Could we clone Tesla?

[Sage_Rat]

@bbeaty

You’d end up with a little Serbian kid. Unless he becomes a NYC pool shark, lives in the wilderness for a year, flunks out of engineering school, unplugs the villiage fire hose, accidentally kills his brother, nearly dies of cholera, etc., he probably won’t be any different than you or I.

On the other hand nothing has changed, so Tesla would still fail. If he was alive right now, but under another name, I doubt that anybody would support his company. Intolerance of “woo” is much higher today than it was in Tesla’s time. People with investment funds take a dim view of crazy-sounding physics claims, and there are plenty such inventors scrounging for funding as we speak. Until they get serious money, we’d never know if any of them is the next Tesla. And nobody in their right mind gives them serious money, any more than they’d fund Tesla himself in the thirty years between 1910 and his death.

A lot of Tesla’s issues were probably problems of mental illness. With modern medicine, I think he’d be able to be far more productive than he was in his own time. Given education in modern knowledge, then, who knows whether he’d be able to jump off it.

[bbeaty]

@Sage_Rat

A lot of Tesla’s issues were probably problems of mental illness.

Perhaps Tesla was as mad as a hatter? He employed mercury in many of his pre-1910 electronic devices. Metallic mercury isn’t a lethal poison, but don’t let it acquire a large surface area by being ground into your workshop floor. Constant breathing of the vapor can give you a long term body load, same as with lead poisoning.

[bbeaty]

@Irishman

bbeaty said:
So much less was known about the topic, how could the investors tell the difference between projections of possibility and woo? I mean, he could shoot out friggin’ lightning bolts from his equipment. That’s gotta get some attention from potential investors.

Tesla biographers seem to agree that one major turning point happened when he publicly announced receiving intelligent signals from outer space; probably Mars. The press stopped taking him seriously after that. Publicity is fickle, and expertise can transform overnight into “guy crazy enough to always be playing with dangerous voltages.”

Here’s a recent indie short film I ran across …which even plays up the Mars thing in trying to make Tesla look eccentric:

Tesla vs. his hotel bill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdD3MRvBvc4