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He had a plan to not only transmit the signals but also transmit the electrical power to run the portable devices. 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.
Although it seems incredible to us today, thousands of people were arrested and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. The government particularly targeted leftists such as Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, J. Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman. Debs was sentenced to 20 years in prison for criticizing the Act itself.
Ronald Reagan’s media expert, Michael Deaver, developed a new approach to Presidential appearances. He realized that if the President made a 5 or 10 minute speech at an event, the Evening News would choose one or two 10-15 second excerpts, and that was what the vast majority of the country would see. Therefore, he reasoned, the words spoken meant relatively little. It was the image what would last in people’s memory. Therefore, he worked hard to concentrate on getting the right background for the President’s appearance. The Statue of Liberty, a naval ship, a factory at work. The set of images that people would have of the President in these different appearances would define the President in the minds of most people. Deaver would be more concerned that the TV camera’s showed the background scene he had planned (rather than a strange angle or just a close-up of the President’s face) than he would be about which words—sound bytes—the TV station would select. Hence Baker’s observation that words were less important than the TV images.
