Edison vs Tesla | The famous scientist of Serbian origin patented about 700 inventions and took part in experiments that continue to amaze after almost a century. It seems Tesla was “the brain” in the controversial Philadelphia Experiment, which would have taken place in the early 1940s.
If it were a simple popularity contest, Thomas Edison would win a second. Ever since the first school classes, we find out that Edison was the greatest American inventor and many inventions are assigned to him, some rightfully others are not. The Incandescent bulb, phonograph or film, to recall just a few of these inventions.
On the other hand, Nikola Tesla’s name is less well known, even if it belongs to some inventions and ideas without which our life would have shown altogether if we think about X-rays, remote control, the radio or electric motor among many, many others.
Although it can be said that Tesla revolutionized science at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the last century, there are also many voices who claim that in reality, he was just a mad scientist.
Nikola Tesla has made numerous enemies, including among his colleagues. Among the most ardent challengers, there were even three equally well-known scholars, Thomas Edison, John von Neumann and Guglielmo Marconi.
My supreme ambition and my burning desire were to see America, to get in touch with the great Thomas Edison. So we started on this journey. After I lost my money and tickets, after a series of unpleasant adventures, including a revolt, in which I was about to lose my life, I arrived at these wonderful realms with only four cents in my pocket. Nikola Tesla
Tesla arrived in New York on June 6, 1884. A 28-year-old immigrant determined to fulfil his dream of this new and foreign realm. In his pocket, he had a recommendation letter from Charles Batchelor, one of Edison’s associates in Europe who wrote “My dear Edison, I know two big men and you are one of them. The other is this young man. ”
New York had electricity from the late 1870s. In 1882, Edison had installed his first power plant in Pearl Street. He did this with the help of J.Pierpont Morgan, the great Wall Street banker. But his system was far from perfect. Electricity was something new. Most people did not understand and feared it. The fires often erupted. The horses were the electric shock in the horseshoes and fled. There were very exciting times for Edison.
Edison – Tesla, Who was smarter?
Tesla had a phenomenal eclectic memory, able to easily and precisely recall images and objects. Because of this, he could visualize intricate 3D objects in his mind and build prototypes of machines and mechanisms using very few preliminary sketches.
He created his inventions directly from imagination, says W. Bernard Carlson of Tesla for Live Science.
By contrast, Edison relied less on intuition and more on studies and laborious sketches for his inventions. If you want, the difference between the two is similar to that of a football team that is a champion first of all due to the innate talent, such as Brazil, and one that gets to the top rather because of the hard work and training, such as Germany. After all, Edison proved to be more efficient – 1,093 patents (according to Thomas Edison National Historic Park), compared to less than 300 patents for Tesla (according to a study published in 2006 at the 6th Edition of the International Symposium Nikola Tesla).
Edison’s extraordinary capacity to capitalize is also here, with the American engaging with various collaborators (like Tesla) who have been innovating for him, and has also bought some of his patents. Even though the incandescent bulb, phonograph or film is believed to be Edison’s most important inventions, there were other inventors working at similar technologies at the time, according to Leonard DeGraaf, an archivist at Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey, and author of Edison and the Rise of Innovation.
If Edison had not invented these things, they certainly invented someone else, he told Live Science.
By showing “myopia” at the time, Edison abolished the “impractical idea” of Tesla’s alternate electric current (AC), but instead promoted his simple, yet less efficient, a vision of continuous DC). By contrast, Tesla’s ideas have always been more “exotic”, without taking into account the directions and demands of the market of those times. Eventually, however, its Niagara Falls (the first of its kind) alternating current and power plant opened the way to electrifying the world.
Continuous current vs. Alternative current
Thomas Edison is known to be the inventor of the light bulb, but he is the only one who has been able to spread the idea that 22 people have worked before. Tesla worked for Edison at the beginning of her career, but following Edison’s failure to comply with the deal, the collaboration ended. Moreover, the discovery of the alternative electricity system by Tesla has become the beginning of a battle between the two, known as the “current war”. Edison’s lighting method was threatened by the superior quality of the new discovery. The continuous current produced a yellowish, fluctuating light, and could only be transmitted over a distance of about two miles. The alternating current, instead, gave a white, constant light, and could be transmitted at far greater distances in a safer way.
Tesla and his inventions have made history
First in Chicago. On May 1, 1893, US President Grover Cleveland pressed a button and nearly 100,000 incandescent lamps illuminated the White City. It was for the first time that a Universal Exhibition was electrically illuminated in bright and bright colours, and the huge generators created by Tesla proved to the world that its AC power system could be used on a large scale and safe. The dispute between Tesla and Edison was decisively cut when Westinghouse Company received an important contract to build polyphase AC induction motors for Niagara Falls.
On November 16, 1896, the plant was starting to supply power to the city of Buffalo, 26 miles away. This great achievement was seen as the unofficial end of the Current War, and the alternative stream became the standard in the power industry. In 1899, Tesla showed that electricity could also be transmitted wirelessly when it was able to light 200 bulbs at a distance of 40 km!
Wireless electricity – a concept that is no longer utopian
If the discovery of the alternating current is an invention that has greatly influenced today’s life, another electric invention, which Tesla was convinced it to work, remained for a long time in the project phase: wireless electricity. Measuring the waves of a storm and the electric discharge cycle, Tesla assumed that Earth and the atmosphere possessed electricity and transformed the planet into an unlimited conductor that allows transmission of wireless telegraph messages and even transmission of electricity at any distance without resonance loss. In his laboratory in Colorado Springs, he experimented with an enormous coil, with which he could create electric arches up to 7 meters and fireballs – a rare atmospheric phenomenon that the researchers could not reproduce in the lab.
In 2007, however, a team of scientists at MIT managed to light a light bulb from a power source located 2 meters away, confessing Tesla’s wireless transmission principle. Tesla succeeded in 1899 in Colorado Springs to light 200 bulbs from a distance of over 40 km! In September 2012, Nokia announces the launch of air-charged phones. Later, in the Wardencliffe lab, the state of New York, tried to build a tower that generates wireless energy for the entire planet, but for lack of funds, the project was interrupted. The tower was demolished, the land sold, but the lab remained standing.
At the limit of normal and paranormal At the end of the nineteenth century, Tesla became an adept of Hindu philosophy and began to be influenced by the great mystics of the times. Later, the Serb declared that he had come into contact with an alien civilization in whose name he called for peace. He also argued that he had found a way for mankind to benefit from free energy, without the need for the fuels that are still being used. Conspiracy theorists strongly believe that its documents that could revolutionize the world have been confiscated by American secret services and that they have been in the possession of malevolent elites.
It was also written that Tesla had a premonition about her mother’s death.
The scholar would have dreamed of the sad event and would then have told them the details of the close people. It is also said that the scientist would have been the “brain” in the controversial Philadelphia experiment, which would have taken place in the early 1940s. Even today, almost 75 years after his death, Nikola Tesla remains one of the most remarkable scientists that mankind has had. Though opinions continue to be divided, and many consider him to be an extravagant scholar, his merits cannot be questioned even by the fiercest challenges.
For more insights about the topic watch the following video:
References: