That Nikola Tesla was just amazing, 100 years ahead of his time.

[Sequoia]

Some things I've found out:

1) Warned us about using up all our natural resources, and totally believed in wind and energy as the answer. Edison however said that the day we run out of natural resources shortages was 50,000 years away and that the forests of South America would provide fuel for that long!

3) Communication: "A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one's pocket may then be set up anwhere on sea or land, and it will record the world's news or such special messages as may be intended for it. (1904)

4) Claimed he could create "fireballs" at will and no one to this day can duplicate it.

5) Claimed he could destroy the brand new Brooklyn Bridge, buildings, and spilt the Earth into with a simple vibrating oscillating device you could stick on the building which would tremble and then put it in your pocket. He tested it on a steel structure in New York (1898).

6) Life existed on other planets, Mars a statistical certainty.

Just a few things that are shock and awe (in my humble opinion). Just when I'm amazed at one thing he did, he does even more. How could the world forget him so eaisly and be taught all about Edison instead, who could never come close to his genius?

[AX10]

1. kick

[Nia Zuri]

2. kick

[Taverner]

3. He was Mozart to Edison's Saliari

He also invented a device that could power a city the size of NY from getting energy straight from the ground. No one has been able to reproduce this either

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

4. He was also a kook.

:shrug:

[Sequoia]

10. As he said:

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”

The world would be quite dull without "kooks" like him! Praise the Lord!

[Warpy]

12. Blessed be the crackpots

for they shall allow the light in.

Tesla remained convinced until the end that electricity could be transmitted through the air. He just never got that conductor vs. non conductor thing straight.

[DinahMoeHum]

5. There's an electric car company named Tesla Motors

www.teslamotors.com

hubba hubba hubba

:evilgrin:

[tridim]

6. #5 was proved a myth on Mythbusters

But it did vibrate the bridge hundreds of feet away from the oscillation device, though not nearly enough to bring it down. It freaked out Adam and Jamie.

Tesla had an amazing mind, I put him in the same class as Einstein. He definitely thought outside the box, especially with his spark gap experiments which IMO still show great promise.

[Taverner]

13. Definitely. Even the greatest minds make mistakes

With Einstien it was Unified Theory (he rejected Quantum Mechanics famously by saying "God does not play dice") and Tesla with the sending of electricity through the air.

[NNadir]

15. It is not correct to say that Einstein rejected quantum mechanics.

On the contrary, Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. He was not awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on relativity, but for his work on the photoelectric effect. This work was the first to suggest that the quantization of energy was something deeper than the mathematical trick that even Planck regarded it to be when first he formulated it.

Einstein had a big problem with the probabilistic "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, even as he acknowledged that the theory was one of the most successful theories of all time. In this interpretation, subatomic particles are not discreet localized bodies but smeared distributions determined by probabilistic analysis. However on some level his disagreement was philosophical more than phenomenological, since it disturbed his faith in causality.

Einstein's faith in a deterministic universe is not accepted today, but sometimes his views on this subject are misinterpreted to mean that he did not accept quantum mechanics as a whole. Nothing is further from the truth

[Taverner]

16. Thanks for the clarification

<---- Liberal Arts Major in college

[Der Blaue Engel]

7. Plus, he made a teleportation machine

and looks just like David Bowie!

:evilgrin:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

8. Good movie.

Bowie always picks such interesting roles.

[90-percent]

9. Tesla

He is to Edison the same way Captain Beefheart is to Frank Zappa.

Way ahead of his time and did a lot of bona fide super natural stuff.

-85% Jimmy

[kevinmc]

11. Brave New World of Tesla Technology

I am a big Tesla fan ... have a lot of books on him and his inventions. Anyway here is a site I came across not to long ago.

http://rinf.com/news/nov05/tesla.html


A "new" kind of electromagnetic (EM) wave began development and testing over 30 years ago (originally discovered by Nikola Tesla) in the empty vacuum of space which, when engineered, can be an inexhaustible supply of energy in great magnitude at any place in the universe. Tesla called it "radiant energy." Because Tesla proposed developing this into free energy for the entire world, his funding was terminated and Tesla's great inventions, which would have prevented any energy crisis, were never known by the common man. ......

[Sequoia]

14. Thanks.

And here are two that I have bookmarked:

http://www.frank.germano.com/nikolatesla.htm

http://www.frank.germano.com/nikolatesla.htm

I first learned about him in the book "Devil in the White City", and then read about him again in "Thunderstruck" by the same author. So I looked him up on the web and found some cool info. Also am slowly reading "Tesla: Man Out of Time". He said he caused the 1908 destruction of the forest in Siberia when he was trying to signal Perry up at the North Pole with his death ray machine. It seems so fantastic, but then again there was no crater. Certainly, it requires more study in any case.

[rman]

17. creating fireballs at will today:

Ball Lightning Experiments
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~reginald/ball_l.html

[Sequoia]

19. Oh Boy!

[rman]

18. I think with Tesla's legacy,

many a myth and mystery surrounding that then new-fangled technology has survived to this day.

As far as science is concerned "Tesla Technology" = electricity.

Of all the esoteric technology ascribed to Tesla, nothing has been put to practice, nothing has been proven.