Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 2

There is some irony in this — the car is powered by batteries that supply direct current (DC), while Tesla’s great accomplishment resides in his contribution to the generation and distribution of polyphase alternating current (AC). He developed an ingenious device, the induction motor, that is ideally suited to polyphase AC because of the ease with which such current creates the rotating magnetic field required by many motors.

Readers of this paper should have at their disposal a copy of “The True Wireless,” which can be found on the Internet.² Note that the insert appearing in the article was written by the magazine’s editor, Hugo Gernsback, who asserted, “Dr. Tesla shows us that he is indeed the ‘Father of wireless.’” Tesla is referred to variously as an engineer, physicist, scientist, and inventor on many websites, including the Wikipedia, which contain his biography. Historically, this blurring of occupations has a distinguished lineage: Galileo, for example, invented telescopes and other instruments and was also an astronomer, and the transistor was invented by men trained as scientists, not engineers.

A Paradigm Missed

Had Tesla’s paper appeared fifteen years before — circa 1904 — its content would be unremarkable. Coming as it does in 1919, just before the era of broadcast radio, it becomes useful as a notable example, in the field of science and technology, of an inventor’s failure to grasp what the distinguished historian of science Thomas Kuhn has described as a “paradigm shift.”

This term first appears in Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962. The work is among the most cited scholarly books produced in the last half of the 20th century and has been in print in various editions for over 50 years. We refer here to the 3rd edition of 1996.³ The expression paradigm shift has entered everyday language, and its use has steadily increased since Kuhn coined the phrase. The concept will be employed here in the discussion of Tesla’s paper.

What does Kuhn mean by this term? In the sciences, he asserts that a paradigm derives from “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.” The word “model” is key here. The Greek-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (100–170 AD) had a model of what we now call our solar system: his earth was at its center, and the sun revolved around the earth. The concept has a limited use — it does explain sunrise and sunset, but as mankind’s knowledge of the planets and stars increased, it became unworkable. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton killed the old model — their work, which began circa 1540 and occupied nearly two centuries, led to a classic paradigm shift. The shift describes the discarding of an old model whose use is unfruitful and untenable in favor of a new paradigm that more gracefully and convincingly describes recent experimental evidence.