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Science

Tesla: Erased at the Smithsonian 358

Posted by Roblimo from the more-important-than-Edison-any-day dept.
Jenny Stevens writes "A group of courageous third graders and their science teacher have decided to try to correct "errors" by the mighty Smithsonian Institution. They are trying to give proper credit to Nikola Tesla (he is my favorite scientist of all time) and his inventions. They have started a campaign and have mailed hundreds of executives of major American corporations asking for donations to their campaign. They have even received a donation from the CEO of Sony Corp. in Japan. To read more, check their Web page. For an intro to Tesla and his contributions check this page."
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Tesla: Erased at the Smithsonian More

Tesla: Erased at the Smithsonian

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  • Re:About time Tesla got more coverage (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You sound like a fellow conspiracy theorist ;)

    Tesla isn't the only one that this has happened to. If you like digging into conspiracy theories, you might want to also check out Tucker ( who thought that seat-belts, disk-brakes and safety padding would be good on cars ) and Farnsworth ( who made Television into a workable technology during the 1930-1940's and who then went on to do ground breaking work in nuclear-fusion ).

    In all of these cases, they have been effectively expunged from history because they came up with ideas and inventions that threatened the priveledge and power of the wealthy.

  • Damn Americans! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Tesla was *not* American! He came to the US when he was 28. He was born in Yugoslavia and had a *European* education (the good kind of education) and then he went to the States.

  • Old news... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, this is old news for those not having gone through the US education system. There is a large tendency to re-write history in the US "in the public interest" if the facts are not in favour of the US.

    I remember quite well from my studies that I had to learn e.g. two names for the higher elements of the periodic system. The ones given to this elements by the original researchers, and the ones claimed by some US guys. I remember quite well the fuzz about the SI unit "Siemens". Since Siemens was not an american hero, the brain-dead "Mho" is used in the US.

    Then there is the stretch about the invention of the telephone (Bell vs. Reis), the stretch about the first plane (Wrights vs. Lilienthal), the wrong claim that Edison invented the light bulb (he just improved it). Even the names of some mathematical proofs have been "highjacked" by US "history" writers (after years I still love my copy of the translation of Bronstein/Semendjajew, for giving proper credit).

    The only remaining questions no one could answe me are: How low must the self-esteem of a nation be that it needs to re-write history in such a way? How bad must an educational system be to promote such lies? And finally, if the system messes with facts in the technical area, how do they mess with facts in politics, history, science? Evolution, any one?
  • The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, specifically its Division of Information Technology and Society, is responsible for exhibits on the history of electricity. While digging around their web site, I found this new exhibit (web-only AFAIK):

    http://www.si.edu/organiza/museums/nmah/csr/powe ring/

    It includes a section on "Powering the Past" which provides much more balanced coverage of Tesla vs Edison and their respective inventions.

    Of course, this doesn't change the fact that the main physical and web exhibits are 100% Edison-centric -- the only hits on "Tesla" from the site's search engine were for the one new exhibit above. While I don't necessarily agree with the idea of recruiting one's third grade classes to forward a private agenda, Mr. Wagner does have a point.
  • Uh I dont think its possible to have a web page that old. The HTML standard wasn't even invented until the 1990's. If that was a gopher link I might agree with you on that it might just be the oldest news discovered but its quite a bit more recent than that..

  • Rivest, um... Shamir? and... yeah, I'd have to look it up too. :)

    Anyhow, they're big names in the field, and it's impressive stuff. I took enough number theory, and learned the basics of public key cryptography. At least, enough to know that I'd rather be coding than doing math proofs.

    I say, let them use the system. I don't like it, and I don't think it should be legal, because if the math is published and you can use it, then the code should be equivalent. But the USA doesn't agree with me, so let them have their patent if they want it. Once speech == math == code, (like so) then it'll be all good, baby, and you can contest patents like that on legal grounds.

    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].

  • Although I think Tesla is one of the great unsung heroes, I really wonder what the point is for this teacher to have drafted the class into crusading over a bunch of issues they probably don't understand.


    They need to be spending more time learning, and less time lecturing other people about what they've been told.


    Is anyone else creeped out about this?

  • Anyone (non-Brazilian) here knows who was Santos Dumont?
  • Education is all about learning. Learning happens from a perspetive. That being said, I'd rather have the third graders learning from a well educated and consientious elementary school teacher than their telivision. If you want to call that brainwashing, so be it. I don't see a thing wrong with it.

    The goal of learning is understanding. To understand something, you must know both sides of the issue. Getting fixed on only one perspective as the ultimate while ignoring others is being brainwashed.

    It's too easy to bring naive people (and third graders are gullible) on your side if that's all they get told. If you want to teach them, you'll educate them so they can decide on their own, that's what a teacher should be doing. Only discussing one side and making them follow you there blindly is brainwashing.

    Personally, I don't think schools are supposed to educate people so they can decide on their own and think critically, it's more like forcing them to conform and adapt to the current social rules. All healthy children are inquisitive and curious, until they go to school, then they often start to hate it.

  • I couldn't have put it better myself.

    By the way, before anyone tries to nail me on the RSA patent fiasco: yes, that too is an abuse of the patent system. Yes, it's a patent on a specific device, and not on public-key encryption in general. It's a different kind of abuse.

    And just a word of warning: I'm about to rant big time here.

    When R, S, and A (I can't remember their full names at the moment) first discovered their algorithm, they published it far and wide. Even now, you'll find the algorithm in any decent textbook on discrete mathematics and number theory (believe me, I have several). They in essence created their own "prior art." Most countries recognized this, which is why RSA isn't patented in most places. But when they applied for it several years later, some idiot in the US who probably never took a day of number theory in his (her?) life decided to grant them the patent anyway, even though they'd already put the thing out so widely that the patent was pointless (I thought you couldn't make patents retroactive like that anyway). That was seventeen years ago this September (when the patent finally expires). Seventeen years during which effective crypto couldn't be widely adopted in the US because of these restrictions. And if it can't be adopted in the US, it can't be adopted anywhere on the Net, simply because the US is such a large part of it that you can't reasonably exclude it. In other words, seventeen years that R, S, and A have set back Net security, all in the pursuit of The Almighty Buck.

    And this is why I think R, S, and A are the scum of the computing universe, ten times worse than Bill Gates and M$ if not more. Had they set aside those concerns seventeen years ago, I'd consider it likely that crypto (with 17 years of an effective, patent-free algorithm) would already be too ubiquitous for anyone to stop it. The current restrictions never went into effect until RSA had been patented, so crypto would have beaten governments to the punch. Big Brother would have become truly pointless. We would have had the privacy that is dying now, because we would have had our crypto long before governments could have done a thing to stop it. These three people are very talented; I can't argue that. But they have so much to answer for that I don't think they'll ever be able to justify it.

  • Give us SOME credit... (Score:4)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Thursday February 10, 2000 @06:08AM (#1289651)
    Most Slashdotters aren't against patents in general, per se. Patents are, generally speaking, Good Things, when applied correctly.

    Consider the case of Stradivarius, the violin-maker. There were no patents at the time, so in order to be able to work as a violin-maker, he had no choice but to keep his methods secret. Alas, he took those secrets to the grave with him. To this day, in fact, even with all our modern technology, no one has ever made the equal of a Stradivarius violin, because no one knows how he did it. This is why you can still get them, but each one costs millions.

    But there's a problem when you try and patent software. You see, Tesla didn't try and patent AC itself. If he had, then Slashdotters probably would have had problems. What Tesla patented was specific devices that use AC. Nothing wrong with that. But software patents take a different tack, They don't patent the device (the code, in this case); they try to patent the concepts behind it.

    Consider the Imatec case. This might not be the best example, because the courts found that they didn't own the patents they claimed, but it still fits somewhat. Imatec sued Apple over ColorSync, claiming it violated Imatec's patents. What was the patent Imatec claimed to own? Not a patent on a specific color-matching system, but on the concept of color-matching in general.

    This is supposed to be illegal by the regulations on patents, but thanks to the fact that software makers have obscene amounts of money to bribe out representatives with, they've gotten the patents upheld. Patents weren't meant for ideas, they were meant for implementations of those ideas.

    Take Eli Whitney's cotton gin, for example. Had he used the same logic as most software manufacturers today, he would have instead tried to patent the concept of getting seeds out of raw cotton before processing it. Then he could have sued every plantation owner in the nation for using "his" process, even if they had never heard of the cotton gin, because they used other means of doing this. Granted, those "other means" were typically slaves, and far be it from me to say slavery is a Good Thing, but that hardly makes the situation I've stated here any better.

    So give Slashdotters here a little credit. We're not against patents. We're against their misapplication and abuse, as software manufacturers do. I'd imagine most of us wouldn't have been against Amazon had they patented their system of one-click ordering, but instead they patented the very concept on one-click ordering, and that's where the patent runs afoul of us. Certainly a patent on an AC generator wouldn't.
  • Your science reporting stinks guys. You definely have an affinity for crank science. Events like the NEAR encounter with Eros don't merit a comment.
  • Ohh yah and did anyone notice that most of the claims made by the third graders rested on filings in the U.S. Patent office.

    Other things we learn at the U.S Patent office

    * Amazon came up with the idea of ordering with a moust click

    *Microsoft Invented sale of digital media over the internet

  • And yes just to head off the argument. It might help them in the long run or help farmers elsewhere but that isn't relevent to the point.
  • In response to this post and the post before it.

    My claim was not the rainforest is not worth protecting because it hurts farmers.

    It does in fact hurt farmers...they can't grow crops in the area they slashed and burned. Does their desire to slash and burn in order to make money gain food etc... outweigh the danger of hurting the rain forest. Probably not.

    However, it does demonstrate the issue is not cut and dried. There are other factors that should be weighed in our decision even if we eventually find them not to be compeling.

    My point was encouraging this sort of political activism by students in the classroom doesn't encourage this sort of thought. It doesn't encourage education but partisan rhetoric.

    I also felt that publishing/giving credence to these arguments *because* they are made by a childrens class is ridiculous and should have no place in our politics.

  • This is ridiculous! (Score:3)

    by PG13 ( 3024 ) on Thursday February 10, 2000 @01:43AM (#1289656)
    Little pisses me off more then seeing kids brainwashed into political activism. These are THIRD GRADERS do you think they can make a fair and honest judgement about the matter apart from what their teacher says? Political activism by a classroom tells us that the teacher is failing because the children probably aren't being fairly fed both sides of the argument.

    Does anyone think that third graders (even bright third graders) would really get worked up and campaign on an issue if it was presented in an unbiased factual manner?

    It only makes it worse that people pay attention to these sort of attention getting schemes conducted by teachers at the expense of students.

    When I was in high school I had a biology teacher which offered us extra credit if we wrote to our congressmen lobbying them to prevent destruction of the rain forest. Now of course all those students weren't (and probably still haven't) thought that while rain forest is good protecting it necesserily involves hurting farmers. Perhaps the government has other (more important) uses for its time and money. To her credit when pressed about the issue she offered to give the credit to writing about the other side of the issue. But most of those students left the class with the impresion that the enviornment was something that *must* be protected and not an issue to be thought about or weighed against other needs.

    Did this teacher ever think that perhaps Tesla isn't honored because he was lacking in other respects? I have heard that Tesla was extremly lacking in theory and proposed many crackpot notions about electricity. Does it cause doubt in anyone's mind that all the pro Tesla sites are littered with ridiculous and incorrect psuedo-science?

    For instance as mentioned above the site that claimed Tesla's transformer increased power output. Interesting that...power=energy/time so Tesla learned how to make energy from nothing?

    Maybe *gasp* the Smithsonian with legions of experts might know more about this issue than a bunch of third graders?
  • I agree -- growing up in Connecticut, I'd see public elementary and junior high schools sending their kids to an annual nuclear freeze rally in New Haven. I always kinda wished my school would do that so I could have the chance to raise hell about it.

    There was an episode in Massachusetts a couple of years ago where a class was learning about how a bill becomes a law and tried to push through a bill making the Boston cream pie the official state dessert. It was sure to pass until the representative from the Toll House's district decided that the Toll House cookie should be the official dessert. I'm not sure how it came out, but I guess it did do a good job of teaching kids how the system really works:

    1) A small group that screams loudly gets what it wants even if it what it wants is absurd.
    2) Politicians would rather pander and grab headlines over a waste of time than deal with real issues
  • Yours is the flamebait, "buddy".

    The man was talking about presenting both sides of the issue and he showed an excellent example of how people sometimes fail to do that. He wasn't saying that protection of the rainforest isn't a worthy endeavour or that farmers' rights are more important than the environment. Perhaps he thinks that, but there's no rational way to deduce that from his posting.
    --

  • Many posters have pointed to the influence of the Edison boosters in downplaying Tesla's contributions. But don't forget that at one time, Tesla had both George Westinghouse and J.P.Morgan in his corner. Westinghouse died, and Morgan became disenchanted with Tesla's increasingly impractical and costly experiments; experiments which he refused to explain or submit to peer review. Nobody could deny that Tesla was a genius of the first rank. But he cut himself off from other researchers, and, in consequence, his later work is a sordidly mixed bag of "results" that are not much use to anybody.

    You want a real hero, then check out Charles Proteus Steinmetz. There's the man who made AC distribution possible. Don't know what the Smithsonian has to say about him, tho (he *did* work for Edison).
  • Without Tesla, there would be no Violet Wand, one of the most fun kinky sex devices around.

    For those of you not familiar, a Violet Wand is an old qucak medical device in which a Tesla coil charges a semi-vaccumed argon-filled glass tube (usually - there are other "extensions"). The electricity is transferred to the skin through the glass. They generally run about 30,000 to 40,000 volts. The one I have runs at 22 watts (though they can range from 8 to upwards of 60 watts!).

    Thank you, Mr. Tesla.

    ----------------------

  • what's up with the attack on liberals in the pages? he never shows how non-liberals would be better, or why liberals would dislike tesla. ditto for the politically correct comments.
  • I wrote the fellow what I thought was a reasoned and polite letter. My response was curt - A response to the effect that my mail was deleted - apparently because I didn't fully agree with him.

    I happen to have read a rather complete biography of Tesla when I was a kid, I'm an EE, and a ham radio operator too. Edison, Tesla, Marconi, etc are heroes of mine, and I have a fair idea of the accurate story. I happen to know that at least in EE school, Tesla isn't given short-shrift as to what he invented.

    The guy has an agenda of his own that doesn't allow him to discuss it in a reasoned manner.

  • >Gauss and Newton both get used quite a bit,
    Well, I've never used a Newton, but a pair of Gauss rifles aimed at the enemy's legs are pretty useful.

    Oh. Sorry, just played MW3 all day yesterday, and I'm still trying to work it out of my system...
  • Oh, please -- Edison did a lot of inventing too. Edison's major failing was that he failed to see that Tesla's AC was the wave of the future, despite being dangerous (and AC *is* dangerous, but we as a society have decided that the benefits outweigh a few people being electrocuted each year).

    Additionally, while Tesla made many important contributions to science and engineering, there is a reason why Tesla is the patron saint of crackpots -- he rather had a crackpot side to him himself -- broadcast electricity, anyone?
  • There is nothing "brain dead" about a unit called the Mho (the inverse of an Ohm) -- it is quite witty, actually, and is a great aid to memory. If other countries fail to use it, well, it's their loss.

    Molecular biology has several of these clever names -- there is a technique called the Southern blot, and later techniques called the Western and Northern blot --the humor is that Southern blots have nothing to do with direction -- their inventor's last name was Southern.

    Then we have the tradition of naming terminator mutations after semiprecious gems -- Amber, Opal, etc. Except the first such mutation (Amber) was discovered by Bernstein -- whose name happens to be the German word for amber!
  • No. The danger of AC is that once you pick up a live wire, you just *can't* let go (That's why electricians are careful to touch potentially live AC wires only with the backs of their hands -- at worst you get a shock and your hand jerks backwards, rather than gripping the wire). This doesn't happen with DC, plain and simple. But DC is hard to transmit over long distances, so it lost out.
  • Perhaps some of Tesla's more wacky inventions don't really merit the term "crackpot", but how about Tesla's ghost detector? Surely even you agree *that* is a crackpot invention, yes?

    Certainly Woz doesn't believe in ghosts.

  • I'm surprised this is not marked flamebait...

    When I was in high school I had a biology teacher which offered us extra credit if we wrote to our congressmen lobbying them to prevent destruction of the rain forest. Now of course all those students weren't (and probably still haven't) thought that while rain forest is good protecting it necesserily involves hurting farmers.

    Got news for you buddy... while the oceans are responsible for a large chunk of the oxygen processed on Earth, the rain forest is still needed to process water, which your starving farmers need to produce the food eat, required for you to be sitting there at your computer complaining about your high school biology teacher. If you keep thinking that protecting farmers is more important than protecting rain forests (after all, it's a bunch of dumb trees weighted against some supreme human beings), go ahead, bulldoze them. Pretty fast you'll realize there are no more farmers to protect, because they just could not possibly grow anything in the quantities your "civilized society" demands, if all they have is dry sterile soil.

    I'm sure your biology teacher talked about "cycles" and "ecosystems"... I just wonder if you were paying any attention. Perhaps you were more interested in that farmer's daughter sitting next to you...

  • You said:

    there's no rational way to deduce that from his posting

    The original poster said (emphasis mine)

    Now of course all those students weren't (and probably still haven't) thought that while rain forest is good protecting it
    necesserily involves hurting farmers.

    No. It does not necesserily hurt farmers. If you get carried away, and start thinking rain forests are more important than everything else, then, yes, it does necesserily hurt farmers (and everybody else in the meantime). But if you take a rational approach to it, no, it doesn't hurt farmers, it helps them. Problem is, you have to think globally, not locally. The rain forest desvastation happening in Central and South America as well as Asia is something people in the UK, UK, Australia or whatever happens to be your current place of residence, have to care about. And that includes the farmers being hurt.

    That "farmers getting hurt" argument is a) mooth and b) FUD (and in my dictionary, that's flamebait). It's used by people who don't have a clue regarding where they stand (hint: it's big, mostly blue and it wanders thru space), and whose primary concern is how to become richer faster. If larger (but not better) crops (at the expense of less rain forest coverage) is how, they do it. Who cares it the whole thing kicks back in five years? I've gotten richer now!

    Yes, you should be given both sides of the story. This guy might not be doing that with those 3rd graders. Tesla had some wakky ideas, but at least he had ideas of his own. It's generally accepted that Edison (very much like Newton) used to "borrow" ideas from others... was Edison alive today, his "employees" would be graduate and post graduate students getting zero recognition for their work. And, btw, the Physics book I used, did say why those units bear the Gauss and Tesla names.

  • Didn't he discover America?

    Depends on the point of view: there were people there who knew that "America" existed :-)

    There's also the vikings, who might have come to America much before Columbus.

    And no, Columbus did not "discover" that the Earth was not flat.

    Admittedly he never set foot on the mainland (from what I remember), but he discovered it as much as anyone can really discover anything.

    He did set foot on the mainland (1502). And again, there's the issue that he didn't really knew this was not Asia but a "new" continent. In that sense, he did not discover America.

  • I tried the site's search engine to see how they handle the DeForest vs. Armstrong thing. No hits for either one, not even for the other Armstrongs (All-American Boy Jack, and Neal or Neil, of first on moon fame), no hits for vacuum tube, no hits for vacuum, no hits for radio. Reckon it's busted?

  • LinuxGeek dun said:

    I didn't say just wireless. Spark gap devices preceeded Teslas work too. Tesla invented wireless broadcast of intelligence with resonance being used to segregate channels. If wireless is the only criteria, then lets throw speech into the possibilities. ;o)

    Yes, spark gap transmissions existed; hell, Maxwell proved how spark gap transmissions could work. :) The trick is using them for information--Morse code, or voice, or whatnot.

    (BTW--even if we limit it to "information transmission by radio", it is entirely likely that neither Marconi nor Tesla invented radio. There is a considerable amount of evidence that radio may have been independently invented by both Loomis (whom is actually credited with the invention of radio in some books) and voice communication by Nathan Stubblefield (probably longwave or ground-wave communications; known to be an early AM system, possibly the first; Murray, KY still has signs up claiming it is the "Home of Radio"). I think the best we can say there is that radio was probably invented independently by at least three, possibly more, individuals...which is the exact same situation as exists with television (no less than three people independently invented it, though we mostly use the Zworykin process for TV much as we use the Tesla method for radio).)

    What Tesla definitely deserves credit for is making high-frequency transmission possible. Before the invention of methods for high-frequency transmission by Tesla, the highest frequencies possible were in the longwave bands (we're talking around fifty or sixty KHz--AM or "medium-wave" bands were still considered HF in those days). Pretty much Tesla made transmissions outside of longwave possible, not to mention FM radio (it can be said that Tesla did in fact invent FM transmissions).

    Oh, and as a wee bit of radio trivia--the first "officially recognised" transmitter WAS a spark-gap transmitter! :) One of the old Marconi stations actually celebrated its 100th anniversary and was fired up for a day for DX purposes...

    Spark gap transmissions are broad spectrum emmisions. Transmission of intelligence requires modulation of the carrier to represent voice or data. Spark gap tranmissions require interruption of the entire signal to represent information and are basically limited to morese type communication. That definition is what I remember from my novice and tech class ham exams 12 years ago. It may be slightly off.

    CW is actually considered intelligence, too; you're still transmitting info, just in binary mode. :) It IS pretty much impossible to do much besides CW on a spark-gap transmitter, though. :) (This is why Tesla's system beat out Marconi's, by the way--you could do voice and tune frequencies. Hell, Tesla probably wasn't the first to do voice; if Nathan Stubblefield hadn't been so bloody paranoid about patents [he was convinced someone else would steal his ideas-- of course, between the modern patent mess and seeing what happened to poor Tesla, he just might've had a point...] he might well have been credited.)

  • Glgraca dun said:

    Radio was invented by a catholic priest called Landell de Moura, who lived in the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul. He even traveled to New York to get a patent.

    According to Brazil, that is. :)

    People in Murray, Kentucky would give serious argument to both that claim AND the claims of Marconi and Tesla (they claim AM transmission was invented by Nathan B. Stubblefield).

    People in West Virginia would give arguments to all that, and claim that Loomis invented radio (there was a demonstration in West Virginia in 1866; this is specifically mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records as possibly the first radio broadcast).

    People in England and in Italy argue that Marconi did it.

    People in Serbia and in a fair section of the US would argue Tesla did it.

    If I remember right (basing this from a half-remembering of an old article in Soviet Life over fifteen years ago, when I actually was sent a copy from Radio Moscow in responce to a QSL request...what with all the QSL requests I made as a kid, I expect I will never be able to get government employment anywhere :), the Russians claim one of their OWN invented radio. :)

    The truth of the matter is, radio was probably simultaneously invented by many people and one method (namely, Tesla's) ended up becoming dominant.

    Same thing happened with TV, by the way--the Russians give credit to Zworykin (who invented the iconoscope); the Americans give credit to him + a fella in Indiana who worked out the technical details; the Brits give credit to Laird (who invented a mechanical TV system using 30 lines that worked suprisingly well), the Germans (who had some of the first high-definition broadcasts) claim yet ANOTHER guy, the French claim Nipkow, and so on and so forth. What happened there was more of a case of several people simultaneously inventing TV, and the system what worked best winning out.

  • Tesla made the wealthy people of his day ( JP Morgan, Westinghouse, etc...) even wealthier with his selling of patents. His rounds with Edison even culminated in General Electric ( Edison Electric Co. + Thomson-Houston Co.) bidding on the Niagra *AC* power plant contracts. GE got the low bid on the distribution system and thus got to build the AC power lines. Westinghouse and Tesla got the bid for the power generatoring station.

    This was before the Chicago Worlds fair of 1893 and his Colorado Springs experiments. About a third of the people living in the US at that time visited Chicago to see Tesla and his wonders. He was far from obscure at that time. The erasure from history seems to have come later.
  • Three times this morning, I had to kill netscape when it loaded that banner. I finally had to turn java off and no more lockups. Thanks for killing the browser of the Linux faithful with a java banner. This is stock RH6.1 installed communicator.
  • Although the fellow was a bit harsh, I think he was trying to make a point. Something of this nature:

    Tesla is recognized because he has a SI unit named after him == You recognizing all of your mothers accomplishments by saying she really knew how to butter toast well.

    It is an insult to them both. I'm positive they both deserve much, much more.
  • I didn't say just wireless. Spark gap devices preceeded Teslas work too. Tesla invented wireless broadcast of intelligence with resonance being used to segregate channels. If wireless is the only criteria, then lets throw speech into the possibilities. ;o)

    Spark gap transmissions are broad spectrum emmisions. Transmission of intelligence requires modulation of the carrier to represent voice or data. Spark gap tranmissions require interruption of the entire signal to represent information and are basically limited to morese type communication. That definition is what I remember from my novice and tech class ham exams 12 years ago. It may be slightly off.
  • Tesla's technique for nitrogen extraction was basically a by-product of his wireless communication/power transmission method. Meaning almost free.

    It is also nice to see that you speak for everyone 'educated' in physics. Well, not everyone. I know several people that have strong to very strong backgrounds in physics (minors and majors in college thru masters degrees). Some think he is a genius with some very eccentric behaviours thrown in. Some have said that they honestly can't understand some of the principles he clearly understood and demonstrated in public on many occasions. Personnally, I don't pretend to be Tesla junior, but I do think his contributions have been used without being acknowledged by much of the scientific community for last 75 years.
  • A very interesting coincidence: I'm just finishing an excellent biography calles "TESLA Man Out Of Time" by Margaret Cheney. I would certainly recommend this book to those interested in Tesla's lifes work.

    He invented and patented this short list and much more:
    -Single, 2 and 3 phase AC generators, motors and distributions systems.
    -Fluorescent lights
    -Electron microscope ( his carbon-button lamp)
    -Atom smasher (carbon-button lamp also)
    -Electron accelerator ( melecular bombardment lamp)
    -wireless communication of intelligence
    -wireless power distrobution

    He also mapped the EMF spectrum into 'octaves', found out how to control rainfall and extract nitrogen out of the air. Where is this knowledge being used today?

    He invented radio, remote controll and spread spectrum coded communication all in a single device ( robot boats, which the navy rejected).

    I have a book called "Giants of Invention" that I was given as a child. Tesla isn't even listed, but George Westinghousem who bought all of Tesla's AC patents is listed for having invented railroad air brakes. Now your opinion may be very different, but I think Tesla has been left out on the doorstep concerning historical credit for his inventions. I think that Edison and Marconi pale greatly in comparison to Tesla, but you may not agree.

    BTW, "TESLA: Man Out Of Time", Margaret Cheney, ISBN 0-88029-419-1

  • Well, since it's called America instead of Colombia, at least someone must have remembered Amerigo Vespucci...

  • You've got them backwards. AC is a wave, there is a point where you have the ability to let go. And in some cases it will throw you away. I know this first hand, I've been hit by 15 KVAC from a neon sign transformer (building Tesla coils) I flew about 10 feet. DC, if you get across it, will contract your muscles and you will be stuck. AC is more dangerous because it carries more power. A distribution power line can blow your arm off.

    Electricians use the "one hand method" to prevent creating a ground path through the heart. Intelligent ones don't touch "potentially live AC wires" at all. They use a voltmeter and make sure.
  • I'm not sure about now, but 2 years ago when I had an account with Concentric, they were running SunOS/Solaris on their boxes. They also have more bandwidth than god, so I don't think they'll fill up any time soon.
  • The interesting thing about Tesla, Edison, Bell, Marconi etc is how similar the world in which they worked was to today's software world: the technologies they worked with RF, inductance, etc, were reasonably open and understood, and easy and cheap(ish) to develop for. Consequently thousands of their peers were developing the same things muchly simultaneously.

    However it was the patent-holders (and Edison was particularly assiduous at collecting these) that won through and got written into the history books. And especially US patent holders, given the way that world trade developed over the 20th century.

    Perhaps in 100 years Slashdotters will be trying to get the guy who *really* invented one-click ordering into the Smithsonian.

  • Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman.
  • After all, everyone knows that Edison invented the light bulb, electricity, etc...

    Actually he didn't even invent the light bulb. He just improved it.

    --
  • Seems to be doing about 150 hits/minute or so right now.

    If they'd put up banner ads. before /. had linked it, they wouldn't need to sell shirts anymore... ;)

    --
  • You can patent a mouse trap.

    You should not be able to patent trapping mice.
  • Which idea was as the great one? Remote controlled vehicles? The AND circuit? The Tesla coil? Radio? He patented all these...the Supreme Court even verified the radio one.

    I quote from the people who gave him the Edison medal: "Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr. Tesla's work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle. So far-reaching is (his) work it has become the warp and woof of industry"

    Sadly, Telsa has wandered away and was feeding pigeons during this speech.

    -David T. C.

  • The other 10% is actually commited by people with extreme tans, or against people covered in white paint.

    -David T. C.
  • Obviously, Edison invented the Tesla coil. Or maybe Marconi.

    Note: This was a joke.

    -David T. C.

  • Yes, the smithsonian is not a bastion of truth.
    Indeed it is not. It's most notable lie is about the Wright Flyer, claimed to be the first "heavier-than-air" aircraft.

    Blatantly false! The honour belongs to Clément Ader's Éole [britannica.com] , which flew as far back as 1890, in France.

    The fact is that the Wright Brothers would not give the Smithsonian their (still) historic Flyer [britannica.com] unless the Smithsonian claimed it was the FIRST "heavier-than-air" aircraft.


    --
    " It's a ligne Maginot [maginot.org]-in-the-sky "

  • I feel it is becoming more and more difficult for an european to understand the american way of thinking...

    Don't worry, we Americans don't actually think. ;)

    Seriously though, I thought it was pretty standard knowledge that Tesla pioneered AC power transmission, the electric motor (Faraday was the dynamo, right?), as well as other stuff. At least my high school physics book contained that info. I think his most interesting idea was to have electricity flowing throught the Earth all the time, so that you just had to stick a metal rod in the ground to get power. Well that and the death rays.

    In my opinion what is more interesting is that Tesla was the stereotypical eccentric engineer/inventor who didn't care about financial interests or publicity. He worked with Westinghouse was never very reliable. Edison was a glory/money hound. Look who history had more recognition for (at least in the US in the past).

    It is a lesson for current techies to speak up and be proactive about intellectual property, lest Al Gore & Bill Gates be recognized as the creators of the Internet.

    One other lesson to get from Tesla is that he was celibate all his life. That's right folks, even the great Mr. Tesla couldn't invent a Get Laid Ray.

  • S'funny. I've been drawing that parallel also. When I mention him and people ask me who Tesla was, I often say "Well, let's use an analogy... When we look back at developing electrical generation and distribution, Edison was the Bill Gates and Tesla was the Linus Tolvalds."
  • I saw a show on (I think) Discovery a while back about a guy making violins in all sorts of crazy shapes which sounded great. He'd come to the conclusion that what gives a Stradivarius violin its sound is the quality of the varnish.

  • Actually, he had american citizenship. But being a cocky american, generally we consider any outsiders to be outsiders for life!

    Take that, you blasted European Peoples!
  • The author Jared Diamond makes a convincing case (Guns, Germs, and Steel) that the economics just weren't there to sustain Viking colonies, even if the climate hadn't changed. There were never any long-term permanent residences on the continent, and the difference in resources and available technologies was too great. On the other hand, when Southern Europeans arrived in the West Indies, they were much more technologically and economically prepared to take advantage.
    ----
  • The word "discover" is certainly politically loaded, but I don't think you can deny that Columbus was the first significant European expedition to arrive here, and that began one of the most significant migrations in human history.

    Somebody was bound to do it eventually. The populations here didn't have the technology or the economy (for easily demonstrable geographic and historical reasons) to compete with the Europeans.

    It's simply a matter of perspective. Instead of denying the obvious, suggest a better name than "discovery".
    ----
  • In his Colorado Springs lab in 1899, he sent waves of energy all the way through the Earth, causing them to bounce back to the source (providing the theory for today's accurate earthquake seismic stations). When the waves came back, he added more electricity to it.

    The result? The largest man-made lightning bolt ever recorded - 130 feet! - a world's record still unbroken!

    The accompanying thunder was heard 22 miles away. The entire meadow surrounding his lab had a strange blue glow, similar to that of St. Elmo's Fire.

    This sounds like the earlier discussion of blue lightning. With a wide path of electromagnetic waves resulting in a large lightning bolt, wouldn't that support the "burning silicon" theory? What do you guys think?

    --
    grappler
  • I'm sure most of you have seen the sequel to the original "Absent minded professor" in which the professor moves from Flubber to "Flubber Gas".

    The reason I bring this up is that I saw a couple things in this discussion that make me think that that movie was a tribute to Tesla.

    He also mapped the EMF spectrum into 'octaves', found out how to control rainfall and extract nitrogen out of the air. Where is this knowledge being used today?

    In the movie, the prof discovers how to create his own rain. When he tried to do it on a large scale, he accidentally shattered all the glass in a several block radius. Accoring to another post here, Tesla also did an experiment in which he shattered many windows in the vicinity, using a steam engine oscillator of some sort. And, in the end of the movie when the prof is in court for his damages to the windows, a farmer comes in showing the positive side effect of huge vegetables created when NITROGEN precipitated into the ground during the experiment.

    Am I going crazy?

    --
    grappler
  • From http://www.concentric.net/~Jwwagner/p6oi.html :

    We charged our original price of $18 [for Tesla T-shirts] from 1989 until recently...

    So this news is, in fact, 11 years old.

    A new Slashdot record! ;-)

    Gerv
  • This is the same organization who gave credit to the Wright Brothers for inventing the aeroplace. In reality, a guy named Gustav Whitehead flew in Bridgeport, Connecticut at least two years earlier.

    Check out: http://airsports.fai.org/jun98/jun9805.html

    Now, if they'd give credit to the Wrights for cash or political reasons, why wouldn't they do the same to raise Edison and sink Tesla into obscurity?

  • Perhaps some of Tesla's more wacky inventions don't really merit the term "crackpot", but how about Tesla's ghost detector? Surely even you agree *that* is a crackpot invention, yes? Well, yes, or even the "death ray" that he kept trying to come up with because he thought everyone was spying on him.

    No-one said he wasn't nuts. He was still a genius though.

    I don't know about the rest of the world, but I was taught both Edison and Tesla in elementary school. I was taught how Tesla invented AC and saw its potential, beating Edison's DC method out.

    In any case, this isn't really about that. The original article says that the Smithsonian is crediting Edison with Tesla's inventions. Which just ain't right.


    ---

  • There are multiple names for some of the elements since the dates of synthesis are disputed. The first group to synthesize an element has naming rights. Thus if the dates are disputed the names are disputed. US researchers did not accept Soviet claims of first-synthesis and Soviet researchers did not accept US claims.

    With regard to names given to proofs, during the Soviet era there was precious little funding for mathematicians. This created a climate in the Soviet Union where the full details of proofs were not published and what was published was obsfucated. If no one else could understand your proof then no one else could build on it; this prevented other Soviet researchers from taking a slice of the very small pie. Unfortunately, this meant that the more descriptive proofs developed outside the eastern bloc were the ones referenced in other papers, leading to the western researchers having their names associated with the proofs.

    The only remaining questions no one could answe [sic] me are: How low must the self-esteem of a nation be that it needs to re-write history in such a way? How bad must an educational system be to promote such lies? And finally, if the system messes with facts in the technical area, how do they mess with facts in politics, history, science? Evolution, any one?

    1. Our problem is that our self-esteem as a nation is too high, not too low. However, believing that nothing is impossible leads one to accomplish the impossible, much to the chagrin of those who said it was impossible.
    2. No worse than one that does not acknowledge the reasons for the discrepancies.
    3. The biggest flaw in our educational system is that it teaches people that stridency replaces reason and that having an opinion, rather than arguing logicallly and persuasively, is the only excuse one needs to insist that action be taken. Though assuming you are not US educated, that seems to be a problem in your education system as well. That said, in a free society control of what is taught rests with the people not the state. In the US education is controlled at the local level. This means that in some areas stupid decisions will be made (e.g., Kansas Board of Education vs. every respected biologist in the world on the question of evolution). However, it is the best system I know of for reducing the likelihood that government sponsored propaganda is force-fed to our children.

    Curt

    "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

  • There was a man named Mahlon Loomis who in 1866 sent a message between two mountaintops in West Virginia. For antennas he used kites, and the receiver was a galvanometer.

  • So this news is, in fact, 11 years old.

    That actually helps explain why the page reads like a propaganda page (a la some of the anti-hassidic, anti-abortion pages)

    I'm not saying that the page is hate speech, just that the design is poor :-)
  • uh, power=work/time, not energy/time. Your point still holds, but it's a lot more complicated then you make it seem.
  • <i>A well known US state, who banned the word and concept of "evolution" from all school text books</i>

    The state was Kansas and you have the facts wrong. They simply removed evolution from the state mandated tests, there is no requirement against teaching evolution.
  • Tesla's confiscated papers (at least the ones they admit to ...) are available at the "freedom of information act reading room" http://foia.fbi.gov/tesla.htm

  • Factual errors (Score:4)

    by matija ( 27014 ) on Thursday February 10, 2000 @02:19AM (#1289709) Homepage
    There are several factual errors in their article. For instance, they state that tesla discovered the AC distribution system and that it used "Tesla's newly developed transformers".

    In fact, AC was well known when Tesla studied in Prague, as was it's advantage over DC - that it could be transformed to a higher voltage. Higher voltages can be more efficiently transported over long distance, but are too dangereous and inconvenient for most everyday use.

    Converting DC to higher voltages would incurr such inefficiencies that the whole system would be untenable.

    What the AC camp lacked, however, was a workable motor. The only motors that worked ran on DC. Again, converting AC to DC was not cost-efficient.

    Tesla designed an AC motor, something considered theoretically impossible up until that time.

    Also, Tesla did not "design the world's first hydroelectric plant" - Edison ran several small plants years before. What he did design, was the worlds first big AC hydroelectric plant.

    None of that, of course, detracts from Tesla's real genius, just setting the record straight.

    If you ever get the chance to visit the technical museum in Zagreb, Croatia, ask them to show you the Tesla exhibit.

    Most of the famous Tesla experiments have been recreated for a movie made about Tesla's life about 20 years ago, and while the exhibit has been somewhat neglected in the last few years, the machines still work, and they are awesome.

    I visited it about a year ago, and as I was the only visitor, the guy in charge demonstrated all the devices to me (and on me).

    Very, very impressive.

  • Richard Stallman would probably organize a boycott against AC current, and would encourage everyone to tear down the AC power lines. "No more AC! DC is the way to go!"

    It would be everything Y2k was supposed to be!

    *shudder*
  • I agree. I can only wonder what parents must think when their kids come home wearing this shirt [concentric.net]. This seems akin to getting kids to write letters to your congressmen because you are upset about an issue. It's misleading and probably unethical.


  • I can't remember where I found this [ucalgary.ca] but it is an interesting read.

  • Edison gets credited with inventing a lot of things he didn't invent, because of amercian refusal to accept the true inventors overseas. Most notably of this is the light bulb, which was actually invented by Englishman Joesph Swan.
  • The times have changed. Someone professing a belief in spirtualism around 1900 would not be considered a crackpot, any more than someone professing a belief in the possibility of a unified field theory would be today. Perhaps in 100 years, these will be the crackpots?
  • Blatantly false! The honour belongs to Clément Ader's Éole, which flew as far back as 1890, in France.
    The Wrights made the first sustained, powered, and controlled flight. Yes, there were many pioneers before them who laid the foundations of their work, but the Wrights crossed the threshold into "real" flight.

    And because of all the failed attempts before them, it was years after their first flight before the world recognized that the age of the airplane was upon us.

  • I agree, it is important to teach kids to make a difference. But, I still think there's something a but sketchy about this:
    1. These kids are eight. Teaching kids to buck the system is great, but only if they understand the system. There's nothing wrong with pointing out that the powers that be can do something wrong, but it's important to present a balanced view, and point out that the powers that be from time to time get one right. Eight year olds don't have enough experience to put something like this in context
    2. This guy seems to have his own axe to grind, and it has nothing to do with the kids. He keeps ranting about "politically correct" truth being enshrined in museums and the evils of liberalism, and frankly this has nothing to do with either.

    Teaching kids that they can make changes is great. Using them as a medium to spread your own political beliefs is an abuse of authority

  • I am getting so damn sick and tired of all the rants about how /. can no longer be trusted because they sold out to Da Man.


    Look people, freedom of the press applies only to the man who owns one. If you don't like/trust /., then download the code, set up a server, and run your own damn site with money out of your own damn pocket! Then you will truly have freedom of the press!

  • I agree... whether Tesla was a great guy is besides the point. You basically have a man who goads his third grade class into furthering his own agendas, by employing "cute" tactics.

    My mother teaches third grade, and at that age, students believe whatever is taught to them. There is nothing wrong with trying to inform them about a great man often overlooked, but to employ them for your own personal crusades!? I think it it is despicable.
  • Wire up cables, sure you can charge everyone, put free power in the air? nooooo, cant do that, no money in that even tho its probably better.
    With all the concern about pollution from powerplants and hazards of electromagnetic fields, you'd think you would have some concern about the far greater losses of wireless transmission and the higher EM exposures it would represent.
    --
  • That sounds like an ion-generator power supply. They can't generate enough continuous current to be harmful, but once the capacitors are charged up they can give you enough of a pulse during the discharge to knock you over. It's like the difference between a trickle from a faucet, and a cup filled from the trickle.
    --
  • It's funny you should mention this:
    The main problem though is that there are a lot of crank cults that have grown up around the subject and their behaviour tends to drop the issue into the lunatic fringe basket. Because of this, anyone who tries to research the subject invariably reacts in a negative way.
    It's funny, because you give a textbook example:
    His last project revolved around the idea of tapping into natural electric currents generated deep within the Earth.

    As the story goes, he suceeded and Morgan was appalled at the idea that this discovery would mean that people wouldn't need to pay for electricity any more once they had the necessary equipment.

    No one can prove it, but like I said, on the basis of his other successes, it's plausible.

    No, it's been pretty conclusively debunked. There has been a huge amount of work done in the last 20 years with regard to investigating earthquakes and especially trying to predict them. One of the techniques used is georesistivity, looking at the electrical characteristics of the rock and soil around faults. If there was any electric power available from driving electrodes into the earth, experiments such as those (and others in different fields of inquiry) would have discovered it as a byproduct; it would have stuck out like bonfire in the night. Nobody's seen anything. Conclusion: the effect does not exist, and this "suppression of free energy" story is another crackpot myth pushed by the scientifically-illiterate fringe. I didn't mean to be quite so blunt, but that's what it is.

    There's plenty of energy available from natural effects on Earth, but that isn't one of them. Serious investigators look for things like geothermal or ocean-thermal power instead. These effects are real, measurable and even usable.
    --

  • If you want to concentrate on that, here's a nice quote for you from page 8 [concentric.net] (emphasis mine):
    The curator continues to describe how electricity (presumably from Edison) brought numerous consumer items to market...citing the vacuum cleaner and fans. He carefully neglects to mention that vacuum cleaners and fans use Tesla's AC motors.
    If Wagner is going to go to bat for Edison, he at least ought to acknowledge that vacuum cleaners use universal motors, which are series-wound commutated-armature motors. These are just like DC motors (they will run fine on DC or AC) and do not descend from Tesla's induction motor technology. (They are also more expensive and crankier, which is why you don't see them used as widely; Tesla really did create the technology for the ubiquitous fractional-horsepower motors we now take for granted. But vacuum cleaners aren't part of his legacy.)
    --
  • I have blocked all the ad sites which try to set third-party cookies. Any ad site which tries to set a cookie on my machine goes into my blacklist, and neither Slashdot nor anyone else will get any more impression revenue nor any click-through revenue from me for any ad that comes from that server. Ever. No matter where the original page came from.

    If you truly need ad revenue from my activities to run Slashdot, you're going to have to do it without consorting with privacy-invaders.
    --

  • I have no clue how that is called or what it was, but I remember very well one cool picture (taken in his lab, that pic is still not in "hands of the democratic governments that want to cover up everything") where he was literally holding an electric ball in his hands.
    You can do this yourself, today. Get any fluorescent tube, and put it in a strong RF field. Many things will do to generate such a field; an HF transmitter, a Tesla coil, or the inside of a microwave oven. The lamp will light with no current applied to the terminals. If you made a spherical fluorescent tube and held it in your hands, you'd look just like Tesla.

    Tesla was a genius. He was not a magician. There is a difference.
    --

  • In the late 1980's-early 1990's, a company (I can't remember the company name) came out with a lightbulb EXACTLY like Tesla's, with the exception that the RF source was built into the base.
    The oscillator was built into the base; the "antenna" (induction coil) was in the center of the bulb itself. It induced current into the mercury vapor inside the bulb via good old dB/dt effects (a changing magnetic field induces a voltage). The goal was to build a fluorescent in almost the same form-factor as an incandescent bulb. The bulbs didn't "burn out", true, but the phosphors degraded with use; it would eventually need replacing due to that. The electronics cost money and the RF radiation couldn't be brought down to acceptable levels, which made them a very tough sell. What killed them was the folded-tube compact fluorescent. We don't need RF-excited mercury plasmas to make a small fluorescent bulb, regular old electrodes can do the job.
    --
  • Ahh, but this is the primary reason why such theories proliferate. Solar, geothermal, tidal, etc, etc, all have the ability to make major contibutions to our energy needs without the production of toxic pollutants or green house gas emissions.
    Without greenhouse gases, certainly. Without toxic pollutants, it's far less clear-cut. Geothermal energy, to name one, brings up toxic brines and radioisotopes (NORM, Naturally Ocurring Radioactive Materials) as part of its normal operation. Use of tidal power disturbs shore ecologies. Solar and wind suffer from the problem that they are diffuse and intermittent sources, and people have been struggling to build robust and inexpensive machinery to use it for centuries. These problems haven't been solved because of conspiracies, they haven't been solved because they're HARD!
    A study of these technologies invariably leads you to the conclusion that some very powerful people are doing everything that they can to prevent the adoption of these technologies.
    Invariably? I don't think so. I've studied these technologies more than many of the self-styled advocates, and my conclusion is quite different. My advantage is that I'm well-studied in physics, chemistry and thermodynamics compared to the conspiracy theorist; they ask "why didn't they..." without bothering to see if Nature might have made it a less than trivial proposition. The difficulty of the problems has led to investment and industrial R&D going elsewhere, and that is just the way things work. Unless you like throwing money and effort down unproductive ratholes, you'd do the same thing too. What scares me sometimes is how hard it is to get some people to understand that.
    --
  • I didn't think that the bulb would last forever, but it did last a LONG time - much greater than that of flourescent tubes, which tend to burn out around the electrodes.
    That doesn't help you if the phosphors degrade enough. The biggest point of replacing an incandescent with a fluorescent is to get higher efficiency, and sooner or later the fading of the light output makes it worthwhile to replace the bulb even if it hasn't totally failed.
    Regarding the RF, was this amount of RF any greater than that which is emitted from a monitor? Especially considering how close you sit to one?
    This bulb had emissions of a very different character. They were actual radio emissions, not just magnetic fields. They carried far enough to interfere with other radio gear. While there may or may not be actual hazards associated with the magnetic fields from CRT's, interference to licensed users of the radio spectrum is something the FCC frowns on. If it would be impossible to sell such a bulb in the USA due to interference concerns, it's an excellent reason to deep-six the product.

    I don't recall who was developing these bulbs, sorry. If you're interested in inductively-coupled plasmas, I'm sure you could find some sources on the web by searching under the keywords "plasma physics induct".
    --

  • The difficult point is - how do you distinguish the viable possibilities from the fruit-cake ideas? How many of the fruit-cake ideas are actively promoted and backed by vested interests to simply confuse the issue and make it even harder ( ie, dis-information dissemination to overload the public so that they give up in disgust and simply accept what they are told? ).
    Sorry, this was the meat of your point and I missed it.

    I doubt that any of the fruitcake ideas are cynically promoted. In my position as a person whose technological and scientific literacy is way above the norm, I have seen just how ignorant (clueless) the average person is. Remember, these are the same people who believe in UFO abductions and the like. They hold passionate beliefs for which they have no evidence whatsoever, and see no contradiction in this. Among this mass of scientific illiterates, there are some like Joseph Newman who believe that someone (perhaps they themselves) have The Secret to unlimited energy, and it's being covered up by unnamed "vested interests". Others with a will to believe follow the Newmans and Velikovskys etc. like sheep.

    I don't know why they do it. Perhaps it's so much easier for them to believe that some human agency stands in the way of utopia rather than nature, because they cannot accept that the universe could thwart their wish-fulfillment fantasies. At the limit it's a witch-hunt mentality; if they aren't getting what they want, someone's responsible and their head should roll! I have encountered this mentality all over the place, and I can't believe that any significant fraction of these people are paid fruitcakes. I think that the combination of general dumbth and credulity, combined with lousy public education, is quite enough to explain the observations. "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity."
    --

  • You've got it backwards (Score:3)

    by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Thursday February 10, 2000 @06:34AM (#1289778) Journal
    The danger of AC is that once you pick up a live wire, you just *can't* let go
    That's the danger of DC, not AC. DC causes muscles to clamp; one of the sensations of low-current DC is not being hurt by the sensation, but being unable to let go. There is a very famous photo of the "electric smile generator" which ran a DC current from a ball on one cheek to a ball on the other; this tensed the cheek muscles and produced an involuntary smile. You wouldn't get this with AC.

    Edison tried to kill AC by having legislatures sanction its use for executions; this is how we got the electric chair. Ironically, DC would have been much more humane; just run enough current to cause the heart to clamp tight and stay that way, and unconsciousness would follow within seconds without burning. Instead we have convicts bursting into flame; burning at the stake with all the modern improvments.
    --

  • Tesla rocks the house man! That teacher must be pretty cool. My favorite album is their first one, Mechanical Resonance!!!


    Allright, I'm sorry, but somebody had to make the joke. *ducks*

  • A whole bunch of info on Tesla is also available at www.amasci.com
  • Uh, open up a college physics text book, does it say who the unit "Tesla" was named after? No.

    He's just as credited as Dr. Kilogram, Dr. Metre and Dr. Second.
  • > Wire up cables, sure you can charge everyone,
    > put free power in the air? nooooo, cant do that,
    > no money in that even tho its probably better.

    As much as I like tesla, and think he had some
    neat inventions (I notice noone has mentioned
    his lesser known inventions, and as much as I
    sympathise with your anti-capitalist sentiment
    (I am anti-capitalist myself), I have to say
    Broadcasting power is just not a good idea.

    A) It would make radio transmission nearly
    worthless. It tends to truely foul things up.

    B) Tesla Coils are funny...they actually use
    the ground itself as 1 plate in a huge capacitor.
    Its a neat concept...really cool...but...
    big ones (like what are needed for broadcasting
    power) do weird things.

    They tend to pump enough electrical energy into
    the earth that "ground" is no longer zero
    potential.

    This doesn't even take into acount the strange
    properties of high frequency energy...which would
    probably make computers that we know and love
    almost impossible.

  • Yellow and red text on black ? That certainly lights up my kook filter. OTOH, he's still basically right. Tesla is under-credited generally, and the Smithsonian is particularly bad at this. I don't particularly like the "Tesla the great American" spin though.

    As we all know (A Brit writes) the lightbulb was invented by Swan anyway 8-)

  • If Tesla were alive today... (Score:4)

    by Shimbo ( 100005 ) on Thursday February 10, 2000 @12:43AM (#1289807)
    I can see him being denounced loudly on /.

    'Why has he got a patent on alternating current - it's not like he invented electrons, he's just moving them back and forwards. Anyone could have thought of that.'

  • are too slow. why on earth is there now a Java® powered banner ad that takes more load time than the actual page (on my ol' 56k-er). please, can we agree upon animated gifs until cable modems are the rule, not the exception?

    yes, moderator, this is a bit off-topic.. but it is relevent. if you don't agree, just leave me to my old lonesome
  • How much more "credited" can a physicist get than by having an SI unit named after him? Or do you Americans have your own units even for magnetic flux density?

  • Comments on the situation. (Score:4)

    by bons ( 119581 ) on Thursday February 10, 2000 @02:53AM (#1289836) Homepage Journal
    rant one
    Yes, the smithsonian is not a bastion of truth. Personally I find it humorous that a teacher is complaining about that, especially after years of being told Columbus discovered America (and the numerous detentions I got for questioning and later arguing inane comments like that).

    rant two
    Lessons learned by the third graders so far:

    • Adults lie
    • Adults spend money to get other adults to lie
    • Your Congressman doesn't care
    • Your textbooks are filled with lies
    • People will give you money if you ask for it
    • Businessmen are more famous than inventors
    • None of the above are likely to change

    rant three Having read the article, he complains that we have the right to demand the smithsonian to do what we want because we pay our taxes and their money comes from our taxes. He then complains that Orkin is unfair in donating a half million dollars (which might have come our of our taxes otherwise) in order to get their man in. Hmmmm... should have spent more money. Perhaps if he had given the donations to the smithsonian and asked them to correct the problem...

    rant four
    How does any of this surprise us? After all, we've been hearing people wonder about the integrity of Slashdot since the Andover and VA Linux acquisitions. If a news group is owned by a larger company (as is the case with Time, MSNBC, Webmonkey and Slashdot) we no longer truth that news group as much as we used to, as we believe they must, at times, answer to their corporate masters. Likewise, if an charity can receive donations, we believe that charity has an obligation to give something in return for those donations. That's how the game is played.

    All that being said, Tesla was, and will forever be one of my heros. He will always be remembered, even if he is never mentioned. Much like Bucky Fuller after him, his legacy lives on.

    -----

  • Tesla did some great work developing the theory and practice of rotating AC machines, but some of of the other stuff is pure hype.

    • The picture of Tesla sitting in a room full of big sparks [concentric.net] is a fake; the sparks and Tesla were photographed separately.
    • His own claims for his wireless power transmission scheme were achievable, but not useful. He claimed he could light one 40W bulb per house in a small town with a big receiving antenna in each attic and a megawatt-sized transmitting station. That's possible, but incredibly inefficient. Plus it causes giant RFI problems. The U.S. Navy's big submarine communication ELF station in upper Michigan has power levels like that, and they have to ground fences and other large metal objects for miles around.
    • Tesla's giant Wardencliffe tower would never have worked. His scheme was to use big UV lamps to ionize a path upward to the ionosphere, so that RF power could be conducted by the ionosphere. RF propagation doesn't work that way; the ionosphere isn't a conductive surface.
    • The original "vibrating building" story (which is probably bogus) involved attaching a vibrator to the steel skeleton of a building under construction. A steel building skeleton doesn't have much damping until the walls and floors are installed, because steel has a high coefficient of restitution (>99%). If the structure has a single resonant frequency (something modern designs avoid for earthquake and wind-stiffening reasons), you might be able to pump it up with a vibrator. You can't pump it up indefinitely; when the loss per cycle equals the energy input per cycle, that's as far as you can go. Irrelevant note: whatever happened to the group putting math typesetting into HTML? I'd put some equations here if I could. For systems with more damping, you can't get very far trying to pump energy into a resonance, which is why the explosives/earthquake idea was a dud.

    Tesla was indeed a great inventor, but he's been adopted as a cult hero by the UFO/Area 51/free energy crowd, which hypes him to the point of silliness. Remember him for AC power, and forget the junk science of his later life.

  • Re:Tesla *does* get proper credit! (Score:3)

    by butchhoward ( 145815 ) on Thursday February 10, 2000 @04:31AM (#1289874)
    We call them 'Gores' because everyone knows Al actually invented the AC motor.

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