Although I’d never take issue with the facts issued by TSD I sometimes contest opinions. The opinion that Tesla was a bit of a crackpot who failed to achieve greatness because of flaws in his social skills irks me.
As has been noted recently in science news pages, genius seems to come in two forms. There are those who produce their best work when young and seem to have an inner creative intuition that gushes out all at one time. Others are experimentalists who only produce their best ideas after years of struggle and development. Of the former there are many notables. A few were Einstein, Orsen Wells, Tesla. Unfortunately they all suffered from the same syndrome: What does a person do with their life when they have already reached their peak before 40?
Its a sad fate. Einstein spent most of his later years arguing with younger scientists and never really accepted the quantum or the uncertainty principle. Orsen Wells found solace in food and drink and in order to make a living was forced to make cheap wine commercials. Tesla was trapped in wave theory, and didn’t accept the dual nature of the EMS and after his great success Tesla retired to a small life where he fed pigeons. So what? He had already created devices of universal application and immense importance, and had personal relationships with the greatest men of his time. He made huge amounts of money and spent or gave away most of it. What more should be expected? His aloof bearing and craving for solitude were part of his genius NOT a personality flaw that prevented his genius from flowering.
He did not die alone, so to speak, because shortly before his death his fellow scientists discovered his plight and honored him with awards and a pension. His poverty was largely a result of his kindness toward his friend George Westinghouse, whose company he saved by giving Westinghouse his patents. A kinder view of this genius may be found in Empires of Light-a world history of the development of the electric power industry.
As far as broadcast power…well let’s say that those with imagination predict that it will in due time be as common place as sliced bread. When? Maybe hundreds of years. In the meantime, Cecil is right in all of his facts about the notion, if not in his opinions about the faults of people.
“The peak of Tesla’s career came in his early 30s, when he sold his alternating-current patents to George Westinghouse for big bucks. He also did pioneering work in radio and other fields”
Fact.
“But thereafter he frittered away his genius and hundreds of thousands of dollars of other people’s money on one hairbrained scheme after another.”
You might disagree about the term “frittered” or “hairbrained”, but this is pretty much a fact. Tesla DID spend huge amounts of time and money on ultimately futile projects that were based on concepts the scientific community at large did not accept.
Cecil was attacking the idea that Tesla was just “too far ahead of his time”, not Tesla’s genius. “Ahead of his time” could only be the case if his concepts proved out, which they did not.
“His problems arose largely from the fact that he was an eccentric who was unable to work with (and consequently to learn from) other people, and the increasing unreality of his ideas shows it.”
That in no way says he wasn’t a genius! It’s an analysis of why he turned “crackpot” in his later years, not an indictment of the man’s abilities. I don’t think it’s at all unfair to say “This man was very smart and did great things; it’s a pity he didn’t work well with others, because he could have done even more incredible things.”
Unfortunately, imagination is not, in fact, a good tool in predicting the advance of science and technology.
For more information on the realities of broadcast power, see my post here. here.
There is a saying: “Every man has an idea that won’t work”. Tesla apparently had many of them. Or did he? Since the U.S. Government impounded his papers after his death, and still classifies them as ‘secret’, there isn’t much to go on as far as how successful some of this ‘harebrained’ ideas really were. Consider the HAARP project. It has more than a few similarities to Tesla’s idea of a charged ionosphere.
Your post about the popular notion of broadcast power is pretty much on the money. And I also agreed with C.'s facts. I think you really got the main obstacle preventing BP research and development correct: (assuming is might somehow be made to work) how to pay for it and/or charge customers.
The difficulty with that barricade is the current economic system, where people provide goods and services for one another for a price. Who would pay for experimentation of an idea that may not work? Well, Tesla did. Not to get into the theory of altruism but suffice to say that not all people are motivated by personal gain. Whether there will ever come a day when an economic system can rely on altruism is anyone’s guess. I’m not holding my breath.
No person is obligated to publicize his discoveries. It may be that at times someone discovering a new thing, idea, or concept has the insight to realize that his discovery may bring more harm to people than good. In that case the person would have to decide if his own gain or glory trumps the peace and security of his fellow man. I am not saying that Tesla did such a thing, just that it is possible.
I appreciate your post. The only thing I’d dispute is the importance of imagination in the creative process of discovery. I should have highlighted the idea of ‘scope’. Civilization takes tens of thousands of years. Who can say what is possible in another few hundred years?
Yeah, pretty much. So did Newton, for whom it has been hundred of years without anything coming from his later experiments in alchemy. I wouldn’t hold it against him, though.
Actually, it is true, sort of. The many of his papers and personal effects after his death, mostly on the request of the military. He was reportedly working on a “death ray,” an idea he had tried to interest the army in prior to his death. Some of his work was later retrieved from the government by his heirs. There is some controversy over supposedly “missing” Tesla notes, both those not found at the time of his death, and those originally taken by the government and later not found in their possession.
You can read some of the bare bones of the story at Wikipedia; the “death ray” was the forerunner of beam weapons, such as were envisioned by the so-called Star Wars initiative.
Basically, this is one of those cases where you should probably blame bureaucratic issues rather than jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon. The Army did take some of his notes, yes; but there is not really any evidence that there was anything they didn’t return. On the other hand, the Army is notoriously bad about failing to declassify documents when their usefulness is over. It just gets filed in a TOP SECRET drawer somewhere and abandoned. So even if there is something they didn’t return, it’s pretty likely that it was by accident rather than design.
HAARP has very little to do with anything of Tesla’s, except perhaps the fact that it’s playing with large scale electrical fields. The ionosphere fluctuates a lot, and this is an attempt to exert some small control over it – but it has nothing to do with broadcast power or teleforce rays. Broadcast Power has nothing to do with a “charged ionosphere”, only using the ionosphere to reflect radio waves.
Well, the alternative is called ‘communism’, and has never worked well in a group larger than a few hundred people – that is, a group wherein all the members personally know each other. (Note: The USSR was not communist, despite popular belief. Their system was socialist, but not communist, which denies the concept of personal property. Amish are a good example of communists.)
Certainly the future may hold scifi-style telekinesis beams and wireless power transmission, and we do have directed-energy weapons that didn’t exist in Tesla’s time. However, the weapons we have and anything we eventually produce will almost certainly not use the theories Tesla developed, and thus should not accrue to his credit. By analogy, the fact that our modern understanding of radioactivity and atomic theory allows us to change one element into another, does not mean that alchemists were in any way correct.
Please! My original post was expression of disagreement with CA statement that Tesla frittered away his genius on one hairbrained (sic) idea after another. It was a disagreement…that’s all. I made the mistake of explaining and although the comments posted in response to my thoughts are interesting I find that here on the SDMB almost any passing comment (taken out of context) is an opportunity for fault finding. No, I don’t imagine that Edison’s every invention made money. In fact very few did. But that wasn’t the point of that comment. And you know it.
To illustrate how discussions might be done here: I couldn’t help to observe that C used the term ‘hairbrained’ in his comment about Tesla instead of the correct term ‘harebrained’ as in ‘stupid as a rabbit’. (Look it up) But I did not make that an issue or an opportunity for fault finding.
When I logged on recently I was surprised to learn that this is a fee based board. I am a guest here. Therefore I am not surprised that some want to get their money’s worth. I hope you have enjoyed yourselves.
Well, you’re right that the original term is “harebrained”, but the erroneous “hairbrained” has been used so often that it may as well be considered part of the vernacular, thus “correct”. But then again, as an SDMB member, I’m apparently dedicated to pointless fault-finding.
I kinda wish Tesla had had the benefit of modern pharmaceuticals, and Da Vinci a combustion engine, and Newton an electron microscope…
