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Earthen Messages: Nikola Tesla in his Laboratory (ca. 1899)

33 points by benbreen 5y ago

bmitc 5y ago
This is a rather frenetic article, bouncing all over the place. I’m not sure what the goal of the article is. Tesla’s life is one of tragedy, I think, in his later years. It has been a while, as at one point I read through every Tesla biographical material I could find, but Tesla suffered several mental episodes throughout his life. Due to loss of research in several fires, lack of funding, lost patent income from being a poor business man, and increasingly wild predictions, he slowly descended into obscurity and wild thinking. If you see pictures of Tesla in his later years, he was increasingly emaciated from poverty. Tesla was rather brilliant in his early years, but it is my opinion this brilliance got the better of him in his later years. As is somewhat common of minds that are somewhat contrarian but ultimately right, as people like Tesla age, they become less able to realize their big projects but still have that spark to go against the grain, leading to seemingly unhinged predictions and claims. A lot of Tesla’s mythology came from letters in his later years, mainly from the ones he released every year on his birthday. He was once part of a socialite crowd in NYC, so it was probably tough to have been forgotten about except through these public releases every year. Briefly alluded to in the article, his relationship with the Underwoods is an important one in his life, and is a good picture of his more intimate thoughts and struggles. I think when learning about Tesla, it’s important to keep these things in mind. He was as human as anyone, and thus fallible. I think it’s best to view him as a hero through the 19th century and more of a tragedy after the transition to the 20th century. On another note, I wasn’t aware that he was intercepting Marconi’s messages, in Colorado no less. It was my recollection that he may have stumbled upon a precursor to radio astronomy, indeed intercepting radio signals from space, but obviously misinterpreting them. I’ll have to follow up on that and read back through material. (Some of Tesla’s bios can be a bit editorialized, so one has to read all of them to get a holistic view.)

33 points by benbreen 5y ago

This is a rather frenetic article, bouncing all over the place. I’m not sure what the goal of the article is. Tesla’s life is one of tragedy, I think, in his later years. It has been a while, as at one point I read through every Tesla biographical material I could find, but Tesla suffered several mental episodes throughout his life. Due to loss of research in several fires, lack of funding, lost patent income from being a poor business man, and increasingly wild predictions, he slowly descended into obscurity and wild thinking. If you see pictures of Tesla in his later years, he was increasingly emaciated from poverty. Tesla was rather brilliant in his early years, but it is my opinion this brilliance got the better of him in his later years. As is somewhat common of minds that are somewhat contrarian but ultimately right, as people like Tesla age, they become less able to realize their big projects but still have that spark to go against the grain, leading to seemingly unhinged predictions and claims. A lot of Tesla’s mythology came from letters in his later years, mainly from the ones he released every year on his birthday. He was once part of a socialite crowd in NYC, so it was probably tough to have been forgotten about except through these public releases every year. Briefly alluded to in the article, his relationship with the Underwoods is an important one in his life, and is a good picture of his more intimate thoughts and struggles. I think when learning about Tesla, it’s important to keep these things in mind. He was as human as anyone, and thus fallible. I think it’s best to view him as a hero through the 19th century and more of a tragedy after the transition to the 20th century. On another note, I wasn’t aware that he was intercepting Marconi’s messages, in Colorado no less. It was my recollection that he may have stumbled upon a precursor to radio astronomy, indeed intercepting radio signals from space, but obviously misinterpreting them. I’ll have to follow up on that and read back through material. (Some of Tesla’s bios can be a bit editorialized, so one has to read all of them to get a holistic view.)