I may be wrong but I believe Nikola Tesla was financed by wealthy New Yorkers after his separation from asshole Edison but they pulled the plug when they realised he was going to give away free power to people.
May be apocryphal but I think there was someone who invented a car that ran on water but big oil stepped in.
The water car is one of those great conspiracy theories that carries just enough weight to sound plausible.
It’s not even close to plausible. It gets legs because it is appealing to think “they” are just that evil and that all our problems can be easily solved once “they” are out of power.
I think there are other conspiracies within the automotive industry that are true, i.e. could have done better for fuel economy but would have impacted profits. The water car is not one of them. There are applications that use water to change engine dynamics that are viable (my dad had a patent on one and lived his life battling people who didn’t want to hear about it), but running on water is too far from reality.
I think it was actually hydrogen electric and allegedly there was some special catalyst that made it thermodynamically plausible.
… Carries just enough water to sound plausible.
How would you run a car on water? Water is spent fuel.
If you’re in a dry, hot environment and evaporate water in a swamp cooler, you lose about 2.3MJ/l (6.3kWh/l), from which you can skim maybe ~10% with a thermocouple. If you’re charging a Dacia Spring consuming 156Wh/km, you’d have to evaporate ~30 liters of water to drive 100km.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization#Other_common_substances
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator#Efficiency
https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/energy-consumption-electric-carBut then, what if you bought solar panels and a wind turbine instead of thermocouples and water?
How was Tesla going to generate free power? Bend the laws of physics?
He believed that the Earth had “fluid electrical charges” running beneath its surface, that when interrupted by a series of electrical discharges at repeated set intervals, would generate a limitless power supply by generating immense low-frequency electrical waves.
In recent experiments I have discovered two novel facts of importance in this connection. One of these facts is that an electric current is generated in a wire extending from the ground to a great height by the axial and probably also by the translatory, movement of the earth. No appreciable current, however, will flow continuously in the wire unless the electricity is allowed to leak out into the air. Its escape is greatly facilitated by providing at the elevated end of the wire a conducting terminal of great surface, with many sharp edges or points. We are thus enabled to get a continuous supply of electrical energy by merely supporting a wire at a great height, but, unfortunately, the amount of electricity which can be so obtained is small.
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/nikola-teslas-free-energy-documents
I read a variation of this years ago though the author of the one I read may have embellished it somewhat.
‘Yes, Nikola Tesla demonstrated wireless power transmission, but not quite in the way people often imagine.
In 1899, during his experiments in Colorado Springs, Tesla managed to wirelessly light incandescent lamps over a short distance (about 25 miles is sometimes claimed) using resonant inductive coupling. He used a large Tesla coil to create high-voltage electrical fields, which could transfer energy through the air. Some reports suggest that he successfully powered a bank of light bulbs several miles away, though there is no definitive proof.
Tesla’s ultimate vision was Wardenclyffe Tower, a massive structure designed to transmit electricity wirelessly across vast distances. However, the project was never completed due to financial issues and skepticism from investors like J.P. Morgan.
So while Tesla did achieve wireless power transfer over short distances, the idea of lighting bulbs miles away in a practical, controlled manner remains largely theoretical.’
Didn’t have to be real, just scary to the powerful.
(Not commenting on truth of whether it happened or not, just a generalization of my observations of the behaviours of the powerful)
The Why Files has a good video on the mysterious deaths around “free” energy technology.
The state of science education is so disheartening.
Isn’t it always how it works? For example nerds invent stuff, “business people” monetise it, nerd gets nothing.
It’s like parasitic behaviour.
“Socialise the cost. Privatise the profit.”
Much of the research comes from the public sector, especially universities. But business tycoons act like they are the ones who invented something from scratch and took all the risk to commercialise the idea.
The nerd can also create a startup, and get a friend to be the business person. Usually this involves selling the startup to a large company at some point.
If the nerd is an academic, the university can “help” the academic to market the invention; the academic will get a tiny amount and the university gets the rest. Or the academic can create a startup on the side, and set up their favorite graduate as the business person.
Yes, but that is also precisely why OP’s shower thought is incorrect: advances in science nearly always lead to new inventions, which make money.
Yes. A couple nerds invented a way to process and manufacture steel quickly and Carnegie bought the patent and made all the steel.
Way to not add anything of real value Carnegie. Anyone in his position would have said, oh let me buy that and then produce my steel faster than anyone else in the world. The only reason he had wealth to do that was luck. Someone took him under his wing as a kid and raised in up in the business/manufacturing/world. Carnegie worked hard, but he had a lot of luck.
Not to completely shit on Carnegie. He started donating some of his wealth away and tried to convince his peers to do the same. He could have been paying his workers more the whole time instead, but waiting to the end helps some workers that might have still been alive, at least.
Well of course. Einstein was a socialist.
I don’t think Einstein hurt the bottom line of anyone, his work was mostly theoretical.
This is about the destruction of the education system.
This is why so many highly intelligent people devote as much time in their lives to art as they possibly can.
It is only through art that you can begin to subvert an architecture of stolen and foreclosed futures.
In another world maybe Pynchon just became an unbelievably good editor for aeronautics technical journals.
Let us not forget that the rich, even on the allies side of WW2 (insofar as the rich keep up the theater of needing to pick a side) would rather not have had even a single Alan Turing if they could not impose a conservative trauma upon him and make him deny his basic self, and so he was executed and bigotry was preserved at a terrible cost we can never know the full extent of.
History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
edit I am imagining the person who downvoted me was like “hey, I feel excluded as a homophobic computer nerd by this statement” -> downvote
Poochie we have to move past this, the reason you failed Basic Physics is not because the rich are trying to hold you back.
I wish I never took physics.
What did physics ever do to you?
Musk would have called Einstein woke
That pattern is strong in the sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration. The real geniuses were sidelined and kept poor.
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-HiltunenI have spent 30 years developing computerization of traditional medical tasks. Anytime a project gets anywhere near M.D. territory they villify it mercilessly, it’s a threat to their cash cow, a threat to their status as the exalted font of all knowledge, a threat to their $600K/yr practice income - they think.
People capable of Einstein’s genious are born daily. There’s two major reasons we don’t her about them.
First, (your suggestion) we have to live under capitalism. Opportunity is distributed poorly and depends directly on circumstance and luck. So most people who could be another Einstein end up working at a service job to survive.
Second, the sciences have grown so much that these works are now the leaves in the canopy of a dense forest. Sure, you can see the trees, you can see the leaves, but every single tree is a different subject, every branch a new revelation, every ring built upon the previous, every leaf subdivided into thousands of little bits, and even the cells with component parts. Once you start learning about a subject you start to see just how complex something as simple as the tree really is. So just like you don’t see every individual leaf, you don’t hear about these people.
Bonus: science isn’t the only place for genius, there’s tons of absolute geniuses working as artists, and that’s a good thing.
This is a major plot point of The Dispossessed by Le Guinn.
I read this as Epstein and had a completely different response ready
to be fair the phrase applies to both
A cure for all diseases? Nooooo, we don’t do cures we do maintenance! The money’s in maintenance!!!
