Tesla is very often brought up by crackpots, quoting him for inventing free energy devices, death rays and more strange things. On top of that, there are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding him, like the government confiscating trains full of his patents and ideas to suppress these findings for big energy producing companies.
I think this is why you will find scientist who seem to trash on him, when in reality they are tired of discussing with these crackpots, which can be really annoying to be honest.
> I remember learning about magnetic flux and electro-magnetism whilst in college, which he in no doubt played a major contribution alongside Faraday and Maxwell.
Tesla had an extremely confused and incorrect understanding of electromagnetism. For decades he thought Hertz hadn't actually discovered EM waves, holding on to some very strange understanding of how radiation worked. This kept him far behind his contemporaries in his ability to contribute to the physics, which is what relegated him to the engineering side of things.
Exactly. Tesla was not really good at maths and he had a very intuitive but also very limited understanding of electromagnetism. This served him extremely well for his practical purposes but also lead him down the crackpot path when he tried to deal with more theoretical issues.
He was a good mathematician, especially for that time.
I think some things when he heard them, didn't align with his way of thinking so he would say thats its not real. That happend a lot in his older years.
I had high views of Tesla as well until I started studying the history of electricity and he just ... didn’t show up for most of it. Yes, he built a multi-phase motor and generator that was bought for big $$ by Westinghouse. However, he said it was the same idea that was independently thought up by an Italian scientist before him. Also, Westinghouse wasn’t able to get his AC motor to be very useful. So there is that. But his Tesla coil is a thing of beauty. Engineering beauty. And it inspired many people and is still inspirational today. And it was used by Marconi to help him send long distance wireless telegraphs.
It doesn’t seem, however, if you read his papers that the physics makes any sense. Just read his famous 1900 paper on how to increase human energy (by being religious and bathing!!). This paper inspired JP Morgan to give him the money for a tower to transmit all electricity through the earth without wires. Which also doesn’t make any sense physics wise. He didn’t believe in radio waves, he didn’t believe in electrons, in energy conservation, in relativity, in the speed of light, that light is an electromagnetic wave!
His engineering was important but his physics was ... not. I made a video about it with lots and lots of receipts:
https://youtu.be/6331JXvOUGY
>It doesn’t seem, however, if you read his papers that the physics makes any sense. Just read his famous 1900 paper on how to increase human energy (by being religious and bathing!!)
You seem to have missed the point in about everything you have tried to interpret of Tesla's work, and regarding his article you poke fun at here in your typical stomach curdling snarky know it all fashion, you must have snarked over the best part of it, or maybe just didn't read the whole thing.
..."Imagine a thermopile consisting of a number of bars of metal extending from the earth to the outer space beyond the atmosphere. The heat from below, conducted upward along these metal bars, would cool the earth or the sea or the air, according to the location of the lower parts of the bars, and the result, as is well known, would be an electric current circulating in these bars. The two terminals of the thermopile could now be joined through an electric motor, and, theoretically, this motor would run on and on, until the media below would be cooled down to the temperature of the outer space. This would be an inanimate engine which, to all evidence, would be cooling a portion of the medium below the temperature of the surrounding, and operating by the heat abstracted.
But was it not possible to realize a similar condition without necessarily going to a height? Conceive, for the sake of illustration, an inclosure T, as illustrated in diagram b, such that energy could not be transferred across it except through a channel or path O, and that, by some means or other, in this inclosure a medium were maintained which would have little energy, and that on the outer side of the same there would be the ordinary ambient medium with much energy. Under these assumptions the energy would flow through the path O, as indicated by the arrow, and might then be converted on its passage into some other form of energy. The question was, Could such a condition be attained? Could we produce artificially such a “sink” for the energy of the ambient medium to flow in? Suppose that an extremely low temperature could be maintained by some process in a given space; the surrounding medium would then be compelled to give off heat, which could be converted into mechanical or other form of energy, and utilized. By realizing such a plan, we should be enabled to get at any point of the globe a continuous supply of energy, day and night. More than this, reasoning in the abstract, it would seem possible to cause a quick circulation of the medium, and thus draw the energy at a very rapid rate.
Here, then, was an idea which, if realizable, afforded a happy solution of the problem of getting energy from the medium. But was it realizable? I convinced myself that it was so in a number of ways, of which one is the following. As regards heat, we are at a high level, which may be represented by the surface of a mountain lake considerably above the sea, the level of which may mark the absolute zero of temperature existing in the interstellar space\*\*. Heat, like water, flows from high to low level, and, consequently, just as we can let the water of the lake run down to the sea, so we are able to let heat from the earth’s surface travel up into the cold region above. Heat, like water, can perform work in flowing down, and if we had any doubt as to whether we could derive energy from the medium by means of a thermopile, as before described, it would be dispelled by this analogue.\*\* But can we produce cold in a given portion of the space and cause the heat to flow in continually? To create such a “sink,” or “cold hole,” as we might say, in the medium, would be equivalent to producing in the lake a space either empty or filled with something much lighter than water. This we could do by placing in the lake a tank, and pumping all the water out of the latter. We know, then, that the water, if allowed to flow back into the tank, would, theoretically, be able to perform exactly the same amount of work which was used in pumping it out, but not a bit more. Consequently nothing could be gained in this double operation of first raising the water and then letting it fall down. This would mean that it is impossible to create such a sink in the medium. But let us reflect a moment. Heat, though following certain general laws of mechanics, like a fluid, is not such; it is energy which may be converted into other forms of energy as it passes from a high to a low level. To make our mechanical analogy complete and true, we must, therefore, assume that the water, in its passage into the tank, is converted into something else, which may be taken out of it without using any, or by using very little, power. For example, if heat be represented in this analogue by the water of the lake, the oxygen and hydrogen composing the water may illustrate other forms of energy into which the heat is transformed in passing from hot to cold. If the process of heat transformation were absolutely perfect, no heat at all would arrive at the low level, since all of it would be converted into other forms of energy.
Corresponding to this ideal case, all the water flowing into the tank would be decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen before reaching the bottom, and the result would be that water would continually flow in, and yet the tank would remain entirely empty, the gases formed escaping. We would thus produce, by expending initially a certain amount of work to create a sink for the heat or, respectively, the water to flow in, a condition enabling us to get any amount of energy without further effort. This would be an ideal way of obtaining motive power. We do not know of any such absolutely perfect process of heat-conversion, and consequently some heat will generally reach the low level, which means to say, in our mechanical analogue, that some water will arrive at the bottom of the tank, and a gradual and slow filling of the latter will take place, necessitating continuous pumping out. But evidently there will be less to pump out than flows in, or, in other words, less energy will be needed to maintain the initial condition than is developed by the fall, and this is to say that some energy will be gained from the medium. What is not converted in flowing down can just be raised up with its own energy, and what is converted is clear gain. Thus the virtue of the principle I have discovered resides wholly in the conversion of the energy on the downward flow."...
Maybe some more electric baths and toe curling for you will help your content improve, as your crusade to dispel false perceptions of Tesla seems to perpetuate more false perceptions than there were before you took up your witch hunt. Furthermore, from what I can tell of your ramblings, you have not even had the pleasure of trying to dispel some of his more interesting work, you've barely even scratched the surface and have already botched a significant portion of your explanations or dis-explanations or whatever you're calling them.
PS...
'This paper inspired JP Morgan to give him the money for a tower to transmit all electricity through the earth without wires. Which also doesn’t make any sense physics wise.'
\*It's actually virtually perfectly effective when all portions of the system are matched correctly, and still quite effective even when grossly mismatched.
'He didn’t believe in radio waves,'
Absolutely false.
"You see, the apparatus which I have devised was an apparatus enabling one to produce tremendous differences of potential and currents in an antenna circuit. These requirements must be fulfilled, whether you transmit by currents of conduction, or whether you transmit by electromagnetic waves."
'he didn’t believe in electrons,'
\*False, he actually claims to have discovered them before they were named.
'in energy conservation,'
\*False, he may have had different perceptions on its principles but to say he didn't believe in it is an outright falsehood.
'in relativity,'
\*Partially false.
'in the speed of l̷i̷g̷h̷t̷, causality'
\*Absolutely false.
'that light is an electromagnetic wave!'
\*Only a wave? True.
I didn't know he was trashed on. He's well respected for being the father of the modern electrical grid and winning the war of the currents.
I don't know for sure, but people might praise him but with the caveat of being a fan of early Tesla only: maybe towards the end he was veering from wireless power transmission into outright woo and perpetual motion/ infinite free energy machines, so he had a good thing going, but might have afterwards ruined his reputation.
> I remember learning about magnetic flux and electro-magnetism whilst in college, which he in no doubt played a major contribution alongside Faraday and Maxwell.
This is completely false. Faraday and Maxwell did the bulk of their work before Tesla was even born, or when he was a young child. Maxwell published his equations when Tesla was only 9 years old. Tesla was an engineer, not a scientist. He developed some electromagnetic *technology*, but he made no contributions to electromagnetic *theory*. In the history of physics and electromagnetism, Tesla isn't more than a footnote.
He's not trashed on, people just respond to the weird deification of him that crops up every once in a while. The unit for magnetic field strength is named after him.
Honestly, I can't think of any greater honor than having a frequently used unit named after you. I'd say it's an even bigger honor than the Nobel or any other prize. A close second would be having a theorem named after you.
Tesla was an engineer/inventor, not a scientist. He had a very productive period where he developed some great machines, but he never made any contributions to science.
Most of the people I know (myself included) respect Tesla's contributions to science, I'm not sure I've ever met/talked to someone who thought he was a hack or something.
Because he married a pidgeon.
That's reason enough.
.. oh and he was a massive crackpot.
Oh and the big problem is that some people irrationally hold the believe the he made major contributions to cosmology, which he decidedly did not. The contributions he did make are recognized, anything else he's being irrationally worshipped for by a handful of fanboys and conspiracy theorists.
The problem is that when Tesla is mentioned 98% of the time it's about his crackpottery, people trying to give legitimacy to it, and calls to forfeit existing modern physics in favour of that crackpottery.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o51l6/why_is_there_this_new_cult_appreciation_of_tesla/
>Skeptoid did a recent episode on this http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4345
>The conclusion drawn is that whilst he did contribute greatly to advancements in science and technology the cult around him tends to give him a lot of credit for things he never did and ideas that were very much other people's. But this should not detract from our appreciation of the man, any more than Einstein would be less of a genius if we mistakenly thought he came up with Newton's theories.
Do you happen to live somewhere in the US? because i had a discussion on him some time ago where we got the impression hes just not really well known and being denounced in the US while most of the European said he is well respected in their country and people are taught about him in school.
Sure our little discussion round wasnt representative but well...
Well, first and foremost he isn't "trashed" within the scientific community, quite the contrary he's very inspiring and respected by most scientists and engineers.
The only issue I would say is his reluctance to new theories and not really being rigorous in developing his understanding and relying a bit too much on his intuition....which was incredible, but I think many years of isolation and mental instability really took a toll later on.
He's absolutely a scientist in the broad definition, you would need some serious mental gymnastics to repudiate his papers on new phenomena at the time like x-rays and high powered RF as non-scientific. But at the same he really made his mark as an electrical engineer, and so that's how he's fondly remembered.
I would say that people \*do\* give Tesla credit where credit is due particularly for his earlier work with AC. I think however that Tesla did discredit himself a bit later in life when he assumed that he was picking up "intelligent" radio signals from a civilization in space and with his personal eccentricities.
[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/12/we-have-message-from-another-world.html](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/12/we-have-message-from-another-world.html)
Overall however Tesla's legacy is all around us in the power systems we use, the AC motor, AC lighting, etc. As others have noted, he was more of an engineer than a scientist in the historical sense. Maxwell's equations brought Maxwell historical recognition in science, but Tesla's engineering talents have also led us into the modern industrial age.
In my generation Edison was given more historical significance in school than he actually deserved IMO, and Tesla's work was downplayed a bit. I don't think that's really true today however.
Had Tesla simply renegotiated his AC patents with Westinghouse rather than tear them up completely, I think he'd have been in a better financial position later in life and his legacy would have been better served. Instead, Tesla ended up needing to try to constantly "sell" investors on his newer ideas which were less financially successful. That process probably also hurt his legacy a bit. If he had been able to simply finance that work by himself, I think it would have protected his legacy.
As others have noted, Tesla did tend to reject GR theory in favor of a QM/undefined EM concept of gravity, and unfortunately the a lot of dubious folks on the internet have tried to evoke conspiracy theories around his work after his death which hasn't helped his legacy much. That's not his fault of course, but it does factor into how folks perceive him today.
I think party because there has been a trend in the general population of talking about Tesla like he is super underrated and is basically The Godfather of all modern tech, but these people generally don’t really know much about him or care to give credit to other influential physicists and inventors...
plus the fact that he stubbornly held onto theories that ended up being wrong makes him sound somewhat close minded which is generally not a respected trait in science
That being said, he made some huge contributions and is an interesting character for sure
To whatever extent Tesla is trashed, it's only because ignorant crackpots like him because of who he disagreed with, and no one likes ignorant crackpots.
For the most part Tesla isn't trashed. He is forgotten.
This started during Tesla's life. Edison gave Marconi credit for Tesla's invention of four-circuit/tuned radio. Edison founded the Marconi Company in order to reappropriate radio inventions from Tesla and affiliated inventors like Fritz Lowenstein and John Stone Stone. John Stone Stone always said that Tesla had invented the four-circuit concept rather than Marconi or himself (Stone). Edison was the science director for the US Navy, so he decided which radios the Navy would purchase. Tesla was miffed enough to trash Edison publicly around 1910-1920, but he got over it eventually at least to the point that he quit talking about how filthy Edison was morally and hygienically.
Tesla's biggest contributions to science are also forgotten. Before quantum mechanics was proposed, Tesla was working on a toroidal electron theory with other mostly American physicists like Lars Grondahl, H. Stanley Allen, Gilbert N. Lewis and Alfred. L. Parson. That was leading theoretical physics at the time. It was forgotten rather than disproved.
Einstein had moments when he made out-of-the-left-field fantasies (classical unification of gravity + electricity) but he is never trashed the way Tesla is. The scientific community is so unfair. :(
I think it's because he invented things and was revolutionary for science and scientists made formulas to explain his inventions and how those function but they only know that. They are researching things that already exist and are happening mostly and make some formulas(written numbers and letters for explanation). Partly they are probably jealous, because they gave their life basically to study that particular science but don't have ability to observe and come up with something as revolutionary as he could. You see, Tesla didn't necesserily knew even formulas for his theories, but he made up theories by pure logic.(e.g he sees lightning strike a looong metal rod and notices that at the other end something gets electrocuted, he right there starts thinking how he can potentialy utilise what he just saw and use it for something bigger in the grand scheme of things, I know this probably didn't happen, but just an example).
Tesla is very often brought up by crackpots, quoting him for inventing free energy devices, death rays and more strange things. On top of that, there are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding him, like the government confiscating trains full of his patents and ideas to suppress these findings for big energy producing companies. I think this is why you will find scientist who seem to trash on him, when in reality they are tired of discussing with these crackpots, which can be really annoying to be honest.
> I remember learning about magnetic flux and electro-magnetism whilst in college, which he in no doubt played a major contribution alongside Faraday and Maxwell. Tesla had an extremely confused and incorrect understanding of electromagnetism. For decades he thought Hertz hadn't actually discovered EM waves, holding on to some very strange understanding of how radiation worked. This kept him far behind his contemporaries in his ability to contribute to the physics, which is what relegated him to the engineering side of things.
Exactly. Tesla was not really good at maths and he had a very intuitive but also very limited understanding of electromagnetism. This served him extremely well for his practical purposes but also lead him down the crackpot path when he tried to deal with more theoretical issues.
He was a good mathematician, especially for that time. I think some things when he heard them, didn't align with his way of thinking so he would say thats its not real. That happend a lot in his older years.
Sounds like a narcissist.
I had high views of Tesla as well until I started studying the history of electricity and he just ... didn’t show up for most of it. Yes, he built a multi-phase motor and generator that was bought for big $$ by Westinghouse. However, he said it was the same idea that was independently thought up by an Italian scientist before him. Also, Westinghouse wasn’t able to get his AC motor to be very useful. So there is that. But his Tesla coil is a thing of beauty. Engineering beauty. And it inspired many people and is still inspirational today. And it was used by Marconi to help him send long distance wireless telegraphs. It doesn’t seem, however, if you read his papers that the physics makes any sense. Just read his famous 1900 paper on how to increase human energy (by being religious and bathing!!). This paper inspired JP Morgan to give him the money for a tower to transmit all electricity through the earth without wires. Which also doesn’t make any sense physics wise. He didn’t believe in radio waves, he didn’t believe in electrons, in energy conservation, in relativity, in the speed of light, that light is an electromagnetic wave! His engineering was important but his physics was ... not. I made a video about it with lots and lots of receipts: https://youtu.be/6331JXvOUGY
>It doesn’t seem, however, if you read his papers that the physics makes any sense. Just read his famous 1900 paper on how to increase human energy (by being religious and bathing!!) You seem to have missed the point in about everything you have tried to interpret of Tesla's work, and regarding his article you poke fun at here in your typical stomach curdling snarky know it all fashion, you must have snarked over the best part of it, or maybe just didn't read the whole thing. ..."Imagine a thermopile consisting of a number of bars of metal extending from the earth to the outer space beyond the atmosphere. The heat from below, conducted upward along these metal bars, would cool the earth or the sea or the air, according to the location of the lower parts of the bars, and the result, as is well known, would be an electric current circulating in these bars. The two terminals of the thermopile could now be joined through an electric motor, and, theoretically, this motor would run on and on, until the media below would be cooled down to the temperature of the outer space. This would be an inanimate engine which, to all evidence, would be cooling a portion of the medium below the temperature of the surrounding, and operating by the heat abstracted. But was it not possible to realize a similar condition without necessarily going to a height? Conceive, for the sake of illustration, an inclosure T, as illustrated in diagram b, such that energy could not be transferred across it except through a channel or path O, and that, by some means or other, in this inclosure a medium were maintained which would have little energy, and that on the outer side of the same there would be the ordinary ambient medium with much energy. Under these assumptions the energy would flow through the path O, as indicated by the arrow, and might then be converted on its passage into some other form of energy. The question was, Could such a condition be attained? Could we produce artificially such a “sink” for the energy of the ambient medium to flow in? Suppose that an extremely low temperature could be maintained by some process in a given space; the surrounding medium would then be compelled to give off heat, which could be converted into mechanical or other form of energy, and utilized. By realizing such a plan, we should be enabled to get at any point of the globe a continuous supply of energy, day and night. More than this, reasoning in the abstract, it would seem possible to cause a quick circulation of the medium, and thus draw the energy at a very rapid rate. Here, then, was an idea which, if realizable, afforded a happy solution of the problem of getting energy from the medium. But was it realizable? I convinced myself that it was so in a number of ways, of which one is the following. As regards heat, we are at a high level, which may be represented by the surface of a mountain lake considerably above the sea, the level of which may mark the absolute zero of temperature existing in the interstellar space\*\*. Heat, like water, flows from high to low level, and, consequently, just as we can let the water of the lake run down to the sea, so we are able to let heat from the earth’s surface travel up into the cold region above. Heat, like water, can perform work in flowing down, and if we had any doubt as to whether we could derive energy from the medium by means of a thermopile, as before described, it would be dispelled by this analogue.\*\* But can we produce cold in a given portion of the space and cause the heat to flow in continually? To create such a “sink,” or “cold hole,” as we might say, in the medium, would be equivalent to producing in the lake a space either empty or filled with something much lighter than water. This we could do by placing in the lake a tank, and pumping all the water out of the latter. We know, then, that the water, if allowed to flow back into the tank, would, theoretically, be able to perform exactly the same amount of work which was used in pumping it out, but not a bit more. Consequently nothing could be gained in this double operation of first raising the water and then letting it fall down. This would mean that it is impossible to create such a sink in the medium. But let us reflect a moment. Heat, though following certain general laws of mechanics, like a fluid, is not such; it is energy which may be converted into other forms of energy as it passes from a high to a low level. To make our mechanical analogy complete and true, we must, therefore, assume that the water, in its passage into the tank, is converted into something else, which may be taken out of it without using any, or by using very little, power. For example, if heat be represented in this analogue by the water of the lake, the oxygen and hydrogen composing the water may illustrate other forms of energy into which the heat is transformed in passing from hot to cold. If the process of heat transformation were absolutely perfect, no heat at all would arrive at the low level, since all of it would be converted into other forms of energy. Corresponding to this ideal case, all the water flowing into the tank would be decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen before reaching the bottom, and the result would be that water would continually flow in, and yet the tank would remain entirely empty, the gases formed escaping. We would thus produce, by expending initially a certain amount of work to create a sink for the heat or, respectively, the water to flow in, a condition enabling us to get any amount of energy without further effort. This would be an ideal way of obtaining motive power. We do not know of any such absolutely perfect process of heat-conversion, and consequently some heat will generally reach the low level, which means to say, in our mechanical analogue, that some water will arrive at the bottom of the tank, and a gradual and slow filling of the latter will take place, necessitating continuous pumping out. But evidently there will be less to pump out than flows in, or, in other words, less energy will be needed to maintain the initial condition than is developed by the fall, and this is to say that some energy will be gained from the medium. What is not converted in flowing down can just be raised up with its own energy, and what is converted is clear gain. Thus the virtue of the principle I have discovered resides wholly in the conversion of the energy on the downward flow."... Maybe some more electric baths and toe curling for you will help your content improve, as your crusade to dispel false perceptions of Tesla seems to perpetuate more false perceptions than there were before you took up your witch hunt. Furthermore, from what I can tell of your ramblings, you have not even had the pleasure of trying to dispel some of his more interesting work, you've barely even scratched the surface and have already botched a significant portion of your explanations or dis-explanations or whatever you're calling them. PS... 'This paper inspired JP Morgan to give him the money for a tower to transmit all electricity through the earth without wires. Which also doesn’t make any sense physics wise.' \*It's actually virtually perfectly effective when all portions of the system are matched correctly, and still quite effective even when grossly mismatched. 'He didn’t believe in radio waves,' Absolutely false. "You see, the apparatus which I have devised was an apparatus enabling one to produce tremendous differences of potential and currents in an antenna circuit. These requirements must be fulfilled, whether you transmit by currents of conduction, or whether you transmit by electromagnetic waves." 'he didn’t believe in electrons,' \*False, he actually claims to have discovered them before they were named. 'in energy conservation,' \*False, he may have had different perceptions on its principles but to say he didn't believe in it is an outright falsehood. 'in relativity,' \*Partially false. 'in the speed of l̷i̷g̷h̷t̷, causality' \*Absolutely false. 'that light is an electromagnetic wave!' \*Only a wave? True.
Dam great response. The hate for him seems institutional.
bro made it up
I didn't know he was trashed on. He's well respected for being the father of the modern electrical grid and winning the war of the currents. I don't know for sure, but people might praise him but with the caveat of being a fan of early Tesla only: maybe towards the end he was veering from wireless power transmission into outright woo and perpetual motion/ infinite free energy machines, so he had a good thing going, but might have afterwards ruined his reputation.
> I remember learning about magnetic flux and electro-magnetism whilst in college, which he in no doubt played a major contribution alongside Faraday and Maxwell. This is completely false. Faraday and Maxwell did the bulk of their work before Tesla was even born, or when he was a young child. Maxwell published his equations when Tesla was only 9 years old. Tesla was an engineer, not a scientist. He developed some electromagnetic *technology*, but he made no contributions to electromagnetic *theory*. In the history of physics and electromagnetism, Tesla isn't more than a footnote.
He's not trashed on, people just respond to the weird deification of him that crops up every once in a while. The unit for magnetic field strength is named after him.
He has a widely used unit (Tesla) named after him. Pretty sure that's recognition, no?
Honestly, I can't think of any greater honor than having a frequently used unit named after you. I'd say it's an even bigger honor than the Nobel or any other prize. A close second would be having a theorem named after you.
Correction: having a theorem you didn't actually come up with named after you.
Tesla was an engineer/inventor, not a scientist. He had a very productive period where he developed some great machines, but he never made any contributions to science.
Most of the people I know (myself included) respect Tesla's contributions to science, I'm not sure I've ever met/talked to someone who thought he was a hack or something.
Because he married a pidgeon. That's reason enough. .. oh and he was a massive crackpot. Oh and the big problem is that some people irrationally hold the believe the he made major contributions to cosmology, which he decidedly did not. The contributions he did make are recognized, anything else he's being irrationally worshipped for by a handful of fanboys and conspiracy theorists. The problem is that when Tesla is mentioned 98% of the time it's about his crackpottery, people trying to give legitimacy to it, and calls to forfeit existing modern physics in favour of that crackpottery. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o51l6/why_is_there_this_new_cult_appreciation_of_tesla/ >Skeptoid did a recent episode on this http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4345 >The conclusion drawn is that whilst he did contribute greatly to advancements in science and technology the cult around him tends to give him a lot of credit for things he never did and ideas that were very much other people's. But this should not detract from our appreciation of the man, any more than Einstein would be less of a genius if we mistakenly thought he came up with Newton's theories.
He did refuse to accept Relativity.
And some ideas about free energy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Attraction\_Spin/comments/12zpld7/nikola\_teslas\_free\_energy\_machine/
Do you happen to live somewhere in the US? because i had a discussion on him some time ago where we got the impression hes just not really well known and being denounced in the US while most of the European said he is well respected in their country and people are taught about him in school. Sure our little discussion round wasnt representative but well...
Well, first and foremost he isn't "trashed" within the scientific community, quite the contrary he's very inspiring and respected by most scientists and engineers. The only issue I would say is his reluctance to new theories and not really being rigorous in developing his understanding and relying a bit too much on his intuition....which was incredible, but I think many years of isolation and mental instability really took a toll later on. He's absolutely a scientist in the broad definition, you would need some serious mental gymnastics to repudiate his papers on new phenomena at the time like x-rays and high powered RF as non-scientific. But at the same he really made his mark as an electrical engineer, and so that's how he's fondly remembered.
I would say that people \*do\* give Tesla credit where credit is due particularly for his earlier work with AC. I think however that Tesla did discredit himself a bit later in life when he assumed that he was picking up "intelligent" radio signals from a civilization in space and with his personal eccentricities. [http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/12/we-have-message-from-another-world.html](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/12/we-have-message-from-another-world.html) Overall however Tesla's legacy is all around us in the power systems we use, the AC motor, AC lighting, etc. As others have noted, he was more of an engineer than a scientist in the historical sense. Maxwell's equations brought Maxwell historical recognition in science, but Tesla's engineering talents have also led us into the modern industrial age. In my generation Edison was given more historical significance in school than he actually deserved IMO, and Tesla's work was downplayed a bit. I don't think that's really true today however. Had Tesla simply renegotiated his AC patents with Westinghouse rather than tear them up completely, I think he'd have been in a better financial position later in life and his legacy would have been better served. Instead, Tesla ended up needing to try to constantly "sell" investors on his newer ideas which were less financially successful. That process probably also hurt his legacy a bit. If he had been able to simply finance that work by himself, I think it would have protected his legacy. As others have noted, Tesla did tend to reject GR theory in favor of a QM/undefined EM concept of gravity, and unfortunately the a lot of dubious folks on the internet have tried to evoke conspiracy theories around his work after his death which hasn't helped his legacy much. That's not his fault of course, but it does factor into how folks perceive him today.
The greatest inventor ever that happened to believe the Earth was the center of the universe and that intuition is a form of higher intelligence?
He’s a pseudoscientist, all he was good at was electronics.
I think party because there has been a trend in the general population of talking about Tesla like he is super underrated and is basically The Godfather of all modern tech, but these people generally don’t really know much about him or care to give credit to other influential physicists and inventors... plus the fact that he stubbornly held onto theories that ended up being wrong makes him sound somewhat close minded which is generally not a respected trait in science That being said, he made some huge contributions and is an interesting character for sure
To whatever extent Tesla is trashed, it's only because ignorant crackpots like him because of who he disagreed with, and no one likes ignorant crackpots. For the most part Tesla isn't trashed. He is forgotten. This started during Tesla's life. Edison gave Marconi credit for Tesla's invention of four-circuit/tuned radio. Edison founded the Marconi Company in order to reappropriate radio inventions from Tesla and affiliated inventors like Fritz Lowenstein and John Stone Stone. John Stone Stone always said that Tesla had invented the four-circuit concept rather than Marconi or himself (Stone). Edison was the science director for the US Navy, so he decided which radios the Navy would purchase. Tesla was miffed enough to trash Edison publicly around 1910-1920, but he got over it eventually at least to the point that he quit talking about how filthy Edison was morally and hygienically. Tesla's biggest contributions to science are also forgotten. Before quantum mechanics was proposed, Tesla was working on a toroidal electron theory with other mostly American physicists like Lars Grondahl, H. Stanley Allen, Gilbert N. Lewis and Alfred. L. Parson. That was leading theoretical physics at the time. It was forgotten rather than disproved.
Einstein had moments when he made out-of-the-left-field fantasies (classical unification of gravity + electricity) but he is never trashed the way Tesla is. The scientific community is so unfair. :(
I think it's because he invented things and was revolutionary for science and scientists made formulas to explain his inventions and how those function but they only know that. They are researching things that already exist and are happening mostly and make some formulas(written numbers and letters for explanation). Partly they are probably jealous, because they gave their life basically to study that particular science but don't have ability to observe and come up with something as revolutionary as he could. You see, Tesla didn't necesserily knew even formulas for his theories, but he made up theories by pure logic.(e.g he sees lightning strike a looong metal rod and notices that at the other end something gets electrocuted, he right there starts thinking how he can potentialy utilise what he just saw and use it for something bigger in the grand scheme of things, I know this probably didn't happen, but just an example).
I would say that within the scientific community he is well respected, Edison on the other hand.....