Awesome topic! Tesla’s life and work are fascinating to anyone who loves technology and the larger than life personalities who make it happen. Tesla was so far ahead of his time. Imagine how our world would have evolved had his dream of free ‘wireless’ electricity been realized.

Tesla may be enjoying a resurgence now, but there are those who have been studying his work for decades. For example:

http://www.arcsandsparks.com/teslapage.html

http://www.teslasociety.com/corum.htm

http://www.ussdiscovery.com/corum/corum/corum.htm

http://www.ttr.com/corum/index.htm

A Tesla scholar in CO with a book store focusing on the body of Tesla’s work. An inventor too.

http://www.tfcbooks.com/default.htm

Sorry this is off topic, though I am enjoying the Tesla conversation. Will WNPR be broadcasting Obama’s Sate of the Union Address tonight? I can’t find it mentioned on your website.

Thank you and keep up the great work,
-Matt

This is my Baader-Meinhof moment–I am reading Love in Infant Monkeys, which includes two stories referencing Tesla, just watched The Prestige, including Tesla as a character, and now your show. I had never heard of this inventor until this month.

Another example of Tesla’s current popularity. We’re in the middles of the Sundance film festival here in Utah. There’s a film on the documentary shorts program called Drunk History: Tesla vs. Edison, in which a man drinks a six pack of beer and a half a bottle of Absinthe and then tells the story of Tesla and Edison. The film features reenactments with John C. Reilly as Tesla and Crispin Glover as Edison.

Edison’s DC current was terribly threatened by Tesla’s invention of AC current, which was clearly superior in every way. In order to discredit Tesla and AC Edison invented the electric chair to show how dangerous AC current was.

wow this show is so cool thanks,

Clip from sites home page:
“Welcome to the home page of The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project.
Our mission is the preservation and adaptive reuse of Wardenclyffe,
the century-old laboratory of electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla
located in Shoreham, Long Island, New York.”

http://www.teslascience.org/

Why do we need *more* innovation? As it is now, anything we have or learn will be obsolete in five years. Soon we will be spending sixteen hours a day in school throughout our lives, giving us no time to *use* the skills we have learned. The real reason we think we need more innovation is the desire to get all the goodies before someone else (such as China) does.
Great prophets saw it coming, but interpreted it incorrectly. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin looked forward to the Omega Point; Raymond Kurzweil looks forward to technological singularity. They are wrong.
What will happen, of course, is total chaos, worldwide revolutions, and other unpleasantnesses. Let’s slow down and enjoy life for a change!

It’s another look at popularity vs. common sense. and good ol Americans left in the dark and duped for years. Due to marketing? You know the other truth.

Where are our usual intellectuals on this subject?

Technical correction: The reason one doesn’t get a shock or get burned by a low-powered Tesla coil is not the high voltage and low current. It’s because the frequency is high enough to keep the current traveling on the surface of what is carrying the current. It’s called the “skin effect”, as any well-taught electronic engineer could tell you. “Surface effect” is, quite likely, the wrong term; it’s certainly uncommon, at least, in this respect.

The seriously high-powered Tesla coils /will/ injure people seriously, regardless of the skin effect.

I miss the taste of postage stamps.

Hi Tom, great show. I wonder about John hays Hammond,Jr. from the North Shore of MA right here in our backyard and how he compares to Tesla and Edison in your guest’s mind. Hammond is credited with the development of the modern day guidance system still in use with our missile technology today. In 1905 he guided an unmaned ship from Gloucester to Boston and back. He at one time also was said to compete with Edison as for who had the most patents in the US Patent office. Dave

On a different, more-general, but pertinent topic, there’s a curious and most-unfortunate disconnect between the desire for technical innovation and the widespread hatred of science and technology, as well as hatred of geeks (in particular honorable geeks, who strongly desire to do no harm).

There is a misconception that DC cannot transport electricity over long distance. This is not true. An example is the High Voltage DC line transporting electricity from hydro electric rich Washington State to L.A. The linkage is known as Intere 65. The beauty of long distance DC transmission is that the loss over power over long distance is much less than AC long distance transmission. Long Distance DC makes it possible for large scale Solar Thermal Electricity transmission from the American Southwest to load centers thousands of miles away.

The “skin effect” is frequency dependent, not voltage dependent. As frequency increases, the (A.C.) current tends toward the surface (or “skin”) of the conductor, with the current density within the conductor falling-off concomitantly; the effective thickness of this conducting layer is known as “skin depth.” (The Faraday Effect is that with a conductor, charge distributes to the outside; that is, the electric field in a conductor is zero. This is why it is safe to be in an all-steel vehicle, for example, during a lightening storm. This conducting container is known as a “Faraday Cage.”)

It never ceases to amaze me how On Point and it’s talented staff create such informative and entertaining programs that draw callers you would never hear on any other radio program or station and who bring such knowledge and enlightened thought to the topic being discussed. This discussion on Tesla is yet another example. And you make it look easy and seamless but a lot of background work is necessary to achieve this. Another excellent program. Don’t ever stop!

One thing that shouldn’t be forgotten is that while Edison had little formal education, Tesla had a university education which enabled him to use theory to solve problems. Edison lacked this knowledge and was hindered more than once by his educational background. The story of how he figured out the wire size to use for wiring an area of NYC illustrates the difference between Tesla’s and Edison’s approaches to problems–the latter made a scaled model circuit of the area. Telsa would probably have solved the problem in a fraction of the time using elementary circuit theory.

Unfortunately, the US has a history of elevating relatively uneducated men like Edison to high status because of a rather deep mistrust of educated persons by the masses.

“Long Distance DC makes it possible for large scale Solar Thermal Electricity transmission from the American Southwest to load centers thousands of miles away.”

Absolutely! A 2000-km HVDC line at 800KV is about twice as efficient (about 95%) as an AC line at the same voltage. AC was adopted over DC because voltages are easily stepped up and down via transformers (big hunks or electrical steel and wire), however with the advent of large-current solid state switches such as IGBTs and MOSFETs, it’s now economical and fairly straightforward to transform DC voltages.

The technology is there to move to solar in a big way. Nothing really needs to invented.

WOW!….There you go again…another rockin’ topic. Many of us here in Western New York (Buffalo/Niagara Falls) have known of or about Tesla for years but now we know more-and what-and why and so do others. I try never to miss your shows. Thanks

Tesla is not well known in the 21st century however, in his own time I believe he was at least as popular as Edison and much more electrifying (sorry) to the public. As an engineer, I can attest that Tesla has always been the technical hero among engineering students, inventors, physicists. Those who have and awareness of world history have also noted Tesla’s importance. For example, it seems to me that John Galt, the pivotal character of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, was based upon Tesla.

Edison was a kind of trial and error inventor who several times, through pure repetition, stumbled upon some groundbreaking inventions with the help of a large staff of talented assistants, including Tesla for a short time. Edison had little understanding of electromagnetic physics and resented those, like Tesla, who did. His statement “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent inspiration,” has the distinct ring of a non genius utterance. Tesla was indeed a genius and, as we are now re-learning, had as much influence in shaping the modern world as pretty much anyone in the past millennium, perhaps even on a par with Albert Einstein. I submit that the reason Tesla is not as well known as would be expected for a person his Herculean stature, is that he cared little about amassing a great amount of worldly wealth but, was more interested in reshaping the world itself.

Is innovation inexorably linked to the desire for money and power? Can innovation occur without profit motive?

“Edison had little understanding of electromagnetic physics and resented those, like Tesla, who did.” -Nick bonge

“Unfortunately, the US has a history of elevating relatively uneducated men like Edison to high status because of a rather deep mistrust of educated persons by the masses.” -Justin

These two statements serve to give, I feel, an accurate description of the men’s relationship to each other, both personally (the former statement) and historically, i.e., why they have held the stature they have by mainstream sources of history for so long (the latter).

I would also add that Edison had much more of a killer instinct, to not only beat what he perceived to be his competitors but quash them. Edison was driven more by fame and fortune, and he was, as others have stated in perhaps a different way, an obsessed tinkerer. This can be compared in very much the same way to Warhol being an artist. (Warhol used assistants to actually do most of the work, and he often projected slide photographs onto a canvass to copy the basic structure of images/composition,etc. to begin his paintings.) Tesla was more a true inventor, and I am glad to see the truth about his legacy really starting to permeate the mainstream, popular, cultural landscape.

When I was a kid (late ’50’s and early ’60’s), Edison was mentioned a lot; Tesla…not so much [as in not at all]. That was a time notorious for a pervasive mentality of American exceptionalism; I’ll bet that had at least something to do with Edison being given too much of an elevated position.

“Is innovation inexorably linked to the desire for money and power? Can innovation occur without profit motive?”

Doubtful, we still carry around primordial brains hardwired to compete for resources and mates.

From a recent NPR story:

“So, to the punch line: Does technology make men more sexy?”

“Dr. PETER UNDERHILL (Department of Genetics, Stanford University): That would be one way to interpret it.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=122944258

Currently at Milwaukee’s Discovery World Museum they have a one hour show replete with an actor who is brilliant at playing Tesla and fifteen foot lightening bolts shooting across the stage… what a hoot! I’m a huge fan!!!

excellent to hear that tesla is coming back into main stream … he did invent this century if u really think about it.. plus he was utilizing a different type of electric wave the Tesla wave .. which resonates the wat we call the shuman cavity hear on earth . that is about 12hz. here in canada i have found a way with the help of a professor in germany to reproduce the wireless transmission of power. i am developing it and will be sharing it people real soon…

I may also add that the US government (FBI) seized all his stuff when he died and to this day have not released it to the general public
. the ramifications on scalar wave technology (which the Russians have ) are to big for governments to handle. Wireless transmission is very easy to reproduce. You need a frequency modulator a transformer that is opposite polarity to each other and exactly the same in every dimension. then u get power with no wires. very easy concept. American energy cartels kill people because they know this. As long as gas and oil are around . there will be no innovation and no new teslas .. It just wont happen ..

Everything that could change this world has already been invented. just bought up by the big companies and the ideas sit in a basement never to be heard from again.. Thomas Townsend Brown is another huge example.

Excellent program, but the absence of any female voices underscored once more one of the reasons that we have such a hard time getting US girls and young women interested in science and technology. The all-male program sends the not-so-subtle message that this is a male topic.

“American energy cartels kill people…” -Jonathan

When you use the phrase “kill people,” do you mean literally that people who are inclined to innovate or have innovation in their grasp are being murdered?

I eagerly await Dr. Carlson’s biography. There’s an interesting novel about Tesla called “The Invention of Everything Else” by Samantha Hunt. It was published a couple of years ago. There’s also a play about him written by four members of the Electric Company Theatre of Vancouver called BRILLIANT!The Blinding Enlightenment of Nicola Tesla. I saw it in Ottawa about 8 or 9 years ago. The play sparked (so to speak) my fascination with Tesla.

[...] Nicholas Tesla and Innovation Today: roundtable with Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review, WBUR On Point Radio. [...]

…DC Links…
One from Quebec to Littleton, MA. May feed some of the
power to ‘BUR. +/-500KVDC, had a professional tour,
decades back.

…Tesla…
I’ve been studying Tesla, and his contemporaries, and
the tecchnologies of the time for 50 odd years. The
situation is complex. Multiple biographies of Tesla,
of various ages can be found, perhaps best read in
connection with contemporary accounts. Much of this
gets ‘misunderstood’.

In addition to the little induction motors that turn digital computer cooling fans, Tesla is also the acknowledged inventor of the electronic logic gate circuit, one of its fundamental building blocks. In the mid 1890s while working on the remote-control boat he devise a method secure telecommunications that used the “AND logic function.” Patent applications for the electronic logic gate were prepared and submitted just a few years later. During the review period the United States Patent Office told Tesla about another patent application for secure telecommunications received from Reginald Fessenden. In 1902 a U.S. Patent Interference investigation was conducted concerning Tesla’s wireless system. Tesla’s claims were supported and he was granted patent protection under the “System of Signaling” and “Method of Signaling” patents—both describing the AND-gate circuit. After World War II when computer hardware manufacturers tried to patent digital electronic logic gates the U.S. Patent Office asserted Tesla’s turn-of-the-century priority in their electrical implementation. These same patents also describe essential features of the spread-spectrum wireless telecommunications techniques known as frequency-hopping and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing.

What we call ”radio waves” today in the past were called “Hertz waves” and we now know, as did Tesla, the wireless system he worked so long and hard to develop did not use Hertz waves. “There is a vast difference between primitive Hertzwave signalling, practicable to but a few miles, and the great art of wireless transmission of energy, which enables an expert to transmit, to any distance, not only signals, but power in unlimited amounts. . . .” [Nikola Tesla, POSSIBILITIES OF WIRELESS, New York Times, October 22, 1907, p. 8, col. 6.] “Mr. Nikola Tesla has announced that as the result of experiments conducted at Shoreham, Long Island, he has perfected a new system of wireless telegraphy and telephony in which the principles of transmission are the direct opposite of Hertzian wave transmission.” [NIKOLA TESLA`S NEW WIRELESS, The Electrical Engineer - London, Dec. 24, 1909.]

This is likely not the place to debate whether
Tesla was doing something non-Hertzian. Clearly Tesla
believed he was. Clearly his transmitters would also
generate ‘Hetzian’ waves.

…Niagara Falls…
Tesla Patents guided Westinghouse Engineers in the
alternator/transformer design. Dams by Civil
Engineers, Hydraulic Turbines from a Swiss design,
if memory serves.

…Trolley cars…
Run on 600(ish) vdc. (Which is an oversimplification: Tesla’s Polyphase could and did drive the
motorgenerators, in later systems.)

…Worlds Fair light bulbs…
Tesla(?) came up with an alternate way of sealing the
filament lamps which sidestepped the Edison patent.
(Lots of people had filament designs…)

…fluorescent lamps…
Tesla did much work with _gas Discharge_ lamps.
fluorescent lamps use a mercury discharge WITH AN ADDED
FLUORESCENT PHOSPHOR. This is a later (1930ish)
development by others.

…Wardenclyffe shutdown…
J P Morgan was paying Tesla to develop a
COMMUNICATION system. (Which Marconi already had
running…). Tesla went off into broadcast power.
When the backer is paying for ‘apples’, promising
a ‘tangello’ is a good way to lose funding….

…Colorado Springs fire… happened a couple years
after Tesla left.

There are at least two biographies available, plus
Tesla’s own writing.

Prodigal Genius
and
Man Out of Time

It will be interesting to see how another turns out.
There is much factual info available, and more, perhaps, of, lesser sort… (Each of the books
above, ferinstance, has documentable errors…)

In my view, the saddest part of Tesla’s legacy is some of the mythmaking engaged in…

(NPR generally broadcasts on _FM_, invented by Edwin
Armstrong, ca 1931, and commonly forgotten…)

(Posted 10:32 EST, 15:32 UTC)

Erratum

“In addition to the little induction motors that turn digital computer cooling fans” should read “In addition to the little reluctance motors that turn digital computer hard drives”

The reluctance motor is similar to the induction motor patented by Tesla.

“ . . . there are some basic physics problems in that in that Tesla thought the world functioned like a great big water balloon, that if he pushed on one side the other side of the world would deflect out. . . .”
All right, I will explain that. In my first efforts, of course, I simply contemplated to disturb effectively the earth, sufficiently to operate instruments. . . . As I perfected my apparatus, I saw clearly that I can recover, of that energy which goes in all directions, a large amount, for the simple reason that in the system I have devised, once that current got into the earth it had no chance of escaping, because my frequency was low; hence, the electro-magnetic radiation was low. The potential, the electric potential, is like temperature. We might as well call potential electric temperature. The earth is a vast body. The potential differences in the earth are small, radiation is very small. Therefore, if I pass my current into the earth, the energy of the current is stored there as electromagnetic momentum of the vibrations and is not consumed until I put a receiver at a distance, when it will begin to draw the energy and it will go to that point and nowhere else.
I will explain it by an analogue. Suppose that the earth were an elastic bag filled with water. My transmitter is equivalent to a pump. I put it on a point of the globe, and work my little piston so as to create a disturbance of that water. If the piston moves slowly, so that the time is long enough for the disturbance to spread over the globe, then what will be the result of my working this pump? The result will be that the bag will expand and contract rhythmically with the motions of the piston, you see. So that, at any point of that bag, there will be a rhythmical movement due to the pulsations of the pump. That is only, however, when the period is long. If I were to work this pump very rapidly, then I would create impulses, and the ripples would spread in circles over the surface of the globe. The globe will no longer expand and contract in its entirety, but it will be subject to these outgoing, rippling waves.
Remember, now, that the water is incompressible, that the bag is perfectly elastic, that there are no hysteretic losses in the bag due to these expansions and contractions; and remember also, that there is a vacuum, in infinite space, so that the energy cannot be lost in waves of sound. Then, if I put at a distant point another little pump, and tune it to the rhythmical pulses of the pump at the central plant, I will excite strong vibrations and will recover power from them, sufficient to operate a receiver. But, if I have no pump there to receive these oscillations, if there is nowhere a place where this elastic energy is transferred into frictional energy (we always use in our devices frictional energy — everything is lost through friction), then there is no loss, and if I have a plant of 1,000 horsepower and I operate it to full capacity, that plant does not take power, it runs idle, exactly as the plant at Niagara. If I do not put any motors or any lamps on the circuit, the plant runs idle. There is a 5,000 horsepower turbine going, but no power is supplied to the turbine except such power as is necessary to overcome the frictional losses.
Now the vast difference between the scheme of radio engineers and my scheme is this. If you generate electromagnetic waves with a plant of 1,000 horsepower, you are using 1,000 horsepower right along — whether there is any receiving being done or not. You have to supply this 1,000 horsepower, exactly as you have to supply coal to keep your stove going, or else no heat goes out. That is the vast difference. In my case, I conserve the energy; in the other case, the energy is all lost. [Nikola Tesla On His Work With Alternating Currents and Their Application to Wireless Telegraphy, Telephony and Transmission of Power : An Extended Interview, with permission of the publisher.]

Jonathan,

I am co-authoring a memoir with Townsend Brown’s daughter. It seems that much of Townsend’s work was sucked up for black programs. If you are interested in the story, drop by my blog, HONK IF YOU KNOW TOWNSEND, at the link above and you will find links to other TTB sites.

rose