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Old 7th Jan 2022, 11:05 am   #1
dave walsh
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Default The Search For The Tesla Files

A new series on the Blaze Channel [FV 63] at 9pm tonight. [The first two one hour episodes out of five]. Should be very interesting. As with J L Baird and Marconi, there are often widely contrasting opinions about his achievements but he did seem to be very much ahead of his time!

Dave W

As if to reinforce my point my point, I've only just noticed that Glyn's thread Electrophoolery thread, from yesterday, refers to Tesla. I'm always interested in coincidences!

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Old 7th Jan 2022, 8:07 pm   #2
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Default Re: The Search For The Tesla Files

I suppose that it is in the nature of things that with major technological steps, paradigm shifts, disruptions, etc., that a small number of the “movers and shakers” involved are somehow singled out and become folk heroes, with their roles often magnified and expanded beyond what they really were. Perhaps a more analytical approach is to look at the lesser knowns who were involved, and what they did, and ask the question as to whether the invention or development would have proceeded on approximately the same timeline without the folk heroes. One could say that it gets down to a case of “who did what and with which and with whom”.

In this vein, Tesla has been credited as being the key player behind the emergence of the worldwide three-phase, AC power system. But although he was undoubtedly brilliant, he certainly did not invent AC, which was alive and well before he came along. And he was not the first to conceive of and document polyphase systems and rotating field motors. He was certainly active in polyphase developments, and although he did make passing mention of three-phase (albeit in six-wire form), his work was essentially with the two-phase system, which turned out to be a dead end. Meanwhile, in the same time period in Europe, Dolivo Dobrowolsky developed both the three-wire three-phase system and the squirrel-cage induction motor, inspired by the original work of Ferraris. In the early days, two-phase systems appeared much easier to understand and analyze than three-phase systems, which probably acted as a brake on the progress of the latter, but Steinmetz fixed that with his complex number phasor approach. As a little piece of fun speculation, I wonder whether had Westinghouse not got so involved with the two-phase system, the original Niagara AC plant would have generated and transmitted three-phase, rather than generating two-phase and transmitting three-phase.

Similarly with Baird. One may draw a line from Campbell-Swinton’s idea through the to the actual development of workable electronic TV systems in 1932-33 without invoking any of the work that Baird did on mechanical TV systems. Perhaps one may credit Baird with dogged determination, but not with technical know-how. For example, I understand that he did not accept the existence of sidebands, which would appear to be somewhat limiting when you were working in the broadcast transmission field. But with folk-heroes, it seems to be a case of “when legend becomes fact, print the legend”. And perhaps the “life stories” of people like Tesla and Baird, involving some adversity (even if self-generated by resistance to technical reality) have more appeal to non-technical audiences than those of Blumlein, Dolivo-Dobrowolsky Steinmetz, etc.


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Old 7th Jan 2022, 9:30 pm   #3
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Default Re: The Search For The Tesla Files

Yes that seems quite a well balanced summary Mr S. I think it was you that may have pointed out the two phase focus to me previously but my electro mechanical knowedge is so poor that the two phases notion was a bit of a revelation to me. I suspect that the new Blaze programs will point out the vast amount of patents and notes Tesla left behind that disappeared. [Unlike Westinghouse he was naive and not much of a businessman].
The American Government certainly seemed to believe that the papers were of great importance though!

I think it might be possible to divide "innovators" into those who are primarily original like, perhaps, the late Steve Jobs with Apple and maybe J L Baird from those who took their inspiration from the efforts of others, eg Marconi who brought together various ideas to establish a working radio system and was able to promote it via social status and with financial backing.

More recently it's been suggested that Bill Gates [in his garage] and Mark Zuckerberg may have progressed in a similar fashion, initially. In the latter's case they made a rather fascinating film about it-The Social Media 2010

Dave W

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Old 7th Jan 2022, 10:35 pm   #4
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Default Re: The Search For The Tesla Files

Stephen King observed that inventions seemed to happen in a time period rather than in a place, or by a particular person. It was steam engine time, then nuclear bomb time, for example- and parallel thinking was blooming in different societies. King distanced himself from this observation by bestowing it on one of his fictional characters, (very useful!) but it's an interesting concept.

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Old 7th Jan 2022, 11:20 pm   #5
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Default Re: The Search For The Tesla Files

Thanks, Dave.

On three-phase history, including where Tesla fitted in, the following is worth a read:

“Early Three-Phase Power - Winner in the Development of Polyphase AC”; by Gerard Neidfhöfer; IEEE Power & Energy magazine, 2007 September-October. It can also be found as a detached article on the web, although web availability and location of this and similar IEEE P&E articles does seem to vary over time.

Neidhöfer is an excellent technical history writer, in the same class as the better-known Thomas Blalock who has penned quite a few IEEE P&E history articles.


On Baird, I think one of the better concise treatments, objective but not unsympathetic, was provided by W.J. Baker in the book “A Young Man’s Guide to Television”, of 1960. Right now I can’t find my copy to reconfirm this and perhaps quote from it.

As you say, Westinghouse was a businessman as well as an inventor, and even though he picked the wrong polyphase horse, he was astute enough to see that polyphase was the future, and one could say that it made sense to go with what was offered, at a time when the three-phase effort was taking place in Europe, not the USA. Westinghouse most amazing feat as an inventor was probably in the field of pneumatics rather than electricity, so would be off-topic here.


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Old 8th Jan 2022, 1:47 pm   #6
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Hello again. The Tesla series seems to be presented in that "Americanised" over enthusiastic way with the usual repeated commentary but there was a lot of interesting info buried in there as well! Clearly there is no need to rush over to the Belgrade Museum any time soon, given the Directors polite but somewhat menacing attitude to [not really] giving access. The tech demo on home ground associated with a small model boat remote control demonstration seemed impressive but it was a very "pond"erous [pun intended] thinking it all through process, coupled with great excitement when it worked. They worried about damaging the boat by wirelessly transmitting too much power to it but it almost came across at first as though they were trying to blow it up I expected them to mention that Tesla had demonstrated the remote control of a model boat in New York during the 1920's but I didn't hear that said.

Overall the discussion re whether there had been 80, 60 or only 30 thirty trunks full of written material recovered when Tesla died really caught my attention. The Museum says it has has 60 but they are not accessible as the trunks are being renovated? Again "Back in the USA" there were a number of interesting explorations, particularly the trip to a small museum in Colorado Springs where the Curator made the most of the limited amount of material that she had in her care. No menace just calm professionalism! I'd said that Tesla wasn't very worldly wise and was exploited but he did seem to have a very prickly, impatient, side to his personality which wouldn't have helped. Given what I'd said about Marconi earlier, I was surprised when the program reminded me that Tesla had once been a close friend of the radio pioneer until he felt some of his own work had been used without permission.

I think I may have the Young Man's Guide To Television myself [somewhere].
It's interesting that you have a balanced view of Tesla and Baird. They have it in common that most people have very little idea of their overall importance one way or the other. Tesla with phased distribution-even if he was "On the wrong bus"- like Baird with the mechanical scanning! Others can be a bit dismissive or just keep their heads down. JLB died around the corner from me here in Bexhill in June 1946. I'd no idea about that until I started living on the coast. He was just about to demonstrate an all electronic colour TV system in London but poor health finally took him out. We had to wait two decades for colour in the UK.

Maybe "Tesla" could become the word for an electric car [depending on overall sales] in the same way that some people in the UK still use "Hoover" as a generic term for a Vacuum Cleaner, when it's a brand of course!

Dave

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Old 8th Jan 2022, 2:20 pm   #7
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Default Re: The Search For The Tesla Files

Funnily enough, Blaze TV (FV-63) came up with a few gems over christmas/new year.
One which stood out was (bear with me on this one) 'Aliens at the Pentagon'.
Don't be misled by the title, it's presented by Nick Pope who is just about the most level headed person you could hope for, and deals equally with multi-agency multi-corporation shenanigans as it does with Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. This is not your usual repetitive 'look at the wobbly footage i caught on my phone before running indoors' TV.

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Old 11th Jan 2022, 8:25 am   #8
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Originally Posted by dave walsh View Post
It's interesting that you have a balanced view of Tesla and Baird. They have it in common that most people have very little idea of their overall importance one way or the other. Tesla with phased distribution-even if he was "On the wrong bus"- like Baird with the mechanical scanning! Others can be a bit dismissive or just keep their heads down. JLB died around the corner from me here in Bexhill in June 1946. I'd no idea about that until I started living on the coast. He was just about to demonstrate an all electronic colour TV system in London but poor health finally took him out. We had to wait two decades for colour in the UK.
I look at it this way. For whatever reasons, some people connected with the invention or development of new technologies become much better known in historical rendition than others who may well have played a larger role, to the extent that they become folk heroes, sometimes known as “THE inventor” of whatever . Denigrating them or their achievements won’t change anything in the big wide world, where myth beats math. Rational analysis might have some effect in those much, much smaller circles where math does actually beat myth. And in most cases, those celebrated inventors did what they did without much thought as to how they might be seen by future generations, so they are hardly responsible for their subsequent iconic status in popular history. My own conclusions, from what I have read, is that both Baird and Telsa have been credited with playing greater roles in the technical development of respectively TV and polyphase AC than was actually the case, but on the other hand, both were there, and both were strong advocates of the technologies they espoused. They at least deserve fair treatment in any work that seeks to outpoint the relative contributions of others. I think that W.J. Baker did that in respect of Baird, as did C. Cooper in “The Truth About Tesla”.

Re colour television, once monochrome had been established, it was almost axiomatic that Maxwell’s method would be applied to obtain the coloured version. Doing it per se was not the issue. Rather the major difficulty (although not the only one) in respect of broadcast side was doing it in a way that was economical with bandwidth and was compatible. NTSC II did a magnificent job on that, in what was a “pressure cooker” situation. Even then the economics precluded its worldwide expansion for as you say, around a couple of decades. I suppose you could say the colour TV was mostly an engineering issue, and less one of invention, although not entirely so.


Cheers,

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Old 11th Jan 2022, 9:12 am   #9
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I recall that many years ago (late 70's early 80's), there was a bit of a kerfuffle about a collection of info on Tesla. I watched it play out and fizzle in the pages of 'Electronics and power' and 'New Scientist'

It seems there was a collection (by whom? of what?) of papers relating to Tesla and that someone had obtained them with a view to making a documentary. I think some of it came from Tesla's family. There was a lot of speculation regarding what was involved and a few people also wanted a good look at it. Tesla hagiography was in full swing at the time. The documentary maker sat on it for rather a long time, the docmentary never got made and the material never surfaced.

There was lively speculation on just what was going on. All sorts of interests seemed involved but the stuff (if it ever existed must be questioned) vanished with scarcely a fizzle.

Ever since, I've kept coming across mention of missing Tesla info of some form or another.

The guy was definitely cleverer than a barrel load of monkeys, and I wonder to what extent his reputation grew in the telling. There could be something very interesting somewhere, or it could be concatenated wishful thinking.

Considering past progress over 40 years, I don't expect to ever know. We'll have to survive and make our own progress without it.

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Old 11th Jan 2022, 10:08 am   #10
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I quite agree with many of the posts here. My heart sinks when I read the rubbish on some forums, you'd think Tesla was some kind of God the way people puff him up.
I always consider him in the same way as Baird and Marconi - clever people who owe most of their fame to their showmanship and their welding together of other people's discoveries. OK there's a certain genius in that, but it does irritate me when I hear yet another layman telling me that 'Baird invented television' or 'Marconi invented radio'.
As for the myth & magic surrounding Tesla, his 'broadcast power' and the infamous missing documents, words fail me.
Sorry, I may be on the wrong side of my bed this morning....
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Old 12th Jan 2022, 2:33 am   #11
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I had two books called something like "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla". One went missing, it had a patent in which I was interested, which was not included in the remaining book. Tesla spent his whole life inventing, for Edison, George Westinghouse, and for himself. There seems to be an inventor for everything in each developed country. How much transfer of information there was between them is anyone's guess. But the end result was spread around, at least eventually, for everyone's benefit. Reading books about these people gives me inspiration and ideas. This morning, I was reading a British electrical textbook, circa 1900 odd, and found a section on precision fuses made from gold leaf that you could see through, later alloyed with silver. I also read of the advantages of wooden trumpets for loudspeaker horns, but apparently they fell out of favour because they need to be ten feet long, in which case they are better than other speaker types. The more people fiddling with these projects, the better. If they have to stretch the truth to obtain sponsorship.....
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Old 12th Jan 2022, 4:24 am   #12
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It wasn't all nice reading and happy happy joy joy. Edison was reputed to be a very nasty piece of work, involved in some very sharp practices as well as the electrocution of those elephants.

A bit later, industrialist David Sarnoff had RCAs lawyers drive Edwin Armstrong to suicide to get his hands on Armstrong's patents.

Earlier, Newton had done all he could to ruin the reputation of Robert Hooke, and to expunge him from historical record.

The science and engineering may be fun, but there were some nasty undercurrents in the business aspects. If you think it attractive to have lived in those days, just think of the dentistry!

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Old 12th Jan 2022, 6:07 am   #13
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There are rumors here that many of Tesla's papers, devices, and such were confiscated by the U.S. Gov't. after his death.

Technomaniac- When I visited NZ in the 70's, one ham radio operator had built a plywood cone speaker ( mono) taking up a large portion of his garage. It sounded fantastic!
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Old 13th Jan 2022, 4:02 pm   #14
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I was careful when flagging up the Blaze series to keep things calm and am gratified to see the balanced response having just caught up with all the views and particularly the extra information supplied from post 8* onwards that I've just read

There's another insightful response from Synchrodyne in particular. Perhaps you are more worked up Andrew but not alone [and we have both lived in Dukinfield!]. I get annoyed for example when even the BBC [and others] only mention the Baird v EMI "failure" of 1936 and don't appear to know anything else! Whether he was a key figure or not, he was badly treated and deserves better in that respect alone [as is the case with Mr Tesla]. I never take an extreme view but it's often the money and not the technology that decides things-think BETA v VHS!

Going back to the sort of coincidence I mentioned at first [in post 1*] the Blaze Channel showed two episodes on Monday 10/1/21. The first "Voices of the Gods", referenced Tesla, particle physics [re Richard Feynman] Cloud Computing and......the apparent appearance of similar inventions across the world in the same time period. Sychrodyne was sort of heading there in post 8* perhaps? An in-depth [American?] University Study of this was mentioned, which catalogued a number of them but I can't recall it now. I don't record everything but it's another apparent phenomena that when you decide not to, something important or related, always seems to pops up

Episode 3/5 of Tesla Files is on Blaze tomorrow [14/1/22] at 9pm. It deals with the Hotel where Tesla died and Warrenclyfe Tower.

Dave W

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Old 13th Jan 2022, 5:35 pm   #15
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I had two books called something like "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla". One went missing, it had a patent in which I was interested, which was not included in the remaining book.
Well, that's a conspiracy if ever I saw one! The problem with Tesla is the adoption of the "If the government has taken it, it must be an everlasting lightbulb, free power, flying car etc", where lack of evidence is put forward as evidence!
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Old 16th Jan 2022, 6:08 pm   #16
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I've been always fascinated by the 'Tesla Mythos' and how it seems to have embedded itself in various subcultures; there seems to be an enduring trope to support the also-rans in technology.

John Logie Baird is similarly deified, though his mechanical-TV stuff is really no smarter than the works of Farnsworth, Zworykin and Nipkow. Somehow the losers attract followers.

Pragmatically, I like the "the time was right" approach to technology: Stevenson may have produced the first railway-locomotive but it took Isambard Brunel to go out and raise the Victorian equivalent of Venture-Capital funding to build the Great Western Railway; Marconi learned from the likes of Sir Oliver Lodge [who went to the same Grammar-school as yours truly] , produced the first really-workable radios and got both fame and wealth as a result.

Look at Edison, Bell, Westinghouse, RCA's David Sarnoff: they understood the technology _and_ the business side of how to turn this into something we can sell.


Patents, rather than academic publications!
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Old 1st May 2022, 3:36 pm   #17
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PM sent to Technomaniac reference the publications mentioned in Post #11



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Old 1st May 2022, 6:40 pm   #18
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Tesla was a very strange man. One of his projects was his "particle beam" which could allegedly be used as a military weapon (if he ever got it to work properly) - this may explain why all his research and design papers were confiscated, presumably by the U.S. Military, 2 days after he died.

He appears to have had quite severe OCD and would not touch other people for fear of getting germs on him.

He was also involved with spiritualism and communication with the deceased, and there are stories of him attending seances, which probably fascinated him due to his strong interest in wireless communication.
(Sir Oliver Lodge, long-time President of the RSGB, also had similar interests).

All in all, a fascinating chap who did much to progress the radio, television, and telephone industries.
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Old 3rd May 2022, 6:14 pm   #19
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I find it very hard to believe that Tesla discovered some significant new and useful principal, involving the production or transmission or use of electricity. And that some wicked conspiracy has hidden or destroyed the records.

Scientific knowledge has advanced very considerably in the decades since then, and if any such new and revolutionary principle HAD been discovered all those years ago, then surely it would have been RE-DISCOVERED by now.
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Old 5th May 2022, 8:48 pm   #20
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While I don't think he discovered 'alien technology', I do acknowledge it can be very hard to re-invent the wheel when you don't have the exact background and train of thought the orginal inventor had. For example the scientfic background of some phenomenon can be known, but the practical application can be lost and not found for quite some time. Even practical appliations take time from invention to being ready for production. Some of the basic technologies for optical discs (VLP, CD) were patented in the 1950's, but not implemented until the 1970's and hardly commercially viable until the 1980's.

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