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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."
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.
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
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
'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.'
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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