Tesla Shield: Is this a scam?, page 1

Originally posted by whitewave
SS, you're right about Tesla being erased from memory. I spoke with an enginering major about to graduate and was glad to find someone I could talk to about Tesla but he'd never heard the name. Four years of schooling in engineering concepts and skill and he'd never even heard of Tesla! Amazing!

Tesla was so far ahead of anyone, including Edison and Marconi, that to offhandedly describe Tesla as a "legend" is a disservice to the fellow. Of course, he did enough disservice to himself in the 1880s, selling 9 mind-bogglingly futuristic patents (including the patent for generating AC electricity) in a package to Westinghouse for a mere $50,000.

Tesla was no businessman, nor was he a profiteer. This is probably why his name is all but unknown to so many students in this age when business and profit reign supreme.

Today, a scientist absorbed in work without profit might seem eccentric, mystical, or even "legendary." But try to describe Tesla's accomplishments as "legend" to the computer developers of today, who, when seeking patents on certain ideas, are stunned to discover that Nikola Tesla already patented the base technology 104 years earlier! Look up U.S. Patents No. 723,188 and No. 725,605 (dated 1903, in Tesla's name), illustrating the principles of the solid state logic circuit (a modern computer uses thousands of these "gateways").

It's not a matter of anyone "burying" Tesla's name and work — I know that's the popular conspiracy theory, but it just doesn't fly. For the most part, Tesla's genius is largely unknown because he didn't market himself well enough.

Look at Thomas Edison — this guy was not a genius, he was a workhorse who relied on trial-and-error, banging his head against a brick wall until the bricks softened (and he paid whole teams of inventors and scientists to back up his sometimes ridiculous endeavors).

But Edison knew how to spin himself and his inventions to the public, which is what made his name a household word.

Tesla, on the other hand, could actually visualize his inventions in detail — intuiting something like virtual reality models in his mind — and did his best work in seclusion, relying on private funding and sporadic sales of his patents (which other people used to further their own fame and fortune). Tesla just was not a self-marketer, which prevented his name from reaching the four corners of the world to the extent of other, lesser inventors.

And, of course, Tesla fans don't like to acknowledge it, but Nikola was a crazy old man in his later years. Personally, I think that this unfortunate condition befell him because of his experiments with "invisible light" (X-rays) decades earlier, during which he may have fried his own brain — he was making massive and repeated X-ray exposures of his own head, without realizing the destructive nature of the radiation.

So, between his poor business skills, poor public relation skills, and possible self-inflicted senility, I believe Nikola Tesla may have sabotaged his own legacy, in spite of his other-worldly genius.

— Doc Velocity

[edit on 3/24/2007 by Doc Velocity]