Group Actions
Engagement
  • Author Author: bluescreen
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 1546 views
  • Likes 2 likes
  • Comments 8 comments
Related
Recommended

Is Nikola Tesla science's greatest unsung hero?

bluescreen

image

 

What is it about Nikola Tesla that inspires engineers around the world?

 

The slights he suffered at the hands of his close-minded, condescending boss, Thomas Edison, who refused to see the potential of alternating current? The breathtaking scope of his altruism, as evidenced by his decision to tear-up his patent agreement on AC current to save his employer, George Westinghouse, from financial ruin? (A decision which in all likelihood prevented him from becoming the world's first billionaire.) His pride, which led him to work as a ditch digger rather than suffer the continuing insults of his employer? His sheer brilliance, evidenced by his epiphany while walking in the park in Budapest that an induction motor could be designed based on rotating magnetic fields? Or the fact that schoolchildren continue to memorize facts about Thomas Edison while educators routinely ignore Tesla?

 

While I applaud Elon Musk's naming his company in honor of the great inventor, I think this further obscures Nikola Tesla in popular culture. He should occupy the same place in the scientific pantheon as Albert Einstein. His pride, altruism, the scope of his genius, and the fact that he spent so much of his early career trying to convince people less clever than himself what should be done all mark him as a real engineer's engineer. If Tesla were alive today, he would be reading Dilbert comics and smiling at the pointy-headed boss.

 

What do you think? Is Nikola Tesla science's greatest unsung hero?

  • in reply to rarestshellac

    It's ironic that you mentioned Donald Trump. His uncle, John G. Trump, as a technical aide in Division 14 of the NDRC was responsible for reviewing and analyzing Nikola Tesla's papers after his death in 1943.

  • Nikola Tesla is not unsung - he is iconic and world famous. I think a guy like Reginald Fessenden was just as important but much less known. How many people know he transmitted voice over radio a year before Marconi transmitted Morse code across the Atlantic?

    He worked for Edison and Westinghouse and like all the greats he learned from his contemporaries and those who came before. However he was alone in believing radio was like waves that could be modulated, until he proved it.

    There are many reasons why he isn't credited as being the father of modern communications, partly because others were making a lot of money off his ideas, partly he was not a good businessman, but he was definitely unsung.

    He had hundreds of patents and should have been extremely rich. He considered Edison to be the only other equivalent inventor of the day. However Edison took full credit for all the work of the staff in his labs which had up to 1,000 staff.

    He donated inventions like sonar and tracer bullets to the war effort.

    https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/radio/radio_unsung.html

  • TESLA - PATRON SAINT OF CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

     

    As someone who has spend over 60-years studying electronics and it's associated history, I would sincerely like to know why, out of hundreds of other minor contributors to the science, Mr Tesla has been chosen to represent all of them. For example, basic historical research clearly shows that alternating current (AC) was known and used well before Tesla was aware it existed.

    He was not the first to construct an AC motor, rather he slavishly followed the plans described in a patented and fully working design devised by the true inventor of polyphase AC generators, Galileo Ferraris.

    Provide any student of radio/electronics a glance at the circuit diagrams drawn by Tesla and he or she will declare them naïve in the extreme.

    As for that 'free transmitted energy' idea; well I would certainly bow down and worship anyone who managed to operate a practical motor from the headphone terminals of a crystal set. Yet in an article in one of Hugo Gernsback's more ludicrous editorials for a 1920's edition of 'Electrical Experimenter' magazine Gernsback wrote that his friend Nikola claimed that he was about to do just that.

    Actually, Hugo Gernsback was at the time a very popular science fiction writer and it may well be that many of the outrageously false stories stories surrounding Tesla may have originated with him. The lay public have always been at a disadvantage when it came to separating technical fact and fiction so it is very possible that some of Gernsback's imaginative 'predictions' of future scientific achievements by Tesla and other players, both minor and major, of the time were mistaken for real. Add to that the fact Tesla himself, well known as being somewhat publicly hungry, would weave such anecdotes into his (apparently well presented) lectures it is probably not all that surprising that so many urban myths surround this eccentric figure. The indisputable fact is that real breakthroughs in science were taking place during Tesla's time and he felt like he wanted to join in the fun.

    Unfortunately for him, by 1919 the technology had left him well behind and his daydreams were all that remained newsworthy.

    Now I am certain that the forgoing comments are going to upset a great many Tesla fans however I would be grateful to anyone who can provide positive proof that they are false. But keep in mind I mean actual PROOF, wishful thinking is not counted. The fact that somebody SAID that Tesla invented the radio valve (tube) does not override the fact that he had no idea how such a device operated. It was in fact Thomas Edison who, while attempting to improve his light bulb, produced the first electric 'valve', in 1883. Admittedly, he did not realise the importance of this discovery and it was left to one of Edison's assistants, Ambrose Fleming, to put it to use. It was eventually taken over by Le De Forest in 1906 who created the triode valve, which was capable of amplifying weak signals as well as oscillating to produce AC over a wide range of frequencies. At no time was Mr Tesla involved or even aware of such developments. Just to SAY that Tesla was the inventor of the radio valve is no more proof then if someone claimed that Donald Trump was the brains behind the development of quantum computing. (Incidentally, nobody has - not yet anyway   ).

  • Tesla was obviously a great scientist - but he's far from "unsung". His contribution to science is recognised by naming the SI unit of magnetic flux density after him, which puts him up there with Ohm, Volta, Faraday, Ampere and so on. There is no corresponding SI unit honouring Edison. Tesla was also prominently featured in my physics textbooks. I think the experience of Edison's achievements being rammed down people's throats is more of an American thing. In the UK, we've heard of Edison and were fed anecdotes about his phonograph etc, but he's not talked about that much here.


    However, Tesla has been turned into an internet cult hero in recent years, painting him as a kind of rock star superhero lone inventor sticking it to the man. This is usually promoted by the kind of people who also claim that the Apollo missions were faked and that cars running on water (and getting more energy from the hydrolysis than is input) have been suppressed by a conspiracy of Big Oil and "the government". What is a little more surprising to me is to see this mythologised rock star version of Tesla appearing on an engineering community. image

     

    Undoubtedly Tesla was ripped off by Edison and others, and it's equally apparent that his peers didn't really understand him. I suspect he would probably be diagnosed today as being somewhere on the autism spectrum if he were alive today. However, for a more balanced perspective, there is a good discussion of the more outlandish claims here: https://www.metabunk.org/tesla-is-overrated-debunking-the-cult-of-tesla.t894/. I think the Tesla cult is also a good example of the "myth of the lone inventor", as discussed in this article: http://mentalfloss.com/article/49434/sxsw-myth-lone-inventor

  • I would have to agree, all the EE's I know think reasonably along these lines. While life and history was/has not been terribly kind to him, I suspect in the most part his genius was not easily understandable by his peers and this was the source of his troubles. He reminds me of some of my fellow Computer Science classmates that eschewed interacting with people, but worked brilliantly on their projects. Always viewed as anti-social and always with their head in some project ignoring the world at large in favor of the thrill of discovery and accomplishment.

     

    - Eric