Nikola Tesla

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“Tesla’s Other Prediction…Is Expected To Come True”

November 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Nikola Tesla, an electrician, made remarkably prescient predictions about mobile and drones, even if he didn’t always fully appreciate the implications of such inventions. By the end of his career, Tesla was dreaming up wacky flying machines for apartment dwellers that couldn’t possibly take flight, but he was more correct in his era about the big picture coming into view than pretty much anyone.

Another of the inventor’s boldest visions–transmitting power wirelessly through the air–seems about to be realized. You will never be without cat memes and pornography again. The opening of Christopher Mims latest immaculately written WSJ column:

In 1902 workers completed a mysterious tower, 187 feet high and shaped like a giant mushroom, on which rested the hopes of one of the 20th century’s most prolific geniuses.

Facing the beach in the hamlet of Shoreham, N.Y., on Long Island, the Wardenclyffe Tower was, according to its inventor, Nikola Tesla, the key that could unlock an age of wonders.

As Mr. Tesla later wrote, the tower’s ability to transmit information to the far side of the Earth would someday allow the creation of “an inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, [which] will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song however distant.”

Sometime in 2016, Tesla’s other prediction—that it isn’t only possible, but commercially viable, to transmit power as well as information through the air, without wires—is expected to come true.

What is coming are hermetically sealed smartphones and other gadgets that charge without ever plugging into a wall. And soon after there will be sensors, cameras and controllers that can be stuck to any surface, indoors or out, without the need to consider how to connect them to power.•

 

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Old Print Article: “Tesla And His Flivver Plane,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

October 22, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

By the time he filed his final patent in 1928, an “Apparatus for aerial transportation,” the 72-year-old inventor Nikola Tesla was a punchline at best and a forgotten man at worst, and he would remain so for the final 15 years of his life, until he died alone and without money in the New Yorker Hotel. His swan song was a small plane which purportedly could rise from an open window like a helicopter and transport two people cheaply and efficiently to their destination. It would revolutionize travel. Alas, unlike a swan, it wouldn’t have been able to fly even if it had been built, which it wasn’t. An article in the February 23, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on the dubious machine.

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“We’ve Designed A System That Discards Us”

October 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

With computers so small they all but disappear, the infrastructure silently becoming more and more automated, what else will vanish from our lives and ourselves? I’m someone who loves the new normal of decentralized, free-flowing media, who thinks the gains are far greater than the losses, but it’s a question worth asking. Via Longreads, an excerpt from The Glass Cage, a new book by that Information Age designated mourner Nicholas Carr:

“There’s a big difference between a set of tools and an infrastructure. The Industrial Revolution gained its full force only after its operational assumptions were built into expansive systems and networks. The construction of the railroads in the middle of the nineteenth century enlarged the markets companies could serve, providing the impetus for mechanized mass production. The creation of the electric grid a few decades later opened the way for factory assembly lines and made all sorts of home appliances feasible and affordable. These new networks of transport and power, together with the telegraph, telephone, and broadcasting systems that arose alongside them, gave society a different character. They altered the way people thought about work, entertainment, travel, education, even the organization of communities and families. They transformed the pace and texture of life in ways that went well beyond what steam-powered factory machines had done.

The historian Thomas Hughes, in reviewing the arrival of the electric grid in his book Networks of Power, described how first the engineering culture, then the business culture, and finally the general culture shaped themselves to the new system. ‘Men and institutions developed characteristics that suited them to the characteristics of the technology,’ he wrote. ‘And the systematic interaction of men, ideas, and institutions, both technical and nontechnical, led to the development of a supersystem—a sociotechnical one—with mass movement and direction.’ It was at this point that what Hughes termed ‘technological momentum’ took hold, both for the power industry and for the modes of production and living it supported. ‘The universal system gathered a conservative momentum. Its growth generally was steady, and change became a diversification of function.’ Progress had found its groove.

We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. …

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once asked, ‘Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded?’ In the business world at least, no stability in the division of work between human and computer seems in the offing. The prevailing methods of computerized communication and coordination pretty much ensure that the role of people will go on shrinking. We’ve designed a system that discards us. If unemployment worsens in the years ahead, it may be more a result of our new, subterranean infrastructure of automation than of any particular installation of robots in factories or software applications in offices. The robots and applications are the visible flora of automation’s deep, extensive, and invasive root system.”

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Old Print Articles: “Nikola Tesla, Father Of Radio, Who Hated It,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1943)

June 23, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nikola Tesla outlived a good deal of his fame, and he didn’t even make it to 140. Perhaps the greatest “electrician” ever, the one who knew a century ago that there would be drones and mobile phones, a man who dreamed so differently that he seemingly fell to Earth, Tesla’s scientific goals grew more outsize as he aged. He even announced in 1933, at age 76, that he would live at least 64 more years because he slept only once a year, for five or six hours, supplementing this rest with an hour-long nap now and again. 

When he died in Manhattan an octogenarian, he wasn’t forgotten, but the lights had dimmed because his ambitions had grown so far beyond comprehension, and because he didn’t have a coterie of associates to burnish his reputation. His obituary in the January 3, 1943 Brooklyn Daily Eagle was relegated to page 11, despite his front-cover, above-the-fold mind. The story:

“Nikola Tesla, 86, the electrical genius who discovered the fundamental principle of modern radio, was found dead in his room at the Hotel New Yorker, Manhattan, last night.

Tesla never married. He had always lived alone, and the hotel management did not believe he had any near-relatives.

Despite his more than 700 inventions, he was not wealthy. He cared little for money, and so long as he could experiment he was happy.

Thought Radio a Nuisance

He was the first to conceive an effective method of utilizing alternating current, and in 1888 patented the induction motor, which converted electrical energy into mechanical energy more effectively and economically than by direct current. Among his other principal inventions were arc lighting, and the Tesla coil.

‘The radio, I know I’m its father, but I don’t like it,’ he once said. ‘I just don’t like it. It’s a nuisance. I never listen to it. The radio is a distraction and keeps you from concentrating. There are too many distractions in this life for quality of thought, and it’s quality of thought, not quantity, that counts.’

Evidently, he did a lot of thinking that never materialized. It was his custom on his birthday–July 10–to announce to reporters the shape of things to come.

On his 76th birthday, he announced: ‘The transmission of energy to another planet is only a matter of engineering. I have solved the problem so well I don’t regard it as doubtful.’

Told of ‘Death Beam’

When he was 78 he announced he had perfected a ‘death beam’ that would bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy planes 250 miles from a nation’s borders and make millions of soldiers fall dead in their tracks. His beam, he said, would make war impossible.

Tesla was born at Smiljan, Croatia, when it was a part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He came to the United States in 1884, became a citizen and an associate of Thomas A. Edison. Later he established the Tesla Laboratory in New York and devoted himself to research.”

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“By Reason Of Its Certain And Unlimited Destructiveness It Will Tend To Bring About And Maintain Permanent Peace”

December 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Long before patenting an early drone system in 1915, Nikola Tesla was enabling a method for push-button war, which he envisioned as a way to scare the world into an endless state of ceasefire. Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way. The opening of a post by Steven Beschloss at the New Yorker blog:

“In September, 1898, at Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla revealed a new invention: a radio-controlled torpedo boat. It was the first demonstration of wireless remote control in history, and it caused, in Tesla’s words, ‘a sensation such as no other invention of mine has ever produced.’ Some witnesses believed that the Croatian inventor was using mind control.

Detailed in his patent, No. 613,809, a ‘Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles,’ Tesla demonstrated how radio signals can remotely trigger switches and direct a vehicle’s movement without ‘intermediate wires, cables, or other form of electrical or mechanical connection with the object save the natural media in space.’ While Tesla recognized a wide list of applications for his remote-controlled robots, including transporting objects to distant locations and establishing communication with and exploring ‘inaccessible regions,’ he presciently, albeit optimistically, zeroed in on the military potential of his invention. ‘The greatest value,’ he wrote in his patent application, will be its use in armaments and warfare, ‘for by reason of its certain and unlimited destructiveness it will tend to bring about and maintain permanent peace among nations.’

Less than two decades later, during the First World War, the Germans employed a remote-controlled motorboat packed with explosives and attached to an unspooling wire.”

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Old Print Article: “Tesla’s New Device Like Bolts Of Thor,” New York Times (1915)

August 4, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Dr. Tesla said that it would be possible with his wireless mechanism to direct an ordinary aeroplane, manless, to any point.”

Unlike Thomas Edison, national hero and reliable citizen, there was always an element of danger and irresponsibility about Nikola Tesla. Part of that came from his old boss and heated rival Edison planting stories about his recklessness, but in all fairness, Tesla did dream up a lot of crazy, scary stuff. The year before he won the Nobel Prize, he proposed a new military defense system which was also a weapon of mass destruction–a drone system, basically–according to a breathless article in the December 8, 1915 New York Times. The story:

“Nikola Tesla, the inventor, winner of the 1915 Nobel Physics Prize, has filed patent applications on the essential parts of a machine the possibilities of which test a layman’s imagination and promise a parallel of Thor’s shooting thunderbolts from the sky to punish those who had angered the gods. Dr. Tesla insists there is nothing sensational about it, that it is but the fruition of many years of work and study. He is not yet ready to give the details of the engine which he says will render fruitless any military expedition against a country which possesses it. Suffice it to say that the destructive invention will go through space with the speed of 300 miles a second, a manless airship without propelling engine or wings, sent by electricity to any desired point on the globe on its errand of destruction, if destruction its manipulator wishes to effect.

Ten miles or a thousand miles, it will be all the same to the machine, the inventor says. Straight to the point, on land or on sea, it will be able to go with precision, delivering a blow that will paralyze or kill, as is desired. A man in a tower on Long Island could shield New York against ships or army by working a lever, if the inventor’s anticipations become realizations.

‘It is not the time,’ said Dr. Tesla yesterday, ‘to go into the details of this thing. It is founded upon a principle that means great things in peace; it can be used for great things in war. But I repeat, this is no time to talk of such things.

‘It is perfectly practicable to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive effects at a distance. I have already constructed a wireless transmitter which makes this possible, and have been described it in my technical publications, among which I may refer to my patent 1,119,732 recently granted. With transmitters of this kind we are enabled to project electrical energy in any amount to any distance and apply it for innumerable purposes, both in peace and war. Through the universal adoption of this system, ideal conditions for the maintenance of law and order will be realized, for then the energy necessary to the enforcement of right and justice will be normally productive, yet potential, and in any moment available, for attack and defense. The power transmitted need not be necessarily destructive, for, if existence is made to depend upon it, its withdrawal or supply will bring about the same results as those now accomplished by any force of arms.

‘But when unavoidable, the same agent may be used to destroy property and life. The art is already so far developed that great destructive effects can be produced at any point on the globe, determined beforehand and with great accuracy. In view of this I have not thought it hazardous to predict a few years ago that the wars of the future will not be waged with explosives but with electrical means.’

Dr. Tesla then said that it would be possible with his wireless mechanism to direct an ordinary aeroplane, manless, to any point, over a ship or an army, and to discharge explosives of great strength from the base of operations.”

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“It Is A Monument Worthy Of Our Scientific Age, A True Monument Of Enlightenment And Of Peace”

July 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A hammer can be a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, but we can’t depend on implements or technology to bring about peace. In dedicating the opening of the Niagara Falls hydroelectric power plant on January 12, 1897, Nikola Tesla, who was born 156 years ago today, rightly announced the following century as one of science but didn’t foresee the horrors that such a shift would make possible. His speech:

“We have many a monument of past ages; we have the palaces and pyramids, the temples of the Greek and the cathedrals of Christendom. In them is exemplified the power of men, the greatness of nations, the love of art and religious devotion. But the monument at Niagara has something of its own, more in accord with our present thoughts and tendencies. It is a monument worthy of our scientific age, a true monument of enlightenment and of peace. It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.”

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“Edison Dismissed Tesla’s Ideas As ‘Splendid’ But ‘Utterly Impractical'”

October 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A tidy encapsulation of the what caused the rift between Edison and Tesla, courtesy of Smithsonian:

‘After Edison developed the first practical incandescent light bulb in 1879, supported by his own direct current electrical system, the rush to build hydroelectric plants to generate DC power in cities across the United States practically guaranteed Edison a fortune in patent royalties. But early on, Edison recognized the limitations of DC power. It was very difficult to transmit over distances without a significant loss of energy, and the inventor turned to a 28-year-old Serbian mathematician and engineer whom he’d recently hired at Edison Machine Works to help solve the problem. Nikola Tesla claimed that Edison even offered him significant compensation if he could design a more practical form of power transmission. Tesla accepted the challenge. With a background in mathematics that his inventor boss did not have, he set out to redesign Edison’s DC generators. The future of electric distribution, Tesla told Edison, was in alternating current—where high-voltage energy could be transmitted over long distances using lower current—miles beyond generating plants, allowing a much more efficient delivery system. Edison dismissed Tesla’s ideas as ‘splendid’ but ‘utterly impractical.’ Tesla was crushed and claimed that Edison not only refused to consider AC power, but also declined to compensate him properly for his work. Tesla left Edison in 1885 and set out to raise capital on his own for Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing, even digging ditches for the Edison Company to pay his bills in the interim, until the industrialist George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, a believer in AC power, bought some of Tesla’s patents and set about commercializing the system so as to take electric light to something more than an urban luxury service. While Tesla’s ideas and ambitions might be brushed aside, Westinghouse had both ambition and capital, and Edison immediately recognized the threat to his business.”

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Bowie as Tesla, The Prestige:

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“He Announced In An Interview That He Had Invented A ‘Death Beam'”

August 26, 2011 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

From a page of obituaries about electrical genius Nikola Tesla, who died alone and in modest means in 1943 at the New Yorker Hotel:

“Tesla’s ideas bordered increasingly on what some considered the fantastic as he advanced in years. On his seventy-eighth birthday he announced in an interview that he had invented a ‘death beam’ powerful enough to destroy 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles and annihilate an army of 1,000,000 soldiers instantaneously.

On his eighty-fourth birthday he declared he stood ready to divulge to the United States Government the secret of the ‘death beam’ that, he said, would build an invisible Chinese Wall of defense around the country against any attempted attack by an enemy air force, no matter how large.”

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David Bowie as Tesla, in The Prestige:

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Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla!

July 10, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The greatest electrician of them all, who died poor and alone at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan in 1943, was born on July 10, 1856.

More Nikola Tesla posts:

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“Quick, Tesla. Where Is It?”

June 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | 1 comment

Nikola Tesla, background, with Mark Twain, who desperately needed to use the can.

Mark Twain’s interest in science unsurprisingly brought him into contact with the greatest of all electricians, Nikola Tesla, and the two became friends. During one meeting, a Tesla invention had an unusual affect on the writer. An excerpt from a Katherine Krumme article:

“Yet another excitement awaited Tesla’s visitors at the laboratory. Tesla had been perfecting a mechanical oscillator, a sort of engine that would produce alternating current of a high frequency. The inventor had noticed an interesting effect of the machine: it produced significant vibrations. Tesla wondered if these vibrations might have therapeutic or health benefits, and one day when Mark Twain was at his lab the author asked if he might experience these vibrations himself.

As the story goes, Mr. Twain stood on a platform of the machine while Tesla set the oscillator into operation. Twain was enjoying himself greatly and exclaimed: ‘This gives you vigour and vitality.’ After some time Tesla warned the writer that he should come down, but Twain was having fun and he refused. Tesla again insisted, but Twain stayed on the machine for several minutes more until, suddenly, he exclaimed: ‘Quick, Tesla. Where is it?’ Tesla directed his friend to the restroom. Twain had experienced first hand what had been known to the laboratory workers for some time: the laxative effect of the machine’s vibrations.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)

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Jack and Meg with a Tesla Coil in Coffee and Cigarettes:

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Nikola Tesla Predicts Mobile Phones (1909)

February 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nikola Tesla in his offices on East Houston Street in NYC.

Nikola Tesla prognosticating in the New York Times in 1909:

“It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have them appear instantly in type in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber in the world. It will only be necessary to carry an inexpensive instrument no bigger than a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles. One may listen or transmit speech or song to the uttermost parts of the world. In the same way any kind of picture, drawing, or print can be transferred from one place to another. It will be possible to operate millions of such instruments from a single station. Thus it will be a simple matter to keep the uttermost parts of the world in instant contact with each other.”

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Nikola Tesla Fails To Report For Jury Duty In 1902

December 11, 2010 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It was common knowledge in the 19th century: Thomas Edison was the far greater businessperson, but Nikola Tesla was the far greater genius. It must be noted, however, that Tesla wasn’t a genius at getting his ass to jury duty. A brief notice from the October 7, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“For failing to answer to a summons for jury duty, Nikola Tesla, the electrician, was fined $100 by Judge Foster in General Sessions Manhattan this morning. Unless the electrician can give a good reason for his failure to appear in court he will have to pay the fine, the only other alternative being imprisonment in Ludlow street jail.”

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Excerpted: “The Day They Hanged An Elephant In East Tennessee,” Blue Ridge Country (2009)

June 19, 2010 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

More than 5,000 spectators watched Big Mary’s execution in 1916.

I’m familiar, of course, with the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant at Luna Park in Coney Island in 1903. (It was a stunt perpetrated by Thomas Edison to discredit Nikola Tesla’s Alternating Current, which was the chief competitor to his Direct Current.) But I had never heard of the hanging of Big Mary the Elephant in Erwin, Tennessee, in 1916, even though it’s apparently been written about quite a bit.

Big Mary was the chief attraction of the small, second-rate Southern circus owned by Charlie Sparks. The great Long Form pointed me in the direction of a 2009 article about Mary’s demise in Blue Ridge Country magazine. It seems the pachyderm didn’t take kindly to a new attendant and killed him. After guns and electricity failed to put Mary down, she was hanged with the aid of a crane in a railroad yard. Sad and bizarre. An excerpt:

“Mary was billed as ‘the largest living land animal on earth’; her owner claimed she was three inches bigger than Jumbo, P.T. Barnum’s famous pachyderm. At 30 years old, Mary was five tons of pure talent: she could ‘play 25 tunes on the musical horns without missing a note’; the pitcher on the circus baseball-game routine, her .400 batting average ‘astonished millions in New York.’

Rumor and exaggeration swarmed about Mary like flies. She was worth a small fortune: $20,000, Charlie Sparks claimed. She was dangerous, having killed two men, or was it eight, or 18?

She was Charlie Sparks’ favorite, his cash cow, his claim to circus fame. She was the leader of his small band of elephants, an exotic crowd-pleaser, an unpredictable giant.

On Monday, September 11, 1916, Sparks World Famous Shows played St. Paul, Va., a tiny mining town in the Clinch River Valley.

Which is where drifter Red Eldridge made a fatal decision. Slight and flame-haired, Red had nothing to lose by signing up with Sparks World Famous Shows: he’d dropped into St. Paul from a Norfolk and Western boxcar and decided to stay for a while. Taking a job as janitor at the Riverside Hotel, Eldridge found himself pushing a broom and, then, dreaming of moving on.

Eldridge was hired as an elephant handler and marched in the circus parade that afternoon. It’s easy to imagine that what he lacked in skill and knowledge, he made up for with go-for-broke bravado. A small man carrying a big stick can be a dangerous thing.”

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