Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 20

inventors, as opposed to scientists, has been less explored.⁶³ When we study the lives of individual inventors or engineers we can find failure to adapt to a paradigm change.

Shifting Paradigms in Invention

Besides Tesla, whose inability to absorb a new paradigm should be evident, we have the example of yet another great inventor, Thomas A. Edison. Edison had little formal teaching in schools and was largely educated by his mother and by his own readings. His first important work experiences and inventions were in the field of the [wired] telegraph, which operates using direct currents, and it is clear that he obtained a strong intuitive grasp of DC theory. It is understandable that his subsequent system of generating and distributing electric power was all based on DC. Paul Israel, the esteemed biographer of Edison and editor of the Thomas Edison papers, remarks, “While experimenting with generators, Edison again relied on his experience with telegraph technology to provide a useful analogy that guided laboratory research.” Israel points out how Edison and his workers sometimes envisioned direct current generators as “carbon battery elements.”⁶⁴

Historians have written about Edison’s unwillingness to adapt to the newly introduced system of AC electric power, which posed a direct economic threat to his own DC system.⁶⁵ We will probably never know for sure if his objection to AC was truly based on his concern that it was more lethal than DC, or whether he was acting out of pride, inertia, economic self-interest, or an inability to grasp a phenomenon requiring some mathematical sophistication that eluded him. His statement in 1891 to Henry Villard, President of Edison GE, “The use of alternating current instead of direct current is unworthy of practical men,” has proved to be as fatuous as Tesla’s notion that Hertzian wave theory is “an aberration of the scientific mind.”⁶⁶

Age and Vanity

We are left to wonder why Tesla wrote this long paper displaying a wealth of ignorance. One clue might come from an article about him that appeared in the New York Times of January 9, 1943, a few days after the inventor’s death. The generally admiring piece observes, “His practical achievements were limited to the short period that began in 1886 and ended in 1903. And what achievements they were.” By 1919, Tesla’s last important work had taken place more than half a generation before. Studying a list of Tesla’s patents, we find that about 90% of them were filed on or before 1903, and all of his important ones were granted before this date.⁶⁷

Resurrecting Tesla’s Reputation

His Electrical Experimenter piece can be read as a rather sad effort to resurrect his reputation. Moreover, his denigration of Hertzian waves and promotion of the primacy of earth currents may be seen as an attempt to preserve respect for his construction of a 187-foot tower (capped with a sphere) in 1901–1903 on