how the modern era was different
where did those new ideas come from?

tradition became weaker

• people's lives were changing--this had started with the industrial resolution but was getting faster
• people were no longer living the same life as their parents and grandparents
• some people rejected modernism and determined to follow traditional ways of life
• modernism is a world view: let's figure out the most efficient way of doing things and not worry about tradition
• people saw all around them a break with the past, mostly from new technologies
  

• technology changed people's lives--technological progress was speeding up--but that was because people accepted it
  
• some people get excited about progress
• where does progress come from? 
  
• abandonment of old ideas (Einstein)
  
• developments in science--science reached the point of being a source of new technology (Tesla)
  
• business emphasis on profit and the realization that new products were a good business strategy (Edison)
  
• consumer interest in things that were new
• at the time people thought the explanation for faster progress was geniuses (but fear as well)
  
• fear of the power that the new science and technology gave us
  

• Seeing a changing world, people became obsessed with the idea of genius
• this was a way of making sense of change--the world is changing because some geniuses were born
• individual inventors were more important then (while most inventions today come from research labs)
• looking back, science and new ways of organizing innovation were making faster change possible

• we want more and more power and knowledge, we aren't content with what we have (Faust)
• people think of the Faustian bargain as selling your soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power
• but in fact in the famous play Faust by Goethe, Faust makes a bet with the devil that no matter how much knowledge and power the devil gives to Faust, he will never be satisfied (but then he loses the bet because he falls in love and says he is satisfied)
  
• as a result of the scientific revolution (Galileo, Newton) people thought that they could straightforwardly understand and control nature; "modern" begins when people realize it isn't going to be so easy
  
• Step 1: Edison used step-by-step research and trial and error
  
• Step 2: Tesla used scientific theory to come up with things more completely new
  
• Step 3: Einstein changed the very framework of reality

• was born 1847, the last of 7 children, educated at home
• the telegraph had come into use as a means of communication (send Morse code over a wire) came into use in the 1850s
  
• At 16 got a job as a telegrapher--wandered around for five years taking jobs in different areas and playing with the machines
• In 1868 he gave up his job and set out to be an inventor
• first patent--vote recording machine--did not sell.  Lesson--demand

vote recording machine, Henry Ford Museum, PEM photo

• moved from Boston to NY and got a job on Wall Street.  Improved stock ticker (1869) and worked on duplex and quadraplex telegraphs (multiple messages on one wire)
• By age 29 he was successful enough to set up a shop solely devoted to invention.
• improved Alexander Graham Bell's telephone (Bell and Elisha Gray invented the same thing but Bell saw the potential, while Gray, a professional telegraph inventor, did not)
• Edison's next invention was the phonograph in 1878 (samples)--not a big money-maker but gave him a reputation as a wizard that helped him raise venture capital.
• Meanwhile he was setting up an invention system, hiring mechanics, mathematicians, and eager young inventors. He called his new shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey an "invention factory" and promised a "minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so."  ( Edison's patent production, list of patents,   The patent system in Edison's time)  In some ways this lab was a precursor of the industrial research laboratory, except it was an independent invention lab, not part of a large corporation.  

 Thomas Edison

• Gas utility developed in first half of the 19th century was meeting the need for household light--Edison explicitly set out to compete.
• The arc light was in use for public places, street lighting, and search lights, after the invention of a practical dynamo about 1870, but was not practical for the home.  Edison saw the challenge was to subdivide the light.  It was known that incandescent light was a potential solution, but no one had been able to make it work (the filament either melted or burned up)
• scientists said that connecting light bulbs in parallel was impossible
• Edison realized he needed all the parts of the system--improved vacuum pump, efficient dynamo, wiring systems (and the practicalities of that meant that the filament had to have high resistance), meters .
• The hardest problem to solve was the filament--at first Edison thought he could regulate current to a platinum filament so it wouldn't melt.  Edison announced he was close to success--stock prices for gas light companies fell.  Edison organized the Edison Electric Light Company, backed by investors such as J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts.  But the platinum filament approach didn't work, despite struggles to find a solution through the middle of 1879.
• Edison had to resort to hiring a Princeton-trained physicist (Francis Upton) to help him and eventually (Oct. 1879) to trial and error of over two thousand materials.  Finally found a new approach that worked better--carbon instead of platinum.  Edison's patent
• On New Years Eve 1879 he put on a big display for press and backers-- got lots of publicity .
• in 1882 he completed the first commercial system--Pearl Street Station ( consequences )

 Generators at Pearl Street Station

• Thompson-Houston arc light company and George Westinghouse, who had invented the railway air brake in 1869.
• Westinghouse realized that high voltage would transmit further and that if you used alternating current you could transform it down again for safety.
• Edison fought bitterly against the AC approach--for one thing he didn't have the necessary knowledge of mathematics.
• Thompson-Houston went to AC and was able to take control of Edison's company in 1892--became GE

• Edison argued that AC was too dangerous and arranged public demonstrations where stray cats and dogs (purchased from local schoolboys for 25 cents each) were electrocuted.  He even executed an elephant (video)
• A lot of publicity was carried out not by Edison but by a man named Harold Brown, who had the support of Edison and the technical help of some of Edison's associates.
• In 1888 New York state changed the death penalty from hanging (which sometimes didn't work well) to electrocution, and Edison and his associates lobbied for the selection of an alternating current design.
• Westinghouse funded appeals by some prisoners who argued that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment.
• In 1890 Auburn State Prison used the first electric chair to execute a convicted murderer, using Westinghouse alternators.
• "Kemmler was strapped into the chair on August 6, 1890. The first jolt of alternating current lasted 17 seconds. Kemmler continued struggling. A second jolt lasted more than a minute, until smoke was seen rising from the body.  It was, The New York Times said, 'an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging.'  The state commissioner on humane executions saw it differently. It was, he said, 'the grandest success of the age.' " source,  more information on the history of the electric chair, another story

 Artist's rendering of Kemmler's execution

• he was an inventor-entrepreneur--good at business
• he thought out the whole system rather than just inventing one gadget
• he was good at finding something useful to do with the results of a failed experiment (1093 patents)
• he also had a particular talent for publicity
• he is developing the model of how business can succeed be continuously developing new and improved products
• Edison's method is mostly trial and error, not theory
  

Early life:

• born in 1856 in what is now Croatia
• his father was a pastor and wanted Nikola to joint the clergy
• Nikola loved math and physics and when he finished higher Real Gymnasium (high school) persuaded his father to send him to a polytechnic school in Austria
• he left school in 1878 without finishing his degree (he set off a university in Prague but decided to quit and relieve his parents of the financial burden of his education).
• He worked as an electrician for a telephone company run by a family friend for four years and then when that disbanded for the Continental Edison Company in Paris.

• he had been thinking about a problem with electric motors, and he had an idea for a solution while strolling in a city park in Prague with a friend reciting Goethe's Faust (Tesla was recovering from a nervous breakdown at the time)
• he thought that some of the technical drawbacks of DC motors (sparking and the rapid wearing out of brushes) could be solved with an AC electric motor--he imagined in his mind a motor that needed no contact to carry the current to the moving parts
• he couldn't find backers so he moved to the U.S. in 1884 with a letter of recommendation from the manager of the Paris Edison company to Edison

• Telsa worked for a year for Edison on DC motors and voltage regulators (he left because he didn't get a bonus he had expected).  Tesla on Thomas A. Edison: "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor." (New York Times, October 19, 1931)
• Then developed an improved arc light system for a group of NJ businessmen.  That was successful, but the businessmen bought him out and he was left without a proper job and ended up digging ditches.  His foreman heard he had an idea for an electrical motor and put him in touch with some investors.
• finally in 1887 he found backers in NY to finance a Tesla Electric Company to develop his AC motor.  he quickly perfected a promising new system of AC power generation, transmission, and utilization, called polyphase, leading to 7 patents in 1888.  Polyphase uses two alternating currents, 90 degrees out of phase with each other, to power two electromagnets, creating a rotating field.  This induces a current in the armature, avoiding the connections that caused so much problems in DC motors.  Tesla did the necessary development to make his initial invention practical.

 Tesla inventions

• Westinghouse, who had previously invented an air brake for steam locomotives, had gotten interested in AC.  He initially bought an Italian transformer and a German AC generator (alternator) and began developing an AC incandescent lighting system that would transmit AC power at high voltages to reduce transmission losses.
• Westinghouse and his staff developed more efficient transformers and alternators and marketed a very successful system--by 1891 Westinghouse was one of the three leading firms in electric lighting in the U.S.
• Meanwhile electric motors (DC) were coming into use in streetcars, and Westinghouse didn't have an AC motor for his system.
• Westinghouse bought Tesla's design: he paid $75,00 and $2.50/hp royalty that promised $30,000 the first three years and $15,000 in each succeeding year, and also hired Tesla.  Demonstrated the system at the 1893 Worlds Fair.
• Trouble was, Tesla had trouble adapting his motor to Westinghouse's AC lighting system, which used only single phase current.
• Everyone got discouraged: Tesla left Westinghouse in 1889 and work on the motor was abandoned for three years.  Then Westinghouse decided to go with polyphase, and developed Tesla's whole system, particularly for use at Niagara Falls.  A new more mathematically inclined generation of school-trained electrical engineers worked out the new systems.

• He then began investigating high-frequency, high-potential currents from a resonant transformer coil that later became known as the Tesla coil .  The Tesla coil is most fundamentally a new kind of transformer that uses a spark gap to transform a low-voltage, low-frequency current into a high-voltage, high-frequency one.   He found this intellectually appealing, but it was not a solution to an existing need.
• he patented the idea but did not seek commercial applications--instead he gave lectures about a new field of research.  These generated a lot of excitement for a while, in 1893 at a convention of the National Electric Light Association in St. Louis 5000 people attended his lecture.   He could light phosphorescent gas-filled tubes without any wired connection.
• He was doing something closer to engineering science than invention, but he tended to present it in language that was more romantic than scientific.

 Tesla in Colorodo

• He dreamed big--the Tesla coil generated radio frequencies but Tesla wanted to use it to transmit not just information but power.
  • He visualized a huge Tesla coil that would transmit electrical power anywhere on the planet.
  • In 1899 he ran a pilot project in Colorado Springs where he generated sparks up to 135 feet long and conjectured that he transmitted electricity to the Indian ocean (meaning a traveler there could have illuminated a phosphorescent tube).   The transmitted energy also knocked out the Colorado Springs power station and caused it to catch on fire. (source)
  • In Colorado Springs, Tesla made what he regarded as his most important discovery-- terrestrial stationary waves . By this discovery he proved that the Earth could be used as a conductor and would be as responsive as a tuning fork to electrical vibrations of a certain frequency.
  • He intended this to lead to a World Wireless Power system .   He lighted 200 lamps without wires from a distance of 25 miles (40 kilometres). At one time he was certain he had received signals from another planet in his Colorado laboratory, a claim that was met with derision in some scientific journals.
• in 1896 he lost his royalty from Westinghouse:GE and Westinghouse pooled their polyphase and railway patents in an attempt to raise the electrical industry out of an economic slump and Tesla was pressured into relinquishing his motor royalty.
• to replace the income he started to seek a commercial market for the Tesla coil.  He got $150,000 from J.P. Morgan in 1900 for a wireless telegraphy plant, and proceeded to developed a power station on Long Island , that did not turn into an operating plant for either radio or power transmission.

 Tesla's Long Island Station

• he devised a scheme to broadcast electric power without wires using the Tesla coil, but he couldn't get support to develop it
• People did not even really understand his concept of broadcasting power--at this point radio is only used for point to point.

• he had always been eccentric, and became more so (read his Autobiography here )
• wrote articles for the popular press to advance ideas of the future of electricity
• died in 1943 at the age of 86, penniless and relatively unrecognized
• now he is a hero on the web
• some conspiracy theorists think Tesla discovered a way to cause earthquakes that is being used as a secret weapon
  

• special relativity--if  you go fast enough (very fast--close to the speed of light) time behaves oddly, so if you traveled in a spaceship to a nearby star at a speed close to the speed of light you might come back having lived two years to find that 10 years had passed at home.
• general relativity--gravity actually bends space and causes the same kinds of effects on time as traveling rapidly.  This effect is very small unless you have a very very strong gravitational field (like from a black hole), but it is possible to observe (during a solar eclipse) that the light of a distant star is very slightly bent as it goes past the sun.
• science isn't common sense any more, in fact the world turns out to work in ways that don't make intuitive sense at all
  

relativity, by M.C. Escher

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This page written and copyright Pamela E. Mack
HIST 1220
last updated 10/2/23

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