Nikola Tesla - his remote-control science technologies

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Serbian-American Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was best known for his alternating-current electricity supply systems favoured by business and much less for his remote-control physics that he rightly saw as more important and which only much later became key to modern life. (Radio remote-control was invented before radio or TV, as it did not need an added converting of radio signals to sound or light.) Most people then could not see much further than the light bulb, but maybe some like Einstein claiming to be physicists should have seen the significance of Tesla's remote-physics experiments but it seems not. He did mostly work on electromagnetic technologies and published little on theory, though much of his work basically assumed the theory of William Gilbert for magnetism, electricity and gravity of action-at-distance signal-response remote-communication and remote-control physical forces, which was also assumed though not openly acknowledged in Newton's physics. Tesla was an exceptional inventor and experimental physicist. But though Tesla's time was also somewhat-younger-Einstein time and both worked in the USA at the same time, Einstein never backed Tesla and maybe joined attacks on Tesla. indeed many may have quite wrongly taken Einstein's physics as somehow disproving Tesla's confirmed remote-electric physics though Einstein certainly never himself attempted any actual disproof of action-at-distance physics. Yet theoretical physicists have the louder voices, and often tend to dismiss experimental physicists as 'just dumb engineers' as Tesla was/is often wrongly dismissed.

The largely wrongly dismissed science of Nikola Tesla

Tesla was the son of an Eastern Orthodox priest and emigrated to the USA in 1884, where he worked for a short time in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. Then he got private finance to set up his own laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and other devices. His alternating current induction motor and related patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money for a short time and established him then as the world's leading electricity scientist of the time. While there were some working on simple-science direct-current electricity, Tesla developed his better trickier-science alternating-current electricity which was quickly widely adopted. Tesla conducted a significant range of experiments with different oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also especially worked as some others did on radio remote communication (later to also include TV) and notably experimented on remote-power charging and he notably built and publicly demonstrated a first wireless remote-control boat in 1898, but his remote-control and remote-power were unfortunately rejected until many years after his death. While remote-control should have been of significant use by the First World War and Second World War, it was not widely adopted until the 1960's. His action-at-distance physics in line with William Gilbert and Isaac Newton was wrongly dismissed by Einstein and other physicicsts of the time which undoubtedly held back some real science progress for many years. There were some others also doing some work on remote-control at around the same time as Tesla, but despite its significance in physics and in technology somehow no Nobel was ever awarded for remote-control. But it was just the continuation of the wrong rejection of the action-at-distance science of William Gilbert and Isaac Newton which no doubt had similar effect and indeed continues still now. So remote-control technologies began to be adopted very late while most of physics still continues wrongly rejecting its action-at-distance physics to support one bit of Ancient Greek push-philosophy that even the Ancient Greeks did not much support !

Tesla had big hopes for science and the good that it might do for the world, but he did not have much personal ambition. The 1890's did see numbers of people working on radio-related and radiation-related research. He discovered X-rays in 1894 and told Roentgen, and was heppy to leave X-rays to Roentgen and not claim the discovery for himself and Roentgen got a 1901 Nobel largely for the discovery. But Tesla did make some powerful enemies. It seems that from around 1897 Tesla began having problems with the US Patent Office, as indicated by his patent 685012 filed 21 March 1900 not being granted till 22 Oct 1901 and his patent 685953 iled 24 June 1899 not being granted till 5 November 1901. Earlier patents had been dealt with rather more promptly. but Tesla's US radio patent filed in September 1897 was not granted till March 1900 losing to Marconi's UK 1896 patent filing. (But when Tesla was told that Marconi was transmitting wireless messages across the Atlantic Ocean, he was reported to have said "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue, he is using seventeen of my patents.") Really the many patents of Nikola Tesla led to practical electricity, remote-control, radio/TV and our modern world - none of which Einstein's theories really helped. Tesla filed his remote-control patent No. 613,809 on 1 July 1898 and demonstrated a working model at Madison Square Gardens in New York in 1898. But a UK remote-control patent had been filed in 1897 and was granted in 1898 though it seems that it was not demonstrated.

Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless remote-power lighting and worldwide wireless remote electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. By around 1893 Tesla fully realised the greater significance of his remote-physics and was publicly demonstrating radio remote-control by 1898. He had basically invented remote-control, alternating electricity and electromagnetism and helped develop radio and radio-astronomy. So in his 1905 U.S. Patent 787,412 Tesla stated "By use of such a generator of stationary waves and receiving apparatus properly placed and adjusted in any other locality, however remote, it is practicable to transmit intelligible signals, or to control or actuate at will any one apparatus for many other important and valuable purposes." (See Tesla's Patent) The first wireless radio had been invented in 1893 by Nikola Tesla and assembled by him in St. Louis USA. But the credit for inventing radio went to Guglielmo Marconi who was issued the first patent for a wireless radio device in England in 1896. Tesla's radio patents were not granted till 1900 in the USA. So it was Marconi who was given a Nobel prize for radio in 1909, and for his historic inventing of remote-control Tesla again got no recognition but he really sought no recognition. It is likely that Tesla's science would have prospered better had he like Marconi moved to a more attraction-physics England rather than to a more cut-throat America, however Edison had lured him to America and then quickly betrayed him aided by physicists like Einstein who wrongly helped label Tesla a crank ? (But Einstein tried for many years to add electromagnetism to his physics and in fact failed miserably, though he was awarded a Nobel prize. And of course Einstein's one attempt at himself being an inventor was a 1930 patent, by him with a former student of his, of a refridgerator (first invented 1922) claimed to be safer but which did not work very well, as US Patent 1,781,541.) Of course, like the USA then and the world generally now, England has also perhaps become quite intransigent on much science especially physics.

It seemed that Tesla had advanced too far ahead of American business, government and physicists who were basically then still chiefly concerned with simpler street lighting. He was also no doubt mistaken in saying that he had received radio signals that might be from off-Earth people, though they were likely from natural atmospheric or natural off-Earth sources. Soon he was being ostracised and called crazy as by physicists in America like Einstein, and he then ceased to be backed or funded. It seems Tesla as a child had been brought up as eastern Christian Orthodox but as an adult showed little or no interest in churches. His spiritual leanings were to affinity with animals and caring for animal welfare. Some rediculously claimed that Tesla was crazy because he was somewhat a loner who liked to feed pigeons and ducks in a park, and he was also generally a vegetarian. [Caring for animals is basically a lifestyle choice like an alternative sexual lifestyle. People can strongly bond with animals so that it becomes like having a child or a partner, and as with being bisexual it is possible to care for both humans and animals. In many countries a majority of people have animal pets, and being an animal lover certainly does not merit being labelled crazy.] Tesla tried to put some of his ideas to practical use in his Wardenclyffe Tower project, seemingly intended as both an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but he ran out of money before he could complete it. Tesla's hopes for some of his technology really far exceeded its somewhat more limited if still potentially valuable practical uses some of which were only commercially adopted after his death many years later. And after Wardenclyffe he experimented with a number of other inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money and with much of his science dismissed, Tesla then lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills when he died in January 1943.

The early Nikola Tesla

Tesla later wrote that he first became interested in demonstrations of electricity by his high school physics professor, probably Martin Sekulić. Tesla noted that these demonstrations of this "mysterious phenomena" made him want "to know more of this wonderful force". But the young Tesla's being able to perform integral calculus in his head, prompted his teachers to think he was cheating. He then attended a technical university in Austria where he initially did well though clashing with a professor and ending by dropping out.

In 1881, Tesla moved to Hungary to work at the Budapest Telephone Exchange then under construction. But for a first few months he worked as a draftsman in the Central Telegraph Office instead until the Budapest Telephone Exchange became functional. Tesla was allocated its chief electrician position and made many improvements to the Exchange equipment. Then in 1882, Tesla got a job in Paris with the Continental Edison Company, and began working in what was then a new industry installing indoor incandescent electric lighting citywide. The company had a subdivision the Société Electrique Edison that Tesla worked at, in charge of installing the lighting system. There he gained a great deal of practical experience in electrical engineering and was soon designing and building improved versions of generating dynamos and motors. He was also sent to troubleshoot engineering problems at other Edison utilities being built around France and in Germany.

In 1884, Tesla got a move within Edison to the United States at the Edison Machine Works in New York with the task of building the large electric utility in that city. As in Paris, Tesla worked on troubleshooting installations and improving generators. One of the projects given to Tesla was to develop an arc lamp-based street lighting system. Arc lighting was the most popular type of street lighting but it required higher voltages than the then current Edison low-voltage incandescent system and was not put into production.

And within six months Tesla quit Edison and with the help of business investors patented an arc lighting system including an improved DC generator. But his business investors soon dropped Tesla and he struggled for a while. But in 1886, Tesla found new business investors and developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current which was a power system format that was rapidly expanding in Europe and the United States because of its advantages in long-distance, high-voltage electricity transmission. His motor used polyphase current, which generated a rotating magnetic field to turn the motor, a principle that Tesla claimed he conceived earlier in 1882. This innovative electric motor he patented in May 1888 and was a simple self-starting design that did not need a commutator, thus avoiding sparking and the high maintenance of constantly servicing and replacing mechanical brushes. The money Tesla made from licensing his AC patents to Westinghouse Electric made him independently wealthy for a time, giving him funds to pursue his own interests for a time.

In 1889, Tesla traveled to the Exposition Universelle in Paris and learned of Heinrich Hertz's experiments on electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves. Tesla found this new discovery "refreshing" and decided to explore it more fully in repeating, and then expanding on, these experiments. Tesla tried modifying a Ruhmkorff coil to create his own Tesla coil with an air gap instead of insulating material between the primary and secondary windings and an iron core that could be moved to different positions in or out of the coil. In 1891, aged 35, Tesla became a naturalized citizen of the United States and patented his Tesla coil.

From then Tesla experimented with transmitting power both by magnetic inductive and electric capacitive coupling using high AC voltages generated with his Tesla coil. He attempted to develop a wireless electric lighting system based on near-field either inductive or capacitive coupling and did a series of public demonstrations where he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent light bulbs from distance across a stage. He spent most of the decade working on variations of this new form of remote-lighting, and in 1893 Tesla said that he was sure a system like his could eventually conduct "intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires".

An observer of a Tesle remote-power demonstration at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago noted: "two hard-rubber plates covered with tin foil were about fifteen feet apart and were terminals of wires leading from transformers. When the current was turned on, electric lamps or tubes which had no wires connected to them, but could lay on a table between the suspended plates or could be held in the hand in almost any part of the room, were made luminous. These were the same experiments and apparatus shown by Tesla in London about two years previous, "where they produced so much wonder and astonishment". And in 1894, Tesla was experimenting on what he referred to as radiant energy of "invisible" kinds being in fact X-rays. Tesla wanted his science to do good, as in maybe providing free electric power, but rich USA science funders then wanted only to fund science that made themselves money and so wanted to fund only what Tesla saw as bad science or gold-making alchemy-science.

Tesla did like some other scientists have real funding problems and his experiment ideas often needed large funds, despite him like Newton and Gilbert not having to support a wife or children. Science theory is generally cheaper than experiment and often draws easier funding from governments or universities of which Tesla experiments struggled to attract. Yet science really rests on experiment and Tesla really believed in and practiced well confirmed and publicized physics experiments. Unfortunately Tesla's science experiments often maybe leaned more directly towards technologies maybe in part because he felt that might better attract funding than 'undirected' experiment though that may maybe not always give the best science possible. He did try sometimes desperately hard to accommodate potential funders though often they did not have very good intentions.

Tesla and Radio Remote-Control

Some time in 1898, Tesla publicly demonstrated a boat operated by a coherer-based radio remote-control — which he called a "telautomaton" — to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden in New York. Some of the crowd that witnessed the demonstration made outrageous claims about the workings of the boat, such as magic, telepathy, and being piloted by a trained monkey hidden inside. There were others at the same time working on related issues like Marconi on radio remote-communication, though that action-at-distance was remote-communication rather than remote-control. But on remote-control the physics profession really failed to back Tesla, and indeed only reluctantly on remore-communication him or Marconi, though Tesla did try to sell his remote-control to the U.S. military for a radio-controlled torpedo, but they showed little interest and his radio remote-control remained a novelty until World War I and afterward, when a number of countries began using it in military programs. But increasing work on action-at-distance radio etcetera by Tesla and others did not prompt any real physics re-evaluation of action-at-distance physics theory by Einstein or other physicists which somehow very wrongly remained ridiculed by 'theorists' and insubstantially studied. The mass of physics theorists ignored physics experimentalists and ignored a mass of physics experiments that did not suit them, as earlier physics theorists had really ignored magnets and apples falling on heads, but this was early Einstein thought-physics time. Tesla tried promoting radio-remote-communication including correctly noting his radio experiments receiving radio signals from space, for which some called him a crazy imaginer of people from other worlds though later radio-astronomy became accepted. Tesla did try further demonstrating his "Teleautomatics" or radio remote-control to little effect then and to be largely ignored by the physics majority. But the remote-control science of Tesla did of course still become very widely used many years later with universal remote-control TV, remote-control toys and much other remote-control becoming common from around the 1960s especially. His remote-power was not really implemented till the 2010s in the form of remote-chargers for phones and other electric devices. But popular interest in Tesla has also held up well despite his unwarranted dismissal by a large majority of professional physicists at the time and perhaps his showing how science-funders can severely restrict science progress.

Of course Tesla's remote-science substantial dismissal did follow on from a majority of physicists long failing to properly consider William Gilbert's 1600 action-at-distance remote physics which was basically backed by Newton. And indeed the majority of philosophers doing likewise, other than maybe George Berkeley with his perhaps rather fanciful immaterialist signal-response philosophy ?

Tesla from 1884 to 1943 and Einstein from 1933 to 1955 were both working in physics in America, but Einstein never backed Tesla or his physics maybe in part in response to Tesla strongly attacking some of Einstein's physics and indeed theoretical physics generally. (But this common battle between 'experimental scientists' and 'theoretical scientists' is even still portrayed in the more recent TV show 'The Big Bang Theory') So how exactly did physics get away with ignoring Tesla's confirmed and publicized outstanding remote-distance-physics experiments - basically by lying and misinterpreting them as had also been done earlier with Newton's light experiments and with William Gilbert's magnetism experiments ? Really remote-control signal-response physics can be called Gilbert-Newton-Tesla physics, and still stands strongly against Galileo-Descartes-Einstein or Quantum Mechanics/String Theory style push-physics. Tesla's work on remote action-at-distance physics led to remote radio and tv technologies, remote phone and radioastronomy technologies and to other remote technologies. But the work of Einstein on his relativity physics has, even 100 years later, still produced little or no new technology, and certainly not the time-travel it implied. So today almost every person carries a remote-communication device and almost every home has at least one remote-control device - and nobody has time-travel. A science that produces little or nothing is surely little or nothing.

Tesla disputed especially Einstein's claimed speed of light limit and his claimed space-curvature (maybe not both equally validly) and in 1935, on his 79th birthday, he wrote that the Theory of Relativity was just "a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense. The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying error. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists." (NYT, 7/11/1935, p.23) Most modern 'theoretical physicists' are no doubt really metaphysicists and not physicists, as Tesla viewed Einstein and his 'thought-experiment' theory. Tesla himself seemed inclined to using multiple theories, as juggling bits of attraction-repulsion signal-response theory and force-field and ether theory. Einstein and Tesla were no friends though when asked or pressed by Time Magazine, on Tesla's 75th birthday in 1931, Einstein did pen an open letter congratulating Tesla on his birthday and commending him as an engineer which no doubt annoyed Tesla as Einstein probably intended. There has been a rumour that Einstein once said something nice about Tesla but there is no evidence for that and nobody in physics is known to have nominated Tesla for the Nobel prize though there was a malicious rumour that he was going to be awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Einstein got the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", though the Photoelectric Effect was discovered in 1887 by Heinrich Hertz and in 1900 Max Planck had suggested that light was quantal in it before Einstein later in 1905 published his small theory paper interpreting the photoelectric effect as involving quantal light. This small work of his really achieved little or nothing. And a logical quantal light theory interpretation of the photoelectric effect might seem to be a particle-set response as requiring receipt of some set of particles within some time period. And key public experiments of Tesla that seemed to support action-at-distance physics were ignored by most physicists then, as still today and as some key experiments of William Gilbert were long ignored also. Most physicists treatment of Tesla was all generally similar to the way William Gilbert and Isaac Newton were also treated by most physicists in their time for backing action-at-distance signal-response physics. And Tesla was subject to some strong public personal criticism. But in technology production it is really action-at-distance physics that has won, though most physicists now still cannot accept the clear fact shown by our actual world and they are holding back physics and the world.

Some of his science technologies Tesla basically gave away, some others were basically stolen while others were ignored for many years till long after his death. And Tesla was certainly much attacked wrongly chiefly by competitors, while disgracefully mainstream science never really gave his science any support maybe in part because one or two of his science ideas then did not seem as useful as he imagined. Of course similar no doubt also applied to many other scientists to at least some extent over the years. And Tesla was quite widely known as wanting his science to do good for the world, maybe more than some other scientists. A conspiracy theory has persisted that one or more United States governments supressed some of Tesla's good science. Of course many conspiracy theories have been shown to be wrong, though a few may have been shown to be right. But people who have done wrong will generally try to hide the fact, so that in some cases the truth cannot be proven though it may be possible to make a reasonable guess at what was the truth as to for example who killed various princes. So it may not be possible to prove some historical theory right, but it may also not be possible to prove it wrong - some reasonable-guess theory may be true. And if Tesla may not have had one wrong done against him, he may have had some different wrong done against him. Wrong doers or course may be governments, churches or others. And some people or even a whole society can do wrong while wrongly believing that they are doing right. The History Channel investigative TV series 'The Tesla Files' being rerun now maybe inspires little confidence in being run rather like various other conspiracy TV series such as 'Ancient Aliens', and maybe deals more with engineering than with physics. So it may produce some interesting bits of information on Tesla, while missing chunks of perhaps more relevant information on him. But his later work faced increasing opposition that often included claiming that Tesla was crazy and his science somehow wrong, which false claims perhaps strangely were not opposed by Einstein or other physicists of the time. Tesla followed Gilbert and Newton, in having his science technologies hijacked while his basic science ideas that were in line with Gilbert and Newton were as wrongly dismissed as theirs were. While industry in England was then advancing faster than in the rest of Europe, the advance of Gilbertian physics in England was unfortunately successfully opposed by a really unwarented contrary advance of Galileo physics in mainland Europe. Though Italy had shown some earlier Renaissance advance, this was when industry was advancing much more in England than in the rest of Eurupe. And then more recently modern physics has been pushed into embracing some other maybe really even more doubtful ideas by Einstein and others.

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