Nikola Tesla Articles
Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 25
AWA Review - January 1st, 2017
Endnotes
1. Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano, “The World on Sunday: Graphic Art and Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898–1911),” (Bullfinch Press, Boston, 2005) pp. 102–103.
2. Nikola Tesla, “The True Wireless,” Electrical Experimenter, vol. 7, no. 3, May 1919, pp. 22–23, 61–63, 87. The following website has images of the original pages: http://www.free-energy-info.com/TeslaTrueWireless.pdf. Other sources of the paper can be found by Googling the search term “Tesla True Wireless.” Vendors of CD’s having a complete run of the issues of the Electrical Experimenter can be found on eBay.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996).
4. R. P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton, and M. Sands, “The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 2,” (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1964) pp. 1–6.
5. Jed Buchwald, The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989); With the birth of quantum theory circa 1900–26, a particle theory of light based on photons was to reemerge, but it did not undermine Maxwell’s work thanks to the concept of the wave-particle duality. See for example Ian Walmsley, Light: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015).
6. Hugh Aitken, Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985), Chapter 3.
7. Hugh Aitken, Syntony and Spark.
8. Interestingly, we have only Tesla’s word that this meeting took place. There is no supporting entry in Heinrich Hertz: Memoirs, Letters, Diaries by Mathilde Hertz and Charles Süsskind, 2nd edition (San Francisco Press, San Francisco, 1977). As Tesla was a famous inventor by the time of the meeting, it is puzzling that he was not mentioned by Hertz. Also, no meeting is described by Bernard W. Carlson in his definitive biography of Tesla: Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013).
9. Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, (Harper-Collins, New York, 1991), p. 136.
10. Paul Schubert, The Electric Word: The Rise of Radio, (Macmillan, London, 1928) pp. 166–168.
11. It was not until 1893, well after Tesla had completed his education, that the great simplification in AC circuit analysis made possible by the use of complex quantities began to be adopted, thanks to the work of C. P. Steinmetz. See, for example, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, “Complex Quantities and their Use in Electrical Engineering,” AIEE Proceedings of International Electrical Congress, July 1893, pp. 33–74.
12. Alfred Hay, The Principles of Alternate Current Working, (Biggs and Co, Boston, 1897) pp. 137–148. Available at Google Books; for other 19th century engineers who used fluid analogies—or rejected them—see Paul J. Nahin. Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude, (IEEE Press, Hoboken, NJ) 1988, p. 59 (note his footnote 3 and the derisive comment “drainpipe theory”).
13. There is a stern critique of using mechanical explanations for explaining electrical phenomena in Henri Poincaré, Maxwell’s Theory and Electrical Oscillations, (McGraw-Hill, NY, 1904) Chapter 1, pp. 1–2. This book is available at Google Books. Tesla was so committed to hydraulic analogies that he supplied one for his high voltage, high frequency invention, the Tesla coil. See N. Tesla, My Inventions. This series of articles originally appeared in the Electrical Experimenter in 1919. They have been republished in his book My Inventions (Barnes and Noble, NY, 1995). See especially pp. 76–77. The analogy is so complicated that one is better served by studying the original electrical device and applying the laws of AC circuit theory and resonance.
14. Interestingly, in U.S. patent 645,576, Tesla has not yet discarded the return wire in a communication/power distribution system he is proposing. Part of his circuit consists of a path through an atmospheric layer that his powerful transmitter will, he asserts, succeed in ionizing. The earth is also employed in the circuit. The patent was granted in 1900, but by 1919 he has dispensed with the return part of the circuit.
15. For an explanation of the concept of Whig history, as it applies to the history of science, see Steven Weinberg, “Eye on the Present, The Whig History of Science,” New York Review of Books, vol. 62, no. 20, Dec. 17, 2015.
16. J. Zenneck and A. E. Seelig (translation), Wireless Telegraphy, (McGraw-Hill, NY 1915) pp. 258–259. This book provides an idea of how textbooks, circa 1910–1920, explained waves received on the far side of the mountain.
