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BlackBerry Predicted a Century Ago By Nikola Tesla
andylim writes "According to the Telegraph, the BlackBerry was first predicted more than a century ago, by Nikola Tesla, the electrical engineer. Seth Porges, Popular Mechanics' current technology editor, disclosed Tesla's prediction at a presentation, titled '108 Years of Futurism,' to industry figures recently in New York. Recombu.com has published the original Popular Mechanics article in which Tesla predicts a mobile phone revolution."
Tesla was a freakin genius.
Our entire modern world wouldnt exist without him. And he never got any credit while he was alive.
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
But could he predict people associating "Blackberry" with "Phone that has a qwerty keyboard", the same way people associate "iPod" with "any MP3 player"?
Living With a Nerd
So the guy predicted text messaging. Impressive. But why does everything have to be a product placement nowadays?
This case is especially stupid, since what really enables worldwide access to messaging are $20 phones.
Not sure why this article claims he predicted the Blackberry. Maybe he predicted the iPhone. Or the Droid. Or just the generic cellphone. Or the walkie-talkie. It's nice that Blackberry is getting some face time but I don't really see the necessity to focus the article on a specific brand rather than the entire product category...
I don't find it very surprising that someone obsessed with perfecting the wireless transmission of electricity would envision the wireless transmission of information. The fact that he predicted Apple would abandon flash though, was a bit of a shock.
-=Bang Bang=-
Pure Blackberry advertising to increase usage in the UK. Why should they correlate "possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world." with the BB and not, say, any phone since the mid 90's?
Tom
Way back in the day when I was in high school I heard Tesla predicted the Internet, using exactly that quote. There's no arguing that Tesla did a lot of amazing things but he's no technological Nostradamus, no matter how much people try to shoehorn him into the role.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Tesla anticipating the advent of portable communication devices does not in any way equate to him having predicted the BlackBerry.
I've found that I'm making small scornful noises increasingly often while reading Slashdot and BetaNews headlines. I have yet to determine the threshold at which I will cease reading technology news altogether, but I feel it is rapidly approaching. I don't want to stop, so please, please, for the love of Christ please stop posting this frothy nonsense.
At the turn of the century, Marconi, Tesla and Jagdish Chandra Bose demonstrated wirelessly turning on a switch over a distance. Marconi could never get the resonance circuit working right (what he called coherer). Got the idea from Bose in a conference, (or stole Bose's notebook depending on where you hear it from). Bose was an idealist and never thought of commericializing his inventions, and was stuck in Calcutta, India anyway. Marconi went into wireless signal propagation and Tesla went into wireless power transmission.
Despite his visionary predictions about wireless communications, Tesla's dream of wireless transmission of power has not yet been realized.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It appears that Tesla thought of everything. So let's just toss out all those silly mobile patents and let the real innovation -- and competition -- begin.
What did he have to say about audio and video encoding?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
From Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis" of 1623:
We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines.
We find also diverse means, yet unknown to you, of producing of light, originally from diverse bodies.We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where were present all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and illusions, and their fallacies.
We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
Where the fuck do retards like you come from?
Asked the slashtard AC who posted via a device that runs on electricity, over a network that runs on electricity, to a server running on electricity and being viewed by ... wait for it ... other people using devices that run on electricity.
Whoosh!
Blackberry is one word, whereas SMS is three, and therefor far more complex and difficult to use.
For example 'i just got a message on my blacberry ' vs 'i just received a short message service message'. You see just how complex it is?
Clearly RIM were the ones who opened up mobile messaging to the world and deserve full credit.
Deleted
"It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have them appear instantly in type in London or elsewhere"
It looks like he even predicted outsourcing...
I have my secretary print out the slashdot comments and leave them on my desk every hour, you insensitive clod!
And so forth. As I recall, Verne also prediction global electronic communications in another novel...
Palm trees and 8
SO does this invalidate the claims in Nokia V. Apple lawsuit. If wireless connectiviry was anticipated in 1909, are practical methods for carrying that out truly surprising 100 years later?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
That stuff is either genius or failed experiments. How would you know the difference?
Note that this article predicts both the Internet and wireless technology, but with no mention of the digital aspects. It also predicts wireless power, such that a ship could be sent across the Atlantic, powered by a single wireless power station on one side. It predicted all of this would happen in something like 5 years.
So he was wrong about how long it would take, and he threw out at least one other idea in that article that we haven't seen happen, and have no evidence can happen.
I like Tesla as much as anyone else, but I'm not sure how to call this one. Fuzzy, at best. I think Orwell had it closer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's predicting exactly WHEN future events will occur that's the real trick.
I make my secretary type them out on a typewriter and put a ditto in the filing cabinet.
Nowhere does he say that we will use a complex network of machines to send and receive messages. He thought that you could easily transmit stuff directly to other devices even if they are hundreds of miles away and even if there are millions of them being used at the same time. This isn't true, just like the other things in the article are not possible with our current understanding of physics. I'm not very knowledgable about science, but I even doubt that this is at all possible in the way he described it.
Tesla would've invented it too, had he not been disrupted by ladies' emotions (and underwear). It's just as well though, somebody would have just stolen it anyway.
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
Anyone who researches Nikola Tesla would encountered this KNOWN fact.
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. - Nikola Tes
Freedom Fries! look it up if you don't believe me. It is filed under F in a card catalog in the Library of Congress in the special Tesla section.
Reading the New York Times column as reproduced on recombu.com, it seems that Mr. Tesla was more interested in the wireless transmission of power, and that he saw the wireless transmission of speech, pictures and other data as a trivial side-effect. His article implicitly seem to address the question: how to give a handheld device enough power so that it can transmit radio signals that have a practical range, and his answer is wirelessly transmitted power. This is somewhat ironic because his obsession with wireless power transmission is what caused friction with his financiers and made him be in debt for most of his later life. His wireless power transmission plans were never realized in a practical way; nowadays, people would find them laughable because they would incur enormous transmission losses and there would be concerns about the health effect of having ultra-high-intensity radio waves all over the place. And even without the technical hurdles, it would be hard to force people to pay for the power they use... Powering handheld communication devices was ultimately made possible possible by advances in battery technology, energy-efficient electronics, and sensitive receiving stations placed at a very high geographic density (aka. cellular networks), reducing the powered needed to transmit signals. That said, there are some contemporary applications of wireless transmission of power, but most of them are low-power short-range, or use different technologies than the ones proposed by Tesla. The most interesting ones are devices that dissipate stray radio waves to prolong their own battery life; I believe Nokia has been toying with this technology. Tesla did predict something in those lines, although he envisaged using natural sources of radio waves.
Of course, the incorrect parts of Tesla's prediction doesn't make the correct part any less impressive.
..we can expect his descendants to file a lawsuit with all mobile carriers for a piece of the money of every mobile phone?
What's a tethering charge, and how is it different from any other data transfer?
In mobile phone service plans offered to residents of the United States, a tethering charge is a surcharge for the privilege to use a handset associated with a plan as a modem for an external device, as opposed to using the handset as a terminal in itself. The rationale is that an external device with a 1680x1050 pixel display will be used to initiate the transfer of a larger quantity of data than a smartphone with a 320x480 pixel display.
Secretary? Typewriter? I have an army of monks with the finest parchment & goose feathers money can buy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Tesla certainly had far better powers of observation and prediction than did the fraud Nostradamus. Tesla also managed great accuracy in his words without all the bull shit and baffle gab of Nostradamus to separates fools from their money. That same Nostradamus spouted muck that so many people interpret as accurate predictions even in this time of supposed enlightened masses. The in reality is more about people trying to fit life to match prediction. The same people that live their life according the their horoscope. The same people that buy the books and films of present day frauds of Nostradamus. Tesla was a great man of his time and a great engineer, who could peek ahead in time using the facts of known physics. This is what separates genius from fraud.
Didn't Nikola Tesla predict the invention of the tractor? Penicillin? A cure for the common cold? The difference engine? The Triumph of The Third International? Popular entertainment that consisted of nothing more than the daily life of boring members of the audience (now that one was wierd. How did he know it woulld be more popular than the obsession with forensic science?).
Nope.
It was - people who were famous for being famous..?
No it wasn't that.
Dang! It was microwave food. MMM!
Hedamannnn!
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
IMHO we should all be pushing for a FOI request for all of Tesla's papers that were taken from his hotel room after he died. I'll bet the coolest stuff is kept secret.
Tesla's view of messaging involved wearing a small silver oxide dome on top of your head. You had a DC battery pack, capacitor, a nylon jacket, tinfoil shoes with rubber soles, and schrodinger's cat (dead of course).
You would generate current by standing in a puddle (or wet grass) and rubbing the dead cat against the nylon jacket. The DC battery pack would begin to charge but since you were insulated from ground, the electricity had nowhere to go and would build exponentially with each stroke of the cat. The Capacitor would charge itself by harvesting the free electrons on the surface of the jacket until finally, it would discharge creating a vertical bolt of electricity shooting out of the silver oxide dome on your head.
The bolt would travel to the nearest (or tallest) person and ground through the top of their heads and get their attention. Tesla demonstrated this at the World's Fair in 1910 creating a message which traveled 4 miles to nearby goat farm in Brussels (where it ignited and killed a pygmy goat). Due to the unpredictability of the recipient, and the awful stench on the receiving end, it just never really caught on.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
P. T. Barnum predicted Apple products over a century ago with his famous, "There's a sucker born every minute." (Actually, the Barnum quote is probably apocryphal.)
Parchment and goose feathers? I have my scribe carve the comments in cuneiform into clay slabs.
Me smash you head with rock.
Thant article is almost a patent application.
He should be awarded a retroactive unnecessary broad patent for everything wireless. Software and Hardware. We should also find a way to slip some video CODEC info into that patent.
That patent would have expired by now and it should neuter most trolls of today...
I don't think so. Isn't this an idea? You see ideas are cheap only when it comes from people who don't have a reputation of being right.
If it wasn't for Edison we wouldn't have just about every modern invention we enjoy, NOT Tesla. Please list the inventions of Edison and Tesla and them get back to me.... Tesla WAS NOT a great unsung genius, the guy was nuts and even claimed to have talked to Martians through radio!
He did some amazing stuff, and figures out AC. No real argument there.
But he also predicted a ton of stuff, was a little mad, and everyone ignores the crap that didn't seem to pan out.
At this point he is becoming Nostradamus of technology.
Did some really advance stuff, but people only talks about his wild ass guess that may or may not have claimed with the person reading them says that claim.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Clerics have a send spell; therefore he predicted wireless messaging.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
inability to obtain funding from others -- Westinghouse, for example, refused to fund Tesla's development of a broadcast-power system after Tesla admitted that there would be no way to determine how much power any given end-user consumed, so there would be no way to bill them for it.
As I understand it, the real demon in the Tesla saga was John Pierpont Morgan, who broke both Westinghouse and Tesla. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
Not only did J.P. Morgan suppress Tesla's most revolutionary work (by halting the flow of money), he also had a role in designing the field of electrical engineering so young engineers wouldn't be tempted to build on Tesla's work:
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Edison was a businessman that did invention when he had to. He had a pretty kickass PR department, but he's a Bill Gates. He may've done some of the earlier work, but he essentially became management, directing his underlings toward discoveries. Tesla was the polar opposite. Pretty crappy at business, but a LOT of ideas. Some of them worked out (AC power, the concept of remote power transmission), some more would have worked given more time and money, and some would never work (teleportation, time travel, etc). Tesla was an eccentric, and maybe a little off his rocker....but I think he deserves more respect than Edison for his crazy ideas, drive to get them to work, and the fact that he *did* get some of them off the ground.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It's not just that the tendancy to worship someone. There's that that tendancy to choose a devil as well. It's human nature to always find a good vs evil struggle in something. Tesla and Edison both contributed greatly to the technological world we enjoy today. Yes, Tesla was a little insane. Yes, Edison was a businessman. Yes, they didn't like each other. They still both made great contributions. Without them progress would have been delayed. Someone would no doubt have made their discoveries but it would have been some time later. I couldn't say if it would be a long or short time but given most major inventions and discoveries in history have at least a little controversy as to who was actually first my bets are on shorter. Still, the other discoveries and inventions which built on there's would also be delayed. We would probably be living in a world equivalent to 1 to 3 decades in the past.
Why is the Blackberry brand being used as a synonym for wireless messaging? There are certainly much better examples out there! If some brand has to achieve Kleenex like status in the wireless messaging market please, not Blackberry! Actually, as a programmer in a company which has to deal with interfacing Blackberries I can tell you they are buggy and they suck! Our customers only buy them because they are cheap.
It is possible, and already achieved.
Just not with OUR science..
Someone incarnating from another planetary system would of course try to re-invent what is commonplace in that world. It's just much harder when living with inferior science, culture and ethics.
Why else would he be so disinterested in data-transfer (mundane), and KNOW that teleportation is possible?
Which means he was just another lunatic. A genius NEVER works totally alone, he "stands on the shoulders of giants".
In TFA it's mentioned that Tesla said "So far only electric waves have been used which have been quickly dampened out in their passage through the air. It is possible, however, to transmit electric current of enormous power for thousands of miles without diminishing their energy". In this sentence Tesla proved he did not understand one of the most basic laws of the universe, the inverse square of distance law, first proposed by Newton and never disproved by anyone.
It's very easy to say a scientist was wrong, like the pope said of Galileo and Tesla said of Newton, but the burden of proof falls on anyone who tries to disprove a theory that produces working applications.
Tesla said over a hundred years ago that the principle of power falling with the inverse square of distance is not true. So far, no one, neither Tesla nor anyone who came after him, ever managed to transmit any form of energy through free space whose power did not fall with the square of distance.
If you predict something and it later happens, then you are a genius. If you predict something that never happens, then you are indistinguishable from a lunatic, but you *could* be a genius, who knows.
If you write something that most people find impossible to understand, but which eventually the greatest scholars of the field manage to understand, then you are certainly a genius. If you write something that no one ever is capable to understand, then you are certainly a lunatic.
This would be the same Edison that resisted our modern electrical transmission standard tooth and nail until he finally hijacked it from Tesla.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sun priests and clay tablets mate. That's where it's at.
I drank what? -- Socrates
640k is enough for anyone.
I drank what? -- Socrates
First off where exactly does Nikola Tesla predict the Blackberry? This could the an Android phone, or the Iphone or any modern phone, given what the article said. Shameless product placement. Also Nikola Tesla doesn't need Tesla Motors to 'live on'. I wonder what the writer got paid to use his hackneyed sense of journalism for this piece.
Here's a PDF of the original interview in the New York Times: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9907E3D7173EE033A25750C2A9639C946897D6CF
I'll bet 10 to 1 that if the article had read "iPhone Predicted a Century Ago By Nikola Tesla" most of these posts wouldn't exist.
Required reading for internet skeptics
And draw pictures on cave walls with blood.
There, fixed that for you.
Tesla's wireless power transmission isn't as mysterious as amateurs seem to believe. The problem is that it transmits power via electrical fields, which would cause a lot of interference with our modern electronic equipment. MIT is working on a wireless power solution that delivers via magnetic fields.
This is an idiotic story that I am ashamed made it on to Slashdot. Tesla never predicted BlackBerry; he predicted mobile technology for sending communications wirelessly (not to mention electricity transmission without wires). This technology is not exclusive to BlackBerry devices and writing an article with the the name BlackBerry (or any other name implying exclusivity) in the title smells of advertising being disguised as journalism. And that this article made it to Slashdot stinks even more, as I would have expected this to scrutinized and thrown out before it ever got proliferated to readers.
Live traffic updates are also one-way. Your GPS system has additional functions which depend either on GSM (as used by GPS-based tracking systems) or simple radio receivers tuned to RBDS services or a Traffic Message Channel (TMC) on FM or DAB.
Functionally, the GPS technology never transmits -- but a device including GPS functionality might also include other technologies to transmit information.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM