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This is bothersome as I have no beef with Tesla but his history of eugenics promotion gets swept under the carpet. His business failures, of course, have nothin

This is bothersome as I have no beef with Tesla but his history of eugenics promotion gets swept under the carpet. His business failures, of course, have nothing to do with poorly thought out concepts and questionable return on investment, but by dirty tricks by Edison. Its also worth pointing out most, if not all of Tesla's patents, are based on previous works and are not original works. Apparantly, Tesla fandom is impossible without absolutely hating Edison, which is bizarre. That's like being unable to appreciate Mercedes without hating Porsche. There's this terrible whitewashing of history with Tesla. His advocates clean up his image and purposely turn the narrative away from him toward Edison when presented with any criticisms. I'd like this museum to show us the historical Tesla, not the fanboy generated meme that appears in web comics. I took my wife to a Tesla presentation at a science musueum in Milwaukee a couple years ago and it was the most shrill and factually questionable presentation I've ever seen. It was more or less an hour of Edison bashing with hints toward things like time travel, death rays, and free energy. I want Tesla to get his due, but not the whitewashed grandfatherly Tesla of meme legend, but the real very flawed guy. A bright engineer who failed in business for valid reasons. I guess everyone likes an underdog story, but this one is beyond reasonable. Eugenics quote: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1010618-the-year-2100-will-see-eugenics-universally-established-in-past http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1010618-the-year-2100-will-s...

kevando 13y ago
Beginning to resemble American politics. A backlash from our reaction to the original backlash.
cbeach 13y ago
I admired Tesla's research. Now I've heard his words on eugenics, my admiration only grows. Eugenics is not about killing people. It's about ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed. Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work in sterilizing drug addicts (voluntary sterilization in exchange for cash) to prevent children being born into misery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics and consider why a number of national heroes (including Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg) were proponents.
- jerf 13y ago
  The "real" problem of Eugenics is that, much like Communism inevitably mutates in an ugly direction, no matter what Eugenics starts as, it virtually always turns into something really, really ugly where some group of people, no matter what pretty words they may use to draw a veil of obfuscation over their actions, are just killing off some group they don't like.
- stevesearer 13y ago
  Eugenics generally gets lumped into the activities of the Nazis leading up to and during WW2. Because of this, most people probably don't know that the United States and its citizenry were fairly fond of it and put it into practice regularly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
- spxdcz 13y ago
  Tesla: "prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization" Who decides who is "unfit"? In the not too distant past, and possibly even today, that might include the non-white, non-straight, non-wealthy, etc. I find it incredibly scary that you could so easily agree that others should decide who gets to enact their human instincts. Let's face it, it would almost certainly be old, white, wealthy men that would make those decisions.
- npinguy 13y ago
  That program is extremely controversial, as your link says. Drug addiction is all about the inability to commit to long term plans in favour of the quick short term happiness. Drug addicts are not capable of making rational decisions when faced with cash on the spot. There is a reason why we don't have a problem with boxing or MMA, but "bum fights" is unethical and looked down upon. Offering drug addicts money for sterilization is unbelievably unethical. It is reinforcing the idea in their minds that their addiction is irreparable, probably guaranteeing after the fact that they will never seek help and recover. And if they do turn their lives around and are faced with different priorities than they did during addiction? Too bad so sad? By the way, I'm not at all expecting to change your mind on this. Given your use of phrases like "left-wing metropolitan elites", I don't see how you could possibly be interested in a debate that involves you questioning your preconceived perspectives.
npinguy 13y ago
While eugenics is indefensible, it was an extremely popular theory at the time with support from a large portion of the scientific community. I'm not saying we should whitewash history and avoid talking about this detail of his life at all costs, but it is not a huge black dot on his record either that is relevant to the narrative of his life. Plenty of worthwhile individuals in history were slave owners. Homophobia only became socially unacceptable in the last decade. You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures.
- drzaiusapelord 13y ago
  > You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures. That's fine, but lets understand that this applies to Edison as well. Tesla fanatics judge him by modern business practices and regulations, but Tesla gets the hand-wringing reply of "but but at the time..." which seems unfair. Lets also get something straight, its one thing to have a positive view of eugenics and another to be a fervent supporter. Tesla published that screed in, what we would call a sci-fi or futurist magazine, and signed his name to it in 1935, during the height of Jewish persecution in Germany. As an educated Serbian I'm sure he was fully aware of this.
  - npinguy 13y ago
    Eugenics received widespread support pretty much until the truth came out about the treatment of the Jews in Germany, which is when the supporters suddenly woke up and understood what the realization of those ideas inevitably leads to. But that truth was not fully revealed until 1945 with the liberation of various concentration camps. Until then, most details and rumors about the camps was dismissed as idle propaganda because noone believed the reality could possibly be so shocking. In 1935, little was known about what was going on in with the Jews in Germany, and most of the really extreme ideas were not implemented yet. What discrimination occurred was not unique in Germany, as most nations of Europe practiced some minor forms of tacitly-approved anti-semitism
    - drzaiusapelord 13y ago
pessimizer 13y ago
It's easy to absolutely hate Edison without being obsessed with Tesla. As for his beliefs on eugenics expressed in that quote, they were very popular at the time and not even particularly illiberal by contemporary standards - being more associated with a sort of scientific socialism like the Fabians - unlike the beliefs of Ford, or Shockley, for example, which were far to the right of their peers.
sek 13y ago
Do you know the movie Idiocracy? That is basically propaganda for that idea. You have to see that in context, this was before the second world war and he wasn't aware that in the future you can manipulate/analyze genes. Today he would probably just be an advocate for that kind of technology. Definitely not an easy topic, but also not black and white. Maybe there is more from him, but your source indicates an opinion like that.
trclark81 13y ago
"Its also worth pointing out most, if not all of Tesla's patents, are based on previous works and are not original works." As is every other patent ever. No scientific breakthrough or cutting edge device is ever created out of thin air. Nearly all of them are through combining and expounding upon existing theory and research. Relativity, for all its brilliance, was an extension of existing thought in theoretical physics at the time that had been coming to a head over the course of centuries prior to that. It is no coincidence that so many great discoveries and inventions in recent history have ended in a race to the patent office or a highly publicized science drama between great minds. Often these great thinkers are working on the same things at the same time because those are the subjects the scientific world is chattering about. Even so, Tesla created a number of things, such as radio control, that were well ahead of his contemporaries and immensely improved upon existing ideas such as Edison's DC systems. He is definitely worth some fair criticism, but not on this basis. As to his business success, I can hardly see how that's even relevant. Few great scientists have also been great entrepreneurs. I'll agree he didn't fail solely on the basis of Edison's supposed feud with him, but neither does his lack of success at business diminish him as a successful engineer and scientist.

kevando 13y ago

Beginning to resemble American politics. A backlash from our reaction to the original backlash.

cbeach 13y ago

I admired Tesla's research. Now I've heard his words on eugenics, my admiration only grows. Eugenics is not about killing people. It's about ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed. Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work in sterilizing drug addicts (voluntary sterilization in exchange for cash) to prevent children being born into misery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics and consider why a number of national heroes (including Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg) were proponents.

jerf 13y ago
The "real" problem of Eugenics is that, much like Communism inevitably mutates in an ugly direction, no matter what Eugenics starts as, it virtually always turns into something really, really ugly where some group of people, no matter what pretty words they may use to draw a veil of obfuscation over their actions, are just killing off some group they don't like.
stevesearer 13y ago
Eugenics generally gets lumped into the activities of the Nazis leading up to and during WW2. Because of this, most people probably don't know that the United States and its citizenry were fairly fond of it and put it into practice regularly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
spxdcz 13y ago
Tesla: "prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization" Who decides who is "unfit"? In the not too distant past, and possibly even today, that might include the non-white, non-straight, non-wealthy, etc. I find it incredibly scary that you could so easily agree that others should decide who gets to enact their human instincts. Let's face it, it would almost certainly be old, white, wealthy men that would make those decisions.
npinguy 13y ago
That program is extremely controversial, as your link says. Drug addiction is all about the inability to commit to long term plans in favour of the quick short term happiness. Drug addicts are not capable of making rational decisions when faced with cash on the spot. There is a reason why we don't have a problem with boxing or MMA, but "bum fights" is unethical and looked down upon. Offering drug addicts money for sterilization is unbelievably unethical. It is reinforcing the idea in their minds that their addiction is irreparable, probably guaranteeing after the fact that they will never seek help and recover. And if they do turn their lives around and are faced with different priorities than they did during addiction? Too bad so sad? By the way, I'm not at all expecting to change your mind on this. Given your use of phrases like "left-wing metropolitan elites", I don't see how you could possibly be interested in a debate that involves you questioning your preconceived perspectives.

npinguy 13y ago

While eugenics is indefensible, it was an extremely popular theory at the time with support from a large portion of the scientific community. I'm not saying we should whitewash history and avoid talking about this detail of his life at all costs, but it is not a huge black dot on his record either that is relevant to the narrative of his life. Plenty of worthwhile individuals in history were slave owners. Homophobia only became socially unacceptable in the last decade. You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago
> You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures. That's fine, but lets understand that this applies to Edison as well. Tesla fanatics judge him by modern business practices and regulations, but Tesla gets the hand-wringing reply of "but but at the time..." which seems unfair. Lets also get something straight, its one thing to have a positive view of eugenics and another to be a fervent supporter. Tesla published that screed in, what we would call a sci-fi or futurist magazine, and signed his name to it in 1935, during the height of Jewish persecution in Germany. As an educated Serbian I'm sure he was fully aware of this.
- npinguy 13y ago
  Eugenics received widespread support pretty much until the truth came out about the treatment of the Jews in Germany, which is when the supporters suddenly woke up and understood what the realization of those ideas inevitably leads to. But that truth was not fully revealed until 1945 with the liberation of various concentration camps. Until then, most details and rumors about the camps was dismissed as idle propaganda because noone believed the reality could possibly be so shocking. In 1935, little was known about what was going on in with the Jews in Germany, and most of the really extreme ideas were not implemented yet. What discrimination occurred was not unique in Germany, as most nations of Europe practiced some minor forms of tacitly-approved anti-semitism
  - drzaiusapelord 13y ago

pessimizer 13y ago

It's easy to absolutely hate Edison without being obsessed with Tesla. As for his beliefs on eugenics expressed in that quote, they were very popular at the time and not even particularly illiberal by contemporary standards - being more associated with a sort of scientific socialism like the Fabians - unlike the beliefs of Ford, or Shockley, for example, which were far to the right of their peers.

sek 13y ago

Do you know the movie Idiocracy? That is basically propaganda for that idea. You have to see that in context, this was before the second world war and he wasn't aware that in the future you can manipulate/analyze genes. Today he would probably just be an advocate for that kind of technology. Definitely not an easy topic, but also not black and white. Maybe there is more from him, but your source indicates an opinion like that.

trclark81 13y ago

"Its also worth pointing out most, if not all of Tesla's patents, are based on previous works and are not original works." As is every other patent ever. No scientific breakthrough or cutting edge device is ever created out of thin air. Nearly all of them are through combining and expounding upon existing theory and research. Relativity, for all its brilliance, was an extension of existing thought in theoretical physics at the time that had been coming to a head over the course of centuries prior to that. It is no coincidence that so many great discoveries and inventions in recent history have ended in a race to the patent office or a highly publicized science drama between great minds. Often these great thinkers are working on the same things at the same time because those are the subjects the scientific world is chattering about. Even so, Tesla created a number of things, such as radio control, that were well ahead of his contemporaries and immensely improved upon existing ideas such as Edison's DC systems. He is definitely worth some fair criticism, but not on this basis. As to his business success, I can hardly see how that's even relevant. Few great scientists have also been great entrepreneurs. I'll agree he didn't fail solely on the basis of Edison's supposed feud with him, but neither does his lack of success at business diminish him as a successful engineer and scientist.