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Why did they ignore Tesla?

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  • 14-07-2014 1:55am
    #1
    AnonEmos99
    Registered Users Posts: 24 ✭


    Nicola Tesla. Genius. Ignored by his peers. Why?

    Tesla was going to offer everyone free electricity. I can see the financial reasons why they didn't bother using his ideas, but was there another reason? He was ten times the man Edison will ever be!
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    #2
    TimeToShine
    Registered Users Posts: 4,881 ✭✭✭TimeToShine


    He wasn't ignored. He just didn't have much business sense and didn't know how to sell his ideas.


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    #3
    Labarbapostiza
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 963 ✭✭✭Labarbapostiza


    AnonEmos99 wrote: »
    Tesla was going to offer everyone free electricity. I can see the financial reasons why they didn't bother using his ideas, but was there another reason?

    Yes. The other reason was it simply would not work. Radio waves are made of photons, just like light. If you were to put any kind of considerable power through the air, you'd waste most of the energy heating the atmosphere. Also any conductors with a resonant frequency around that of the transmission frequency would be jumping with electricity. I'm not sure if the story was ever true - and that it might just be part of the Tesla myth. (Tesla was going to give the world free energy, but evil JP Morgan shut him down).

    What he may have been trying to do was harness telluric currents. These are the electrical currents that run through the earth. Imagine if we could harness lightening, and tap into its' electricity at will.

    He was ten times the man Edison will ever be!

    Edison is always presented as a great inventor and engineer, but this is really American mythology. He was more a greater marketer. New technology is always a hard sell - for a long time after the automobile arrived, many people still believed it to be a novelty that would soon pass.

    Tesla left Edison and went to work for Westinghouse. Tesla had the AC patents (alternating current - which is used for all electricity transmission these days). And Edison had the DC patents; Direct Current. DC is deeply flawed as a method of electricity transmission. But Edison was going to brazen it out. The technology needed to be marketed to the public, and the public were a little nervous. So in an interesting piece of skulldugery on both sides, they tried to convince the public, each other's technology was deadly dangerous. This culminated in a battle to have the other's generator used in the nascent electric chair.


    Tesla definitely was an eccentric. Edison did rip him off, but Westinghouse made him very rich. The Tesla myths are good yarns, but that's probably all they are.


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    #4
    Morbert
    Registered Users Posts: 3,457 ✭✭✭Morbert


    Tesla's eccentricity is unfortunately alive today in the form of various crank movements. An exasperating mysticism has sprung up around him.

    http://www.crank.net/tesla.html


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    #5
    Rucking_Fetard
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,260 ✭✭✭Rucking_Fetard


    Elon Musk donates $1 million to Nikola Tesla museum after webcomic calls him out


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    #6
    Labarbapostiza
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 963 ✭✭✭Labarbapostiza


    Morbert wrote: »
    Tesla's eccentricity is unfortunately alive today in the form of various crank movements. An exasperating mysticism has sprung up around him.

    http://www.crank.net/tesla.html


    Yes, I know, and it's getting worse - he's the patron saint of crank science. There was no doubt he was eccentric, but some of the stories, that find their way into every account of Tesla, are just a little too implausible. He would have been well aware of all the limitations of sending free electricity through the air, but I do think at Wardenclyffe he was trying to tap into Telluric currents.

    I think Wardenclyffe may have been two coils; one that he would charge, and the other coil connected to the earth. I think the idea was to use the first coil to induce a charge in the earth connected coil, and then once charged, discharge it. I believe the idea was to literally pump electricity out of the ground. Is there a way to do this without spending energy in the first coil?

    Or it might have been an attempt to create a point of low potential in the ground, with the aim of capturing eddy currents in the crust; if that's what lightening is.


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