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BlackBerry Predicted a Century Ago By Nikola Tesla

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the and-he-looks-like-david-bowie dept.

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."

10 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Yet another example of why... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yet another example of why... by dave420 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ... Stuff he completely refused to document or explain, making it perfectly indistinguishable from the rantings of once-great scientist who has slipped into mediocrity, or even insanity. It's strange how you think the 'stuff' he came up with, that you don't understand, is somehow noteworthy. Surely that is irrational, as you don't know what it is. It's as if you are worshipping at the altar of Tesla. You're not a conspiracy theorist, are you?

  2. Free advertising going too far by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Blackberry Advert by tom17 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Blackberry Advert by dave420 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The real kicker is BlackBerry devices, and your aforementioned "any phone since the mid 90s", can't do that. Only satellite phones can do that, and I'm pretty sure RIM don't make those.

  4. Funny, I heard that one differently. by Abstrackt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:That's all fine and good by Jurily · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, Tesla was talking about the Nokia N900, but the submitter never heard about that one.

  6. Count the misses, not just the hits. by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
    1. Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. by iwbcman · · Score: 3, Insightful
      After having read about Tesla's demoing of remote controlled(wireless) submarine which used digital logic for navigation at he 1896 World Fair in Chicago(IIRC), I went to the head of the Physics department at the University of Louisville(circa '89), to ask him what he thought about Tesla's contributions. The man looked at me with a straight face and declared that Tesla was a raving lunatic who had contributed nothing. That day I dropped out of my Electrical Engineering major. I figured that if the supposedly brightest minds in our department were a) so utterly ignorant b) so obnoxiously arrogant and c) whose imaginative capacities were dwarfed by common ants, that I had nothing to learn from them. Haven't looked back once in all the years.

      It would not be utterly misguided to view the history of electrical engineering in the last 100 years as the attempt to document and render reproducible that which Tesla intuitively grasped and understood.

      I didn't bother mentioning to the man that if it wasn't for that raving lunatic who had contributed nothing that he would a) be working in a room powered by candlelight or b) that we would have DC power generators on every city block providing electricity .....At the rate we are going we will still need another 100 years to catch up to where Tesla was 100 years ago....He managed to pull these things off *without* a body of knowledge composed by millions of people working together, around the world, for the last 100 years-without modern theories, without modern equipment, without decent funding, etc.

      And our geniuses of today nitpick and dismiss what Tesla did, because we are oh so much smarter nowadays, give me a friggin break...

  7. Re:That's all fine and good by realityimpaired · · Score: 3, Insightful

    (And I have to say, is predicting a device really that special? Communication devices already existed, and this just said, one day they'll be smaller and mobile. I'm going to predict that in the future we'll have faster computers, and they'll be smaller too.)

    You're forgetting that he said it in a day and age where most people simply didn't have a telephone line at all, and if they did have one, they usually had a party line that they shared with their neighbours. Not only did he predict that communications devices would be smaller and mobile, he also said that everybody would have one, and that they'd be networked globally. That's a fairly big leap, and while you can argue in hindsight that the writing was on the wall, it's akin to predicting netbooks in 1943.

    And there's a few things that Tesla got wrong in his prediction... he said that it would be possible and easy for a single tower to control millions of devices from thousands of miles away. In reality there's millions of cell towers in the world, and each may have a few thousand phones on it at a maximum. There's a few orders of magnitude difference there.