Folks Of Interest Tesla's Wardenclyffe Property At Risk

You are correct. Edison was a gifted marketing person as well as an inventor. Tesla was the sort wwho let the work speak for itself. As we know, the world often responds more favorably to the sizzle than the steak.

Edison certainly did bring forth an impressive list of inventions. His technique was slightly different: he employed legions of assistants who brute-forced developments. There is nothing wrong with this approach; it certainly worked for Edison.

Tesla was a loner who brought forth his inventions on his own. That by itself does not make him a better person, but it speaks volumes about the intellect and ability.

Edison was my childhood hero. I hardly knew anything about Tesla.

Later in life, having read the books and done the research, I realized that Edison - as a person - had many qualities I do not admire. Tesla, OTOH, was a different type of person.

Tesla's 'failure', if that is what you want to call his penniless state when he dies, was immediately caused by a traffic accident in his later years. He was struck by an automobile. He never fully recovered and this slowed him down.

 

Tesla DID win. All our homes are powered by AC current, not the DC current Edison was pushing.

 

I have one of the insulators from that line. Pretty cool. Telluride used to be a cool town too, before it got Californicated.
Tom

 

Yup, Edison's attempt to electrify homes and industry with DC power was an epic failure.

Bob

 

I think that tower came down when he lost funding, was it J.P. Morgan maybe? Anyway when they found out he wanted to deliver free electricity via the airwaves, it was "see ya" Then he moved to Colorado and I think his financiers tore down the tower then. Tesla claimed he got his ideas from aliens and washed his hands like a thousand times a day. He's my favorite hero and Edison was a dork for fucking him over.

 

You need to read some more then, Tesla was not the only one Edison pulled his BS on. Swan and Sawyer come to mind, and that's only the light bulb.

 

The tower came down to be sold as scrap in an attempt to pay off debt. Unlike more recent times, no one was standing there with a blank check to bail him out!

The Colorado tower came first. He spent 8 years in Colorado with a much smaller tower - still some 2 million volts. He lit it up one night and the town went dark - it drew so much power that the local power station shut down. The townspeople were not amused, and I believe that this is one of the reasons that he moved to the new lab at Wardenclyffe.

 

The really sad thing is that it would only take about a million dollars or so to purchase the Wardenclyffe property. Since no one has stepped up to purchase it and maintain it as some kind of historic site, anyone could purchase it, plow it right into the ground and build a mini mall.

 

No matter how many things we can say about Tesla,good or bad-
He was a true genius.....

Jealosy,then and now can dilute the truth,but the man's list of accomplishments as a total- humbles the accomplishments of several generations of other inventors and forward thinkers.

 

Unfortunatly, that seems to be the American way. We dont seem to have any concept of our own true history as we keep tearing it down and putting up something new. Not always better, just,new. Progress is a good thing. But preservation is too.

 

Got spark!! Tesla rocked!! ~sololobo~

 

Is the Tesla we are talking about here have any relation to the new OT Tesla electric car that is out there now?

Some corporate asswipe at my work has one. I hate to admit it but it is pretty cool....for what it is.....

 

I don't think any relation, just a name used in tribute.

 

Correct. Elon Musk named his electric car company in honor of Nikola Tesla.

 

Many developments on the Tesla front! There is a movement afoot to raise the money for a not-for-profit to buy the land so that it is reserved for a museum. New York State will pay half. Only $850,000 needs to be raised (NYS will pay an equal amount), and almost $400K is already raised. Read this and, if you can, perhaps kick in a couple of bucks:

Help me raise money to buy Nikola Tesla's old laboratory - The Oatmeal

 

Guys, here is the link to donate. Even a $3 donation will go as far as, well, $3 goes. (3 was Tesla's favorite number.) Donate and the HAMB will shower admiration and praise upon you. Men will stand in awe. Women will weep, and children will cheer.

I donated more than I can afford. But it is worth it. Over half a million raised so far toward the goal of $850K.

Here is the link, if you decide to do something: Let's Build a God**** Tesla Museum -- Indiegogo

 

Lots of myths about Tesla. Yes he was a great inventor, a genius on a level with Einstein. But he did not die penniless and he was not deported. He lived most of his life in the US and died in New York, well up in his 80s. He had 2 suites in a good hotel there for many years, one as a residence and the other set up as a laboratory.

He died during WW2. His papers were siezed by the US government as they possibly contained technical secrets of military value and his home country was under Nazi rule at the time. After the war part of the material was returned and is in a museum in his home town.

As for his relationship with the Westinghouse company. He gave Westinghouse full credit for putting over the AC electrical system in spite of a lot of dirty work from Edison who tried to stop it, as it was competing with his DC system. This cost Westinghouse a lot of money, time and problems but it was worth it. Once the AC system became popular, Westinghouse did owe Tesla millions in royalties which they could not pay. Tesla did tear up the original contract but he still got a very satisfactory settlement from Westinghouse. Nobody knows exactly how much but Westinghouse has a cancelled check for $800,000 which was a partial payment.

Tesla always had plenty of money and friends in industry. He was not an extravagant person, he did not party or spend money on luxurious living, he was in love with his work and spent most of his time and money on his experiments.

Later.................

Tesla's old room in the Hotel New Yorker now has a memorial plaque. He lived there from 1933 until his death in 1943. The hotel was built in 1930.

Other guests included Mohammed Ali and John Kennedy.

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

 

Good information, thank you for posting it.

I again remind everyone to check out the fundraising site. Even a $3 donation will be appreciated. (Tesla's favorite number was 3.) If you donate, the internet will cheer you now and forever, and will erect a 60 foot bronze statue of you, pointing to the stars. OK, maybe not.

 

BTW, apparently Elon Musk made a significant personal donation on the above fund raising site.

 

Did Tesla not erect one of these towers in Serbia after he was deported and the resulting spark blew some Siberian village off the map hundreds of miles away??

 

No. He was never deported. He never had a lab or built anything in Serbia. He came to the US as a young man, and lived here all his life.

 

I had one thing to ad, that hasnt mentioned at all... Besides being a complete genius, Tesla was OCD and had to have things arranged in multiples of three (or something like that).. I also read once that the mere sight of a a pierced ear on a woman literally made him sick... to me, it just confirms how narrow the gap is between genius and insane.. The things Tesla thought up are the basis for Radar, sonar, X-rays, star wars and things they dont even talk about..
I personally like a good conspiracy, HAARP for instance... billions of dollars at work in the middle of nowhere Alaska based on ideas of Teslas.
... To keep on topic though, the basis for HAARP comes from his ideas to electrify the world with out wires, and that included electric cars that would simply pull their power right out of the sky like a radio signal... Imagine for just a minute what todays world would be like had those ideas gone forward and actually worked???
I would recommend to anyone that has actually read through this thread to research Tesla more, there is tons of info on youtube alone about him.

 

i often wonder if tesla liked "lil' kim".

 

If you really want to understand Tesla's work first you need to understand ether theory. When he was a young man in the 1880s he had the best technical education the world had to offer, in Germany and Austria. At that time the leading theory in physics was ether theory. Later it was supplanted by Einstein's theory of relativity. When relativity came out, Tesla read up on all Einstein's work, understood it thoroughly, and rejected it.

Years later others found the same flaws in Einstein's theories that Tesla saw right away. Ever since then, physicists have been trying to get to the bottom of these problems which led them to dark matter and dark energy which are the big thing in physics right now.

Dark matter and dark energy sound an awful lot like ether theory.

The point is, you will have a hard job reconciling Tesla's work with the conventional theories of physics, radio etc. Everything he did was a development of the ether theory he learned as a young man.

He also said "Radio is 90% electronic and 10% electrical. My system is 90% electrical and 10% electronic. That is how I am able to get the results I do".

In other words, conventional electronic theory only explains 10% of Tesla's work.

He did an immense amount of work with air coils. He also experimented not only with alternating current, but with direct current that was turned on and off hundreds, and even thousands of times per second. Somehow this interrupted DC has much different effects than AC and allowed him to develop things no one else could understand, like broadcast power.

So, if you really want to follow Tesla's work you will have to revise your knowledge of physics and electronics, and move forward into the 19th century.

 

Edison invented the incandescent light bulb and it's been failing ever since !

 

One thing held Tesla back, and another our understanding of some of his work as documented in his notes.

He was held back by the limitations of the materials of his time. Wooden and rubber insulators, cotton and varnish insulation -- not the best when dealing with ultra high potentials (voltage). What he could have done with the materials we order from McMaster-Carr!

We are held back by vocabulary. The words did not exist for him to describe some of the ideas and instrumentalities he worked with. How could they; he was inventing them? Nowadays science and technology has established a consistent vocabulary. Tesla's arcane descriptions, using the words of the time to describe advanced principles, makes it difficult for most, if not all of us, to completely comprehend some of the finer points.

 

It may be that some of the terms and descriptions come from ether theory and other physics and math of the 19th century. Tesla was very forthcoming about demonstrating and writing articles about his inventions, I do not believe he ever deliberately made them obscure, however someone who tries to look at his work from the standpoint of today's physics and electronics will find it obscure and confusing unless he goes back and studies the terminology of 19th century science.

There are a lot of things written about Tesla that muddy the waters but if anyone went back and read what Tesla himself had to say, and the papers and books of his contemporaries a lot of things would be cleared up.

 

Actually, I think the bulb we've been useing for the last 100 years was Tesla.. not Edison. I may be wrong about that tho.
Here's a pretty good (but short) documentary that talks about a few of his inventions
http://youtu.be/qdPoOAVAuFQ

 

Electric lights were around long before Tesla, arc lights as early as the 1840s and experimental light bulbs not long after. Edison's first practical light bulb came into use in the 1880s, in the 1890s Tesla demonstrated the fluorescent light in public, 40 years later it was introduced as a new invention by General Electric.

 

I for one sure am glad we have AC in our homes, especially with how hot it's been lately!