Slashdot Mirror
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."
Not even that. The submitter completely made up the "BlackBerry" part! It would be better to say Tesla predicted the early smart phone, although it appears at one point he's suggesting speech-to-text as well.
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
I think you must be in the wrong country.
In fairness to the submitter, the article writer made it up too (as do quite a few others)
I can't seem to find the original source (AP I assume) but here's a version substituting "SMS" for "Blackberry"
TECHNICALLY, a satphone only transmits up to the closest satellite. Single sideband (PSK31 if you want data) on the HF bands can transmit all over the world.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
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.
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.
Tesla was, for the greater part of his life, badly hampered by a severe lack of money to carry out his more expansive projects. Some of this was due to his overgenerous nature, as when he gave up entirely the royalties Westinghouse owed him on the power-generation devices Tesla had designed, some was due to his lifelong habit of chasing ideas off in odd directions without consideration for their economic utility, and some was due to his 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.
While this article quotes Tesla predicting wireless technology, it is not very similar to what we actualy have. His prediction was for central switching stations, not distributed cell towers. What Telsa was talking about is not what we have today. It bears a superficial resemblance, but it is a completely different technology.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
that's the funny thing. Blackberry is a late comer "mee too" copycat.
Motorola had the first QWERTY data phone.. the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.
Nokia was next with their Mobira Senator.
Then IBM had the personal communicator.
I had the first real smartphone the QCP6035 from kyerocera. It predated the first blackberry by 2 years.
Blackberry did not invent anything. They simply copied others ideas and patented them as their own.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Kay proposed his Dynabook in 1972... but before that Gene Roddenberry and company proposed the PADD in Star Trek circa 1966. The iPad looks (and sounds) a lot more like PADD than the Dynabook.
Hey, credit where credit is due!
Alternately it could be sarcasm.
There are cell phone watches out there. It's just that the demand for something so small is not around as it's not very convenient to use.
I agree - considering that most of the things we use - are directly from the Lab of Edison, where my grandmother use to work as a close personal assistant of his. An no, I dont worship the old bastard - i do respect him. And yes his toiling and rants with Westinghouse / Tesla were probably the catalysts in competition for such and amazing inventor's streak - but its is UNDOUBTEDLY the crazy angry old Edison that out did Tesla when looking at the pragmatic and practical value of such said inventions.
And its Marconi that invented the Radio, not Tesla. The argument was concluded in European and World courts over ten years ago.
sounds like a car phone to me, those pre-cell phones that had a limited number of channels covering a whole city.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
No, I am picking at technical details. The device that Tesla predicted would look completely different from a technical standpoint than the devices we have today. He was perdicitng something that would be an offshoot of his wireless electricity distribution system. As others have pointed out, the main thing to consider before thinking his predictions were so wonderfully prescient is how many predictions did he make that have not panned out at all.
If Tesla had been a science fiction writer (similar to, say, Jules Verne) I would be willing to allow that he predicted modern cell phones (and if that is all you want to make of it, OK). But as a technical innovator, his concept of mobile communication devices is based on a completely different technical paradigm. A technical paradigm that would never have led to the devices we know today.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Edison was one of the great inventors of all time. Not the greatest. Not the most prolific either. But nobody I know would argue against him having a place in the top 20 inventors of all time.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
But he did. Telsa was the inventor of the AND logic gate. When computers started to catch on and research was done and people went to patent their inventions, some of them found out that Telsa already had the patents some more than 50 years earlier because he was already developing the same techniques while trying to control devices wirelessly. So, he did do that, it just wasn't mentioned in the article probably because it wasn't seen as important at the time and because it was quite simply beyond everybody else.
When Tesla developed weapons for the military and displayed them at a World's Fair, he demonstrated remote controlled submarines and torpedoes and tried to explain how both the submarines and torpedoes could be controlled and guided wirelessly by operators far away. In a time where a simply wireless system that allowed ships to talk to each other reliably, submarines, or torpedoes would have been a major military breakthrough, the army and navy just couldn't even comprehend what he was talking about let alone figure out how to use remote drones effectivly.
I meant, iPad wasn't Stolen by Apple.
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
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.
Most normal people simply say, "just a sec, I got a message on my phone." What wierdos call it a blackberry?
The same weirdos who ask for a Kleenex instead of a facial tissue? Or who ask "Would you like a coke?" when they're asking if you'd like a carbonated beverage? Or who ask for an Aspirin instead of a tablet of acetylsalicylic acid?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/04/25/1143225/Dont-Talk-To-Aliens-Warns-Stephen-Hawking?art_pos=1
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.