Saturday, August 28, 2010

Something about "rights" that I wrote a long time ago

Too many people these days believe that they have some kind of special right that is owed to them. Truth is, you don't.. The only RIGHT that you have, is to Die. That's right, your only natural, God given right, is to die. "Why is this?" You may be asking. You may be thinking to yourself, "I have tons of rights.. I have the right to drive, the right to be homosexual, the right to run for president, the right to make fun of ugly people, but you don't. You don;t have a right to live. Only to die. God is gracious enough to give you the ability to live, and the ability to do those things, but nobody owes you a special right for anything. Now, I'm not talking about person to person favors, I'm talking about rights. Don't get confused now. :P God created people in his own image. An image that is perfect, one without flaws, and guess what we do.. We screw it up. We lost our right to live. Death became something that was more real than day and night when Human kind fell into sin. God gave us a right to die that day. He has only revoked that right twice, and I guarantee he will not again until Judgement day, and he will never give us anymore rights. It is grace alone that we thrive off of our entire lives. Through the grace of God, and the grace of others. If nobody else showed grace towards you, where would you be? Sure as hell not where you are right now.. These are my thoughts on People's Rights and what not, but as I state in other blogs, If you don't believe in God, then take this with a grain of salt, or take it to heart and hear what I have to say. If you want to hear what I have to say about God and the Bible, then continue reading my blogs or message me, but if not, then don't waste mine and your time and leave it be.

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

Dear Sir Bouillon,

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