Is Nikola Tesla Overrated?

[Spacescifi]

In other words...are his plans for inventions that were never built viable at all?

The stuff he talked about seems farfetched.

1. Wireless power: Yes we can do it, but Tesla had in mind doing it WITHHOUT satellites or solar. Probably electromagnetic  waves since he was fond of those.

2. Death rays: I really do think Tesla was over his head here. Beam weapons work a lot better in space than in the air. Unless he knew a way to straighten a lightning bolt and shoot accurately across the air that way.

3. Flying wingless air vehicles: It is popular to say Tesla designed all manner of UFO wingless EM craft that could have flown.  I doubt it was viable though...unless Tesla was just that good and his knowledge died with him.

What do you think?

 

Edited November 16, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Cavscout74]

My guess is he had a lot of ideas but without any means to work on them, he never ran into the problems that prevent them from existing now.   Wireless power - maybe.  Most of the rest - science fantasy.   As to your #3, the wingless flying vehicles, I don't recall - though I'm no expert - any reference to electro-magnetic craft.  The only references I remember were to using bladeless turbines to make them fly.  And while bladeless turbines exist, they are generally far less efficient and where they are used, they are used as pumps for fluid transport rather than propulsion.  What little I do know about them, I doubt they would be capable of making anything fly. 

I think he was relatively sincere, just that his ideas weren't workable even if he had gotten funding.  Interesting topic though, I'm curious to see what others think.

[K^2]

Yeah, Tesla's definitely overrated. That's not to say that he wasn't a genius. He invented many marvelous things, some of which are in use today, mostly related to fluid dynamics. As @Cavscout74 points out, they aren't necessarily the most efficient, but they have uses due to some of their other unique features. Most notably, Tesla turbine and Tesla valve. He also had a lot of good ideas on electricity, some of which did pan out.

That said, he was sloppy in testing things, and a lot of ideas he claimed would work he never took beyond paper. Primarily, that seems to have come from the fact that he jumped from one exciting idea to the next, not taking due diligence with any one of them.

And there's nothing wrong with recognizing his achievements, and I know that some people are fans of Tesla because he achieved so much despite some flaws that maybe they can relate to, which is good. Unfortunately, there are also two categories of people who are trying to rise him to nearly martyr status for just completely wrong reasons.

First, there are people who think they are unrecognized geniuses and keep pointing at Tesla and claiming they are the same. While statistically I expect that a few of them are, and we're talking literal few, as in fewer than ten, an overwhelming majority of these people never bothered to learn even the most fundamental parts of math Tesla needed to do what he did, and think that anything they think up is absolutely true, without any evidence whatsoever.

Second, there are people who try to prop up Tesla as martyr fallen to capitalism. They claim that Tesla would single-handedly lead us into the bright future if it weren't for the likes of Edison ruining his chances. But the truth is that Tesla's biggest problem in making a successful business out of his genius was lack of personal discipline, and it's the same problem that would prevent him from building anything truly grand given resources.

[Serenity]

Anyone who gets in the bad side of the history becomes overrated.

Don't trust what you read, read but make your own mind.

[Spacescifi]

4 minutes ago, Boyster said:

Anyone who gets in the bad side of the history becomes overrated.

Don't trust what you read, read but make your own mind.

 

History is written by the victors...I don't have any dislike at all toward Tesla.

I just wanted to know if the conspiracy theorists who think Tesla is a modern tech messiah of sorts lived up to his hype.

Like most all men that have lived and died...he did some amazing things, but he was a product of his time, and he did not know what we know now about how good or viable his ideas were, since he did not get to see the real proof via testing.

[Serenity]

23 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

and he did not know what we know now about how good or viable his ideas were

You are spot on with this,

the scary thing is thats also true about Thomas Edison, we don't know if that was the right way or there is a better way or what would happen otherwise.

We picked one side and destroyed the other one, thats not science thats politics.

Both sides should have been funded and invested on and let the future be at its best not whatever the powerful decided its right.

[Spacescifi]

3 minutes ago, Boyster said:

You are spot on with this,

the scary thing is thats also true about Thomas Edison, we don't know if that was the right way or there is a better way or what would happen otherwise.

We picked one side and destroyed the other one, thats not science thats politics.

Both sides should have been funded and invested on and let the future be at its best not whatever the powerful decided its right.

 

What?

Tell me more...what was Tesla trying to do that was shut down?

I know him and Edison were not exactly friends, but I do not know much as to why.

[Serenity]

6 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

What?

Tell me more...what was Tesla trying to do that was shut down?

I know him and Edison were not exactly friends, but I do not know much as to why.

Not exactly friends? What? Edison literally summoned the whole universe to obliterate Tesla and his ideas.

Go to youtube and search Thomas Edison vs Nikola Tesla, they are plethora of videos and information on this.

 

Edited November 17, 2020 by Boyster

[Superfluous J]

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Is Nikola Tesla Overrated?

Only when not he's not being compared to Edison.

[Serenity]

32 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

Only when not he's not being compared to Edison.

Error error brain needs restart error, that sentence broke my brain

[mikegarrison]

You can't always trust everything you hear on You Tube.

Tesla worked for Edison at one point, but according to his autobiography, he quit when "The Manager" (not clear if it was Edison himself, but it doesn't seem like it was) promised him $50,000 to solve some problem with the power generation plants. Tesla did solve it, and then was told that the offer of $50,000 had been a joke.

But there did not seem to be much personal animosity between Tesla and Edison.

The so-called "war of the currents" was actually fought between Edison and Westinghouse, not Edison and Tesla.

Around the 1990s-2000s it suddenly became really, really popular to disparage Edison and celebrate Tesla as supposedly a victimized creative genius. Then the conspiracy theorists got involved, and ever since then there has been a cult of Tesla-worship.

Edited November 17, 2020 by mikegarrison

[Superfluous J]

8 minutes ago, Boyster said:

Error error brain needs restart error, that sentence broke my brain

 

             Is Tesla Overrated?

         +-----------------------------------+
         | Does the statement of opinion     |
         | involve a comparison with Edison? |
         +-----------------------------------+
              |                      |
             Yes                    No
              |                      |
+--------------------+        +----------------+
| Tesla is not being |        | Tesla is being |
| over-rated         |        | over-rated     |
+--------------------+        +----------------+

(That took far too much time)

Edited November 17, 2020 by Superfluous J

[Serenity]

2 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

(That took far too much time)

Thank you, that put some pieces together, that graph is satisfying to watch.

Edited November 17, 2020 by Boyster

[Nuke]

he understood ac and radio very well, but he didn't even believe in electrons. i think he is overrated but that doesn't mean the guy wasn't a genius. science is a group effort and i think its wrong to give any one scientist all the credit. 

i always wonder if the edison-testla fued has been blown way out of proportion. most of that was just edison electric and westinghouse jockeying for market share. 

Edited November 17, 2020 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

He said that Tesla is overrated, too.

Spoiler

Archimedes also was doing nothing but playing in bathtub.

[YNM]

He was a genius, but sadly he believed in things too much, esp. with the whole earth-generated electricity and all. Had the celestial bodies been that charged up, the universe would've been largely governed by electromagnetic attractions...

[starcaptain]

22 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

The stuff he talked about seems farfetched.

1. Wireless power: Yes we can do it, but Tesla had in mind doing it WITHHOUT satellites or solar. Probably electromagnetic  waves since he was fond of those.

It was wireless distribution but also indirect and globally wasteful.

His idea of wireless power was to pump the ionosphere full of high (i.e. mindbogglingly dangerous) levels of voltage, which then anyone could just tap down using a receiver. It is almost certain that this scheme would have been very inefficient, increased the amount of lightning in weather, and would have implications for spacecraft operations.

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, starcaptain said:

It was wireless distribution but also indirect and globally wasteful.

His idea of wireless power was to pump the ionosphere full of high (i.e. mindbogglingly dangerous) levels of voltage, which then anyone could just tap down using a receiver. It is almost certain that this scheme would have been very inefficient, increased the amount of lightning in weather, and would have implications for spacecraft operations.

Well to be fair, it would not have had any implications for spacecraft operations back when he proposed it.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, starcaptain said:

It was wireless distribution but also indirect and globally wasteful.

His idea of wireless power was to pump the ionosphere full of high (i.e. mindbogglingly dangerous) levels of voltage, which then anyone could just tap down using a receiver. It is almost certain that this scheme would have been very inefficient, increased the amount of lightning in weather, and would have implications for spacecraft operations.

Do not see how it could work at all.  Yes we have some wireless power but its induction over some cm or beamed direct energy as microwaves or laser. 
As you say lightning would probably have drained it. 

Death ray, again how, yes he could probably build some sort of artillery sized lighting device who with an shotgun range. 

On the other hand he invented a lot, he should have been focused on stuff who worked. 

[YNM]

2 hours ago, starcaptain said:

His idea of wireless power was to pump the ionosphere full of high (i.e. mindbogglingly dangerous) levels of voltage, which then anyone could just tap down using a receiver.

Not just that - he thought that the ionosphere could provide more power than what was prompted through. Obviously to us it's clear that whatever effect the ionosphere have are only limited to RF reflection and the occasional geomagnetic storms, but he thought it to be much, much more.

[kerbiloid]

Newton was another such loser.

Being hit by an apple, he decided that big Earth attracts little apple stronger than vice versa (otherwise, the earth would jump to the apple, hitting the apple with Newton's head), and called this "gravity law".
Then he decided that apple is hit by his head same painfully as the head with the apple (at least, he hoped so), so he called this "action-reaction law".
Also he realized that he was sitting and sleeping motionlessly, until the apple hit him, so he called this "inertia law" (i.e. "I'd better sleep here and do nothing, until anybody else forces me to").
And if the apple was a little lighter, he would jump up less emotionally, so he decided that acceleration is proportional to the applied force "the stromger I kick, the higher you  jump force-acceleration law".

)The latter two laws can be combined in one: "these lazy workers start accelerating only when you force them")

He even was not able to properly place his books on the shelf without changing them many times, and even invented a whole "binomial" method for that.

He has shown that white light splits into rainbow colors passing through a colorless glass, just to cause battery hurt among the glass manufacturers hard-selling expensive colored glass for stain glass windows, when they could just polish them properly, like Newton did.

Actually he was doing things which every pupil does in school, just three centuries before, and they call him genius.

Tesla at least invented electricty for iPhone recharger.

Edited November 18, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Spica]

16 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Actually he was doing things which every pupil does in school, just three centuries before, and they call him genius.

Inventing Calculus at age 22 during a plague outbreak that sent him home from school is at least a little more noteworthy than "what every pupil does in school".

[kerbiloid]

21 minutes ago, Spica said:

Inventing Calculus at age 22 during a plague outbreak that sent him home from school

Just because he didn't invent Zoom to continue his learning remotely during the quarantine.

[starcaptain]

56 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Just because he didn't invent Zoom to continue his learning remotely during the quarantine.

Let's see you write Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

[YNM]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Actually he was doing things which every pupil does in school, just three centuries before, and they call him genius.

At least until someone else came and thought of "what if you fell off a roof". (Newton did great on maths too however, the whole calculus thing was practically almost out of thin air.)

Edited November 18, 2020 by YNM