Nikola Tesla in the news
A very nice article on Nikola Tesla can be found at
RedNova:
bq.
In Praise of the Mad Scientist
Inventor Nikola Tesla is beginning to remind me of the Michigan Mushroom-that underground fungus, nearly as large as its native state. He keeps cropping up unexpectedly like a truth suppressed. In 2004 this once forgotten scientist peppered films as motley as the smoky Coffee and Cigarettes, the siliconesleek Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and the shoestring Primer.
bq. Tesla, beside inventing the radio (check with the Supreme Court, Marconi fans), the radar, remote control, and alternating current (AC electricity), also tinkered with a series of dreamy though equally ingenious ideas : plans to light the oceans, photograph thoughts, use insects to create a harnessable power supply, communicate with life in outer space, harvest free energy from the Earth's atmosphere, control the weather with electricity, even build a ring about the equator that, by remaining stationary while the planet rotates, would make it possible to travel around the entire world in one day.
bq. At the start of the last century, Tesla's mind-bending inventions foreshadowed a future in which an enlightened citizenry, wardrobed in silver space suits, would travel about a world where no one was ever hungry and war existed only in memory-where scientific wonders were invented every day in backyards, garages, and small workshops. Tesla, the cult hero of independent invention, is materializing again, a bright-red streak on the gray background of corporatized science, to remind us that something went awry.
Tesla has always been a personal hero to me. It is too bad that so many of his inventions are credited to other people (Radio for example). He was a contemporary of Edison and while Edison was tinkering around with carbon filaments, Tesla was busy with another invention -- the fluorescent light. There is credible proof in his Colorado Springs lab notebooks that he was successfully working with Radio Astronomy too -- bouncing signals off the moon.
Someday, there should be a good documentary made about him -- he is one of t eh cornerstones of modern Science.
Posted by DaveH at February 5, 2005 7:11 PM