The Indic Mathematical Tradition 6000 BCE To ?

[Husky]

Still on the western habit of crediting the wrong people and how actual originals get shortchanged.



This post is about a matter I'm sure everyone already knows, but still:

real genius Tesla vs management-type Edison (can ya tell I don't like people who do MBAs and are in "management")



Nikola Tesla was a Serb, born in the Serb-majority "Military Frontier" of the Austrian empire, in an area that is now in Croatia, and from where the catholic Croatians have repeatedly ethnically cleansed the Serbs all the way down to the mid-1990s (so Nikola Tesla is lucky he and his orthodox christian family didn't live in his birth-place in the turbulent 20th century, else they'd have been ethnically cleansed aka genocided along with the other Serbs there by the catholics.

[color="#0000FF"]ADDED:[/color] Meanwhile, you can see the catholic Croatians - and suddenly even islamic Albanians - try to claim a part or even all of the Serb Tesla on this wacky page. Sort of like christoislamics try to claim all things Hindu, or the way islamaniacs in Malaysia claim a Hindu posthumously to have been a muslim and try to grab his body for an islamic burial, claim all of his achievements and try to forcibly convert his family. Typical christoislamic tactic.

BTW, it's not "bickering over merely petty things" to finally have recognition for a people - and especially so when said people (Serbs in this case) have frequently been genocided by catholicism and islamania, with this genocide then whitewashed and negated first by communism and then by western christendom/US, with the US usually re-arming the genocidal maniacs for round 2 and 3 against the victim population.)





Tesla had migrated to the US, where he was persecuted in a different manner:



It's better to read the stuff at the links themselves, since there's highlighting, useful links in the body of the texts and images.

And link 3 is full of images containing text which I can't easily reproduce here, but it is a must read as it explains how Edison wasn't the father of the lightbulb (he had minions to come up with ideas for him, and like typical management people - who are the most uninnovative people on the planet and can only parasite on other people's genius, Edison is only famous for filing patents of these his minions' inventions).

[color="#0000FF"]1. badassoftheweek.com/tesla.html

2. listverse.com/2012/06/07/10-ways-edison-treated-tesla-like-a-jerk/

3. theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla[/color]

1. badassoftheweek.com/tesla.html

The Badass of the Week.





Nikola Tesla



Pretty much everybody even remotely associated with real-time strategy games has heard the name Tesla before - the Serbian God of Lightning's omnipresent, ever-zapping coils have been ruining the lives of digital Allied soldiers and gibbing U.S. war machines into spare parts since the release of Command & Conquer: Red Alert in 1996 - but surprisingly few people these days are familiar with the life and times of one of humankind's most eccentric, badass, and volumetrically-insane scientific super-geniuses.



First off, Nikola Tesla was brilliant. And not just like Ken Jennings brilliant, either - I mean like, "holy crap my head just exploded (from all the awesome)" brilliant. The Croatian-born engineer spoke eight languages, almost single-handedly developed technology that [color="#0000FF"]harnessed the power of electricity for household use, and invented things like electrical generators, FM radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights, and giant-ass machines that shoot enormous, brain-frying lightning bolts all over the place like crazy. He had an unyielding, steel-trap photographic memory and an insane ability to visualize even the most complex pieces of machinery - the guy did advanced calculus and physics equations in his damn head, memorized entire books at a time, and successfully pulled off scientific experiments that modern-day technology STILL can't replicate. For instance, in 2007 a group of lesser geniuses at MIT got all pumped up out of their minds because they wirelessly transmitted energy a distance seven feet through the air. Nikola Tesla once lit 200 lightbulbs from a power source 26 miles away, and he did it in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts in the middle of the god-forsaken desert. To this day, nobody can really figure out how the hell he pulled that shit off, because two-thirds of the schematics only existed in the darkest recesses of Tesla's all-powerful brain.[/color]



Of course, much like many other eccentric giga-geniuses and diabolical masterminds, Tesla was also completely insane. He was prone to nervous breakdowns, claimed to receive weird visions in the middle of the night, spoke to pigeons, and occasionally thought he was receiving electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrials on Mars. He was also obsessive-compulsive and hated round objects, human hair, jewelry, and anything that wasn't divisible by three. He was also asexual and celibate for his entire life. Basically, Nikola Tesla was the ultimate mad scientist, which is seriously awesome.



Another sweet thing about Tesla is that he conducted the sort of crazy experiments that generally result in hordes of angry villagers breaking down the door to your lab with torches and pitchforks. [color="#0000FF"]One time, while he was working on magnetic resonance, he discovered the resonant frequency of the Earth and caused an earthquake so powerful that it almost obliterated the 5th Avenue New York building that housed his Frankenstein Castle of a laboratory. Stuff was flying off the walls, the drywall was breaking apart, the cops were coming after him, and Tesla had to smash his device with a sledge hammer to keep it from demolishing an entire city block. Later, he boasted that he could have built a device powerful enough to split the Earth in two. Nobody dared him to prove it.[/color]



Tesla also ordered the construction of the Wardenclyffe Tesla Tower, a giant building shaped like an erect penis that would have housed the largest Tesla coil ever built. The massive structure, ostensibly designed to wirelessly transmit power, has been cited as a potential cause of the mysterious 1908 Tunguska Event � a ten-megaton blast that detonated in the wastelands above central Russia that completely obliterated and deforested everything unlucky enough to be located within a several hundred mile radius. While nothing has ever successfully proven Tesla's involvement in the ass-destroyingly huge explosion, it's pretty awesome that this guy could potentially have detonated a weapon 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and have done it back before they'd even invented the submachine gun.

(Interesting if his research really did result in the Tunguska Event. The hypothesis I heard for what could have caused the event was that it may have been a meteorite impact, though only after-effects/ruins of such an impact were detected, no material from the supposed meteorite itself. It was concluded that it must then have been wholly ice and that this melted away upon impact. IIRC. [Ref: CS-C] Of course it's admitted this was only a hypothesis, since they couldn't really discover what had actually caused it.)



Tesla in his lab.



During his adventures blinding half of the world with science, Nikola Tesla harnessed the power of Niagara Falls into the first hydroelectric power plant, constructed a bath designed to cleanse the human body of germs using nothing but electricity, and created a 130-foot long bolt of lightning from one of his massive coils (a feat which to this day remains the world record for man-made lightning), but perhaps his most badass invention was his face-melting, tank-destroying, super-secret Atomic Death Ray. In the 1920s he claimed to be working on a tower that could potentially have spewed forth a gigantic beam of ionized particles capable of disintegrating aircraft from 200 miles away and blinking most men out of existence like something out of a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers comic. His weapon, known as the "Teleforce Beam", allegedly shot ball lightning at 60 million volts, liquefying its targets with enough power to vaporize steel, and, while it could shoot further than 200 miles, its effectiveness beyond that range was limited only by the curvature of the Earth. Luckily for all humans, this crazy insanity never came to fruition - most of the schematics and plans existed only in Tesla's head, and when he died of heart failure in 1943, little hard data on the project existed. Still, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI confiscated all his personal stuff and locked it away anyways, just to be safe.



Despite being incredibly popular during his day, now Tesla remains largely overlooked among lists of the greatest inventors and scientists of the modern era. Thomas Edison gets all the glory for discovering the lightbulb, but it was his one-time assistant and life-long arch-nemesis, Nikola Tesla, who made the breakthroughs in alternating-current technology that allowed for people to cheaply use electricity to power appliances and lighting in their homes. They constantly fought about whether to use alternating or direct-currents (their bitter blood feud resulted in both men being snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee), but ultimately Tesla was the one who delivered the fatal kick-to-the-crotch that ended the battle � at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, his AC generators illuminated the entire experience, marking the first time that an event of that magnitude had ever taken place under the glow of artificial light. Today, all homes and applicances run on Tesla's AC current.



Nikola Tesla was one of those super-genius badasses whose intellect placed him dangerously on the precipice between "great scientific mind" and "utter madness". He held 700 patents at the time of his death, made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of physics, robotics, steam turbine engineering, and magnetism, and once melted one of his assistants' hands by overloading it with X-rays - which isn't really scientific, but is still pretty cool. And honestly, if there were one man on this planet who was ever capable of single-handedly destroying the entire planet through his insane scientific discoveries, it was Tesla. That alone should qualify him as a pretty righteous badass.

2. listverse.com/2012/06/07/10-ways-edison-treated-tesla-like-a-jerk/

10 Ways Edison Treated Tesla Like a Jerk

Jamie Frater June 7, 2012

Thomas Edison has over a thousand patents in his name. Some of them are even based on his own ideas. But more often than not, he was working off another great innovator’s findings, and tinkering until he produced something that could make a buck or two. He is often praised for having invented a number of household items we take for granted, and couldn’t live without. But considerably less credit is actually given to the genius scientists and inventors who worked under his employ to make him rich (and a household name). One of those men is Nikola Tesla, who got an incredibly short end of the stick, and whose brilliance often goes unacknowledged and under-praised beneath Edison’s blinding overcast. Here are ten ways in which Edison was a real jerk to Tesla.



10 Disrespectful

Towards the end of Edison’s life, he was quoted as saying he wished he respected Tesla and his work more than he had. Too bad, at that point the damage had been done: Tesla died broke and lonely, while Edison died wealthy and with great self-esteem. While they had worked together, Edison had often called his ideas “impractical” or mocked them (if he wasn’t plain threatened by them). It seemed Edison knew that he had this brilliant young mind under his thumb from the moment he came to America to work for him. (At that point he already had a few patents in his name, for devices that operated by rotating magnetic fields.)



9 Driven by Greed

Tesla once criticized Edison by saying in a New York Times interview, “He had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.” Whereas Tesla was an impassioned engineer who seemed to be utterly fascinated by the technical aspects of his work. He had a photographic memory, could memorize entire books, and used to have literal flashes of genius where he’d conceive the solution to a problem, or visualize the detailed schematics of a device he’d yet to invent. Edison insisted on developing (or replicating and patenting) devices that had some practical utility (something that could make him money), never just science for purely science.



8 Mocked Tesla’s Line of Thinking

Not only did he call some of Tesla’s brilliant ideas impractical, or have potential inventions of his shut down, he just didn’t seem to value Tesla’s mind. Tesla, who worked late into the night, remained celibate until his death at 86, was an eccentric and often obsessed over his work. Edison, however, was more socially functional (well, he had a 16-year-old wife, if that counts as proof), and didn’t take Tesla often highly esoteric comments entirely seriously.



7 Took Credit for the Fluoroscope

The fluoroscope – a device for producing X-ray images – is something Tesla had been working on prior to Edison’s pig-headed dabbling. In the process, Edison managed to give his assistant terminal cancer (who had to have his arms removed before he ultimately died), and he almost blinded himself. But he sure got that patent all right.



6 Wouldn’t Pay Up

Edison backed out of paying Tesla $50,000 to fix his DC motor – which Tesla did with great ease. He managed to turn an inefficient device into something incredibly efficient that saved Edison all sorts of money (well more than he agreed to pay Tesla). All he said was that Tesla failed to “understand the American sense of humor” (Tesla was a Serbian immigrant). More like he failed to realize how much of a stingy two-timer Edison was. Edison offered to up his pay from $18 a week to all of $25. Tesla, not a moment too soon (but far too many too late), resigned. Thereafter he wound up digging ditches, before starting his own company and accepting investments to do some experiments in his own right.





5 Meddling Fool

Edison has a Medal Named After Him, Which Tesla Was Awarded. The Edison Medal is presented yearly by a group called IEEE, or the “Institute of Electrical Engineers” (a group of Edison’s friends). It is an outright slap in the face that Edison’s name is paraded by an award in the field (one he is not truly a part of) of which Tesla is an exceptional, shining example. A greater slap in the face still was when Tesla was awarded the Medal in 1916.



4 Early Radar Technology Laughed Off

If Edison hadn’t deemed one of Tesla’s most crucial radio wave-based innovations to be “impractical” back during World War I– when he first proposed plans for such–countless lives could have been saved for having the advantage of being able to detect enemy submarines. Of course it would be actualized until decades later. But just to think of what damage Edison’s ego-driven meddling has cost time and again is infuriating.



3 Fought against Tesla’s AC Power

Simply put Edison (with a few other moguls on his side) didn’t want to see Tesla’s Alternate Current succeed, because it posed a (fiscal) threat to the viability of his Direct Current (which Tesla had previously souped up for him). A bitter public battle took place, with George Westinghouse of the Westinghouse Company on Tesla’s side. Edison sought to use spineless scare tactics to convince the public his AC units weren’t safe. In order to “prove” this “fact,” he had a number of animals electrocuted, including a circus elephant (which was to be put to death for killing a some people). Ultimately, Tesla won this “War of Currents,” only because he indeed had the better power mechanism. Although the current of success swept into a place of high regard, he forewent obscene wealth so as to–in a show of unprecedented humility–save the Westinghouse Company (which would have gone broke with the royalty payments). Instead, Tesla made a few grand by just selling his patents outright. To view the full infographic above, go here.



2 Killed a Man to Prove Tesla Wrong

[color="#0000FF"]Edison was known for his intimidation tactics (e.g. he used to hire a bunch of goons to smash technology and make sure he got his dues for his patents), but never did it get so bad as with his campaign against Tesla; he went so far as to invent the electric chair, using Tesla’s AC power to have a man on death row execute. The event was gruesome and messy, drawn out. George Westinghouse was quoted to have said, “They would have done better using an axe.” And so the first execution by electric chair took place, just to prove Tesla wrong (and preserve Edison’s financial stakes).[/color]

[color="#800080"](The 3rd link also shows how Edison had lots of children's pets electrocuted to scare the masses away from AC, as something deadly.)[/color]



1 Shared Virtually None of His Wealth

Edison was a wealthy man, and always finding new ways to get wealthier. That meant rushing his crude discoveries and unoriginal devices to the patent office to secure his royalties. While Tesla was largely a one man technology-synthesizer, Edison had buildings stocked with brilliant engineers and scientists who did all his bidding, while he took the lion’s share of the revenue for himself. Tesla just happened to be one more sucker to get trapped in his greenhouse of genius, where all he need ask for is a few drops of water and sunlight to churn out unrelenting yields.



Jamie Frater

Jamie is the founder of Listverse. He spends his time working on the site, doing research for new lists, and cooking. He is fascinated with all things morbid and bizarre.

mentalfloss.com/article/30140/acdc-tesla%E2%80%93edison-feud

Tesla on Edison: "If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once, with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. ... I was almost 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 (the day after Edison died)

Compare this insightful statement by Tesla as to Edison's (in)abilities, with the much-praised and parroted statement attributed to Edison of "Genius <or something> is 1% Inspiration and 99% Perspiration". What would that management-type Edison know about genius or inspiration etc anyway? Clearly Edison was talking about 1% inspiration by his many slaves aka "employees" - and the 99% perspiration refers to the work of said slaves too (except when Edison decided to dabble/perspire, on which occasions he could only use brute-force methods - since that's all his regressive 'brain' was ever capable of).

Meanwhile Tesla was largely inspiration, plus the minimum perspiration required - which may still be a lot - to get his ideas implemented.



Don't know what US is like today, but Edison = the typical AmeriKKKan capitalist of that time (which is ultimately the same as the communists, who also crush other people underfoot to get ahead and then hypocritically declare this is all in public interest too. Objectivists similarly walk all over others but announce that 'better' people have the right to do so and that there's no such thing as public interest. The fact that the inventor of objectivism - the raving Ayn Rand - viewed herself as an example of a 'better' person just underlines what was already obvious: that objectivism is yet another insane ideology. The longer humanity sticks around, the more looney and dangerous ideologies they keep unleashing on the world. Can't looney people be contained somehow? Whatever happened to MTV's "celebrity death match"? Now that was an idea worth keeping...)





[color="#0000FF"]3. theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla[/color]





The west treats even other Europeans like this (not to mention eastern Europeans, particularly Slavs and especially Orthodox Serbs always get the raw end of the deal from other Europeans). No surprises then that Hindoo mathematicians didn't get credited and got plagiarised instead with christo-aliens running off with all the credit.





Again, the stuff worth reading in this post was

[color="#0000FF"]1. theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

2. badassoftheweek.com/tesla.html

3. listverse.com/2012/06/07/10-ways-edison-treated-tesla-like-a-jerk/

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