This story mainly stands on its own but there are a couple points I want to emphasize. First, it's a nice example of that distinctive Tesla combination: important innovator; savvy showmen; extravagantly over-promising flake. That's not just something that shows in retrospect; you can see it coming through contemporary accounts. Sober observers were well aware of all of these facets. The man was capable of amazing advances; he also reported getting messages from Mars.
I also like the way the story knocks down a false but persistent trope. There's a tendency to treat earlier generations as innocent and unimaginative, often oblivious to the extraordinary events that were starting to unfold. Call it the "little did they imagine" genre. The trouble is it's almost entirely wrong. Particularly in America, people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw themselves as living in a wondrous time and they tended to greet new developments with great excitement, if anything, often overestimating the degree to which their world was about to change.
Reading through these old articles, one thing that strikes me is that wildly ambitious ideas were not accepted unskeptically, but they weren't treated dismissively either. People seemed to get that an idea could fail miserably and still be of great value.
The article seems to be describing what we'd now call neon lamps. That was an idea that worked out. Tesla probably wanted to run them at some extremely high frequency, but the one's that came into use run at 50 or 60 Hz and use the phosphor's persistence to even out the light. (Of course, you can break the light into orange and blue if you move your hand or a ruler quickly. Try it, it's neat.)
ReplyDeleteThe US especially has always had its industrial magicians. Henry Ford, for example, was noted for his limited range of products and his innovation. He was also noted for having to pull Ford from the jaws of bankruptcy by sheer innovation and showmanship. Is he sounding like Steve Jobs yet? There was Howard Hughes with his starlets and airplanes, Thomas Edison with his lurid demonstrations and cultivated eccentricities and Thomas Watson with his clever slogans, largely cribbed from I forget who at NCR. Now we have Bezos and Musk and a host of others. We still live in fun times.