Disentangling Facts From Fantasy In the World of Edison and Tesla 386
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.'"
Re:Someone's just trolling (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Tesla is revered as god here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [pbs.org] 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 [imdb.com].
It's not all true (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Important facts missing from the post (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:You joke about DC (Score:5, Interesting)
>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.
There is actually an interesting twist to this however which comes into play with very long power lines. The Cahora Bassa hydro-electric dam powers much of South Africa's Gauteng industrial region despite being in another country. Gauteng runs on AC, Cahora Bassa generates AC - but the line between them is DC. It gets rectified at the dam site and then reconverted to AC when it gets to the local grid.
Obviously that equipment cost a pretty penny - but DC was still cheaper. The reason is that DC only requires as single cable - which can be supported by quite a thin little pole (the ground itself can be the return line).
So if the line is long enough - running the power over DC can be more economical, you just need enough distance for the cable savings to start to get bigger than the converter costs.
Re:It's not all true (Score:4, Interesting)
Radar - Blumline.
Not sure if he invented the science behind it, but he was certainly the engineer that made it work properly. Also invented stereo sound recording and playback decades before it was thought of commercially. His (expired) patents ensured that one company couldn't stitch up the entire market.
What about Charles Steinmetz? (Score:4, Interesting)
Steinmetz understood how to build three-phase motors (the standard for big motors today) better than anyone in the early days.
Confusing political systems with economic ones. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Hollywood still pissed of Edison? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:false equivalency (Score:3, Interesting)
Edison's position is generally mis-characterized. For long distance transmission, Edison said of course AC power at high voltage would be best. He argued that DC was best for distribution (i.e. supplying several city blocks)
Edison was basically correct except that expensive motor-generator sets would have been needed to convert AC to DC.
Also, to put it in context, Edison's vision of a central generating station was one that supplied a dozen city blocks. His vision never extended to huge remote power plants except in special cases like Niagara Falls. Edison was not interested in individual inventions, but rather the entire end-to-end industry of producing and delivering electric power to light bulbs, i.e. the electric light utility. Non-light uses of electricity such as motors were secondary. He originally charged per lamp, not per kwh. Therefore, inter city scale power transmission was not main stream according to Edison's view. Within those confines, Edison's arguments in favor of DC were essentially correct. Ultimately though his visions were not sufficiently scalable as the "electric light utility" grew into the "electric utility."
Edison to Deforest ... ALMOST! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Tesla would have been a Slashdotter! (Score:5, Interesting)
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. [wired.com]
** Edison's Menlo Park Lab Invents the Electric Chair. [smithsonianmag.com]
*** Edison's hires goons to shut down movie filming. [wired.com]
Re:Irrefutable fact (Score:4, Interesting)
You think Audie Murphy did some incredible shit, check out Leo Major ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Major [wikipedia.org] )
The level of unreality is outstanding. Pretty sure he's actually Wolverine.
Re:Irrefutable fact (Score:5, Interesting)
The phonograph was perhaps the most original of Edison's inventions. His inspiriation for this was his previous invention of a recording telegraph that used depresions in a rotating disk to record the dots and dashs of telegraph transmissions for later playback. The playback was electrical with the depressions in the disk causing a feeler riding on them to open and close an electrical circuit, but Edison (despite his deafness) was able to hear the crud sounds the feeler made while riding on the disk. Strangely enough, while he based the phonograph on this observation, the first phonograph used a cylinder instead of a disk to record sound.
Many have commented on how Edison 'stole' the idea of the electric lamp from others. What Edison did was to take their primative ideas and make two simple but essencial changes to the design, which made the difference between success and failure. Until Edison all previous attempts at an electric lamp used a heavy low resistance element heated to incandecance by a low voltage electrical current. The element was operated in air either in the open, or protected by a glass cover. Sometimes a thermal regulator was used to allow the element to operate close to its melting point to produce as much light as possible. Edison's lamp used a thin high resistance element operating at high voltage. Since such a thin element would burn up quickly Edison sealed it inside a blown glass bulb in a high vacuum. Edison was lucky in that a brand new type of vacuum pump that used the flow of mecury to trap air had just been invented. He bought the first production model available for his experiments. He hired professional glass blowers to produce the sealed bulbs for his lamps. He experimented with various metals to find one that had the same rate of thermal expansion and contraction as glass for use as the lead in wires for the lamp (Edison used platinum). He spend years expermenting to perfect what seems today like such a simple idea. It wasn't so simple at the time. Any complaints about Edison stealing the idea of the electric lamp from someone else is simply sour grapes.