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Disentangling Facts From Fantasy In the World of Edison and Tesla
dsinc writes "Forbes' Alex Knapp writes about the Tesla idolatry and confusing his genius for godhood: 'Tesla wasn't an ignored god-hero. Thomas Edison wasn't the devil. They were both brilliant, strong-willed men who helped build our modern world. They both did great things and awful things. They were both brilliantly right about some things and just as brilliantly wrong about others. They had foibles, quirks, passions, misunderstandings and moments of wonder.'"
Tesla > Edison.
All that's left of them now is what mattered the most to the rest of the world.
This is all lies and propaganda brought to you by those crazy Edison supporters. DC current. As if.
Which is precisely what TFA is addressing.
It's the same kind of media attempt to put forth a "balanced" view, even when there's a clear bias in reality. It happens all the time in politics. Just because they want to claim that Tesla not marrying is the same as Edison strangling puppies for sexual pleasure, doesn't mean those two options are the same. Some times, there isn't any reason to search for a middle ground, if one side is simply wrong.
I have to say: it was a good article, a good argument, relevant to my geek interests and a worthwhile way to spend some time on the daily commute. Compliments to the submitter.
Actually, anyone who electrocutes animals *is* a douchebag.
Certainly not by the measure of business acumen, and, therefore, things he personally achieved. Tesla was undeniably greater in terms of "things he was wrong about", and "general insanity".
Cats = chosen creatures of God.
"In the beginning, God created man, but seeing him so feeble, He gave him the cat." - Warren Eckstein
Dogs are the opposite of cats, and "dog" backwards = "god", thus cats are as gods.
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." - Albert Einstein
Can anyone prove this wrong? This also backs up perhaps how cats will always get what they want, even from 4chan.
I live in Belgrade, Serbia, and Tesla is revered as god here. For a person who only spent a night in Belgrade (he was born in what is now Croatia but was of Serbian ethnicity), it's a bit strange he got major boulevard and airport named after him. He is also on our money and has a number of monuments.
We also have a Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, which I recommend everybody visit. It has working examples of some of his inventions, so you can see what the first radio controlled device looked like.
I don't mind it though, he was a brilliant mind. Of course, sometimes he was out of touch with reality and had no sense of business, but geniuses often are like that...
If you can find this series subtitled and want to learn more about the life of Tesla, I strongly recommend watching this.
"Highway to Hell" may have not been possible without Telsa/Edison so they are both equally important.
The wireless energy one would be a good example. Tesla was really big on the idea and did a lot of work on it but the reason it never happened wasn't because of some mean conspiracy against him, unless you count the laws of physics. It is because of the inverse-square law. Electromagnetic waves drop in power with the square of distance from the transmitter. Net effect is that to cover any distance you need a bigass transmitter and when you are talking powering something, it is just not feasible.
Tesla tried to solve the problem but couldn't, because it is just how EM propagation works. It would take some other method for wirelessly transmitting power to make it feasible, which nobody, including Tesla, has come up with.
The guy was an unmitigated genius, and also a complete nut, but he wasn't some god of all invention who created everything good.
Also there's a difference between contributing to things, and inventing them. Tesla contributed to the theories behind radar, but he didn't make it happen. If you want to go on the "who started it" thing you'd probably end up back with James Clerk Maxwell, given that it was his equations that formed the foundation for classical electrodynamics and thus the most basic theoretical foundation. Of course, there was a hell of a lot from that to functioning radar.
My bet is that comic spurred this article. The writer was annoyed by this deification of Tesla.
2 things:
1) Congratulations, /., on your new corporate partnership with Forbes. I'm sure it will bring synergistic benefits to both of you.
2) The article fails to determine the source of the ridiculous Tesla idolatory that has poisoned sensible discussion about his achievements for the last 30 years. In case you didn't know, it can be traced back to one single book: Tesla: Man Out of Time, by Margaret Cheney. That ridiculous hagiography - and its even more ridiculous follow-up, Tesla: Master of Lightning - has a hell of a lot to answer for.
But it was legitimately a problem back in the day. The reason was twofold:
1) There's no good way to generate DC using a mechanical system. So while something like a solar cell will generate you DC, a mechanical generator won't, at least not without some fiddling and then not as efficiently as AC. These days, not a big deal, we have good devices to convert from one to the other quite efficiently. However when the current wars were happening, DC generation wasn't as good as AC generation. You see it to this day: Cars use alternators (as in alternating current) to generate power, despite being DC devices. The alternator then has a rectifier bridge to turn it in to (pulsed) DC power, which the battery helps clean up.
2) There was no good way to convert DC voltage. AC is exceedingly easy to convert with simple technology: A transformer. You can step it up or down with some wraps of wire, and it is fairly efficient to boot. No such luck with DC. There just isn't a good way to step it up with the technology they had back then. As such you needed generators close to the home. You couldn't run massive voltages, far too dangerous (and as a practical matter difficult to generate directly) and you couldn't go for long runs because of impedance loss. These days thyristors can do the trick nicely but they are 1950s tech, and the ones that can do HVDC are more recent.
Were we to rebuild the grid these days, DC might well make sense (though it does have some other issues that need to be considered). However during the current wars, Tesla really did have it right. The technology was there to make AC work well, not DC.
Edison really was fighting for DC because of his invested infrastructure, not because it was a superior technology at the time.
Because he used to work 70 hours at a stretch -- like many computer programmers I know.
Our current patent system was around then, doofus, and the lightbulb was patents. Patents != Copyright.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I'm not sure his over the air power transmittion would eliminate TV or radio. It was supposed to be thorugh capacitance vibrations. Transmitting information via an electromagnetically vibrating atmosphere might hit the same hurdles as ethernet over power lines. Off the top of my head I don't see any reason other than business that his towers of power wouldn't work along side of radio communication. But then again, I almost failed electromagnetics.
Edison was pretty much the devil. He tortured puppies to make AC look dangerous. That makes him arguably a puppy killing terrorist. Also, the article claims that Edison solved "a very tough engineering problem", when it basically amounted to just changing the filament. That's a relatively minor step that resulted in a major change in commercial viability, sort of a straw that broke the horses back thing, and his choice of filament was replaced in the bulb we know today.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Oh, but it was. The U.S. film industry being based in Southern California is due in large part to that fact.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The groundless assumption that since neither extreme can be true, the truth must be precisely in the middle.
Can anyone prove this wrong?
Apparently not.
In fact my cat has just told me that its positively correct.
Ill raise you Newton, F=ma. Guess what's accelerating.......... Tesla accomplished more when he worked for edison, no, when he was contracted by edison, than Edison ever thought up in his lifetime. Edison made money, Tesla helped make our present world. Alex, you're an idiot. That's like saying Newton did it by himself. Newton was a genius, no doubt, but he adopted the capernican system, which in turn was Ptalumei. I its early and my spelling sucks while driving in traffic after logging in after 1.5 yrs, retrieving passwords etc, just to point out how much of an idiot Alex is. Tesla rules!
He had a huge staff who did the vast bulk of his R&D and a significant % (possibly the majoroty) of his achievements were actually made by his staff with Edison just facilitating their efforts and then claiming the kudos.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Yeah, no.
This is exactly what we're talking about. Clever fella, certainly. God who took with him to the grave secrets we haven't discovered even to this day? Not so much.
Oh wait, was this a troll?
"There is enormous speculation about his death and his later work in dealing with bending space-time"
He bent space time after his death?
A discussion of the development of electricity without mentioning Charles Proteus Steinmetz is incomplete. You are pandering to the people with the big PR departments and an army of lawyers instead of the ones who really got things done.
Steinmetz understood how to build three-phase motors (the standard for big motors today) better than anyone in the early days.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Everything you really need to know about Tesla vs Edison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gOR91oentQ
Communism > Socialism > Capitalism
Sincerely,
Signed: The Rest of the World
Socialism and Capitalism are economic systems.
Communism is a political system - a rather brutish one.
And as far as Socialism > Captialism? In a dualistic World where you're only allowed to have one or the other I'd have to reverse that sign. OTOH, some of the Scandincian countries have interesting blends of the two systems and the thing that REALLY intrigues me is that they are ALWAYS on the top of the list when it comes to happiness and freedom.
I'll take being happy over rich anyday.
It's not your fault. We here in the US are pounded by propaganda like any other peoples living under an exploitive power elite.
"Business magazine says businessman better than engineer" shocker.
Um... that's not different enough.
They teach us about Thomas Edison in schools. Everyone thinks he's great. Therefore, there must be another way.
To be hip, we talk about Tesla instead. You probably haven't heard of him.
Futurist Traditionalism
The fact that he dismantled his death ray after that unfortunate accident in Tunguska, instead of using it to wipe Edison's laboratory off the face of the planet, proves both the man's vision and magnanmity.
I presume you have wikipedia to back up this claim?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Edison = Jobs, Tesla = Ritchie
After what I saw edison did to the elephants, and the IP agreements he made his
employees sign, I lost all respect for the man both his intellect and his person.
Edison was a dark and troubled person. Killing something just to prove a point -
someone else did that, too...
When I was a kid 30 years ago, Edison was still the undisputed old god of engineering. It only was later, that he became villified as the suppressor of Tesla and AC. I think, it has todo with Edison's viewpoint towards intellectual property. He and his colleagues at Menlo Park invented mainly and did not produce anything, so he relied on patent fees. He procescuted anyone who produced stuff that violtated one of his many patents including early movie technology. This forced movie people from the east coast to the west. The rest is history. Tesla was clearly the far better, more visionary scientist. Edison remains the more important inventor and engineer (lightbulb, phonograph, movie technology).
Edison will always get my disdain for running the most disgusting smear/FUD campaign that I am aware of.
He repeatedly and publicly executed animals to "prove" the danger of AC current.
He fried Cats/Dogs/horses/cows and even an Elephant, just to discredit a fellow inventor.
Why Forbes is attacking some webcomic's exaggerated and tongue in cheek interpretation of Tesla while trying to present it as some kind of established opinion?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
also, Tesla didn't electrocute an elephant to scare little old grannies about the dangers of D.C. And any neigborhood dogs and cats he could get his slimy paws on. So yes, Edison was douchebag. A product of his time, but a world-class electrified douchebag nonetheless.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Actually most of Edison's ideas WERE his own. He didn't do much of the actual work of constructing prototypes or models, his hired "technicians" did this work. Edison did supervise the most interesting projects but his employees were simply given some guidelines and did the work themselves in most cases. Comparing him with Bill Gates would be correct, Mr. Gates was very involved with most of Microsoft's technical direction and he contributed to much of the technology they developed, at least in the early days.
On very interesting fact is that Edison almost invented electronics. He was working on improving the telephone (he did invent the carbon button microphone) at the same time that he was working on improvements to the electric lamp. One problem that plagued the early production carbon filament lamps was a gradual darkening of the inside of the bulb (due to evaportation of the carbon filament). Edison noted that one side of the bulb (the side connected to the positive end of the filament) darkened more than the negative side AND that a shadow appeared behind the positive end where no carbon was deposited. This was partly do to the bulb not having a perfect vacuum. Edison added a free wire into the bulb to which he connected a sensitive ammeter. When the meter was connected between this free wire and the positive end of the filament a current flowed. When it was connected to the negative end of the filament there was no current. This was the "Edison Effect", or thermionic emission, the principle upon which the vacuum tube depends on. If Edison was aware of atomic theories of electricity (IE: that electricity is the flow of negative atomic particles) is unknown. If he had been just a bit more curious he might have inserted a THIRD element into the bulb between the filament and his first electrode and experimented with the effects of both positive and negative charges on it. If he had he would have been able to notice that there was a ratio between the current change on the outer element and the voltage change on the inner, IE: amplification that could have been used as a repeater element for telephone circuits. Edison was just a small step away from inventing the Triode Vacuum tube about 30 years early! He was working on two projects that could have been connected to do this. However it didn't happen. I wonder how the world might have changed if Edison had made this leap of discovery.
And his filament didn't even work all that well. It was the work of another inventor, a practically unknown black man named Louis Latimer, I believe, who finally invented a better filament for the light bulb.
And Edison takes all the credit. As usual.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Mr. Gates was very involved with most of Microsoft's technical direction and he contributed to much of the technology they developed, at least in the early days.
Yeah, like when he stayed up all night writing QDOS and then MSDOS, the foundation of the Microsoft empire.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them f*cking each other over for a goddamn percentage."
Edison's organization had a habit of stealing/copying other people's intellectual property rather than sticking to original work.
This is ignorant. Yes he bought QDOS, and yes he had people working for him to modify it. This doesn't take away the fact that he was heavily involved in building the BASIC that was loaded into PROM on my PC-1! For the first several years of the company Bill coded. He also was very astute at guiding the financial and business aspects of his company, and being at the right place at the right time multiple times. Don't forget that he pointed IBM at Digital Research FIRST, before he went and purchased QDOS. At the time - Microsoft was a language company. They specialized in creating language compilers. That is how IBM had Pascal, etc. available for the PC the first day it was introduced!
GAWD - you're making me defend Bill Gates - STOP THAT! (Now I've got to go and compile a linux kernel or something to make up for this!)
Have you compiled your kernel today??
I have to start by saying that I am extremely biased. Even though it is only a few hours away, my wife won't let me visit the Edison museum in Fort Myers for fear I would burn it down.
However Edison was a truly dispicable man. You can say what you want about Gates, Jobs, Elison, Zuckerburg and others but they are businessmen and often nasty businessmen.
Edison spent years trying to discredit A/C including killing animals as large as an elephant.*
One of his inventions was the electric chair which by it's very design is a device to kill.**
The nascent movie business actually pulled up stakes and moved 3000 miles to a little CA town called Hollywood because Edison's thugs would destroy any film or equipment being used for movie making unless he got a cut.***
I could go on but I think I'm getting a tad emotionally attached to this post. I think all of us are. Have you ever seen so many four and fives?
* Jan. 4, 1903: Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point.
** Edison's Menlo Park Lab Invents the Electric Chair.
*** Edison's hires goons to shut down movie filming.
I had occasion to speak a number of times with a nephew of Tesla's. He claimed that the family always privately believed that Edison had torched his uncle's New York lab.
They both contributed in their way. Edison was moderately intelligent, methodical, driven, and most importantly -- completely sane. This brute-force approach produced usable, marketable results, although no advancements in scientific theory. However, he was the perfect person to stand on the shoulders of giants to bring technology to the masses.
Tesla was the epitome of the insane genius, prone to bouts of unworkable fancy that had a grain of great insight that would later be worked out by others. Wanting to use radio waves to detect subs was a good example, envisioning RADAR before anybody else, yet not quite understanding how it could be practically applied.
What SCO became wasn't what SCO once was.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
The US has troops in dozens of countries around the world in various capacities outside of current war. We have the leftover cold war troops in Europe, the troops holding the line against North Korea's insane leaders, and smaller advisory or advance contingents on the rest of the continents except Antarctica. It is understood that we are the real defense for many other countries should the SHTF, so those countries don't have to spend so much on their own defense.
Some countries do complain about the actions of some individuals stationed there, and it's understandable, and they will grumble about kicking the US out. However, they are usually reticent to take the financial hit that a US withdrawal will cause. I've seen a community in Germany decimated after a base closure, since the base was a good chunk of the local economy (direct gov-gov payments, soldier spending, and hiring of many local nationals on the base). Usually when they really want us gone, it's because our bases are sitting on some valuable real estate.
So glad someone remembers this.
So when do we get to put the RIAA/MPAA to task for decades of patent violations, with plenty of documented history behind it?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
he was NOT a patent troll, since he BUILT the stuff he patented.
True but he was a different kind of patent "troll". For example with the light bulb once Swan had patented his design in the UK Edison submitted a almost direct copy for patenting in the US and then tried to sue Swan for patent infringement in the UK! The two eventually settled out of court with Swan running the UK side of things and Edison in the US. So by today's standards he was not a troll but he was certainly some sort of unpleasant creature living under the patent bridge - a patent orc perhaps since he liked to raid others patents and got away with it due to his wealth?
No, Tesla very likely figured out a way to distort time quantization while screwing around with electricity. At least, that's what has been postulated.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
in 2007 NYC finished the transition to AC http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/11/16/225213/the-last-dc-power-grid-shut-down-in-nyc
O hurray, another politics thread! I expected joke thread, then thread about TFA, then politics thread. But thank goodness it popped right up!
I like the humanist side of the argument, but I find that I'm compelled to ask: Who thought Tesla was a "god-hero" or Edison "the devil," to begin with?
Tesla has a unit named after him (one tesla = one weber per square meter). Edison does not.
If he bent space time I would guess it could have been done after his death.
And the pace continues. We're moving in the right direction, both in the US and overseas. I know we closed well over 100 Army installations (ranging from few-acre sites to large bases) in Germany since the end of the Cold War, and a good chunk of the remaining ones are scheduled to close in the next few years. The Air Force went from a huge number of bases to just a few. Ramstein is the only big US one left, we have a tanker squadron at the NATO-controlled Geilenkirchen, and Spangdahlem keeps getting smaller as they transfer planes out.
It's actually harder to do this in the US since we have congresscritters protecting their local jobs.
I just hope we do it smartly and don't overdo it like we did after WWII, screwing us for Korea.
...a vampire? :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Indeed. Edison's business practices are one of the big reasons the MPAA exists: to attempt to stop someone else doing to Hollywood what Edison/proto-Hollywood did to Méliès:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon#Distribution
OK let em get this straight. Conservatives (Forbes Magazine- very) are now worried about the deleterious effect on the free market if people know that Tesla was an radically under-appreciated genius who was repeatedly screwed over by the money-grubbing, politicking fame -hound Edison whose efforts to discredit, defame and disenfranchise Tesla set back progress by a good half century?
http://www.electroherbalism.com/bioelectronics/tesla/teslaversusedison.htm
The image of Edison as the icon and living embodiment of genius-through-sweat and progress via patented, monetized innovation, must at all cost be protected now? So the culture wars now extend to every nook and cranny at all times in history present, future and past ?
Let it go. Edison was what he was and yes, he was "banging" Tesla more frequently and harder than a screen door in a tornado. That's the tail of the historical tape. It doesn't mean anything beyond what it was.
For those modding me down, keep at it. It's obvious we're a few decades ahead of you in temporal theory.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” Nikola Tesla
I read TFA and it's absolutely correct. Tesla's contribution to the development of science and technology has been FAR overrated lately.
Edison's contribution, OTOH, was significant. He didn't "invent" that many things, he made them practical.
We had flying cars forty years ago. So why can't you buy one? Because they are not practical.
Everything that Tesla invented was like the Mizar Flying Pinto. Kind of interesting to look at, wonderful if it were true, but totally outside of practical reality.
And now a response addressing the article (again, from the oatmeal): http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response
This jyberish about which is better is irrelevent. Forbes article simply substitutes one misunderstanding for another.
AC comes out of spinning generators that produce electricity. Large scale production could not be rectified into DC back then. Even today it still is not all that practical but continues to improve. It is not about "transmission". DC has advantage over AC in transmission due to skin effect and lack of need for phase synchronization.
The real argument was NOT really about AC vs DC.. It was about local vs large scale means of production. A generator on every corner vs much fewer large scale generators. Fewer larger generators required higher voltages or unreasonable amounts of copper and could not be rectified. Smaller more numerous generators could make due with lower voltages that could be rectified.
Wow, great quote - I would mod you up if I could - Edison's disciples still work the same way today, and just as unproductively
Ignorant and ideological, in just a few words. It goes capitalism->socialism, since the latter came *in* *response* to capitalism. Try reading Marx's Captial, with his analysis and description of "unbridled capitalism" that existed in the 1800s... and the the right wing in the US is trying to reinstate now.
Socialism and the Labor (sorry, Labour, for you Canadians, Aussies, and Brits) are why you, personally, have a) holiday, b) weekends, c) any benefits from your job whatsoever, beyond the right of your boss to tell you "whatever it takes", and insist you work 60 or 80 hours weeks.
To quote Chaz Mulligan in Zelazny's Stand on Zanzibar, you're an ignorant idiot.
mark
Longitudinal waves. Standing Waves. Scalar Waves. All names of the same thing. A guy named Eric Dollard in CA did research on Tesla and evidently created the same single wire, ground, and air energy transmission system that Tesla did. He has displayed this publicly and as far as I know he attributes all of it to Tesla. I have read about this a bit, and there are groups who are actively pursuing this technology as well as the theory behind it, as it falls outside of classical EM theory. As far as E. Dollard, the displays are understood to be real and what Tesla discovered also real. History has been unkind to the man.
All points of time and space are connected.
Here's a great response to the forbes article, from the author of the article that the Forbes article is critiquing:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
And L. Ron Hubbard was a hell of a war hero.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”
Nikola Tesla
Having read extensively about both Edison and Tesla, my personal theory is that one of the reasons Edison championed DC power over AC is that he didn't UNDERSTAND AC, especially the concept of muti-phasic AC, which is what makes the AC system really work. He was very much a DC sort of guy, who had essentially no theory behind his inventions beyond what he saw worked. That is why he had the quote about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. One other problem he had was that even though Maxwell had published his definitive theory of electromagnetism before Edison even really started his career, Maxwell's prose was incredibly impenetrable -- especially for someone with as little formal education as Edison. Additionally, most of the real further work on the theory of electromagnetism was done in Germany (the scientific and technical hub of the world till the 1930's) and published in German, which Edison of course did not read. Tesla, on the other hand, studied electrical theory in Austria, spoke and read German, and had a mental gift for taking a bit of theory and constructing entirely complete inventions in his head. He considered the actual construction of the devices as little more than an afterthought.