Saturday, August 28, 2010
Something about "rights" that I wrote a long time ago
Nikola Tesla
I am sure that all of you here have heard of many great scientists throughout time such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, but have you ever heard of a man named Nikola Tesla? Chances are that unless you are an electrician or a technology enthusiast, you have not. So, who is this man and why should he be remembered? In short, he was a scientist who was over 100 years ahead of his time in his research and it is coming to light now that he was right about everything that he had proposed thus far. He was a scientist born out of place in time, and as a result, has been ignored by those who have written our text books.
“Nikola Tesla was born a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856 in a mountainous area of the Balkan Peninsula known as Lika. His father Milutin, and his mother Djuka, were both Serbian by origin.” (Uth). His father was an Orthodox priest, and also a writer and poet and as a result, Tesla spent large amounts of time in his father’s library reading. His mother invented appliances that helped make farm and home responsibilities easier, one of these being a mechanical eggbeater. “Tesla attributed all of his inventive instincts to his mother” (Uth).
When Tesla was 28, he left his home for New York City to work with who he believed to be the greatest electrical engineer, Thomas Edison. Upon his arrival to America, Tesla stated that "What I had left was beautiful, artistic and fascinating in every way; what I saw here was machined, rough and unattractive. It [America] is a century behind Europe in civilization." (Tesla). Through a letter of introduction from one of Edison’s business associates in Europe. Tesla began working for Edison and after a few months resigned. After this, Tesla began digging ditches to make ends meet and was offered his own company by a few investors and when he had invented an arc lamp, the investors who owned the rights appropriated his invention and left him with “a stack of worthless stock certificates.” (Uth).
Near the end of his life, to save one of his friends businesses, Tesla released the royalties on his alternating current induction motor and thus ensured his own financial demise. “Soon afterwards, Tesla began to show symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The symptoms became pronounced very quickly, and what was left of his already ‘eccentric’ reputation was soon in tatters.“ (Redshaw). Nearing the end of his life, Tesla showed signs of slight mental illness, claiming to be visited by a certain white pigeon daily and on January 7th, 1943, “Nikola Tesla - one of the greatest geniuses of any age - died of heart failure, alone and destitute in a shabby hotel room.” (Redshaw).
At the time of his death, Tesla had been working on the Teleforce weapon, or ‘death ray’ that he had fruitlessly tried to market to the US War Department who eventually declared his papers to be top secret. Following his death, Tesla’s safe was opened by his nephew Sava Kosanović and shortly after that, Tesla’s papers and additional property were seized by the United States’ Alien Property Custodian office in Tesla’s compound at the Manhattan Warehouse, despite being a naturalized citizen.
Now that you have a basic outline of his life and you have seen where he had come from and where he had ended up, it is time that I fill in the blanks in more specific detail. Earlier I mentioned that Tesla had worked for Edison for only a few months and then had resigned, but in such a short amount of time, a lot had transpired between these two inventors.
Up until now, all electricity had been delivered and used as direct current where the voltage stays at a constant wavelength because nobody had ever thought of doing it differently. The problem with direct current is that when travelling long distances through a wire, it loses some of its power and thus becomes extremely inefficient. 100 volt lamps at the customer’s location would be connected to a generator supplying 110 volts to allow for some voltage drop in the wires between the generator and load. Tesla argued that an alternating current would eliminate this ‘lossy’ format of electricity, but when he had pitched the idea to Edison it was quickly dismissed and Edison put Tesla to work on his direct current system.
“Tesla claims he was offered $50.000 (~$1.1 million in 2007, adjusted for inflation) if he redesigned Edison’s inefficient motor and generators, making an improvement in both service and economy.” (Cheney 54). A few months after having this offer made to him, Tesla did just what was asked of him, but when he inquired about payment, Edison told him that, “When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke.” and instead paid him only $18 a week. Very shortly after this, Tesla resigned from Edison Machine Works and the ‘current war’ began.
If Tesla’s claims about the alternating current system were true, and if he could get the public to take a hold of the idea and buy into it, Edison would have been put out of business. Edison might have seen the potential of such a system, and as a result, battled against any and all claims of Tesla’s, stating that alternating currents were more dangerous than direct currents even though the inverse was actually true. “Edison carried out a campaign to discourage the use of alternating current, including spreading disinformation on fatal AC accidents, publicly killing animals, and lobbying against the use of AC in state legislatures.” (Craig 70). Tesla tried to fight back and even demonstrated that an alternating current is only as dangerous as you make it when he lit a light bulb using his body as the conductor and when he shot a bolt of harmless lighting into a crowd of people through his tesla coil. Never the less, alternating current won out in the long run and it is what is used to deliver electricity today, but this was not the case for most of Tesla’s life and was one of the factors that drove him to mental illness in the long run.
Now, Edison was not the only inventor that Tesla had run into problems with, because there were actually quite a few others who were either trying to destroy or steal from this great inventor. As we all know, in 1901 Guglielmo Marconi invented a device used to transmit data over long distances without the use of wires that is now known as the radio, but what is never mentioned is that Tesla predated this invention by about 4 years with an invention of his own. Tesla had demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" as early as 1891 and in 1899 he “demonstrated a radio controlled boat in Madison Square Garden that allowed secure communication between transmitter and receiver.” (Tesla). Despite having fought for the title of inventing the radio for many years of his life, the Supreme Court never attributed to him that title until a year after his death when they found that 15 of Marconi’s 16 patents were actually invented by Tesla himself.
Another discovery and invention of Tesla’s, the x-ray, is credited to a man named Wilhelm Roentgen, even though the evidence of this being Tesla’s discovery is held up in the name of itself. Tesla coined the term ‘x-ray’ when he theorized that these waves travelled along longitude and the name has stuck ever since despite its inaccuracy. Tesla continued researching in this field and performed several experiments prior to Roentgen’s discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but never had made any his findings broadly known and because most of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue laboratory fire of March 1895.
In addition to the radio and x-rays, the fluorescent bulb, neon lights, the speedometer, the automobile ignition system, the basics behind radar, the electron microscope, and the microwave oven were also inventions of Tesla’s that were credited to other inventors. Tesla was a terrible business man in that he did not patent enough of his inventions and had too much fun showing people what he was doing and got caught up in the emotion of inventing. “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.” (Tesla).
While many of his inventions were stolen by others, or very closely replicated, Tesla still had many of his inventions accredited to him while he was still alive. If he had inventions accredited to him, then, you might ask, why have we still not heard of him even as a stand-alone inventor? Well, the reason is that people did not believe his inventions ever really worked and because there were still many obstacles that he had to overcome in order to make even one working model of any given invention. From his building being burned, to his lab being torn down and from financial situations to the world thinking he was insane because transmission of voice, picture, and electricity had been unheard of at this time, it would seem that Tesla was never in the right place at the right time throughout his entire life. “By the end of his career, Tesla had over 700 inventions and 100 patents to his credit.” (Nikola).
Tesla’s most famous invention, and the one that he is remembered for most, is the alternating current induction motor. Up until 1888, every motor used a series of carbon brushes to create the rotation of the rotor. This meant that every motor went one direction and one direction only and could only operate at a given voltage. Tesla’s motor used a 3-phase magnetic field to push a rotor around its axis used a 120 degree shift in the sine wave of the electricity. This meant that the three magnets were working together at complimentary amperages to create a steady wave of magnetic force. By reversing the positive and negative poles on the power source you could cause the magnets to switch their poles in a 180 degree shift and the rotor would begin to spin the other direction whereas with a direct current motor, it would not run if the poles where reversed. This “allowed the more efficient AC power ("alternating current," where the rotor swings back and forth) to become the standard for most office and household appliances.” (Nikola).
At the time, many people believed it to be impossible to create a motor that ran off of an alternating current and as a result, they often discredited Tesla’s research, but as time went on more and more people became accepting of such a ‘ludicrous’ invention. Even Edison hopped on the alternating current band wagon when “shortly before he died, Edison said that his biggest mistake had been in trying to develop direct current, rather than the superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp.” (Cheney, Uth, and Glenn 19). Now, Edison died in 1938 and Tesla 5 years later in 43, but the damage had already been done mentally to Tesla and his illness slowly crept its way into his mind.
Another invention of Tesla’s is the Tesla Coil. This was the basis for his wireless transmission of power and he demonstrated it by lighting light bulbs that were without any wires and even powered a car for an entire week after removing the gas tank and replacing it with a small black box, all without once charging a single battery. Today the Tesla coil is employed as a toy to hobbyists because nobody knows how to get it to work correctly.
Tesla invented the first radio broadcasting tower with a building that he called the Wardenclyffe Tower which was named after James S. Warden who purchased the land on which it was built for Tesla. The “Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917) also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early wireless telecommunications tower designed by Nikola Tesla and intended for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony, broadcasting, and to demonstrate the transmission of power without interconnecting wires.” (Massie. and Underhill 67-71) but was never completed, again, due to financial problems.
Tesla claimed that you could build one of these towers in every country and build receivers wherever you needed the power as long as they both operated at the same resonating frequency, which was very low, close to 25 kilohertz. He also believed that if it operated at the same frequency as the sky you could retrieve electric power from the upper atmosphere as well as store electric energy up there.
This idea of ‘pulling’ energy from the sky leads us to the next point of focus in this paper and that is Tesla’s theorized inventions. Radiant energy, energy that is all around us, is what Tesla spent a lot of his time trying to harness and according to his documents, achieved just that. He started with a ‘cloud’ of electricity near the ground that was charged to 30,000 volts through an alternating current motor and when the radiant energy hit the cloud, it would compress itself and increase the voltage to over 10 times the input and by using an oscillating capacitor you could retrieve the energy from the cloud and keep it at a near-constant 30.000 volts. Nobody has been able to duplicate this experiment as some of the papers were lost in the lab fire of 1895.
Tesla is coined as a mad scientist because of these next three theorized inventions and rightly so I would suppose, because these are some pretty crazy ideas. The first of these is the earthquake machine which Tesla claimed could be hidden inside an overcoat pocket, the device needing be only a few inches long and no more than a few pounds in weight. What this device did was oscillate at the same frequency as the ground or an object it was attached to and when the right frequency of oscillation was hit, the entire subject would begin to quiver violently but would cause no harm to objects around it. “At one point while experimenting with mechanical oscillators. [Tesla] allegedly generated a resonance of several buildings causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonance frequency of his own building and, belatedly realizing the danger, he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived.” (O’Neill 162). Tesla told the police that it must have been an earthquake and essentially told his assistants to ‘zip-it.’
The other two inventions that I am going to mention are both related in that they use charged particles to interfere with matter. The first of these is literally a force field, that is, “a barrier, typically made of energy or charged particles, that protects a person, area or object from attacks or intrusions.“ (Tesla) and the other is a particle beam. "Dr. Nikola Tesla, inventor of polyphase electric current, pioneer in high frequency transmission, predecessor of Marconi with the wireless, celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday yesterday by announcing his invention of a beam of force somewhat similar to the death ray of scientific romance. It is capable, he believes, of destroying an army 200 miles away; it can bring down an airplane like a duck on the wing, and it can penetrate all but the most enormous thicknesses of armor plate. Since it must be generated at stationary power plants by machines which involve four electrical devices of the most revolutionary sort, Dr. Tesla considers it almost wholly a defensive weapon. In peace times, he says, the beam will also be used to transmit immense voltages of power over distances limited only by the curvature of the earth."
Now, just because Tesla worked on such crazy inventions and claimed to get a few of them to work should not steer you away from the true genius of his work. Tesla was a genius inventor and a very eccentric and quirky man who never seemed to get the credit that he deserved. It is only now, almost 70 years after his death that he is coming into the broader public eye, and people are realizing the potential of his inventions. As the energy crisis heightens and new wars are being waged every day, just think of the lives that could have been spared had Tesla been able to finish his research and how far we would be today technologically. Tesla believed that his wireless technologies would bring the world together in what he called a ‘huge brain’ and we can see that today through the internet, radio, tv, and other various sources of media. Tesla truly was the Father of Modern Technology, a man born decades ahead of his time.
“I have always been ahead of my time.” – Nikola Tesla
Uth, Robert. "Tesla - Life and Legacy." Tesla - Master of Lightning. Public Broadcasting Service, 2000. Web. 24 April 2010.
Redshaw, Kerry. "Nikola Tesla." Pioneers. N.p., 2000. Web. 30 April 2010.
Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. New York City, NY: Experimenter Publishing Company, Inc., 1919. Print.
Cheney, Margaret. Tesla: Man Out of Time. Simon & Schuster, 2001. 400. Print.
Craig, Brandon. The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History. McFarland & Company, 1991. 279. Print.
Tesla, Nikola. "US Pat. 613809." US Patents. (1898): Print.
"Nikola Tesla." Inventor of the Week. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jul 1996. Web. 1 May 2010.
Cheney, Margaret, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn. Home power. Barnes & Noble Publishing, 2006. Print.
Massie, Walter, and Charles Underhill. WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY & TELEPHONY. 1908. 67-71. Print.
O'Neill, John. Prodigal Genius. 162-164. Print.
Crusades Fiction
It is good to be back in France, Sir Bouillon. Oh how I have missed our beautiful lands! You could not fathom the scarcity of flora and fauna near Jerusalem, and after we finished our crusade, it was even more barren. Praise the Father that he would have spared my battalion from the Muslims of Tyre for they had defended against and defeated every brigade that was sent their way. Those Muslim dogs tricked the Damascenes into helping them fight against our troops which had sealed our fate as soon as we stepped within their boundaries. My battalion was sent to take over Jerusalem, where we succeeded in our efforts and took complete control over the Jews and Muslims. They outnumbered us nearly three to one, but they did not have the grace of God among their armies as we had.
While we were in Jerusalem, many of our Francs tortured and killed many Jews and Muslims, even going so far as to eat them! I was asked to join in with their festivities, but instead I abstained from their vile atrocities. These native people out here have built many beautiful buildings and temples to their gods and it was a disgrace to have to see them become demolished. I occasionally consider to myself if it was necessary to destroy their amazing architecture, but I would suppose that it was essential in taking control of the city.
After we took control of Jerusalem, we set up four Crusader states among their cities: The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Tripoli. I was a part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem where your very own cousin now resides as ruler. He is an extraordinary soldier and among the most pious of knights. His proficiency with a sword would bewilder and amaze you, as it should be, beings he learned from the best swordsman in France, that being you of course, Sir.
I hear that they are sending out another small band of crusaders in one year, but I do not have faith that they will succeed. There are too many Turks lurking in the hills along our pathway back to the Levant. It would be a death sentence to go with them, so I am choosing to stay in France now for the remainder of these horrible crusades. Please accept this as my resignation from the Order of Knights.
Significantly Pierre Saucé
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Finish this story: Alice tried to remember who had given her the key...
As she contemplated all of this, a cat ran across her path in the street, and under a door with an old fashioned padlock keeping it from blowing open in the slight breeze. It clattered in the wind, and looked as though one big gust would rip it from the hinges. She followed the cat, and went up to the door. She grabbed the padlock and shook it to see if it was loose in any way but it would not budge.
“Curious.” She said to herself. “I wonder if this is what that key is for.”
She pulled the key from her pants pocket, slid the teeth into the lock and turned the handle counter clockwise. It made a distinct clicking noise as the pins inside lined up, and the shaft came free, opening the lock. She removed it from the door and gently set it on the ground beside her with the key inside.
She opened the door slowly, and crept inside the damp, dingy building. There was no electric lighting system inside, and the only source of light that she could see were 4 faint candles running along what seemed to be a table set with teapots and coffee cups…
Monday, February 8, 2010
Describe what heaven might look like and whom you might or might not find there.
As far as who might be there, and who might be missing, I would not have the slightest clue. I could make a few inferences of who would or would not be there; judging solely on character and actions, but only God knows where a person's heart is in their lives. I would be chauvinistic to assume myself better than someone else and say that I am going to heaven because I am a "good person" and that this person is in hell because of their "evil deeds." I bet that ever last one of us would be surprised to see who is in heaven and who is not. Though you might not know who is not there because there is no sorrow in heaven and if you knew who was not, the first human reaction is to be sorrowful over loved ones who wasted their lives and ended up in hell. Maybe we will know who is not with us in heaven, and will understand why they are not, and can look at everything with clear, open thoughts. It is difficult to try and think about things that are outside of human nature.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Write about 3 lessons that you have learned from your parents, both good and bad.
Parents, though almost always under appreciated, have taught all of us important lessons in our lives, whether it was through their actions, both good and bad, or their words, also both the good and the bad. If you look hard enough, you can always put a positive spin on anything in life. My parents have taught me many lessons by being a good example, and by being a poor example, showing me situations that I would not want to subject myself to. There are three things that I have picked up from my parents that I would consider to be the most important lessons that they have taught me; One from my mother, One from my father, and the last I have learned from both of them through their past actions and their present actions.
The first thing that I learned from my mother and from her father is that no matter what happens in life, always smile, and always find the good in things. To my mother, nothing else matters except that she is happy, and that the people she cares about are happy. I believe that sometimes my mom will put other people’s happiness above hers and that she goes out of her way to make people happy, even if it means that she will not be as happy as she could have been. When I was discussing college, and which ones I would want to go to, and the possible careers that I had in mind, my step dad was baffled when I told him that I did not care about a high-paying job. He does not understand the outlook on life that my grandfather, my mother and I all share that is that no matter what happens in life, we always smile.
Smiling is the key ingredient to a happy life. One smile can go a long way. Studies have shown that if a person is in a bad mood and they see a person smiling at something, their mood lightens up and they will wear a smile upon their face as well. This tendency of humans to repeat a smile that we see creates a chain effect where a simple smile from one person can brighten several people’s lives any given day.
Not only does the act of smiling brighten another person's day, I have also found out that it can brighten your own day. When something does not go the way I had planned it to, or if I am ever down, I always think of what my grandpa told me one day, “No matter how bad life gets, always find the good in it and smile because life is too short to waste it with a frown on your face.” I could tell that he had told this to my mother when she was a child, and that she had passed that lesson down to my siblings and myself. On my last day of Newspaper during my senior year of high school, our adviser made us give a speech about the past year, and I brought up that quote and by the end of my speech, had a few people crying and the entire class raising their hands to respond to my speech. I knew then that it was a powerful lesson, and that I should hold it close to my heart and never let life get me down, and to always shoot for happiness even if it means having a harder life.
Though my father was not around for the better half of my earlier years, he still has taught me a very important lesson that had I never learned it, I would hardly be the man that I am today. What I am talking about is the fact that when it boils right down to it, all you really have left is your morals and religion.
My dad is not the kind of man that you find at church or listening to the latest Christian rock CD, but he is my source of religious inspiration. I have spent countless hours in the car driving from and to father’s house with him talking about nothing but religion and morals. One of our favorite pieces of discussion is the Apostle John’s Revelation on the island of Patmos where Christ came to him and showed him the events of the end of the world. It’s no hidden fact that these times are nigh, and we talk about the importance of religion when those times come. My father will sometimes even say jokingly, “You know, I almost feel like packing up and living out in the woods by myself and God just to get out of all of this corruption.” He will then continue and explain that thought by saying that he does not want to be in the epicenter when Christ comes back and that he does not want to be hunted down for his belief in Christ as our redeemer.
This is the lesson that I have picked up from him; because I believe in the true God, I will be hated my many, and loved by few. I will be ridiculed and tormented for my faith, and all for what? Nothing in this life of course, but is not 80 years of suffering worth it for an eternity with my creator in heaven.
The final lesson that I have learned from both of my parents is to have a good marriage. When I was about 5 years old, my parents got a divorce, and they both remarried a few years afterward. During their first marriage to each other, all that they ever did was fight, and even now in their new marriages, they still fight with their new spouse.
My mother has always told me that I have to find a woman that I can’t stand to be without, and that I can’t stay mad at when we do fight. Her and my step dad fight every other day, usually about things that do not matter in the grand scheme of things, but that are picked out and brought up just out of annoyance with one another. I hear them fight, and I am smart enough to figure out the underlying properties of the fights and I simply take it all in and learn from their fights.
About a year ago, I was in a really bad relationship with a girl, and my mother had told me to make a list of every attribute or skill or quality that I wanted in a spouse, and when I had compiled the list, my current girlfriend had none of the specifications on the list. I was told to be as picky as I wanted to be because I can only get married once, in theory. The first two items were religion and morals and I have not found many girls that I am attracted to and that share those same values as I do except for two. It is safe to say that I broke up with her a few weeks after I had finished the list and found out that she was in fact the complete opposite of that list. I have only dated one girl since then simply because nobody fits my standards anymore except for those two that I mentioned earlier. I have very bad communication problems with one of them, and the other one lives in Florida. God will guide me through this I am sure, and I will trust his judgment. This was a lesson well taught, and a lesson well worth the pain to learn personally.
All of three of these lessons fit together into one another, though it may not seem so at first. If you combine any of the two then you end up with the third as the result. If you are happy and have a strong relationship with God, then you will find a good spouse. If you are happy and have a good spouse, you only have God to thank for it. If you have a strong faith and a good spouse, then God has given you a happy life. I may not thank my parents all too often for teaching me so many important lessons, but I’m sure that if they ever read this they would know how much they really mean to me, even though I may not show it at times. Thank you, mom and dad and thank you God for good parents.
