this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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I feel bad for Nikola Tesla having his name associated with all this nonsense. Not even death let him escape from rich assholes taking credit for the work of others.
If it makes you feel any better his first name has fared just as poorly in terms of automakers lmao
https://www.reuters.com/legal/convicted-nikola-founder-milton-owes-electric-truck-maker-168-million-judge-2024-09-10/
I'm actually a big fan of Edison Motors, who are working to make heavy trucks into hybrids. And they're Canadian!
I'm excited for their hybrid conversion kits
Me too. I want to get another of the car I drove in high school and slap a hybrid kit in it
The car I had in high school is absurdly rare these days.
I had a 1989 Ford Probe.
Did the probe share parts etc with the eagle talon and the Mitsubishi eclipse or am i thinking of something else?
No. There were design similarities, but it was basically a Mazda MX-6. Which I also owned later. That one tried to kill me with fire.
if Nikola Tesla weren't a eugenicist i'd agree with you
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100-130299355/
Oof, that's a tough read.
I have read a number of comments from people with illnesses or other issues that are genetic, saying they don't want to pass their problems onto the next generation.
So, bizarrely enough, there is a certain amount of eugenics happening, it's just purely voluntary.
It's the top-down nature of the eugenics movement that made it so morally repugnant. "We decide who's fit to have kids."
Fair enough.
Kind of me, I have a genetic heart defect I don't intent to pass on. Though realistically, it was unlikely to happen in the first place.
Oof.
It was a common view, especially among progressives, from the late 1890s to the start of WW2. The temperance movement embraced eugenics, so did the family-planning movement, and through it, early feminism.
Eh, I don't buy this. There were always dissenters and weirdos and people knew differently. There were trans pioneers. There were vegans. There were abolitionists. Not everyone was like that.
Tesla wasn't a biologist, let's leave it at that. Humanity's greatest biological strength is their adaptability, which requires variety. Eugenicism is inherently disadvantageous to humanity because it reduces their ability to adapt and respond to environmental threats. A counter to that would be E.O. Wilson, see Half Earth, a short read that emphasizes biodiversity.
Eugenics only makes sense to cowardly people who are afraid of being treated how they would treat others. It's a bad idea to Cavendish Banana Hapsberg people (oh and btw eugenics is deeply tied to incest kinks, see Elon and Trump).
Again, this is thinking that is pretty intuitive if you aren't bloodthirsty and pathetic
Imagine disregarding the entire domain of Tesla's work - changing the entire world as we know it with his research and innovations - and the comment they need to make for online points is some virtue-oriented pat-me-on-the-back-im-ethical blorp about random social norms of the time. lol but cry.
He had really bad autism. He was in love with a pigeon. Brilliant he was, but mad as a hatter.
I think he was just intuitively good at seeing what exactly is the portrayal of electricity and magnetism. A unique genius with a certain insight.
I sometimes feel that there were many businesses concerns that grew around his early research and they were so successful that his newer research must have been a threat to that.
Through all the mystery, half-truths, and frankly magical thinking people have with this man, it's really hard to know what he was up to in his final days of work, before he became a homeless bag-man. I somehow feel, without making any kind of declarative statement, that he was working on transmission of energy with longitudinal (vs transverse) waves, and discovering methods of conveying and extracting electrical potential from and through Earth.
Inline Edit: To expand on the above paragraph: The Earth doesn't really "absorb" electrons like a pillow absorbing a ping pong ball. The energy in the negative charges that the Earth grounds must move in waves, therefore they're grounded but now the waves are bouncing around in the Earth; that energy still exists and may sum with other waves in an additive way. I believe, again without making a declarative statement, that Tesla recognized this and was pioneering research on how to transmit energy via, and gather momentum from those waves. There were successes transmitting energy and encoded information through Earth which can be repeated today with garbage dump salvage electronics. I believe he was discovering a few dangerous things as well: Harmonic discharges of electrical devices to ground could be captured (think telecommunications and military); and he was conducting novel elemental research on tapping Earth to harmonize and extract force(s) - what these things portended led to his complete scientific alienation.
The word "free energy" always obliterates any form of rational discourse. But there was something to it in a way, but to clarify, not in a literal way. Not in the sense of violating fundamental laws of conservation, rather seeing the "other side of the coin" that if the Earth is effectively infinite Ground then it's also effectively an "infinite" source of power if harvested.
I've never really "researched" the man directly but what I do know comes from quite a bit of my casual STEM self-study over decades.
Careful. Most of what "we" are taught is complete horse-shit, or at the very least a severely simplified and perverted version of underlying reality. Many people, even those who work with electricity daily,are going to go cross-eyed hearing this notion. It requires real understanding I'm afraid.
Edit, I mean you guys can downvote me all you want, but I've only spent 30 years doing this shit lol ... Remember, if you're going to talk to somebody that you hold in esteem re your unfamiliar topic of electromagnetism... Remember that they aren't holding pioneering knowledge in their minds... They're hooking up wires, checking voltages, plotting circuits, making sure telephone interference isn't present, and that's it. It doesn't matter how well versed one is in electronics or electricity, 99.99% chance ones's not thinking about these deeper subjects. I know a hell of a lot more than I let on and if you can't see that, you need help lol
People say that because they support it and they don't think it's a big deal. There were always anti-eugenicist movements (and always people opposed to fucking children, and having slaves, and even eating meat or going to war, and other morally shitty things justified with this excuse). That's literally how the movements against these things came about - people throughout time have been against them. You just discount them because you align yourself with the other side, for some reason.
Tesla was not mentally well. But he had the power to make weapons, including a so called "Death Beam" https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html
And look, Trump connection:
https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html
It's not about "judging," it's about not feeling sorry for Tesla's name being attached to a shitty eugenicist since he himself was a eugenicist
His legacy can live on with Dr Parkinstein. (Parker Edmondson)