I just finished reading a rather involved biography of Nikola Tesla. Now, despite the fact that the author was obviously in awe of the man, Tesla did develop some incredible devices.
We know about the Tesla coil, AC power, and several of his other inventions, but what about his less widely-known ideas? What about this sympathetic harmonics earthquake machine? What about wireless transmission of electricity through the upper atmosphere? Whatever happened to the ones that got away?
Tesla was little more than a crackpot, in his later years. Early on, he showed promise, but he failed to keep up with developments in the undersrtanding of electrical phenomena. Cecil on the subject of Tesla.
Well, after getting ripped off and ceaselessly denigrated by Edison–then subsequently being awarded the Edison Medal for his talent, I can’t really blame him for going a little spare.
I have to wonder if he failed to keep up with the understanding of electrical phenomena, or if in fact his particular insight was simply not in line with everyone else’s research at the time…
(to use a rather bad analogy, maybe he was thinking about something on the level of relativity when everyone else was just chugging along with the electrical equivalent of newtonian physics, but he had no way to properly express his notions with the science of the time. I know Cecil disagrees, but I still have to wonder.)
How many “crackpots” have turned out to be geniuses centuries after the fact? For example, I’m sure DaVinci’s sketches seemed utterly preposterous in his day-- and perhaps the plans he made were impractical to produce, but the notions behind them were more often than not quite prescient.
It would be like me trying to design a faster than light starship today… I’d know what I wanted it to do, and I’d do my best to make a plan for one based on the upper limits of my theoretical knowledge. It would be the bleeding edge of theory. Stephen Hawking himself would be impressed. Then 300 years from now an engineering student will look back and laugh hysterically at the utter stupidity of it all. 
Tesla really did make some bad decisions. He was confident that atomic nuclei couldn’t be cracked. He stuck with electrostatics and RF experiments rather than jumping onto particle accelerators like the rest of the physics community. He was convinced that x-rays were longitudinal EM rather than simply being high-frequency light. And he apparently believed that the “nearfield EM” we know today, was instead an entirely different phenomenon than radio waves (it’s not.)
But Tesla was also right. See below.
Well, Tesla is accused of crackpotism for (among other things) his claim that the whole Earth could resonate electrically at 7Hz, 14Hz, 21Hz, etc., all the way up into the tens of kilohertz He discovered this in his radio observations of lightning strikes. Balderdash! Obvious crackpotism! Contemporary physicists would have none of it. But then in the 1950s after Tesla was safely dead, during investigations of the VLF radio signals produced by lightning, it was discovered that… the whole Earth can resonate electrically at 7Hz, 14Hz, etc. The phenomenon is today known as the Schumann resonances after its discoverer. But Tesla is still a crackpot!
Tesla also claimed that he could broadcast usable energy worldwide from a single radio transmitter. Garbage! 1910 physicists know that radio can’t bend around the Earth! Also he was using low frequencies (below 10KHz), and everyone knows that your receiving antenna must be immensely long to intercept significant power at those frequencies. Too bad an engineer[Corum] in the 1980s finally sat down and calculated how well Tesla’s scheme would have worked… and found that it was borderline feasible after all. It uses the Earth-ionosphere waveguide. There would be a few megawatts of constant loss to ionospheric, but above that, the system would only need to supply extra power whenever distant antennas were actively pulling in energy. It would behave like a huge electrical grid, where a certain amount of power is lost to wire-heating, but where customers draw energy as needed, and only then to the generators run faster. Oh, and it also turns out that you DON’T need an immense antenna to receive longwave power. The electrical aperture or “virtual diameter” of a small receiving antenna can be greatly enlarged by adding a high-Q resonator to the antenna. Particle physicists are well familiar with this effect, since it causes the enlarged virtual cross section for particle collisions at certain frequencies(energies.) And radio hams use this trick all the time in order to operate on 160 meters using antennas mounted on cars which would otherwise be far too short to function. So Tesla’s scheme would have worked, the only question is… HOW WELL? He certainly could have run small motors and light bulbs worldwide. But Tesla claimed that his tests showed that “industrial” amounts of power could be transferred. He wasn’t a crackpot regarding the broadcast power scheme. Maybe he was right about the power levels too. Nobody knows, since the measurements would have to be determined by experiment (there’s still too many open questions about the theory to make solid predictions.)
But Tesla is STILL A CRACKPOT!
During WWII, Tesla proposed building a system of “death ray” towers which could supposedly shoot down aircraft many miles away. Utter tripe! Too bad that modern researchers later rediscovered Tesla’s ideas, and put them to heavy use in the last ten years (the 2002 Nobel prize for chemistry was based on the very thing Tesla used as his death ray: a beam of atomic clusters generated by the “electrospray” effect, and then accelerated electrically in a vacuum.) Tesla’s death ray was essentially a water-jet cutter, but a cutter using tiny mercury or tungsten particles rather than tiny water droplets, and he accelerated them electrically rather than using high pressure. It certainly was a “death ray.” The only question was over the length of the lethal range. Modern water-jet cutters are only lethal over a couple feet at most. Tesla claimed that he had built and tested death ray devices, and insisted that they could take out aircraft over many kilometers range. OK, so if he wasn’t insane when making claims about the other stuff, possibly he was correct about this too (or possibly not, since someone would have to replicate Tesla’s devices to determine the true lethal range experimentally.)
But that doesn’t matter, TESLA IS STILL A CRACKPOT. All experts know this! (But maybe we should start to become suspicious about experts who possibly have a conflict of interest in their running down Tesla.)
In all of Tesla’s later work there is a repeating pattern: first the experts of the time declare that Tesla’s stuff is utter crackpot. Then decades pass, and it turns out that Tesla was at least partly right (and possibly completely right.) But then something strange happens. His vindication HAS NO EFFECT… the scoffers don’t change their tune. They still insist that Tesla was a crackpot, even though more and more of their evidence for crackpotism is struck down.
Sociologists are familiar with this effect. Once people publically use ridicule against another person, the scoffers find it almost impossible to publicly retract their ridicule and to admit that they were wrong. I suspect it’s because scoffers are convinced that they’re fighting on the side of good, and when it turns out that their victim was right after all, it demonstrates that the scoffers were not just wrong, but also were arrogant bullies whose case was based on ignorance. How many people ccould face that about themselves? Many choose mild insanity instead, and dive into a system of distortion and denial. It’s a classic example of unconscious distorion caused by a “conflict of interest,” but one involving the scoffer’s public reputation rather than involving money.
I think Cecil should be extremely cautious about running down apparant crackpots. If those crackpots should later turn out to be legit, then the amount of crow he’d need to swallow becomes stunningly huge. Such things are known to send lesser men into fitful silence (while they fiercely hope that somehow everyone forgets their ridicule of legitimate new ideas.) Silence, or sometimes they break loose from reality entirely, where they continue trying to justify their ridicule in the face of the clear fact that they were wrong and their victim was right. The scoffer loses the ability to see the clear fact. But everyone else does!
We aren’t to this point with Tesla yet. Many of Tesla’s ridiculed ideas have turned out to be perfectly real, but much is still open to question. On the other hand, we should take a lesson from Langley, the head of the Smithsonian, who fiercely ridiculed the Wright Brothers’ claims in public, and then found himself trapped when their claims later proved to be real. Langley opted for mild insanity rather than owning up to his gigantic mistake. He insisted until his death that the Wright Brothers were liars and frauds (and as a result, the Smithsonian displayed no Wright Flyer until after Langley had died. Instead a museum in Britain displayed the last surviving Flyer.) Such is the kind of insanity triggered by public ridicule of discoveries which later turn out to be real.
Max Planck on this sort of insanity: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Researchers call this “Planck’s Other Law.” In my opinion, Planck’s law owes its existence to the extreme difficulty we humans have in recanting a stance of confident public ridicule. Opponents of an idea SHOULD find it easy to change their minds when the evidence shows a need for it. But if an idea’s opponents have indulged in sneering, they now have a major conflict of interest. They can’t just say that they were wrong, they must also face the fact that they were stupid, arrogant, and perhaps helped to prevent progress.
The way to avoid such things is to investigate issues thorougly before daring to use namecalling such as the “crackpot” label. Maybe Cecil has made himself an expert on Tesla’s history, and his conclusion is based on careful study. I suspect the opposite. I suspect that he adopted a negative view of Tesla, and now is selecting evidence in order to maintain that view. Remember, “conflict of interest” can be an immensely powerful force in science:
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” - Sherlock Holmes (A C Doyle)
Maybe Tesla was wrong. But if we insist that he was not just wrong but was also a big flaming crackpot, then we put ourselves into a serious bind if Tesla’s “crackpot” discoveries later turn out to be sound.
Hmm, the message board ate my last carefully crafted reply, so I’ll summarize…
I think you may be being too harsh on Cecil… He isn’t a scientist who is expected to independently verify all these claims, he has to go (and indeed, as a reporter who works for a paper he is obligated to go) with what the mainstream says.
That being said, given the volume of subjects he has to reply to, I don’t think he’d develop such a deep vested interest in his answer re: Tesla (as opposed to a Ph.D in Physics, for example) that he would go mad or be publically humilated if proven wrong.
Look at Dark Matter. Astronomers spat on the notion of its existence and anyone who espoused it, but after it was found in 1998 they swear by it, factoring it into all their theories. Those reporters who had gone with the old line simply reported that the theory had changed and moved on. That’s what will happen here.
Maybe Cecil was a little harsh with his dismissal of Tesla, but we shouldn’t be blaming him, rather we should be blaming the establishment that has painted Tesla into this artificial corner of historical obscurity.