Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Nikola Tesla died on January 7th 1943, alone in a hotel room, poor and forgotten for the scientific community and people in general. He was a dreamer, a genius, advanced to his time and wanted to give free energy to everybody.

On the other hand, Edison and others were interested on patenting ideas and earning as much money as they could. Always tried to discredit Tesla work.

Many years later the world recognised Tesla’s work.

This thread is a little tribute to a big man.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

His monument is the AC power grid. One of the largest machines on planet Earth. So big that everyone has seen it, few have noticed it. So successful everyone takes it for granted.

I'd rather celebrate someone's birthday than their ending. Special exceptions for genuinely evil people.

David

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Tesla wanted his wireless power network to be for Man's benefit. If what he meant was free electricity, that would have scared a lot of people who stood to make a lot of money.
Edison was for DC power. Easy to produce, but not to distribute. Thus no electric trains, no TGV, Japanese Bullet.
Aye. The National Grid was only possible with AC generation & distribution. Now we distribute at 400Kv & 10,000A. Tesla would have been immensely pleased by this, I think.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Hello.
Nikola Tesla was an outstanding man of his time, it is sad that he died alone in a hotel room. But this is a hard world we live in.
May he RIP.
Regards
Kevin

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Wanting to give away free energy and living in a universe where free energy is available are two different things, which Tesla may have confused - together with his fan club.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

My understanding, from what I have read, disagrees with this, Nikola had over 600 patents, many of which were commercialized, especially those for AC machinery. He wasn't very well off financially, essentially because he was stiffed by the large companies like GE, who used his ideas and paid him a very small % that he agreed to.

Edison by comparison, was a "cut & try" inventor and realized many ideas after weeks and years of experimentation, but was probably a better businessman than Tesla and negotiated better deals or took control or owned the companies which commercialized his inventions.

Tesla remarked something to the effect, that in Edison's case, an ounce of theory would have saved him a pound of hard work. Tesla was much bigger on electrical theory than Edison and clearly was an electrical genius.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Tesla had some very bright ideas. Like most people, he also had some very daft ideas. Unfortunately he seems to have acquired a modern fan club which thinks some of his daft ideas were bright ideas.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Bright or daft he didn't have many competitors and was certainly way ahead of most of what could be described as "conventional" electrical engineering at the time, whether DC [distributed via foot thick cables and a Power Station on every street corner] or AC which he came up with "in phases" after reading German poetry! There is so much material and mystery involved that it's premature [and predictable] when someone always pops up to knock him down again.

There are many supporters but they often keep quiet about this none PC subject [as happens in the political sphere sometimes]. I'm also reminded of Eric Laithwaite and his downfall after pioneering MagLev trains. Some of us will remember him from the time when The R S Children's Lectures at Xmas were still exciting! There isn't even agreement about whether or not the FBI did take away Tesla's papers when he died in poverty but the mere existence of that story may be significant in itself 8-/

Dave

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

At least his name lives on in the SI unit for magnetic flux density. I end up saying his name several times a week!

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

I wonder what the arragement is for the Tesla electric cars, with regard to paying royalies to Tesla's family for the use of his name?

Aub

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Yes, Laithwaite was brilliant on magnetic levitation. Talked complete nonsense on gyroscopes and anti-gravity, but his understanding of classical mechanics was insufficient for him to grasp the rebuttals from his own colleagues at Imperial College.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

They'd just say it was another Tesla. Maybe Elon Musk's cat! Same as my neighbour across the road doesn't get paid by Roberts radio for using HER surname.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

I wonder whether Tesla (the car brand) pays for using their name on the Czech and Slovak market, as there were (and possibly still are) electronics companies that used the Tesla name commercially.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Several times every day here, my 6 year old Boxer dog is called Tesla. named so because she is a bright spark!

I admit to being a bit sick of people asking her name and then when told say "after the car?" I then have to explain who Tesla was...

(This is usually to people with a dog called Steve and a child called Trixi-poo...)

:thumbsup:
Rich

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

There is also a company called Tesla in the UK :-
http://www.tesla.co.uk/index.html

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Must admit I find it difficult to appreciate which of Tesla's ideas are daft or not after reading some works recently on sub atomic particles which posit particles continually coming into and going out of existence from nowhere?? When you get to that level common sense (hang on a particle's got to come from SOMEWHERE) seems to go out the window and it's a very strange mental landscape.

Bit like the voltage leading the current by 90 degrees after capacitors or inductors which means at some point there is voltage but no current and likewise current but no voltage - or the electrical equations that use the square root of minus 1 to get a real world solution???

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Yes, the universe can be deeply counter-intuitive. 'Common sense' can lead people seriously astray unless that common-sense has been trained by some years of physics education. This is because for most people 'common sense' has only been trained by what they can see and touch, which means no overtly quantum or relativistic effects.

A particle does not have to come from somewhere, provided that its antiparticle also appears at the same time. There is a form of common-sense in physics: conservation laws have to be satisfied, and most symmetries have to be respected.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

This is why it is somewhat surprising that almost all the material detected in our universe, so far, seems to be composed of what we call normal matter without any matching quantity of anti-particles.

Where have they all gone?

Is there another universe, somehow beyond our ken where all the anti particles live?

Are the concepts of symmetry and conservation just local niceties?

When you get well away from our sort of scale of things the universe becomes a very strange place. Positions, energies and existence of particles start to become statistical as we get smaller. Most of the things we derive comfort from seem to go out the window.

David

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Most likely this is because the theories that were developed in Newtonian Physics were designed to make us feel comfortable and fit with our practical perceptions of the world in the first instance.

And they appeared to work for the most part too. I'm not sure for example how much Quantum Physics was required to achieve the moon landing.

The fact that what appears to be common sense starts to fall over at relativistic speeds and at the quantum level has never troubled me much. I only have one component in my workshop I call "quantum mechanical", the Tunnel diode, but I know everything else is too, but for practicalities sake, I just block that thought out and it keeps me sane and "comfortable" and I have never had to resort to string theory to repair an instrument.

Re: Today 76 years since Nikola Tesla died
 

Newtonian mechanics is good enough get you to the Moon. You don't need to worry about relativity at the kind of speeds you'll be travelling at, and the Moon is a big enough target for any quantum effects to be masked.

Positioning satellites are affected by relativistic phenomena, and at least the first ones launched actually had two sets of firmware: one based on Einstein's relativity and one based on Newtonian physics, just in case Einstein was wrong. That might just count as the biggest scientific experiment ever .....