Note: I have recently learned (June, 2022) that the story of Tesla has been somewhat hyped over the last hundred years. So, although he was undoubtedly a genius in matters of electrical design, he was not so gifted when he ventured into other areas of physics. He was also not at the center of the War of the Currents, nor was he ever intending to give the world free energy, per se, though he did think that in his Wardenclyffe project (New York, 1901-2), he could supply energy cheaper than was being delivered at the time because it would use less of the relatively expensive copper wiring. This issue of how to lower the cost of providing an electrical grid to a region by minimizing the overall amount of copper wiring used was a practical engineering concern over the industrialize world decades before Tesla arrived on the scene. So, although I think that Tesla was a great inventor and promoter of practical electrical devices (e.g., his Tesla Coil), his reputation has been blown out of proportion to his actual accomplishments. Unfortunately, Tom Kelley seemed to have had access to the popularizers of Tesla, whom he trusted to present accurate accounts, but they seem to have missed the mark. Although Tesla was indeed one of the important contributors to the field of electrical engineering of his day, he really doesn't deserve to be considered as its primary unsung hero.
Question: Was Tesla cheated out of some of his due recognition by the common citizen of the civilized world? Yes, but so too are hundreds of other scientists, inventors, and technicians who deserve much more recognition in the civilized world than they actually get. We simply don't teach this stuff to students in primary and secondary schools to the degree that I think we should. What we have here is sort of a conspiracy of silence forced on us by educators who feel that the subject of the history of modern invention is too nerdy, technical, and irrelevant to the majority of students. But there is a price our modern world pays for that educational short-sightedness. Sure, students might read about Faraday, Maxwell, and Newton, but this hardly scratches the surface. The real problem here is that because we tend to take the technology that's all around us for granted, that we also tend to ignore the hundreds of people who contributed to this wonderful technology.
To some degree this educational philosophy is 'correct', but it has had its negative consequences. If we grow up being completely ignorant of the rich history of modern inventions then it is to us a huge black box that, for all we know, never happened, and then some con-man comes along and tells us that all this was reverse-engineered off of captured alien technology and we're susceptible to believe such nonsense, but it won't seem like nonsense to 'ignorant' people who graduated high school and wrongly think they know what's going on, when, really, they don't. Then they're told that the moon landings never happened and they believe that lie, and believe the lie that the earth is flat.
In my opinion, there are three areas of the development of modern engineering and science
that should be taught to primary and secondary students that falls in the time range
of 1800-1945, and they are:
1) The modern electrical grid, 2) the modern theory of the atom,
3) the steam engine and the internal combustion engine and the automobile.
Then there are four areas of the development of modern engineering and science
that should be taught to primary and secondary students that falls in the time range
of 1900-1990, and they are:
The development of 1) controlled, powered flight, 2) of the digital computer/microchips,
3) of rocket technology, and 4) of mass communications technology.
Then there are three areas of the development of modern engineering and science
that should be taught to primary and secondary students that falls in the time range
of 1940-today, and they are:
1) modern medicine, 2) materials science, 3) computer (software) science:
computer apps, computer languages, algorithms.
Question: How would these subjects be taught? Clearly, I'm thinking of
a historical approach that emphasizes who invented/discovered what-when, but
not to go too deeply into the theory. I also think that simple classroom demonstrations
could be performed, though I do not see the class as having a laboratory
part to it, unless a particular student would like that.
Question: Is the history of invention merely a matter of the lone inventors and their
inventions? Well, not really. To bring a piece of modern technology into being can be
a matter of pure luck or dogged determinism. Collaborations are often necessary.
Funding is always an issue. Financiers need to be involved, as do universities,
private organizations, governments, local, federal, and international standards
committees -- and those had to be invented, too, along the way.
For a more recent exposition of Nikola Tesla, see Kathy's YouTube video on Tesla at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6331JXvOUGY .
Her YouTube site name: Kathy Loves Physics & History
I propose to provide for the reader an introductory three-part survey of Tesla's life and accomplishments. In this first part, a biographical survey of Tesla's life is presented with emphasis on some of the more important people in his life, and the major events that affected his life. The second part will explore the technical accomplishments of Nikola Tesla. It will cover those things that Tesla brought to practical use, and those things that Tesla built but, due to limitations in capital funding or in the prevailing technology, wasn't able to develop a successful product. It concludes with a review of some of the hundreds of ideas, visionary technologies, and fanciful speculations that Tesla had shared with interested listeners throughout his whole life. The third and final article will develop more fully some of the questions raised in the prior articles, especially the legacy of Nikola Tesla. It will explore the mystical nature of the man, which triggered a whole industry of occult opinions about him. It will also examine the political climate that he found himself in, with special notice of the polemics that were written after his death.
To my mind the satisfactory overview of the life of Tesla can be best separated into three broad intervals. The first part of his life I call the Constructive Period. It includes his formative years in Croatia, his education, and finally his reputation-forming years in Budapest and Paris, concluding with the passage to America. The Productive Period starts from his arrival in New York, and ends approximately after the turn of the twentieth century---a period that saw the realization of great and innovative technology from the genius of Tesla's mind. The Period of Decline overlaps somewhat, the previous period. Its characteristics include: the gradual loss of capital that Tesla desperately needed, the loss of prestige from the engineering community that once begged Tesla for his help, and finally, in his last lonely years, the loss of favor among most mainstream journalists. Unless otherwise cited, I have derived the biographical material from both the Cheney and the Hunt and Draper biographies.
A CULTURAL STUDIES ANALYSIS OF HIS LEGACY
Download Thesis on Tesla: Thesis Paper (672KB)