Slashdot Mirror
Tesla: Erased at the Smithsonian
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."
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.
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):
e ring/
http://www.si.edu/organiza/museums/nmah/csr/pow
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.
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.
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.
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.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
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?
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
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.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
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.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
LinuxGeek dun said:
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...
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.)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Glgraca dun said:
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.
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Well, since it's called America instead of Colombia, at least someone must have remembered Amerigo Vespucci...
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.
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Seems to be doing about 150 hits/minute or so right now.
/. had linked it, they wouldn't need to sell shirts anymore... ;)
If they'd put up banner ads. before
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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.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
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.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
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".
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
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?
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grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
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?
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grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
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?
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
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.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
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.
Duct tape + WD40 => DevOps
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 can't remember where I found this 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?
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
Look people, freedom of the press applies only to the man who owns one. If you don't like/trust
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Tesla was a genius. He was not a magician. There is a difference.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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".
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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."
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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-)
'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?
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
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:
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.
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No Zen is good zen
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.