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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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I still hear people praising Thomas "piece of shit reason we didn't have wireless charging a hundred years ago" Edison.
But I have to wonder if Edison's vision of a DC electrical grid might have been environmentally better in the long run, as it would have been very, very decentralized, with a small power station necessary every couple of kilometers. It might have spurred an accelerated study into renewable sources of electricity, such as wind, even decades and decades ago.
As things turned out, Tesla/Westinghouse's victory with AC allows these centralized and "too big to fail" behemoths to suck coal and spit out black smoke out of sight and out of mind for most people.
Bold of you to assume that wouldn't have just resulted in a coal burning power station every couple kilometers...
At first, absolutely yes, coal smoke everywhere, creating an untenable crisis within the cities themselves. That type of crisis would have been tackled as a priority, would have been an integral part of the loudest political dialogues and arguments, decades ago.
They already had coal pollution everywhere. And they had a solution for that.
Which was "make the poor people live in the path of the smoke".
That can't be done as easily if you have a power plant every mile or so. The issue would affect everyone to some extent, rich and poor. That would have been the issue with Direct Current, it would have been impossible to keep it out of sight and out of mind.
Most of those would be small though. Like the size of a small factory. And most people in the UK would have had plenty of those within a mile of their house, right up until we offloaded all our manufacturing to China.
Even a full sized coal plant isn't objectionably dirty enough that people would demand an alternative. We only moved mostly to gas because it was cheaper (and that's where renewables will eventually win again). There's one less than two miles from my house. It would be nice if it wasn't there, but the air is far from unbreathable. If a small coal plant every few miles was the price of having electricity, people would put up with it.
I get what your saying, but I think the benefits of DC power plants would have been short term, rather than long term.
Once scaling was introduced there's no way Edison DC power stations every block would make any sense materially, financially or societally.
I can't blame Tesla for toxic capitalism any more than I can blame the wright brothers for manipulative airline ticket prices today.
Same reason we didn't have electric cars a hundred years ago
Unregulated capitalism and undeveloped antitrust laws are the culprit with respect to centralization, not innovation.
I'm confused what's this about? Please don't tell this is about Tesla's dumb as shit "wireless energy" plan because you know that like, just doesn't work right?
Huh, this is new. You don't believe in wireless electricity?
This is about how Edison bankrupted Tesla and all his financiers because it's the only way his primitive technology could compete.
Wireless electricty is a thing, as demonstrated by Faraday through his laws of induction, first discovered in 1832, 60 years before Tesla came onto the scene. Wireless electricty as you know it is mainly just fancy induction.
I'm talking about Tesla's batshit crazy plan to make wireless electricty by just, sticking electrodes into the ground and/or sky and pumping enough voltage into it so they arced because he thought the earth could be used to conduct electricity. Wardenclyfe tower failed not because of Edison, but because Tesla was an idiot who thought the luminferuous aether was real and electrons were made up.
Also please, do you know how stupidly inefficient a Tesla coil is? The most common use of resonat inductive coupling is like, RFID chips, not large scale power transfer like Tesla wanted
In addition to inventing and building multiple electrical machines that worked (dynamos engines, etc), Tesla repeatedly demonstrated the effective wireless transfer of energy.
There was no "failure" of the wardenclyffe Tower, monopolists who wanted to charge money for free electricity tore it down.
Transceivers in common use today work in the same way that Tesla described, and you know how induction works as well, so your problem here is that regardless of his inventions working, Tesla also believed in a broad prevailing scientific notion unrelated to his electrical work that was later proved too vaguely conceptualized to be relevant.
His inventions worked. And as you say, Tesla's 'bullshit crazy plan"(that works) is simple induction.
You sound very upset and are acting as though you are in an argument, but you are also agreeing with everything I'm saying and everything Tesla accomplished.
Do you just like Edison/dislike tesla, or what is making you so upset?
You sure about that?