A Crummy Commercial

 Recently I've seen some pictures of bugs and sounders from the middle days of wired telegraphy.  And that got me looking at an early wireless telegraphy book: https://worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technolgy-Early/Wireless-Telegraphy-and-Telephony-Morgan-1920.pdf Before proceeding, I thought this dedication was interesting: Alfred P. Morgan was a fan of Tesla One thing that struck me were the drawings and pictures of multi-wire antennas.  The first drawing of a transmitter shows an antenna with multiple wires and that "fan" connection that probably gave rise to the antenna symbol used in schematic drawings. Here is a photo of an amateur antenna and shack: This all reminded me of that famous Sarnoff/Einstein/Steinmetz photo mentioned previously in the blog: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/06/famous-people-meeting-or-not-plus-ultra.html   Sarnof, Einstein and Steinmetz The tangle of stuff above the heads of the group appears to be the terminus of a mighty multi-...

 Who doesn't love a freebie ?  The autobiography: My Inventions by Nikola Tesla was presented in 6 parts of the February to June and October 1919 editions of The Electrical Experimenter magazine. Find them on the wonderful World Radio History site:   https://worldradiohistory.com/Electrical_Experimenter.htm Here are the links along with my notes: part 1: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/EE-1919-02.pdf Tesla's smarter brother died in a confrontation with a horse His Father talked to himself, had a prodigious memory His Mother was source of his inventiveness he saw "visions", could visualize inventions in minds eye   a sort of mental simulation, he could do various versions in   his mind before actually building something for real   kind of like iterative computer simulation   he felt the Edison way was a waste of time his father didn't want him reading his books (afraid tesla would ruin his eyesight) he developed a strong w...

 I was watching the movie: Tomorrowland (2015) recently.  One of the fictional premises was that Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Gustave Eiffel and Jules Verne were part of a secret society called Plus Ultra. Eiffel, Edison, Tesla, Verne Which got me to thinking:  did Tesla ever meet Steinmetz ?  Of course Steinmetz knew Edison:   Steinmetz and the famously hard of hearing Edison   And Edison and Tesla had met although that didn't end friendly :)  But did Tesla meet Steinmetz ? This is a photo of a group of men in 1921, Einstein and Steinmetz stand out and there is a fellow behind them purported to be Tesla.  But although this man is slim and has a mustache he doesn't appear to be Tesla's height (6 foot 2 inches).  He should have towered over Einstein (5 foot 9 inches) and Steinmetz (4 foot).  Apparently the man was named John Renshaw Carson, an engineer.  Later in the century another John Carson made David Sarnoff a lot of money as t...

 When I was in the 5th grade, 1965-66, I got pneumonia and had to stay home from school for several weeks.  I was a voracious reader then but can't remember many of the books in particular.  But when I had pneumonia I couldn't use either the school library or the local municipal library.  And I had a lot of time on my hands staying in bed all day.  So my Dad got me books.  And while I don't remember the titles/authors I do remember the subjects: mainly biographies. A book on Edison of course but another on Steinmetz, too.  Charles P. Steinmetz, born in Europe, emigrated to the USA.  An engineer of the highest grade who worked for General Electric.  People like Tesla dreamed up the new and formerly impossible but men like Steinmetz made those ideas real.  I'm not sure most appreciate the nearly endless grind in getting a product to work, then making it better and always, making it cheaper.  The development side of R&D is underapp...

cover photo from Wisconsin Public Radio web page  I started listening to this book on Chapter-a-day from WNMU (90.1 MHz) in Marquette, MI.  It's on here at 8 AM here while I'm exercising. It can also be listened to on-line:  https://www.wpr.org/listen/1925416 or downloaded:   https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wpr-podcast.streamguys1.com/cad/cad220516h.mp3 I've only heard the first few days of the book but it seems to me that someone should have given Tesla a small notebook and a pencil, he literally scratched out the ideas for his polyphase AC system in the dirt of a Hungarian park ! Thinking of Tesla reminds me of my college electrical machines course when Dr. Staats taught us about the single phase induction motor.  It tickled him to death that there was a "theory" of how it works (the counter-rotating field theory).  And then he demonstrated the various ways that a single phase induction motor could be started (with a capacitor or a switched wind...