Saturday, July 31, 2010


Back to the Futurist.



(This work is still in progress... Please forgive its length, inaccuracies and grammar.)



“Things that may be impossible today may some day become possible.” Things like creating programmable artificial life that can change the course of the history of Earth are now possible, at least in theory. Dr. Michio Kaku, a pioneering Theoretical Physicist specializing in String Field Theory, is an acute anachronism, simultaneously clairvoyant. With his flowing white mane, Kaku is a media lion, a darling sensation, willing to be interviewed by anybody on virtually any topic as long as he can impart his pet theories and anecdotes during dialogue.



Michio reminds me of a former mentor who said frequently, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.” and wondered if he had already told the story or joke. Actually, I had but I rarely slammed on his brakes. No matter what, this bald wonder always added something new that I had never heard before or since. Kaku is a lot like George except for the hair.



Things may still be impossible to achieve today that may have been possible in the past instead of the future if the right string were plucked or the past was a little different from what is remembered. We stand tapping our foot waiting for some part of the past or the future to become the present as we struggle with the concept of time itself.



Born during an electrical storm July 10th 1856 at the stroke of midnight the ‘mad scientist’ Nikola Tesla would prove to be a phenomenal futurist. By 1882, in his mind and in a dirt schematic, Tesla had already invented the induction electric motor as an employee of Continental Edison Company in Paris. Some say this happened in Belgrade even before he went to Paris but somehow, somewhere he determined Alternating Current and opposing magnetic fields in a whirling unison produced a better way to convert energy into work.



Tesla’s letter of recommendation from his supervisor Charles Batchelor to Edison read: “I know two great men and you are one of them. This young man is the other.” Nikola Tesla, the young electrical engineer and inventor in 1884 crossed the Atlantic to work closer to his nemesis the virtuoso scientific genius Edison. He had just four cents left in his pocket when he saw the Statue of Liberty.



Edison recognized Nikola’s immense faculty and grew to rely on Tesla. Thomas Alva, holder of 1093 patents, although not all truly his own, still more than any other man, offered Tesla $50,000 to do something he himself had been unable or too busy to do… redesign Edison's inefficient motor and generators so Edison, the entrepreneur and company could net even vaster profits. When Tesla asked for payment for his work, Edison replied, "Tesla, you don't understand our American Humor." It was not unusual for Edison to break his word to those creating ‘his genius’ when he personally profited. General Electric continues this tradition; it gobbles up by purchase or larceny intellectual property of others that it can leverage.



Since Tesla who only made $18 per week working for Edison could do math, he realized it would take 53 years to earn what he had been promised and was not forthcoming. To Tesla there was nothing funny about it. He refused a diminutive raise to $25 per week; instead immediately he resigned.



Edison stole one too many ideas. His greed caused this valuable employee to leave with a chip on his shoulder that would come back to haunt Edison, Edison General Electric and the corporate structure of that time. It would not take long.



In 1886 after digging ditches for his old boss Edison so that he could continue to eat; Tesla founded his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. He was awarded the patents in 1888 for his electric induction motor and worked on his Alternating Current Polyphase System.



In 1892 Tesla’s ‘Shadow graphs’ led the way for X-Ray technology three years before it was ‘rediscovered’ by Willhelm Roentgen. Once again this trend haunted him and continued to recur throughout his life; the logical consequence of Tesla’s thinking became the basis for someone else’s invention. Nikola did not sweat the small stuff.



Tesla’s Polyphase System allowed transmission of alternating current electricity over long distances. With the support of George Westinghouse and his Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company (a direct competitor to Edison) the two began collaborating and in 1893 Tesla and Westinghouse provided AC to power the marvel of lights for the Chicago's World’s Fair Columbian Exposition. Edison forbade the use of his ‘Edison's patented light bulbs’ so Tesla developed a new style of light. The first shots were fired; the war ensued.



Guglielmo Marconi in 1895 transmitted a radio signal outside Villa Griffone in Pontecchio, Italy over a hill the distance of almost a mile. He had beaten Tesla to the punch with the first wireless radio transmission even though Marconi’s triumph was based upon what was later determined to be seventeen Tesla patents and the work of many others. It did not matter; it was Marconi that was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for that first transmission and the one across the Atlantic and he shared it with Karl Ferdinand Braun “in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy". There was nothing for Tesla but another war.



Marconi’s public demonstration was good enough for the US government to recognize Marconi as the inventor of radio. This is akin to turning in someone else’s homework before they had a chance. Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi) says: “Marconi did not discover any new and revolutionary principle in his wireless-telegraph system, but rather he assembled and improved a number of components, unified and adapted them to his system.” Just like Edison, Marconi made something commercial of something theoretical.



Tesla’s lifetime works were destroyed by fire (also in 1895) when his laboratory burned. Tesla had previously demonstrated a “Wireless Transmitter/Receiver System” in St. Louis TWO YEARS before Marconi had made his transmission. Nikola now not only had to prove his concepts and ownership but all of his documentation and research papers were lost in the inferno, all of them. Tesla was devastated but with a photographic memory he reconstructed and continued on. Tesla filed for the basic Radio Patent in 1897. The controversy over who indeed invented the radio would continue longer than Nikola did.



Niagara Falls was harnessed and its power converted to electricity for the city of Buffalo for northwestern New York industry in 1896. Later it was used for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. Tesla’s concepts, in direct opposition to Edison’s effective monopoly of DC power transmission (that required a power generating plant to keep voltage constant on almost every corner or at a minimum every mile), were now used to get electricity from Point A to Point B. Immediately, the ‘War of the Currents’ commenced. This was the beginning of the end for Direct Current as a transportation vehicle for public electricity. No longer would the sun be blocked out by the large size and tremendous number of shielded copper wires; we rewired in AC. The theory of opposites working together in unison within a system for a common end is the basis for much of Tesla’s genius. Obviously, the competitive spirit also fanned his flames.



The sore loser Edison engineered an electric chair, electrocuted animals and persuaded the state of New York to use ‘Sparky’ to execute a prisoner to demonstrate the danger of alternating current. Edison dubbed the use of AC for electrocutions “Westinghousing” after Tesla’s primary accomplice and collaborator. Although they won the war, both Westinghouse and Tesla were almost broke.



Tesla gave Westinghouse a break and released the company from contract forfeiting some AC motor royalties in 1897. This saved Westinghouse from the threat of bankruptcy that was partly due to his backing the installation of ‘The Grid’ using Alternating Current to transmit electricity. Later in the financial panic of 1907, Tesla again saved Westinghouse. Tesla gave up his Westinghouse royalties on every induction motor, valued at over $12,000,000 and any future share of the certain continuing fortune to insure that mankind would benefit. He wrote: “Money does not represent such a value as men before placed on it. All my money has been invested in experiments which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.” Nikola bet his money on the future and his ability to generate new and more imperative discoveries. These grandiose financial blunders further indeed characterize Tesla’s mad scientist legacy.



It is because of Westinghouse but more particularly Tesla that we don’t have more huge wires crisscrossing America carrying electrical current than we already do. Tesla’s wisdom and inventive spirit might have insured that we would need none of those towers and wires today. In his lab he proved the viability of wireless transmission of electricity but never had a chance to work out all of the bugs. Far back in 1894 (before the fire) using the Tesla Coil, Nikola generated 1,000,000 volts and achieved 16 foot discharges in his New York City lab.



In 1899 he headed toward the mountains to Colorado Springs to continue research on the wireless transmission of messages and also electrical power. He investigated the earth’s ‘telluric currents’ via transverse and longitudinal waves (from the Latin tellūs, "earth", telluric current is an electric current moving underground or through the sea, caused by human activity and natural causes; these currents are extremely low frequency travelling large areas near the surface of Earth). The Earth itself is the conductor. Nikola sent millions of volts as far away as 135 feet with no conductor like copper wire. Tesla wrote, "the inferiority of the induction method would appear immense as compared with the disturbed charge of ground and air method."



He transmitted extremely low frequencies between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere and also through the ground. Tesla engaged in research of long distance power transmission through the ‘Tesla Effect’. Tesla had demonstrated back in 1891 “the transmission of electrical energy without wires”. The ‘Tesla Effect’ (named in honor of Tesla) is a term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter, not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Nikola used longitudinal waves to transfer energy to receiving devices and sent electrostatic forces through natural media across a conductor situated in the changing magnetic flux and transferred power to a conducting receiving device. Very basically he lit up light bulbs that were not screwed into a socket or in a lamp that was plugged in.



Although Tesla claimed in his Colorado Spring Lab he had produced 135,000,000 volts (which would still be the highest voltage ever achieved) and also that he lit 200 incandescent bulbs 26 miles away with wireless power, we are still wired into the grid. If he was able to do this then, more than a century ago; why hasn’t this happened in the developed world or especially in the third world where it could be even more beneficial?



He was getting a little too ‘far out’ when he reported unusual signals that he thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Mars or Venus. It was a far too much for his neighbors and even the scientific community. By January 1900 he moved out and his lab was torn down. What could be salvaged was sold to pay of his debts.



In 1900 - 1903, Nikola almost ‘bilked’ J. Pierpont Morgan and other investors with his Wardenclyffe “Transmitter” Laboratory out of more than their original $150,000 seed money. Since Morgan was banker for American Telephone & Telegraph, International Telephone & Telegraph, Western Union, United Corp., and many other electrical utilities it is more probable he was putting his money on the horse that could provide radio transmission capabilities not yet discovered or exploited rather than someone who could provide free electricity to the world. Marconi conquered the Atlantic during the construction of Wardenclyffe.



The Wardenclyffe tower topped with a huge metal Tesla Coil, loomed 187 feet tall, with its 68 foot circumference dome. A shaft beneath the tower went 120 feet deep into the ground. Sixteen iron pipes were placed end to end, making another 300 additional feet deep so that the machine as Tesla put it could "have a grip on the earth so the whole of this globe can quiver." Extremely low frequency ‘telluric currents’ of Earth could be transceived at this depth. Atmospheric conditions would not interfere while he still experimented on wireless telecommunications. Wardenclyffe also was intended for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony and broadcasting including news, music and even pictures.



Whether this facility was for sending and receiving radio messages as its primary mission, or if wireless electrical energy transmission was its real objective remains to be determined. But Morgan thought that one of the primary purposes of Wardenclyffe in fact was the wireless power transmission and that was not what he had signed on for. Marconi had already succeeded so he refused to further bankroll Tesla or his work any longer.



Wireless energy around the world was certainly one of Nikola’s motivations. His Tesla Coil that topped the tower was like a giant electrical pump or heart, a transformer that increased power through a magical conversion and was able to fill entire buildings and for Nikola, hopefully the Earth, with high voltage electricity. He dreamt that people only had to receive the power to utilize it. He started the project to make the whole world a wall plug. It is a shame Eiffel did not build Tesla’s tower so it could remain as an architectural marvel instead of being torn down during World War II because people did not realize the scientific miracle it was.



This became a very bad period for Tesla. He ran out of the money he so disdained and couldn’t pay his workers. He was forced to close this lab. Worse, the U.S. Patent Office decided on some of the patent applications and Guglielmo Marconi was issued the patents for radio! It has been reported (although the names of nominees are never publicly announced) that Tesla refused the Nobel Prize in 1912 because it was to be shared with Edison. The medal and cash prize would have helped his situation at the time. Nikola did ultimately accept the Edison Medal in 1917 but had to be prevailed upon to agree to that.



Tesla was a soothsayer. He, like Kaku was popular with the media because he had as much to say as we have much to hear. Tesla, a lifetime ago wrote a 1931 Article for The New York Times on “Our Future Mode of Power”. As he looked into the future, he penned, “If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations.” This futurist from our past foresaw the exhaustion of our nonrenewable resources and studied, patented and urged the exploitation of the endless sources of power including radiant, cosmic rays and geothermal power. “All that is necessary is to find an economic and speedy way of sinking deep shafts to tap into this enormous geothermal energy.” Tesla was not only defining the path; he attempted to construct it for all. He did much on his own with many successes and failures. One of his greatest catastrophes was his financial ineptitude that caused him to stop and restart so many times.



The same year Tesla began his litigated ‘Patent War’ with Marconi, he signed over the deed to Wardenclyffe to the owner of the Waldorf Astoria to again attempt to pay off his debts. It was no where near enough. In 1916 he filed bankruptcy. The next year, seventeen years before the invention of radar it was Tesla who proposed using the reflection of radio waves bouncing off objects to determine their position and speed if moving. Although municipalities are now thankful for the cash infusion the radar gun generates from speeding tickets, Tesla still did not worship the almighty dollar. He suffered for his naïveté and contempt for money. He continued to let others pirate his smaller ideas while he concentrated on the more substantial ones.



Tesla was fluent in eight languages, a genuine savant suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. He had had a nervous breakdown in Serbia even before he began his formal advanced education, his career or emigration to help Edison.



Nikola was obsessed with the trinity of three. He was ecstatic as long as something was divisible by three. Like Howard Hughes, Nikola was also mysophobic and fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene. He used a handkerchief only once. Both exceptionally brilliant men had an irrational fear of germs and constantly washed their hands.



Tesla was exceedingly passionate about pigeons. He fed them in the park; he nursed them back to health in his roll top desk and outside of the hotel room where he lived in his old age. He fed and talked to them; he even called one of them his ‘wife’ and claimed when she died his inventive fortitude left him. He remained celibate preferring to put his energies into research and theory instead of relationships. Not overtly adroit in his people skills he entertained many well heeled friends and rubbed elbows in the highest circles of society, but in his heart he was a loner. He warred with both Edison and Marconi throughout life for their theft of his ideas. Others who did the same thing he disregarded.



Individually, Edison and Marconi had a smaller impact on our future than people credit them with. Granted, both were geniuses; each provided great advances for mankind. They were fabulous inventors, engineers and administrators. However, if they were not able to utilize and capitalize other’s ideas, their contributions would have been far less significant. Many who allied themselves with Edison and Marconi, those who did the grunt work, have been forgotten by history, their patents gobbled up by the masters of industry.



Teleportation was envisioned as a natural extension of Tesla’s labors and fertile mind. Using the Transporter to ‘Beam me up Scottie’ was not only because the shuttlecraft wasn’t ready for prime time. It was the way to keep Star Trek on the air by enabling the crew to visit planets and get home to the Enterprise more cheaply at least as far as television production was concerned. Gene Roddenberry or his assistants might have thought of this on their own but they certainly were not the first to do that either. Tesla posited that if sound and electricity could be transported wirelessly why not matter itself?



Tesla dedicated his life to research and discovery that would improve the life of man. He not only operated on remote control, he in fact actually invented it in 1898. Thanks to Nikola we can now spend nights on the couch arguing over the clicker.



In the Time Magazine article “Science: Damn Good Man” July 25, 1927, Tesla states. ". . . You will be able to go anywhere in the world—to the mountain top over-looking your farm, to the Arctic or to the desert—and set up a little equipment that will give you heat to cook with and light to read by. This will be carried in a satchel not as big as the ordinary suitcase.” Of course we are still waiting. He could conceptualize it and talk about it but doing it was now beyond his grasp.



In 1931, eighteen years before Michio Kaku was born, Tesla was the honored at age 75 by Time Magazine. One week that year, like Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and others, he was on the cover. On his birthday, which the article celebrated, he received kudos from more than 70 colossals of science and engineering including Albert Einstein although Nikola claimed to have done the math to prove Einstein wrong. The full text of the Time article is at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,742063,00.html.



It took until 1935 for the Court of Claims to invalidate 15 of 16 of Marconi’s patents. Tesla had already started to move into his future and was becoming a simple curiosity. In 1943 Nikola Tesla was dead of heart failure. He died alone in room 3327 (its number divisible by three) of Manhattan's Hotel Governor Clinton, on January 7th, penniless. That same year the Supreme Court further invalided many of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi's patents for the radio and radio equipment. It gave credit to Tesla based on the large amount of his work and ideas that predated Marconi’s work; ideas that Marconi used for ‘his invention’. The patents were now Tesla’s and in Tesla’s future, 1944, a future that he could not see beyond his grave, the hammer fell; the case was finally settled in the U.S. Supreme Court, another war that Tesla ultimately won.



His Obituary in the Time Magazine on January 18, 1943 issue expended more copy on his loony eccentric behavior than his immense gifts to the world: “Died. Nikola Tesla, 86, "electrical wizard," inventor of the Tesla transformer, the Tesla induction motor, discoverer of the rotary magnetic field principle; in Manhattan. Croat-born, he came to the U.S. in 1884, worked briefly for Thomas Alva Edison, became a great electrical inventor on his own. In his old age he holed up in hotel rooms, became an urban hermit, taped his doors and windows and tried to keep the room at a 90° temperature, had his vegetables boiled two hours, wiggled his toes several hundred times every night to "tone up." He also announced that he had discovered a death ray capable of killing a million men, had been in touch with Mars. Once he figured he would live to be 135 but changed his mind when Prohibition died, boosted the figure to 150.”



After Nikola’s death the FBI and the Office of Alien Property (even though Tesla was a US citizen since 1891) raided his 3327 hotel room to confiscate his research papers. It was almost a decade later, in 1952 that the United States eventually released them to Tesla’s nephew. Bill Gates does not own them; the majority (if not all) are now housed in a museum in Belgrade, Serbia dedicated to Nikola Tesla’s dream and accomplishments for the sake of mankind. This man shook the Earth with his visions, experiments and partly by his insanity.



The Strategic Defense Initiative (Regan’s ‘Star Wars’) is another logical extension of Tesla’s fertile mind; his death ray in action. Did this idea come from the papers long held and studied by our government? Nikola was not the only one capable of black thoughts. Tesla’s obvious insanity makes him the mad scientist incarnate.



Nikola Tesla’s vision helped create the twentieth century. He is still shaping our future as we know or optimistically, will know how it. We wait to see how much his ideas will affect the twenty-first. Although he accomplished wireless transmission of electrical power long ago, we are still wondering how it can be done and why there are still power poles everywhere we look. Has their removal not happened because our corporate world has not figured how to profit by wireless transmission of electricity?



In 1898, Tesla devised something now used in over 600 million cars, the “electrical Igniter for Gas Engines” – the automobile ignition system. However, Hybrid cars would not even be possible had the idea of induction motors and how opposites work together permeated Tesla’s brain. A bunch of geeks in California are banking with their new best friend Toyota on huge financial success based on some ideas more than a century old that were not theirs. Their ground breaking mode of transportation is powered by an induction motor from electricity stored in batteries fed from the grid Tesla engineered but would have surely replaced by now. The ‘Tesla’ can fly but it is earthbound because it has to stop to plug in and charge the batteries. If Nikola had performed his magic and free electricity was available to the ends of the earth the need for the extra weight of the batteries and nightly charges would be a thing of the past instead of our wonderful future.



Modern scientists are working on engineering artificial or genetically modified life. Introducing new life forms into our environment is responsible for possibilities that maybe should be left undone or impossible. Kaku talks about the disaster of the ‘Killer Bee’ and the many other catastrophic species relocation events. The outcome of genetic tinkering could be even more perilous; copyrighted genetic food could leave more than a bad taste in our mouths. Corporate genetic fiddlers and life engineers have a lot of clout, some with results that won’t be realized for generations. It’s the “Anything for a Buck” theory of the corporate world.



Like the upstart Nikola Tesla against the corporate goliath Edison we need competition and new futuristic innovative ideas to deal with some of our global crises. We will benefit from that as long as time is not wasted in the litigation and dilly-dallying. We need the reason of people like Kaku to put some of these things in perspective for us. As theories become practice we must have theorists to explain some ramifications of our decisions. How these things in the future will affect our future, and even how those things in our present will change our future; these things are complicated.



On a news interview Kaku said something prophetic that portends possible bad result. “You can not recall a life form.” Attempts to gerrymander the environment can have disastrous results. Sitting on our butts can leave us driving around with hundreds of pounds of batteries in our trunk or under our floor.



We might have to stop a blind progression toward Soylent Green. “Why, in my day, you could buy meat anywhere! Eggs they had, real butter! Fresh lettuce in the stores.” People can now accurately say also: real meat, real eggs and real lettuce.



“Det. Thorn: It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!

Hatcher: I promise, Tiger. I promise. I'll tell the exchange.

Det. Thorn: You tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. You've gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!”



It’s not just about the food, the global warming or some other potential Earth disasters. Energy and matter might seem simply as different components that magically can convert back and forth by the speed of light squared… E=mc2. The equals sign signifies only a relationship between the two. We do not need the speed of light to convert fuel into a Carbon Dioxide surplus, just a gasoline or diesel auto or a coal powered power plant.



Tesla had his favorite pigeons and talked to the animals… But did Nikola actually listen to or talk with aliens? Nikola really slipped up when he revealed he listened to aliens. He was discredited. This is a concrete example of what Kaku tried to explain in the guillotine joke analogy with the priest, lawyer and finally the theoretical physicist who was stupid enough to point out “the rope is stuck in the pulley.” Know when to keep your mouth shut. We also need to know when to scream bloody murder. It is time to put it in gear.



I have only met one genuine genius futurist in my lifetime. He left Earth a decade ago this month. What is left of FM2030 now lies carefully cryogenically sealed in scaldingly hot Arizona in a liquid nitrogen bath. He trusts that in his future he can return to see what he missed in his past. I’d like to be around to have another vegetarian meal with him with real lettuce.



Michio Kaku, our theoretical physicist futurist also said, ultimately making a connection to terrorists, “And what is the Internet. The Internet is the beginning of a Type 1 telephone system. That is all it is. And so, this transition is perhaps most important transition of all time. Some people don’t want it. They fear this transition because this transition is to a planetary civilization tolerant of many cultures.” Michio is really getting into the future when he starts talking about different stages of planetary civilizations. Others would prefer to keep our future our past.



“The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of its time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.” Nikola Tesla. That applies only if we start playing the game by the rules.



If we had Tesla’s wireless power transmission or maybe even the wireless networks that could span miles and miles through the air or through the Earth (the technology exists to do this) things would certainly be different. Part of our present would already be our past. We could all be futurists.



The time is now. The future is now. We don’t have to be a theoretical Physicist to see this handwriting on the wall. Corporate profits or the manipulation of the application of technology only to insure them cannot prevent what will happen eventually. I’d rather not wait. Populate the goat cells with programmable DNA and turn them loose on the Gulf oil spill if it will help and is not a danger to us. How much worse can that be than millions of gallons of dispersant?



“Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to their work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine." And, "The opinion of the world does not affect me. I have placed as the real values in my life what follows when I am dead." Nikola Tesla. I wish Tesla was cryogenically sealed and we could crack his vault and let him loose.


For the conspiracy theorists, remember to look up in the sky for a Droid Predator Drone. It is the failure of the future if it forgets its past. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

© 07.29.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg











Modern Marvels - Mad Electricity