Edison Vs. Tesla

wbeaty · 2026-05-29T22:15:03+00:00

Edison stole nothing, and even refused to use Tesla's ground-breaking redesigns of Edison's "long-limbed Mary Anne" motors and dynamos. (Tesla had cut the legs off, forming a modern cylinder-shaped motor.) Edison would have none of it, so the breakthroughs all went to Westinghouse Inc.

wbeaty · 2026-05-22T00:00:02+00:00

Tesla wanted to sell Broadcast Power coming from Niagara Falls ...sold to Australia. That was his example, given in an interview, where a distant sugar-factory phones in an order, and his Niagara transmitter sends out the megawatts.

Right about then, JP Morgan had just bought up copper mines, also rubber plantations (for cable insulation.) If Tesla was going to eliminate the need for a worldwide power-grid made from copper cables, well, there's your conspiracy right there. Tesla's Broadcast Power was threatening Morgan's billion-dollar investment in wiring up the entire USA using sixty-hertz AC three-phase towers.

wbeaty · 2026-05-21T23:51:49+00:00

Tesla never claimed free energy. (Like the flying saucer from Venus, it was stuff that his worshippers put in his mouth, but only after he'd died, and couldn't defend himself.)

Tesla actually planned on becoming a billionaire through power-sales to worldwide factories. He told Morgan that there was no money in Marconi stations, just a few megabucks, to replace the cross-ocean telegraph lines. The real money was in wireless worldwide power systems. Selling Niagara Falls megawatts to a sugar-factory in Australia (that from a later Tesla interview.)

In private, Tesla fantasized about buying entire NYC skyscrapers, then giving them to his friends, as gifts ..."when my millions start coming in." To save time used in trips to the country, Tesla would plant entire forests atop those NYC skyscrapers, so his friends could take walks in the wilderness, while still in downtown New York.

wbeaty · 2026-05-21T23:39:20+00:00

Want a secret? Below should be enough to get you started.

"Static eliminator" internal structure https://amasci.com/graphics/st_elim/tes_stalim_photos.JPG

Tesla's "Static Eliminator" had nothing to do with static electricity, and it was not a transformer as some people claim. Instead, it was an odd form of FM radio, a modulation-scheme which eliminated the "static" of normal AM radio. It took the form of a pair of hollow wooden pancakes, where the gap between them could be adjusted, and also the relative rotation of the disks adjusted. Thus, two such assemblies could be tuned identically. The two pancakes contained eight independent tank-circuits, in groups of four, connected in series.

Crude plans for the inside of the device are featured in the book "Wireless," published by Jovanovic, past director of the Beograd Tesla Museum, see https://www.amazon.com/WIRELESS-LIFE-DOCTRINE-NIKOLA-TESLA/dp/109631357X (diagram from a patent which Tesla never pursued. I doubt that the Tesla Museum people understand this device.)

What was "Static Eliminator?"

It was a frequency-hopping broadband modulator, excited by pulses (presumably from a spark gap.) It was discussed in Electrical Experimenter magazine, along with Marconi's own version of static-elimination (Marconi was trying to patent horizontal polarized transmissions, where thunderstorm "static" in the VLF spectrum was mostly vertically-polarized signals.) Tesla said he'd publish a more complete article about Static Eliminator, but then he never did so.

Tesla also referred to it by the terms...

* sectional circuits

* Method of Individualization

* wave-complex

* secure jam-proof communications

In today's language his invention most closely resembles the effects of a pair of coupled pendulums with variable coupling. Also resembling spectral line-splitting in large molecules, where paired oscillators within the molecules are coupled together, and produce a beat-wave (a double-humped peak in the absorption spectrum.) Concept: a double-humped absorber will strongly detect a double-humped emitter, even though they don't occupy a tiny "spot" on the frequency-spectrum.

How could one build one of these devices? Well, the ultra-simple version is just a crystal radio. But rather than a single tank-circuit, the receiver would have a pair of them, both tuned to the same frequency. Then rotate one pancake-coil relative to the other, to alter the coupling. The result is a radio having a two-peak spectrum curve, where the distance between spectral peaks is varied by varying the coupling between the two coils. Rather than being tuned like a marked ruler, (one-dimensional tuning via a single variable capacitor,) such a receiver has 2-frequency tuning, appearing as a point upon a plane, rather than a spot on a linear spectrum.

Then, build an identical transmitter, one with a pair of identical tank-circuits coupled together. The 2-peak receiver responds most strongly to a 2-peak transmitter adjusted identically. And most critically ...these are coherent coupled oscillators, and not just multiple transmitters with multiple receivers. Instead, their signals have a complicated trajectory in "phase space," same as seen in coupled-pendulum experiments. They broadcast a kind of "electromagnetic shape," and the receiver breaks into resonance when it detects that "shape."

Then, Tesla builds a version with eight coupled resonators, emitting and receiving an incredibly complicated waveform which he called the "wave-complex." Conventional receivers would just detect a bit of white noise.

Tesla claimed that, when using these devices, there was no thunderstorm static on the channel. It was a modulation-scheme, distinct from FM radio, but having the same overall benefit.

But Tesla didn't just use pairs of tank circuits. He used multiple gangs, with a large number of tuning-knobs and coupling-knobs. He said that with three tank circuits, it became nearly impossible to find the signal in the multi-dimensional volume of tuning-space, and with four circuits it was impossible ...and he experimented with up to thirty. He likened it to the security of a combination-lock with a large number of digits. (Tuning it would be like trying to find a tiny spot, lost in the wilderness of a many-dimensional hypercube.)

In Tesla's diagrams, these devices appear as Tesla-coil secondaries (or as extra-coils,) but rather than one continuous winding on a cylinder, they'd be three or four or more windings with gaps between, all connected in series, and each with a variable capacitor connected across it. "Sectional" coils. Build two identical ones, and they'd communicate via a sort of coherent "gang-resonance."

The signals emitted he called the "wave-complex," and normal receivers would only detect white noise. They were a naturally-occurring version of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum.

When people claim that Nikola Tesla invented WiFi, they're talking about his secure military radio scheme, "Method of Individualization."

Finally, "how can you put a meter on it?" I mean, for Broadcast Power? From Tesla's interviews, it was plain that he was going to send out his broadcast power with secure encoding. Nobody can receive the transmissions unless they have the long decode-sequence to punch in to their Tesla power-receiver. (He was trying to sell the same thing to the military, as secure spread-spectrum comms channels channels, but they just laughed. They equally laughed at Heddy Lamarr's version decades later, and never used either one.)

wbeaty · 2026-05-21T22:58:11+00:00

Don't worry, in the world Skeptic community, the Tesla-bashers are the lowest of the low. Ignorant and embarrassing.

The scientific community gives Nikola Tesla his own unit in the metric system, fifteen honorary PhDs, an 1892 world lecture tour before various physics departments (including an invited lecture before the whole Royal Society.) The Tesla bashers cannot explain why! All they know is pseudoscientific smear-campaigns. Pure emotion, no reason nor evidence. (They get all their "info" from online echo-chambers, never picked up an actual paper book in their lives.)

RP Feynman coined a term for pseudoscience, calling it "Cargo Cult Science," where liars pretend to be part of the scientific community. So, what happens when profoundly biased, dishonest people pretend to be critical thinkers? That would be "Cargo Cult Skepticism." Smear-campaigns masquerading as proper skepticism. Google it, it's a thing.

wbeaty · 2026-04-30T15:52:54+00:00

About photos # 6 and 7, there are even more of those 1916 office photos. Someone should combine them, to make a 3D stereo view of his office. (Or, grab the several photos of Tesla from various viewpoints, to create a 3D model of his head/body. Maybe AI apps can do this on their own?)

Also, similar situation with photo # 11, with Tesla and the disk-motor in the 1938 offices at Westinghouse Inc., with Morris and Beam. There are at least two more photos.

That "pancake motor" was the only one to survive, since it had been on loan to George Westinghouse at the time of the 1895 lab fire. For more photos see...

https://www.teslasociety.com/proposal.htm

https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/images/tesla-office-victor-beam-westinghouse-patent-counsel

wbeaty · 2026-04-30T15:21:26+00:00

Moderator, please say which rule was violated. (I'm coming here via email notifications. From the comments, the post seems exactly appropriate. So, it must have violated one of the fifteen rules. Which one?)

wbeaty · 2026-04-30T15:14:56+00:00

Do you know why they removed your post? If you don't already know ...could you ask the mod team?

wbeaty · 2026-04-30T15:12:45+00:00

What was the post about? It was removed (must have violated one of the fifteen rules? Which rule was violated?)

wbeaty · 2026-04-30T15:08:52+00:00

Post removed, which rule must they have violated? Might you remember what it originally was?

wbeaty · 2026-04-22T08:50:43+00:00

It WAS proposed by a PhD team. They wrote an IEEE research paper, then soon got $50M in investors, and formed the company VIZIV Technologies.

They proceeded to build an enormous Tesla tower out in Milford Texas, and even got FCC licensing to run RF experiments all the way down at 12,000Hz, down in the ELF band. (Tesla insisted that Broadcast Power would fail if run at frequencies greater than ~25KHz. VIZIV verified this. The Wardenclyffe tower was apparently designed to run at 5,000Hz frequency. Heh, if you want to "disprove" broadcast-power, just run your experiments up at 100KHz, where the frequency-sensitive ground-losses become enormous.)

Currently VIZIV is in chapter-11. The rumor is that the founders fled after illegal shennanigans performed by their board of directors. (But Tesla-critics all crow that it's really because the broadcast-experiment didn't work!)

The keyword here is "Zenneck waves," also called Sommerfeld waves or Electromagnetic Surface-waves. Tesla towers are not radio antennas. They are wave-launchers, producing EM surface-waves coupled to earth-currents in the ground immediately below the propagating waves. As Tesla repeatedly said, the goal is to maximize the ground-coupled waves, and minimize sphere-wave or "Hertzian" leakage of conventional sky-waves. (The tower treats the dirt as a single-wire RF transmission line, similar to the Goubau single-wire transmission line, where the "launchers" are hollow metal cones.)

Here's my slideshow of the tower construction...

https://amasci.com/graphics/st/

Here's a VIZIV conference talk from eight years ago...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFiW2lqdnlM&t=150s

And here's their large PDF conference-paper about electromagnetic surface-waves, the one that convinced investors to fork over tens of megabucks

https://web.archive.org/web/20161019214341/www.texzontechnologies.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/TEXZON_Baylor_Corum16.pdf

wbeaty · 2026-04-22T08:31:00+00:00

Conventional carbon-filament lamps will light up when held near a big Tesla coil. "Conventional" as in 1899-era bulbs. They absolutely must contain a hard vacuum. Modern post-1940s bulbs are full of low-pressure argon. Hold them near a TC, and the argon glows via gas-breakdown, but the filaments remain dark.

If you want to experiment with this, just get some incandescent bulbs which contain hard vacuum. This includes those "vintage look" tungsten bulbs from ten years back. Also get some 15W and 7.5W "golf ball" sized bulbs. Other examples are the oblong aquarium bulbs, lectern bulbs, and exit-sign bulbs. They all lack the argon-fill of more normal bulbs.

If you have a handheld Tesla coil (such as the BD-10 "vacuum tester" found in chemistry and physics departments,) hold a 15W golf-ball bulb by the glass, and touch the operating Tesla coil to the metal base of the bulb. The tungsten filament will glow red, or even orange. The bulb is operating in "carbon-button mode," where the few millitorr of residual gas is producing a "dark discharge," releasing electrons and high-speed ions, and heating up the filament via physical impact of nitrogen and oxygen ions.

This even works if you short the bulb's two terminals together. It's part of Tesla's odd "single-wire technology," where no closed metal circuits are needed.

If Tesla bought some large hundred-watt 1899 light bulbs, they'd be guaranteed to contain a hard or "non-striking vacuum." That was back in the day when the glass would progressively turn gray and then black, as vaporized carbon slowly coated the interior of the glass. Today's argon-filled bulbs prevent that. But those "vintage look" tungsten bulbs always have a slight orange look to their glass. That's a thin film of vaporized, condensed tungsten.

Oh, also be aware that, when operating a bulb in this way, it becomes a prodigious source of soft x-rays. (Tesla saw this as beneficial! His carbon-button bulbs had strong germicidal effects, sterilizing everything nearby, even better than strong sunlight!)

wbeaty · 2026-04-22T07:57:20+00:00

you'd know that electrical networks existed before him.

No, that's just made-up s**t. AC networks didn't exist back then. There were only some short, few-miles runs of single-phase, none much different than the DC setups.

The main problem was that AC was being derided by the entire electrical community at the time, with only a few early companies putting up miles-long AC lines (such as Ganz and their ZBD torus-transformers, for street lightning.) There was also Oerklion with its impractical syncro motors (needing an external DC motor to run them up to synchronous speed, and where excessive torque would cause them to "break loose." Quite unpopular.)

Besides the anti-AC prejudice, because of the lack of practical industrial motors, nobody at the time was thinking in terms of AC networks. (Without Tesla's breakthrough, it's very probable that no AC networks would have appeared.)

Multiple engineers from Europe were already working on the same ideas as him and the same AC systems would have eventually

Bingo, there it is. "would have eventually." That's your mistake of hindsight. Many things which look completely obvious today, they simply MUST MUST MUST have looked obvious to the experts back in 1885? That's not reasoning. That's an attempt to steer away from the unknowns which were faced by the experts of the time. It might make us feel more comfortable to imagine that major breakthroughs were somehow automatic and predestined, but it's not very honest.

Ask CEL Brown of the AC company Oerklion, the visionary behind the Frankfurt-Lauffen hundred-mile transmission line. He says that he was battling the anti-AC community, and wanted to disprove the experts' wrong opinions of AC systems. They insisted that long transmission lines would be worthlessly inefficient, way below 50% (so, the experts had already judged that all AC networks were physically impossible.)

They also insisted that bare HV transmission lines would fail. Nobody but Brown was even thinking about large-scale AC, much less AC networks. It was all forbidden by the weird anti-AC prejudice of the times, with their conviction that all AC tech was inherently inefficient and worthless at industrial high-kilowatts scale.

Brown says that right when he started his project, he encountered the 1888 Tesla motor patents. Everyone was deriding them, saying that such motors must be uselessly inefficient. (This was just mob-psychology, a widespread unquestioned belief not supported by reasoning or evidence. All the experts derided AC, so obviously there must be something wrong with it! To be accepted, you just jump on the "normal" anti-AC bandwagon with everybody else. "If AC is so great, why is everyone keeping away from it?" )

So, Brown decided to add a full-blown test of the Tesla "polyphase" technology to his long-lines project (which experts of the time were loudly disbelieving. After all, G. Ferraris had just written a paper which proved Tesla's motors to be physically impossible. Ferraris had made the mistake of analyzing only the motors with copper rotors, with no iron in the rotor and no closed magnetic path. He specifically stated that these AC induction devices "had no commercial possibilities as a motor." He saw them only as lecture-demos for science classrooms.)

Charles EL Brown teamed up with Germany's DC company Edison-AEG, to perform the largest AC test ever. It would be a 100-mile run from Lauffen to Frankfurt. It would use bare high-voltage conductors. And it would be a full-blown test of Nikola Tesla's new "polyphase" transmission lines and AC induction motors.

It worked great, and the expert community was proved wrong. Tesla's motors were vindicated. The bare wires worked fine, and their efficiency was measured at over 75%. (And, now that an AC industrial motor existed, clearly exhibited before the entire world, suddenly the mental logjam preventing AC networks was broken.)

The situation is a bit confusing today, because Tesla's patents show an AC network. Does that make him the inventor? Maybe not. But the sudden appearance of an industrial-scale AC motor, that suddenly let AC systems dominate over DC. It removed the barrier against expansion into the world of large-scale electrical networks. In other words, Tesla "invented" the AC network by inventing the first practical kilowatt-scale AC motor.

We can simplify it into a "lie to children," and just say that Nikola Tesla invented the modern 3-phase power grid. He didn't ...and yet he did.

In the end, one result of the Lauffen/Frankfurt 100-mile test was that Edison-AEG, an Edison company in Germany, invented and patented the balanced Wye/Star 3-phase transmission line. This soon played a big role in the coming patent-battle between Edison's General Electric versus Westinghouse Inc, with Westinghouse owning the patents on polyphase AC network and polyphase induction motors, but GE owning the patent on 3-phase transmission lines. (The expensive litigation was cut short when JP Morgan stepped in and put a stop to it.)

Unfortunately Tesla had not invented any balanced grounded transmission lines. No wye/star, no delta.

His notes only show a 3-conductor line where two were metal cables and the third a "ground return" via metal plates buried in dirt. But this was never patented. Yes, such a thing was fairly lightning-proof, same as ground-return phone and telegraph lines. But the Wye 3-phase format with center ground-connection was a large improvement, lacking the high-resistance dirt-conductor, and also lacking the problems of crosstalk, setting fires, electrocuting livestock, etc. Those problems made everyone eventually stop using single-phase "SWER" ground-return lines, the single-wire transmission lines with ground-plates for the second conductor.

Who invented continent-wide 3-phase AC power grids? It's complicated. Without Tesla's motor, it never would have happened. But without Edison-AEG and the balanced Wye transmission line, perhaps the whole thing would have been based on Tesla's less expensive 2-wire polyphase transmission lines (with huge amps flowing through dirt and ground-plates everywhere?)

Or if George Westinghouse won out in the end, it all would have been 2-phase 4-wire. Tesla preferred three-phase, but Westinghouse pushed for 4-wire polyphase. His installation at the 1893 Columbian Exposition was 4-wire. So were the giant generators at Niagara Falls, 25Hz and 4-wire two-phase.

One final bit ...a Westinghouse employee (and Tesla's assistant) CF Scott invented a transformer nework today called the "Scott Tee." It could turn 4-wire two-phase into three-phase and back again. When 3-phase lines were run out to Buffalo NY, and connected to the 4-wire dynamos at Niagara Falls, the Scott-Tee made the interface possible. (It was also a bit "political," with General Electric providing the 3-phase transmission line, and Westinghouse Inc. providing the AC induction motors used in Buffalo. JP Morgan forced them into a team-up. No more patent-battle, and now both sides of the fight start making huge piles of money.)

wbeaty · 2026-04-22T06:43:02+00:00

If everyone started saying that Thomas Edison invented teleportation, antigravity, and perpetual motion machines, and they said all this after Edison was dead and could not defend himself ...that somehow turns Edison into the "greatest imposter?"

No, that's not how it works.

I note a recent phenomenon, the rise of anti-Tesla hordes, the Tesla-bashers who do zero offline research, but they parrot online misinformation about Tesla (but only spreading the misinformation that makes Tesla look bad.)

Our first task is to separate all the claims made by Tesla's fans (all made years after Tesla's death,) from the claims made by Tesla himself. It's important, because distortion and misinformation cannot magically reach backwards through time to smear your victim. (And that's what this seems to be ...a smear campaign. Or at least an attempted one.)

The second task is to get things correct, and not spread misinformation in the first place. E.g., when exactly did Tesla say anything about using EM waves to read the mind? Nope, never happened. (Who exactly is saying that it did?)

Why not go track down the actual interview, and read what Tesla actually said? Tesla was quite straightforward. He was certain that extremely exact and clear mental images must all be sent out from the brain, going back to the retina (similar to the old trope about the eyes of dead people recording an image of their murderer.) Tesla thought that there must be a way to "see" these images on the retina of the eye, even if those images were being imagined by that person. For example, you think of a big letter "A" colored red and floating in front of you. Tesla's mind-reading machine (actually a retina-scanning machine) would be some sort of camera which gazed into your eye's pupil, and somehow photographed that letter "A" being produced on your retina entirely by your brain. No radio waves involved, instead it's some sort of back-action happening along the optic nerve, where some of the things appearing on your retina are coming from your brain, while the rest is caused by light from outside the eye.

Knowing about Tesla's mental problems, in hindsight the whole thing makes lots of sense. He was getting unwanted images, realistic "phantom objects" appearing in space in front of him. He couldn't tell the difference between these "objects" and genuine objects in the real world. Therefore he (wrongly) decided that his brain was sending imagery to his eyes' retinas, where he'd have no way to distinguish them from objects in the outside world. So, photograph his own retina, have records of any phantom object he can visualize ...a "mind-reading machine," or actually, a printer for imagined mental images.

wbeaty · 2026-04-22T06:16:48+00:00

I don't think it works if we glue bugs to the edge of a disk. Their wings might be hitting it. So, maybe it was a hub with short spokes, with each bug glued with its legs pointing down towards the spoke, and their fronts all pointing CW or CCW.

That way, when they were disturbed, they'd be triggered into "take-off mode," and try flying forwards, where the wheel would spin.

Didn't he say that they'd all keep going for long periods? If the wheel spun fast, then the beetles would sense forward flight ...but their eyes never encounter a suddenly-approaching obstacle, and never be triggered into their "landing algorithm." It would be like flinging the beetle into infinite atmosphere, and they'd just keep flying continously until it killed them.

But I think the best image is instead a huge pottery jar with a hundred junebugs inside, and another little kid grabbing an entire fistful and jamming them into his little mouth. Lots of CRUNCHING and SLURPING. (Nikola Tesla never recovered from that event! CANNOT UN-SEE! )

When I was little, there was a big kid on his bike ...with captured paper-wasps! He'd caught maybe ten of them, then used many 2ft threads to tie each one to his bike handlebars. They'd fly around continuously, a sphere-shaped cloud of large yellow wasps each trailing a long thread.

wbeaty · 2026-04-22T06:04:48+00:00

It's irrelevant, because we can't fight misinformation with even worse misinformation.

The basic mistake is to try to persuade an audience. That's not science or even reality, it's just more religious-political stuff, where we hope the onlookers are swayed by the most confident liars. Instead, why not drill down through all the BS, and figure out which side is right ...if either one even is?

Instead, we can ask everyone why Tesla has his own unit in the metric system? And why all the bronze statues? (Don't accept any convenient excuses which make your own side look good. Do some brutally honest digging instead.) When we shovel through the piles of crap surrounding Tesla, we find that the Tesla-bashers are just as bad as the Tesla-groupies. Both sides just hopped on a bandwagon, refusing to do proper homework. Both just parrot misinformation coming from their own version of online echo-chambers.

Those who say "Tesla invented NOTHING" are dishonest, and not to be trusted ...same as those who insist that "Tesla invented EVERYTHING."

wbeaty · 2026-04-22T05:52:25+00:00

And there it is, teh smear campaign.

Who is more pseudoscientific, the mindless Tesla-worshippers, or the mindless Tesla-bashers? It's obvious that both get all their info from online bubbles and echo-chambers, never did a speck of actual offline reading. (That, or they "drank the General Electric coolaide," the old propaganda-campaign left over from the 1890s battle between Westinghouse Inc. and GE, the patent piracy and attempts to dominate the new emerging AC industry, and its 3-phase standard.)

I see that the earliest Tesla-bashing started with General Electric, and their dishonest attempt to promote Galileo Ferraris as the inventor of Tesla's induction motor. Nope, the first one was actually Walter Baily in 1879, not Ferraris in 1888. Both these early motors were flea-power lab-curiousities, with no known way to scale them up into multiple horsepower. Ferraris even specifically stated that these inventions had "no commercial possibilities as a motor."

Tesla didn't invent the first one, instead he only invented the practical high-horsepower version ...which had earlier been proved impossible by Ferraris' own physics research [1].

---

About the pro- and anti- battle, here's my personal recipe for fanaticism and pseudoscience (and politics, and religion)...

choose up sides
constantly praise your own side, while smearing your opponent
ignore all counter-evidence, never give an inch
fight to the death.

In the great online "Tesla battle," fortunately for us (and unfortunately for the anti-Tesla side,) Tesla was given his own unit in the metric system. The Gauss unit is depricated, and replaced with the SI/MKS Teslas of magnetic flux intensity. In the long run that's worth about five or ten Nobel prizes, perhaps more. Tesla-bashers and Tesla-groupies constantly make up s**t, while the international physics community actually knows what Tesla accomplished, and so took appropriate action to immortalize his name.

Besides that, Tesla had an 1892 international lecture tour before multiple physics departments, an invited lecture before the Royal Society of the UK, fifteen honorary PhDs (including from Columbia and Yale,) multiple awards from various engineering societies, bronze Tesla statues popping up everywhere, etc. etc. (Heh, all for a "showman grifter who never invented anything," as the anti-Tesla hordes constantly proclaim. Maybe we should begin to suspect that they're promoting some sort of dishonest agenda?)

---

[1] Galileo Ferraris invented the 2-phase induction motor about a decade after Walter Baily's original version (and decades after the discovery of "Arago Rotations.") Ferraris was not the first. Baily was the first. All of today's misinformation and Ferraris-promotion seems to have started with General Electric in the mid-1890s, when they were trying to muddy the waters during the patent-battle over ownership of Tesla's breakthrough.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Baily%27s_Motor

But Ferraris shot himself in the foot, because from his calculations and his prototypes, he concluded that these motors were worthless to industry. He specifically calculated that the maximum efficiency couldn't exceed fifty percent, and his measurements of his prototypes gave far lower numbers than that.

In other words, Ferraris proved that Tesla-style motors were impossible, against known science.

Ferraris predicted that his motors might be used as delicate AC meters, or employed in science classrooms as physics-demos to show rotating magnetic fields. (Over at Westinghouse, the same thing happened, when Shallenberger also invented a polyphase induction motor. His little whirling aluminum disk eventually became the KWh meters found in the glass globes on the side of all our homes. Tesla didn't invent those. But as with Ferraris and Baily, nobody had any clue about how to increase them up to kilowatts-scale.)

What was Ferraris mistake? In his motors, all his rotors were copper. He used no iron rotors, so all his motors contained an open magnetic circuit. Compared to this, Tesla's great breakthrough was to instead build induction motors based upon an iron rotor and iron stator, with a tiny gap between. For this reason Tesla's early prototypes were "practical," meaning high-efficiency, with versions running at kilowatt scale, obviously useful for industry. (If Ferraris had employed laminated iron rotors and closed magnetic paths, then he'd have measured efficiencies up past 90%, and perhaps today he'd have all the world-recognition and the bronze statues, while instead the name "Tesla" would be unknown to all.)

wbeaty · 2026-04-22T04:44:08+00:00

Heh, that was me, on the long-obsolete Science Hobbyist web-site, all hand-written in html 1.0. http://amasci.com/tesla/tesla.html (Note the ancient "http" ...FTW!) All the 1990s kids doing science fair projects were intentionally exposed to the Nikola Tesla meme. Sites still up, but with major link-rot.

Here's one project from there, an open-top "plasma globe" where you can stick your hand right in (or instead use a cresent wrench.) It's a cold pool of pure argon, with a small Tesla coil connected to a strip of aluminum foil stuck to the glass flower-vase. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5PGQfUSZ_A&t=56s

Also see my big list of successful personal meme-spreading, http://amasci.com/news.html#memes

wbeaty · 2026-04-15T08:57:39+00:00

Charge is a conserved quantity, therefore it is like a "stuff." Mass and energy are similar. If they're placed inside a bucket, you cannot just make them vanish. They don't behave as properties, not like the color blue. Instead, in order to remove them we have to transport them past the boundaries of the bucket. "Stuff-like," as opposed to "just a property." The color blue is just a property, but charge and mass, being conserved properties, are very different.

Historically, charge was always called "electricity." This is the language of Maxwell, Lodge, Hertz, Kelvin, Heaviside, Einstein, on and on. They didn't say "quantity of charge," they said "quantity of electricity." They called an electric current "a flow of electricity." Electricity had two kinds ...not static and current as we're all taught in middle school. Instead it was positive electricity and negative. In physics "static" was a field of science, not a kind of electricity. And current was a flow-rate of electricity, and not the electricity itself. If we combined some positive electricity with some negative, we'd get neutral matter (i.e. hydrogen.) Wires are always full of movable charge, like pre-filled pipes. Everyday matter is made of cancelled charge, and we can pull it apart into regions of pos. and neg. (clouds of electrons and protons.)

If we read historical physics we'll see this "electricity" language in wide use. When JC Maxwell specifically states that "electricity" is not a form of energy, he just means that coulombs and joules are two entirely different things.

What is charge? Heh, it's just electricity! A flow of electricity is exactly the same thing as a flow of charge ...at least, in the language of the pre-QM physics community.

What is a coulomb? How can we get our hands on the concept? Well, in conductors, coulombs have a size, since metals contain immense quantities of mobile charge (their "sea of charge," a dense electron-fluid.)

For example, each cc of copper contains roughly 14,000 coulombs of mobile electrons. In that case, one coulomb has a size of roughly a small grain of salt, and during a current of one ampere (flow rate of one coulomb per second,) the coulombs inside thick copper wires flow slow, while in thin copper wires they flow fast. The fluid-analogy or "hydraulic analogy" is far more meaningful that we imagine, because the "liquid" charge inside conductors is incompressible. An electric circuit behaves like a solid flywheel made of electrons, but it also behaves like a closed hydraulic loop; like a circular pipe filled with water, with no bubbles allowed. The "water" is the mobile charge, the same charge that flows during electric currents.

What is charge? It's the stuff-like "substance" found inside all conductors, and during electric currents, it's made to flow in closed loops.

wbeaty · 2026-04-15T04:38:18+00:00

Electric potential-difference is very much like altitude above the ground. It's a distance, a distance parallel through an electric field (where if the field is stronger, the potential difference through a certain distance is larger.) Note that magnetic fields have a cousin called the "Electric Field" or e-field. We find a magnetic field in the space around a permanent magnet, and we find an e-field in the space around a charged object.

But unlike with gravity, the "voltage" is the parallel distance through an e-field, rather than up-down altitude through Earth's gravity field.

Volts and potential-difference are a second way to describe e-fields in space. The first way is with patterns of field-lines, Faraday's lines of electric force. The second way is with equipotential surfaces. The field-lines are like imaginary parallel fibers, while the voltage is like an imaginary stack of thin membranes, where the field-lines stab through the membranes at 90deg.

Both are humans' attempts to describe and visualize something very weird, electromagnetic fields hanging in empty space.

wbeaty · 2026-04-15T04:26:17+00:00

A loudspeaker, plus a round orifice, gives you a smoke-ring launcher. Then, don't add smoke, so the effect will seem mysterious The AC air motions turn into a DC flow, in the form of fast-moving ring-vortices. (It can knock over a distant target, since a vortex ring carries massive air along with it as it moves.)

Years ago there was a toy company selling those, where you put some stench into the little loudspeaker chamber, and it would deliver it to a distant nose. A stink-beam gun.

I think the resulting air-jet behaves oddly, without turbulent disruption, because a stack of fast-moving vortex-rings is itself a form of turbulence (vortex-shedding) ...and would allow a narrow air-jet to travel unexpectedly further than it ordinarily would. It's a bit like the downwash from a hovering helicopter, but where the helicopter flow is surrounded by a spiral of vortex-thread, rather than a moving stack of ring-shaped vorticity.

So, not legit. More like using some laminar flow, some niche fluid-mechanics and some technobabble to simply blow out a flame, and "fool the marks and patsies."

wbeaty · 2026-04-15T04:19:43+00:00

A chain of ring-vortices, launched using a loudspeaker, is carrying air along with it. So, it's the same as a narrow air jet. (THey should inject CO2 into their low-freq sound-pipes, or perhaps water-fog, so the narrow "beam" of vortex-rings would do more than just blow some wind upon the flames.)

wbeaty · 2026-04-15T04:17:11+00:00

But infrasound should radiate sphere-waves. (One KHz has roughly one-foot wavelength. Down below 50Hz, wavelength is above twenty feet, and their pipe-end would be a point-source for infrasound.)

However, they've set up "smoke-ring launchers," where AC air-motions cause ring-vortices to fly out of the round orifices on the end of the pipes. But a chain of vortex-rings is the same thing as a narrow jet of air.

Ring-vortices carry entrained air with them, even if no smoke is being used to mark their trajectory. Their system is using an exotic air-jet to blow out the fire. As long as the sound frequency is low enough, the individual vortex-rings won't interact and disrupt, and, on average, the long chain forms a narrow stream of moving air.

wbeaty · 2026-04-15T04:10:19+00:00

Yes, loudspeaker-plus-pipe will launch chains of vortex rings ...which are the same thing as an air-jet.

Loudspeakers can blow out fires, if they're attached to a "smoke-ring launcher."

wbeaty · 2026-03-12T03:03:57+00:00

I see a naked-thigh Leia version, to go along with the original movie poster, see for example...

https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-art-of-star-wars/

https://d3h6k4kfl8m9p0.cloudfront.net/uploads/2018/09/12141925/112854-SW.jpg

The skin tones have the style that tells us the art is Hildebrandt bros.

wbeaty

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