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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.
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.
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.
Actually, Tesla was talking about the Nokia N900, but the submitter never heard about that one.
Just wait until you read his letter on why the iPad sucks.
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.
Well, it makes a change from people round here talking about "Iphone-like device" to refer to "phone", and I'm surprised for once that the media have chosen Blackberry rather than Apple yet again.
Really though, looking at the article:
such a hand-held device would be simple to use and that, one day, everyone in the world would communicate to friends using it
There's nothing here that even implies a QWERTY keyboard, or even being so-called "smart" (which is ill-defined anyway, and simply means the high end at any given time). This description refers to mobile phones in general (whether it's communicating by speech, text, or Internet - almost all phones do all these things).
If anyone one company deserves the mention, it should be Nokia, who've shipped billions of these "hand-held devices" and have 40+% of the market. Other companies worthy of mention would be LG, Samsung, Motorola - in fact, RIM and Apple come rather low on the list.
(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.)
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!
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.
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.
You mean the windmill, invented by Heron of Alexandria in approx 50AD?
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.
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.