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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.
Which is precisely what TFA is addressing.
AC was much better for transmitting back then because transmitting high voltage is more efficient (less current means less copper and less resistive waste) and they had an efficient way of converting high voltage AC to low voltage AC (transformers). Efficient high voltage DC-DC voltage conversion was not something that was possible back in the day.
DC is actually more efficient for long distance high voltage transmission -- they just didn't have the technology to convert DC voltage. Now days HVDC transmission for new long distance lines is much more viable.
For modern high-voltage transmission, capacitive losses matter even at 50/60Hz. HV transmission is best done as DC. The thing Tesla was right about was that with technology available back then, AC distribution was the only feasible one. It has only been in the last few decades that we have the semiconductor technology that would allow completely solid state, DC-to-DC power conversion all the way to the consumer. That would be, ultimately, the way to go. DC-to-DC converters can be quite compact compared to 50/60Hz transformers, especially when running at high frequencies. I've seen resonant converters taking in 10kV 3 phase and outputting 1.5kV DC at about 50kVA. It had PFC as well. Two people could very easily lift one up, it was probably less than 200lbs, just bulky, and the magnetics (cores) could fit in a breadbox. Try lifting up a 50kVA oil immersed transformer with same ratings -- it's half a ton, give or take.
Alas, circuit breakers for DC are significantly more complex and expensive than ones for AC, since you have an arc that needs to be quenched. They need to have a chamber that utilizes spatial gradients in pressure or temperature (due to asymmetry of the plasma chamber) to move some air around to blow the arc out. AC arcs are usually self-extinguishing, except at extreme short-circuit currents and voltages (high voltage substations and the like).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
What the article does not note is that Tesla didn't really claim to have invented alternating current, but he did claim (probably validly) to having invented the a working, practical AC induction motor (while a student in Europe), which made AC practical for industry. He also claimed to have invented a practical AC generator (at least he had a patent on it that he sold to Westinghouse). Additionally he did invent and patent a working system for radio and wireless signal transmission that was essentially copied by Marconi later. Add to that the Tesla coil and the working florescent light bulb, and you have a pretty impressive set of inventions. Compared to Edison (who I admire very much also) Tesla with just a couple of assistants revolutionized a great deal of the world. Edison's real claim to fame, on the other hand, was in inventing the modern invention research team system. His actual inventions were relatively few, but with teams of some dozens of inventors he spewed out patents that made him much richer and successful than Tesla (though not as rich as he wanted - he was essentially defeated in business by J.P. Morgan). Tesla unfortunately subsided into partial insanity after his attempt at power transmission in the teens, and almost every invention after that was essentially in his head.
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.
Yes, and Nikola Tesla was simply wrong in promoting alternating current for about any use. If you look at modern electrical or electronic gear, they all have circuitry to convert alternating current to direct current before powering anything.
EXCEPT for the AC electric motor and the florescent light bulb -- two of the most common uses of power even today (and certainly before about 1960). In 1960 the refrigerator, the record player, the kitchen mixer and also various household pumps were powered by what was essentially a slightly improved version of Tesla's motor. The incandescent lights were also being run off his power too. Only really the radio needed a coil to convert to DC.
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.
Edison himself wasn't a great inventor. He was a great businessman and head-of-R&D. Pioneer of inventing as a business - not as just a couple of lone experts, but a whole department of underlings systematically tackling potentially profitable issues with pooled resources. He dabbled, yes, but most of the actual inventing was done by his employees.
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.
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
For modern high-voltage transmission, capacitive losses matter even at 50/60Hz. ....
That's an overly broad statement. Capacitive reactive losses really matter a lot on submarine or buried cable. Not much of a factor in overhead HV transmission. Think of it like the classic parallel plate capacitor - since that's what we have, just our "plates" are curved away from each other (which reduces capacitance, but let us consider them as flat here). The area (over the length of the lines) is large, yes. But what kills that off so to speak, is a product of two things: a poor dielectric medium (air) and a large distance (many meters) between the "plates".
For "plates" 3cm wide with a length of 1km and a separation of 10m: about 27pF. In other words: 27pf/km.
Formula: (where's my dang MathML slashdot?) C = k * E * A / S where:
C is capacitance in Farads
k is relative permittivity of the dielectric. Equals 1 (for air)
E is permittivity of space, a constant 8.85E-12 F/m
A is area in meters squared
S is separation distance in meters
For that 1km model above the impedance at 60 Hz is 100Mohm. For a 220KV line that is a loss of about 480W/km. Such a line would be conveying power in the few hundreds megawatt range. Not much of a reactive loss there. Different on sub/buried: k is much larger, and S is much smaller (mm - cm distances).
he was NOT a patent troll, since he BUILT the stuff he patented.
I'd would agree that he was a patent asshole, though.
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.
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??
“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
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