Nikola Tesla Quotes

It took a while but radios and TVs were produced in portable versions, and of course now we have Wi Fi, the Internet and Smart Phones and Tablets. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.

Not only did the Radio fail to inhibit war, but Marconi completely missed the way demagogues like Hitler and Mussolini would use propaganda via the radio to induce war in their societies. They did not justify war; they made it a national duty. Media inventors seem to have an overly optimistic view of the invention’s effect. See {635261}.

One of the great scientists of all time was totally wrong when it came to predicting the practical utility of the technological developments of science. In all fairness to Kelvin, once he had actually tried the new technologies, he became a great enthusiast for them and helped introduce them to the world.

This quotation illustrates on how even recent history can be perceived differently depending on one’s philosophy and world view. In America, we tend to minimize the government’s role in important innovation and great leaps forward. Many people from Communist or Socialist cultures, tend to minimize the role of private enterprise. For example in the case of the Internet, it is true that all the initial R&D was funded by DARPA, a unit of the Defense Department. And it is also true that the World Wide Web innovation and development was done and paid for by CERN a scientific consortium of European Governments. However, the total amount of those two government expenditures would not equal Microsoft’s R&D budget for 1 day. Most of the developmental capital came from the private sector and the people who did most of the innovative work were private sector employees. However, there would have been many years delay if the U. S. Government had not funded the first small but critical activity. The government sector provides a very large proportion of the sales income for Microsoft, Apple, Intel and the many other Silicon Valley firms, not with contracts for innovation but as buyers of their hardware and software. There are government contracts but those applications are specialized for the government and are a small fraction of the revenue received by Silicon Valley.

This quotation is important for a politician or policy maker to understand. Many of the most useful technologies for mankind, were never developed for that purpose at all. In many cases, the major motivation is just understanding how a phenomenon functions, in others it just seemed like a scientific next step. In this case, Marconi was quote surprised that this new concept of radio would have much practicality.