Tesla Sceptics... (It's not too late to give Tesla the recognition he deserves!)

[shortbus=]

As I said in another of the Tesla threads here Edison was a republican and Tesla a democrat.

 

[tvtech]

As I said in another of the Tesla threads here Edison was a republican and Tesla a democrat.

Politics have zero to do with this great thread.

If you don't mind that is. Please read the uploaded book. From cover to cover. And you will understand all.

Regards,
tvtech

 

[DerStrom8]

Politics have zero to do with this great thread.

If you don't mind that is. Please read the uploaded book. From cover to cover. And you will understand all.

Regards,
tvtech

Not sure how shortbus= meant that, but I read it as a metaphor, not as real politics

I'm glad you're enjoying this thread, tvtech. I'm amazed how well everything is coming together, thanks to one blogger. Many thanks to The Oatmeal! They're the ones who got the ball rolling!

 

[shortbus=]

Was not meant as politics but as Der said a metaphor. I've been a fan of Tesla since I was 12yrs old, almost 65 now.

 

[tvtech]

Was not meant as politics but as Der said a metaphor. I've been a fan of Tesla since I was 12yrs old, almost 65 now.

Oops. Sorry about that

Regards,
tvtech

 

[MrAl]

Hi,

If after reading this thread anyone still feels that Tesla received bad repute for some of his work, consider how lucky he was when you read about Blondlot, who did much work in science but made one big mistake because of his over enthusiasm for science...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper-René_Blondlot

 

[Sceadwian]

Telsa Sceptics...

Tesla's right up there with George Ohm if you ask me. Did some solid science work, but honestly didn't create anything fundamentally new, but I think my thoughts on Ohm are already pretty well known =>

 

[DerStrom8]

Tesla's right up there with George Ohm if you ask me. Did some solid science work, but honestly didn't create anything fundamentally new, but I think my thoughts on Ohm are already pretty well known =>

Scead, you really NEED TO READ for once! You have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. You obviously know nothing about Tesla. If you did, you'd know that he invented the polyphase AC generator, which is what is used today. Without that, you probably wouldn't even have your computer to post these ridiculous claims with.

For your information (And I don't even know why I'm telling you this--I should have ignored you by now, but I'm assuming you're just too lazy and ignorant to actually do your research before arguing), Tesla has about 300 patents to his name, including remote control, tuned circuits (and radio), and of course, the polyphase method of generating AC electricity. You need to stop throwing your useless cr*p out there and acting like it's fact, because it's not, and it's very obvious you've never read any actual literature about him. So just stop it. You're cluttering up this thread with your garbage, and I've pretty much had it.

 

[MrAl]

Note to Scead:


Tesla has a fundamental unit of magnetism named after him. Not easy to get that kind of recognition.
Tesla wasnt perfect, but his big loss on that big tower still pales in comparison to many of today's losses considering the value of money over time. NASA lost twice as much (even considering inflation) just a few weeks ago with a space vessel test that crashed and blew up the whole thing. Who do we blame for that?
It's a good thing that Tesla didnt invent the Space Shuttle or he'd be blamed for those tragedies too. We dont actually blame any one person anymore because if we did there would be lots of doomed scientists around who went mad and died pennyless.

 

[Sceadwian]

Lets get a few things straight.

Galileo Ferraris invented the polyphase induction generator.
Tesla published his work more than 6 months after Galileo and ended up winning a court case based only on Tesla's claim that he 'dreamed up the idea' before Galilleo with only 'witness testimony' no physical evidence, 5 YEARS LATER

More suggestion of this is available here. This isn't to soil Tesla's name, but credit needs to be given where it is due.

Outside of the induction motor nothing in modern society needs polyphase AC to function Derstrom, granted that's an important thing it is not the MOST important thing about electricity or it's use. The first thing a modern PC power supply does is convert the incoming power to DC through a single phase inverter! Low frequency AC is good for power transmission but horrible for component density, all modern switch mode supplies work at frequencies that are impractical for power transmission so don't think Tesla was god geek on earth of electricity, he didn't have all the answer, just some high and mighty ideas, many of which had no practical usage.

Even his near field power transmission was horribly misplaced as modern science has show just how inefficient it is.

Tesla's patents were many. He also died penniless and alone in a hotel room in New York city because he couldn't defend his patents, and some of them are of questionable origin or scientific validity.

He suffered and much of his science is based on his obsessive compulsive nature. It is a credit to him as a human being to understand eveything about him not just a few trivial technical blips which have deeper routes.

I'm not saying he shouldn't go down in history as a genius or one who added much to science, but that he be known for EVERYTHING that encompassed his life because that is the primary reason for many of the things he did.

 

[Hayato]

Well Polyphase Induction was only one of his claimed inventions. He did a lot more, Scead.

Even the flourescent light or the remote you have in your home has a Tesla's finger on it.

And AC polyphase was one of the best inventions ever, just to remember, almost all long AC transmission lines are triphasic, which allow a efficient way to distribute the electrical power along a wide area w/o great losses.
Why is it more efficient than DC? Because with AC you can step up and down w/o problems. Polyphasic machines require less current to operate, meaning that heavy industrial motors will draw less current, meaning that a city (which is a triphasic load) will require thinner cables to be fed, etc...

If you want to transmitt DC over a long way, just like any other kind of current, you need to convert it to a high-voltage, but to do that you need a transformer and, as you know, transformers does not work with DC. So you need to invert DC to AC to step it up, then AC to DC to make the transmission travel then DC to AC to step it down then AC to DC to feed your customer. Or you have an option to use a substation each 2 miles or so.

 

[Sceadwian]

Why am I being so badly misquoted in this thread and my entire addition being disregarded?

This stuff took me seconds to look up in a general sense.

Low frequency AC is good for power transmission but horrible for component density

Component density isn't a major factor for power transmission but it is for virtually all end usages of power.

I don't doubt AC polyphase was one of the more important inventions concerning power generation/transmission. But it WASN'T TESLA'S, the courts do not define who invented something there is clear precedence for documented proof that AC polyphase started with someone besides Tesla months before Tesla even claimed anything, and that Tesla carried the flame and nothing more, granted he carried a mighty big flame in some of his AC testing, he was not the core originator of a basic idea that I'm able to determine in that specific regard.

 

[Ratchit]

Hayato,

If you want to transmitt DC over a long way, just like any other kind of current, you need to convert it to a high-voltage, but to do that you need a transformer and, as you know, transformers does not work with DC. So you need to invert DC to AC to step it up, then AC to DC to make the transmission travel then DC to AC to step it down then AC to DC to feed your customer. Or you have an option to use a substation each 2 miles or so.

There are high voltage DC lines, at least in Europe, I believe some are across the English Channel to France. There are advantages. Don't have to worry about inductance and capacitance. Don't have to send peak voltage almost 40% more than the RMS value of the voltage, so the insulation can be thinner, or the wires closer together, and the voltage not as high.

Ratch

 

[Mikebits]

Why am I being so badly misquoted in this thread and my entire addition being disregarded?

This stuff took me seconds to look up in a general sense.

Scead, you seem like one of the smartest dudes that comes around these parts. Only thing is your people skills.

 

[Hayato]

Hayato,



There are high voltage DC lines, at least in Europe, I believe some are across the English Channel to France. There are advantages. Don't have to worry about inductance and capacitance. Don't have to send peak voltage almost 40% more than the RMS value of the voltage, so the insulation can be thinner, or the wires closer together, and the voltage not as high.

Ratch

Agreed. There are all over the World. But still, you need to conver it to AC at the ends, allowing down conversion, and the HVDC lines maintaince are very expensive, you need high power inverters/switchers, the breakers and contacts must be replaced constantly due the electrodeposition.

I am not saying the DC transmission is not good, but, overall, the AC presents more cost advantages over DC and it is more practical, speaking in terms of the last mile.

 

[nsaspook]

Why am I being so badly misquoted in this thread and my entire addition being disregarded?

Politics, religion and Tesla. A great applications guy but he actually did almost nothing to advance technology in a fundamental way like Maxwell, Heaviside, Gauss and Faraday did with electromagnetic field theory. Tesla played with electricity while James Clerk Maxwell understood electricity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUHMRxrGjsI&list=LPP_5CXKDULoc&index=7&feature=plcp

 

[RichTheDude]

Lets get a few things straight.
Outside of the induction motor nothing in modern society needs polyphase AC to function Derstrom, granted that's an important thing it is not the MOST important thing about electricity or it's use. The first thing a modern PC power supply does is convert the incoming power to DC through a single phase inverter! Low frequency AC is good for power transmission but horrible for component density, all modern switch mode supplies work at frequencies that are impractical for power transmission so don't think Tesla was god geek on earth of electricity, he didn't have all the answer, just some high and mighty ideas, many of which had no practical usage.

That is most of the worlds power distribution and industrial machinery made redundant then. I guess modern society does not need this as well?

He suffered and much of his science is based on his obsessive compulsive nature.

This has absolutely no detrimental effect on his achievements, hence it is pointless to mention. I was under the impression that this site was called electro tech online, not "Shrinks Online".

 

[Sceadwian]

RTD, 3 phase motors are irrelevant to the point Hayato was trying to make when he stated Tesla invented polyphase power generation which is false there is no proof of this, he stated that without Tesla many of the devices we commonly use today wouldn't exist, this is again false, he had nothing to do with anything even close to modern. Tesla did not 'invent' AC power, he is just well known for grandiose experiments that utilized it, so he at best accelerated technology and created nothing fundamentally new that had practical application.

I believe the induction motor that he patented that went into production was his biggest claim to fame, and he neither discovered the basic principle of that nor was the first to make an induction motor, and designs advanced much since his original, he simple patented a design and sold it based on others work. This is not a bad thing though! But as far as super geek genius of historical monumental proportions everything that is known about him says otherwise!

RTD again understanding his psyche is important to understanding his technical creations because they go hand in hand, you can't exclude the mind in science as science well knows through things like the placebo effect for one and various group dynamics, not to even mention politics. A large chunk of the entire reason he ended up in a technical field is because he exhibited savant like abilities with integral calculus, basic understanding far beyond what 'normal' people would be able to achieve even hard at study and it is a DIRECT reflection and how he viewed and approached the world. His personal social beliefs are even more dramatically outside of average. Again this isn't to say those beliefs were wrong or somehow that being 'not normal' is a bad thing, but his basic psychological structure was fundamentally different from what any 'normal' human being can possibly understand because they think like normal people.

I'm not saying Tesla was an insane idiot, or that he shouldn't be given great acclaim as history already has done this, his in the books! But EVERYTHING he did and who he was has to be looked at as a whole either in this forum or in the comic or the general public at large because they fail to look at the human being Tesla was, the comic and the fund raising is nothing more than putting Tesla on a pedestal as some heroic visionary genius in order to get cash in the bank for their own motives which have very little to do with what Tesla did or who he was as a human being or even an inventory or visionary genius or whatever!



Lets discuss this rationally and a little less sensationally from this point on...

What did Tesla create that as uniquely of his own design that provides a practical application that is still in use today?

The Tesla coil was used in early spark gap radios, and quickly became obsolete. In some early crude medical electrotherapies (of dubious nature and no benefit)
They do teach some fundamentals of circuit dynamics and harmonics of real world induction systems which I think is a good thing this was not his intent when he created the device. Outside of that the Tesla coil is used as nothing more than a very illegal (radio noise) fancy toy for people that want to say they have built one, or play really bad music by modulating the output. Suffice to say there is nothing a Tesla device can do that other designs can do as well or better, and he was not the fundamental creator of the concepts that his designs came from.

So of the two things he is most well known for, the induction motor (which can not be proven that he invented as there was work previous to his claims though he did patent a functional unit that he made money off of) and the Tesla coil which has no practical use, why does he deserve this incredibly exalted status above others before him, and since?

The florescent lights basic function was discovered in in the 1840's by Maxwell and Faraday, 16 years before Tesla was even born!

Even basic understanding of radio waves had far more important roots before Tesla came on the scene he just adapted what he knew to do something in an attempt to make money.

I would like it if someone could provide evidenciary proof that Tesla actually discovered, or invented a fundamentally new technology or basic scientific understanding of the electro/magnetic spectrum.

If anyone would like to challenge any of the statements I've made previous to this post please do so in private, and anything I've made from this post forward as a simple list of links to proofs that Tesla truly created something fundamentally that did not exist before, or that his experiments did anything more than advance experimental data, rather than find a new effect or basic principal that was unknown before.

As far as I'm concerned, he deserves the notation he got in the SI unit of measurement for flux density, as a derivation of the Weber as the unit it was based off of. That's about it.

 

[Mikebits]

Didn't he invent radio. I know Marconi gets credit, but...

https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_whoradio.html

 

[Sceadwian]

Radio wasn't invented no matter what the history books say, it was discovered, it's a fundamental property of our universe not something that someone invented!
I believe that was David Edward Hughes. That starts the practical stuff
The first noticed effects of transmission of radio waves (without understand that they were radio waves) predates that a bit but technology wasn't sufficient at the time to receive them or measure what was going on properly to define it.

Marconi did not invent radio, he was just the first person to take previous theory and develop practical application. He basically invented a practical radio, not radio itself. This is why there isn't a unit of measurement after Marconi