NIKOLA TESLA
A brief introduction by Jonathan Eisen from…Suppressed Inventions & Other Discoveries; copyright 1999.
* Nikola Tesla was arguably the greatest inventive genius of the twentieth century, perhaps the greatest at least as far back as Leonardo da Vinci. What a shame and indictment on our educational institutions that his name enlists barely a mention here and there in the hallways of learning.
* When pressed, electrical engineers, who in fact owe their livelihood to Tesla, will tell you that Tesla invented alternatiing current and the “Tesla coil” which they play around with every so often when they have to. But they will probably not be able to tell you anything about his 700 basic patents, or his ability to fetch electricity from the ambient atmosphere, or his conclusion that the earth itself is a capacitor, and his experiments with transmitting electricity around the globe to virtually anywhere, or his invention of the radio (well before Marconi), X-rays, the transistor, and countless other inventions so far ahead of the times that even today they are still virtually unknown.
* Even so, his bladeless turbine does seem to be making something of a comeback. And the Tesla Society is trying to interest the world in reviving some of his other lost inventions. He was convinced that “free energy” is a fact, rather than mere speculation, and over the years he has become something of a magnate for people working in the field.
* Tesla’s legacy is well known to a small-but-growing group of interested scientists and researchers. His astonishing story is recounted still: How he tore up his contract with Westinghouse in order for his alternating current electrification of America to proceed, how he had the rug pulled out from under him by J.P. Morgan when it looked as though his Colorado Springs experiments showed that wireless electricity transmission was feasible, how his Wardenclyffe tower on Long Island was destroyed when it seemed that his new system was about to supplant the old AC system, making free energy available to everyone.
* What a tragedy that a genius of such magnitude should die broke in his room at The New Yorker Hotel. For sometime afterward the FBI was quite interested in his papers, some of which dealt with new kinds of torpedoes, “death rays”, and other inventions too numerous to mention here. As Chaney in her biography of Tesla: “Like Einstein he had been an outsider and , like Edison, a wide ranging generalist. As he himself had said, he had the boldness of ignorance. Where others stopped short, aware of what could not be done, he continued. The survival of such mutants and polymaths as Tesla tends to be discouraged by moderen scientific guilds. Whether either he or Edison could have flourished in today’s milieu is conjectural. The example set by Tesla has always been particularly inspiring to the lone runner. At the same time, however, his legacy to establishment science is profound for his research, although sometimes esoteric, was almost always sweeping in its potential to transform society. His turbine failed in part because it would have required fundamental changes by whole industries. Alternating current triumphed only afer it had overcome the resistance of an entire industry.”
* We must consider ourselves fortunate to have benefited from Tesla’s alternating current technology; without which the world as we know it would not exist. How else might our lives differ today if formidable opposition had not halted his free energy research? Clearly, humanity would no longer operate according to a fossil fuel economy.
NO COMMON SENSE
ANALYZE THE EXAMPLE
* Which supports and barriers were in play?
* What were the dynamics?
* Who, or what, won the Tug-of-War?
* Discuss the outcome with your friends and family.
* Use Post #4 as a reference for the dynamics, and the relationships, between the supports and barriers.