/2007 9:21:00 AM PDT by CutePuppy
Printed version of article : http://electronicdesign.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=16478
Easily one of the most under-appreciated people in history. I had never even heard of him until just a few years ago. How is it possible that not one of my classes in high school even mentioned him? I heard a lot about Edison, Bell, Marconi, etc, but Tesla was at least as significant.
bump for later
My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (ISBN 0910077002) is a book compiled and edited by Ben Johnston detailing the work of Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla wrote his autobiography My Inventions at the age of 63 in a series of articles for the Electrical experimenter magazine. Much of the content in the book originally appeared in the Electrical experimenter magazine of 1919.
“”The ‘World-System’ has resulted from a combination of several original discoveries made by the inventor in the course of long continued research and experimentation. It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the inter-connection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment. By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Globe. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant. These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientific advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line-wire. One far-reaching result of this is that any device capable of being operated thru one or more wires (at a distance obviously restricted) can likewise be actuated, without artificial conductors and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to which there are no limits other than those imposed by the physical dimensions of the Globe. Thus, not only will entirely new fields for commercial exploitation be opened up by this ideal method of transmission but the old ones vastly extended. . . .””
there was a great (and very funny) SciFi short story based on this theory. (Great Scifi - 2 volume set) I believe it was called “The Lost Art”
Perhaps the most brilliant kook in history. The hard part was figuring out the line between his brilliance and his kookiness.
Why did Ron Paul's name just pop into my head?
Wouldn’t wireless power transmission be ENORMOUSLY inefficient? Wouldn’t the power available decrease with the square of the distance from the source? And aren’t RFID tags only useful within a super short range of the transmitter?
To me it sounds like Tesla came up with some very interesting ideas, but went a little nuts what with the claims of communicating with Mars, and liked to overstate the potential of his inventions, etc.
jas3
I would think that antennae for frequencies that low would be too big to be very efficient. What's wrong with the centimeter wave range?
Discovery Channel Mythbusters did a show about Tesla’s earthquake machine and showed that even a small device could vibrate large structures when they resonance was spot on.
Tesla is a fricking genius. Bigger than Einstein, IMO.
Because he was world class at screwing up a good thing.
Unlike the businessman Edison, who was no scientist, but a genius of an inspired mechanic, like his friend Henry Ford, and a tireless super-methodical (and supernaturally brilliant) investigator of anything with commercial potential, Tesla was a true scientific genius. Although his discoveries had enormous commercial potential, he was definitely not a business man. On the flip side, Tesla was a genuine uniquely Balkan-type probably paranoid nutcase.
However, if Tesla said he was talking to Mars; take it to the bank, he was talking to Mars. And when the CHICOM get there, they had better learn Serbo-Croatian, or they will never be able to communicate with the natives.
BTW, If you ever want to start a bar fight in Serbia, or Croatia, tell them their dual national hero Tesla was of Croatian, or Serbian, ancestory. There are even rumours of non-Slavic forebears, but you didn't hear it from me, OK?
Because Tesla was an employee of Geo. Westinghouse. Ol'Georgie, a comtemporanious financial baron the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan, did not share the limelight.
Do you remember the name of Carnegie's partner?
How about naming the money man that shoved Edison out of the electrical generation business?
I read some stuff about Tesla many years ago. One of the greatest scientists no one has ever heard of...
I also remember reading somewhere that Edison “stole” some of Tesla’s patents/ideas.
I’ve heard that when he died during the height of the 2nd world war that our government got all of his papers and they haven’t come to public view since........ Urban myth?
But, the original wireless power transmission is sunlight.
I had never even heard of him until just a few years ago. How is it possible that not one of my classes in high school even mentioned him?
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He was covered in my highschool physics course. I was in the advanced placement class though.
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