The Automatization of Nikola Tesla: Thinking Invention in the Late Nineteenth Century (original) (raw)
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Nikola Tesla : vizionář - génius - čaroděj
2007
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Nikola Tesla Colorado Springs notes 1899-1900
Proceedings of the IEEE, 1980
Tesla has been called the 'Master of lightning' Nikola tesla i njegovo delo [Hardcover] by Slavko Boksan... "...the man who invented the twentieth century" and nicknamed, "the patron saint of energy." "I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver, I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of my soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food, otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again even if it took hours." "I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem." CAFFEINE as a magical stimulant. ... he gave up gambling and smoking for good and forswore all further contact with women. 1881 he moved to Budapest and found work as a telephone engineer. This suited him much better than academia, and it was during this time that he came up with his first invention, a kind of early loudspeaker. Toward the middle of that year, Tesla began to suffer from a peculiar condition: a multiple sensory overload where sunlight blinded him, the ticking of a watch sounded like the blows of a hammer, vibrations from traffic made him lose his balance, and his pulse spiked and plummeted wildly. His doctors were baffled Tesla's spooky ability to know the answer to mathematical problems halfway through the question and to conjure phantom engineering diagrams from thin air He discovered X-rays three years before Wilhelm Roentgen and was the first to point out their biological risks. ... devised the first radio-wave transmitter two years before Marconi In 1899 he moved his lab to Colorado Springs to unveil his piece de resistance. This, he believed, of all of his inventions, would prove the "most important and valuable to future generations." It was a massive "magnifying transmitter" able to send radio waves and electricity through the air over long distances. At 51 feet in diameter it could generate 4 million volts, and light two hundred lamps, without wires, from twenty-five miles away. Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island... Tesla's plan was global: to unite telephone and telegraph systems in a single wireless network, transmitting pictures and text from one side of the globe to the other in minutes, and delivering mail between special terminals, using electronic messaging. He had, in effect envisioned the World Wide Web a hundred years early ... never recovered financially, living out the last ten years of his life in room 3327 of the Hotel New
Design Research Foundations
The Poetics of Invention 4.1 Questions and Methods Why call a technology Bluetooth after a king of Denmark? Why choose a sheep to represent a research project? And why tell all kinds of stories when one should concentrate on serious matters directly related to engineering sciences like algorithms or programming? We could dismiss the naming and storytelling activities on the grounds that they are commercial, futile, or even whimsical. They do not seem to bring anything to the scientific validation, or promotion, of a research project. However, it is hard to overlook the fact that naming a technology, creating logos, and telling stories, are actually part of any engineering project and therefore the question remains: what is their role and value in research practices? Looking at examples ranging from the naming of a field such as "artificial intelligence" to the christening of a project on distributed mobile networks like "SAFARI", I make the hypothesis that research and engineering could be analyzed as poetic activities. Beyond this, I also contend that naming, telling, putting into images, are not only the final touch of a marketing program but part of the expansive part of the design process. If this hypothesis is true, ignoring these practices could be detrimental to strategies of innovation. In this chapter, I therefore look at the place and role of symbolic presentations as part of the making of invention and design. Here, elaborating on the philosopher of science and technology Simondon who defines invention as articulating imagination to cultural and social context through a tangible artifact, 1 I further argue that the tangible artifact is not the only production that defines the invention. The latter is made of poetic and narrative creations that eventually generate the tangible artifact. Logical demonstrations or negotiations between actors are not enough to support an invention that, in fact, benefits from subjective and cultural associations, and poetic activities related to humanistic and literary practices. Researchers and designers use and work on symbolic representations, 5 Aristotle and Lam (2014). 6 Ibid. p. 6. 7 Latour (1988).