Real-Time Information Quotes
The Professor just connected a telegraph wire to the balloon tether rope and the observer/telegraph operator in the balloon could describe in real time the position, deployment, weapons and strength of the Confederates. The information was picked up by the Union officers on the ground and a few seconds later by Washington where Abraham Lincoln, a brilliant innovator in the use of telegraph technology, had a telegraph office right next to the White House. Observational intelligence was in real time reaching the Commander in Chief and the war planners not unlike the functionality of a modern observational drone. The graphic is a photo of that balloon preparing for launch.
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.
