Was Tesla a Quack?

Were Tesla's ideas practical?

Reply to
Yzordderrex
Loading thread data ...

Three-phase motors work. Sending utility power through the air doesn't.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
John Larkin

Tesla earned $1M from Westinghouse, IIRC. That was for his poly-phase geniosity. He has a long list of patents granted for this work, they're quite detailed. For example, check out 401,520. A number of his other patents build further on that one.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

Tesla was many things he had some brilliant practical inventions like the three phase motor and some quack-y ones, too.

The latter are partially attributable to the fact that electrical engineering science was not as well-understood in his day and also his narcissism and need for attention and to always be thought of to be working on something really BIG; he was as much a brilliant self-promoter and attention-seeker as he was a brilliant engineer.

Reply to
bitrex

Some of them, mostly from the first part of his career iirc. Wireless power transmission, not so much.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Not all of them were practical. Methinks that if you research the great inventors, you'll find that many have far more impractical ideas than those that worked. "5 flops from the world's most famous inventors" For example, Al Einstein and Leo Szilard patented a refrigerator: that was seriously impractical.

The problem with great inventor is that they tend to push the envelope of practicality quite often. In patents, it's "First to File" who wins, so haste is more important than making sure that something works before patenting. The result is a fair number of half-baked patented ideas. So, if you look at Tesla's inventions, don't be too surprised if you find a few that are problematic.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Tesla had great ideas and some not so great ideas.

He sure has a LOT of followers that are quacks... Just search Youtube for free energy and tesla

Reply to
boB

In the words of the immortal Yogi Berra, ?I really didn?t s ay everything I said?. Tesla didn't say anything about "free energ y" really. He did think he could share energy cheaply using other people's money.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

He was a good self-promoter and showman, too. His wilder ideas are enjoyed a lot by the "I'm gonna be BIG someday"-type who seem more interested in fame and fortune intrinsically via whatever method they feel suits them personality-wise. Non-bigified ideas don't provide the requisite sense of self-importance.

Conversely it also takes a certain "type of guy" to devote one's career to say, improving the theoretical efficiency of integrated CMOS charge pumps by three percentage points.

Reply to
bitrex

I searched Google Patents for free energy and got a bit of a surprise. There are a huge number of patents built on "free energy". For example: "Refrigerating system using "free energy" for circulating liquid re-frigerant by pressure" This patent is owned by Carrier Corp, which is certainly not a quack operation. In claims 38 through about 43: [0038] Hereby it can be achieved that all kinds of free energy can be used to pump the refrigerant around the refrigerating system. [0042] Hereby is achieved that there is not any or at least very small energy costs connected with the circulation of refrigerant. There are literally thousands of other free energy patents. It would seem that a fairly substantial number of companies and individual inventors seem to believe in free energy.

However, patents represent ideas, not tested principles and devices. It's easy enough to patent an idea that MIGHT work, should anyone contrive of a way to actually produce free energy. If you have some idea for a free energy powered gizmo, just patent it now, and sue the inventor that actually delivers a working device in the future. Are such ideas practical? Today, nope. In the future, maybe. For the entry cost of filing for a patent, it's a cheap investment in someone else's future.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

What about propane or natural gas fridges that have no moving parts - aren't they based on these guys' design?

My dad and his friends had a propane fridge in an old farmhouse in eastern Ontario back in the 60s - we would connect and open the propane tank for the propane stove, lights, and fridge whenever we went to this recreational farm that had no electricity - nearest pole was around 3 miles away...

So, there was a practical use of a fridge with no moving parts.

Which reminds me of a story told to me by someone in the propane business as I recall - that a customer was complaining about their propane fridge not working and asked what might fix that. The service man said there may be a vapour lock in the system and the cure was to simply turn the fridge upside down and then back. Customer left happy enough - and stomped back a day later to complain "Why didn't you tell me to empty the fridge first!"

John ;-#)#

--
(Please post followups or tech inquiries to the USENET newsgroup) 
                      John's Jukes Ltd. 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
John Robertson

"Free" in that context probably means "I'm not paying for it".

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

I think the use of "free energy" needs to be more precisely defined in order to make a meaningful analysis.

On a quick glance through the Carrier patent, it looks to me as if their interpretation of "free energy" is along the lines of

"Energy which can be harvested from one part of the system, from another part of the system, and used in a productive way, where in earlier implementations that energy was wasted. This allows the same goals to be achieved, with input of less energy, increasing the energy efficiency of the system."

The Carrier refrigerator patent talks about circulating refrigerant in a second cooling loop, without the use of a pump. The pressure to do this is apparently developed as a side effect of the heating and cooling of the refrigerant in the first cooling loop (which is circulated by a pump). The heat removed from the refrigerant in the first loop would normally be exhausted to the air (in effect, wasted) but in the Carrier invention it's harvested to do useful work on its way out to the outside world.

By analogy: the energy used to heat the interior of a car with an internal-combustion engine is "free energy" by that definition. It's simply part of the motor's output, which would otherwise be discarded (via the radiator) into the environment. The original energy is supplied by the fuel; some portion of it is just being used more efficiently.

None of those sorts of inventions are "cheating". None is creating energy out of nothing. They're all making more-efficient use of the energy that's already being input, and the gain in efficiency provides "free" energy.

This is very different from the "free energy" beloved of many Tesla followers, which claim to harvest energy at the output with no energy at the input (or, insome claims, X amount of energy is put in to start/maintain the system, Y amount is harvested for use, and X

Reply to
Dave Platt

IIRC, you can't patent an idea in isolation. It has to be a specific 'thing'; something unambiguous and well defined - like a mechanism for instance.

--
This message may be freely reproduced without limit or charge only via  
the Usenet protocol. Reproduction in whole or part through other  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Cursitor Doom

True. You have to include some science fiction describing the manner of implimentation making it an invention:

Can You Patent an Idea?

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

AFAIK, a summary of his electrical knowledge is: brilliant, but missed out on the consequence of a real, lossy system.

For example, feeding energy to a resonant tank will not "build energy forever", it is limited by the loss resistance of that tank. This levels off at a time constant determined by the ratio of resistance to tank impedance (i.e., the Q) and the tank's resonant frequency.

The story about hooking up a shaking machine and causing a building to collapse (or nearly) is certainly either contrived, or apocryphal. A building is a very lossy system: it may have resonances, but they won't be very high Q, and so the peak amplitude resulting from any kind of input will be small, relative to the input. That leaves sheer brute force -- for which there are more practical methods to apply it, e.g., a wrecking ball. (Ironically, modern skyscrapers are probably pretty high Q, damped as much by wind resistance as by their own material losses. Passive and active dampers are critical in these!)

Likewise, his belief in wireless power transmission, denying Hertzian theory: if radiation loss is not, in fact, lossy at all (e.g., the energy remains trapped in the air, not absorbed by various sinks), but is the manifestation merely of loose coupling, then it would work out. But, as it happens, the real world is lossy, and Tesla coil secondaries are far from lossless, too.

Modern analysis proves this easily, but analytical tools and knowledge were much more piecemeal back then, so I guess it could happen. For example, Maxwell certainly would've understood, a whole half a century earlier -- but Tesla was no Maxwell.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Tim Williams

t

e

ill

ich

h

it

re

but

Tesla was a genius, some of the things he came up with were very impressive . But he was also something of a nut. His belief that someone would fund th e wireless transmission of electrical power that there was no way to meter or charge for was bordering on insanity, or worse. His insane ego seems to have gotten in the way at times. With some of his ideas it's hard to tell w hether they were genius or crazy.

Every inventor chases down dead-ends, one can't really criticise him for th at. He had no way to know they were dead ends at the time.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Or he actually tried it, and then misinterpreted the results. His vibrator was able to shatter a huge cast-iron link from a steamship anchor chain (apparently performed the demo in front of a large outdoor crowd.) Pieces flew tens of yards.

What happens if we attach that same 100s-hz vibrator to a large steel structure, then tune for maximum effect? Probably we'd get the "1960s football game" phenomenon, where vibrating surfaces remove much static friction, so that objects begin drifting around and falling off the girders. It would sound like the building was in danger, but only the workers need worry. Nikola Tesla: apparently NOT killed by falling boards and boxes of rivets.

Reply to
Bill Beaty

You mean, him denying that his own invention was "Hertzian-based."

Tesla harped on the fact that Hertzian radio worked by inverse-square, just throwing away all its energy into space, and could not be used for broadcast power. (Therefore it was clearly worthless: nothing but feeble morse code signals!)

Tesla's system was not radio; it was a conductive path through the air, with ground-return to complete the circuit, and only could function when the drive was tens of megavolts. His tower was an electrode, not an RF resonator.

Which? The only engineering analysis I've seen of Tesla's system concluded that it works like gangbusters, even assuming the lower bound of Earth's cavity-Q under 10. They estimated the losses as megawatts, which is far less than a power-grid the size of many continents. But the paper didn't treat the problem of the emitter geometry: a many-KMs vertical tower is required for kilowatts of VLF. That, or possibly an electrically-short "cavity probe" which doesn't encounter the usual freespace impedance, since it's driving a cavity resonance. Down where Tesla operated (below 20KHz,) everything becomes nearfield, and even the largest antenna ever built is just a capacitor plate.

Reply to
Bill Beaty

I just want to say that there's a Tesla statue at Niagara Falls, back when I was an EE (at UB) we went there to have pictures taken on his birthday. Lay in some tribute/offerings in hopes that we pass the circuit design class*... :^) (I've never really understood induction motors)

George H.

*where you had to make some transistor amplifier work.
Reply to
George Herold

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.