2-12-18
issues in these chapters:
- business strategy
- what happened with Tesla's
motor?
- so is Tesla's new research
radio or not?
Tesla's backers followed a patent
strategy of selling or licensing his patents, not starting their
own manufacturing company
patent-promote-sell strategy
key to this was promoting them
Tesla lectured to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers
in May 1888
- mix of physics professors
interested in electricity and practicing engineers
- formal engineering education
is just replacing apprenticeship
- professional societies are
making engineering more scientific
Tesla was interested in ideal
technologies, but he wasn't a scientist, he was interested in
doing things (at least in theory) more than in how the universe
works
Westinghouse was interested in Tesla's patents
a Westinghouse engineer--Shallenberger--had overlapping ideas
but discovered that Galileo Ferraris (a physics professor in
Italy) had published the idea of a motor based on a rotating
magnetic field, though he didn't think it would be practical
if the idea was known before Tesla patented it then Tesla's
patents would be thrown out
Westinghouse did buy Tesla's patents and Tesla went to
Pittsburgh to work out problems for manufacturing
Westinghouse wanted a motor that would work on his existing
single phase system so Tesla worked on split phase designs
Tesla left after a year because of design decisions he didn't
agree with
he wanted to do things his way
Westinghouse leaves the polyphase motor design on the shelf
after some travel he returned to New York to work in a new area:
high frequency
1887 Hertz detected the electromagnetic waves predicted by James
Clerk Maxwell
this led eventually to radio, but no one is imagining that yet
Tesla
started building high frequency AC systems
(much higher than the 60 cycles we use today)
he realized there were ways to get even faster oscillation of
the electrical current
he was interested in transmitting electricity through the air
lighting light bulbs not connected to any wire
but he thought that the effect was more electric fields than
electromagnetic waves
