NVIDIA Tesla

Seeing these two words together is like witnessing some form of holy high-tech union. The NVIDIA Tesla line of uber-performance GPUs is a truly a delight to behold. The concept is wicked, a portable, plug-in style box featuring some serious graphics hardware, taking any regular computer and turning it into a rendering dynamo. Or any other high-res task that would normally take something like a farm or grid of machines working day and night to process.

It also comes in server-mountable and desktop-installable flavours, and while tasty, these aren't quite as delicious-sounding as the

Tesla D870 Deskside Supercomputer

Imagine some hardware hacker figures out how to mod an LCD into the side and hauls this baby over to a LAN party... bound to happen sooner or later.

Tesla's Heritage Subject of Edit War

Whenever I'm explaining who Tesla is, which seems to be frequently, it's always a bit unclear where exactly he's actually from. I usually go with Croatian or Serbian. I was amused to find the matter had evolved into a full-scale edit war on Wikipedia's Tesla Article, and has made it onto the Lamest Edit Wars page. The latest seems to be "an ethnic Serb of the Austrian Empire."

Tesla Cooling Technology

While reading a link from hackedgadgets.com about a DIY-Laser etcher setup, I got sidetracked onto the Wicked Lasers site and began admiring their new Blu-ray offerings. I know a few laser hobbyists and as far as quality is concerned these are considered the best.

Imagine my surprise to find the Spyder II GX and BX series lasers have a cool logo advertising their Tesla high-efficiency thermoelectric cooling system. Tempting, to say the least.

The Prestige

So I finally saw The Prestige on Saturday. I had forgotten that it was directed by Christopher Nolan, of Batman Begins and Memento fame, both of which were excellent. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, who in my opinion played an excellent Batman, are competing magicians. The Prestige refers to the third and final stage of a good illusion. The kicker, if you will.

David Bowie does an excellent job playing Nikola Tesla, who instead of having a brief cameo like I was expecting, was actually fairly central to the plot. Apparently he has developed teleportation technology, except instead it turns out to be duplication technology. The illusionists are interested, of course, because it makes for impossible feats, and begin to understand the implications of having clones running around.

The Tesla Technology looks excellent. In the trailers for the movie you only ever really see this wooden cabinet that is the receiving end of the tele-duplicator, but the initation pad is under a huge steel ball pulsating with huge streams of electricity. There is a kind of Tesla stage-show indoors with more impressive streamers.

Michael Caine plays kind of a backstage engineer and I like how he made a clear distinction between the two prestidigitators, and Tesla, the actual wizard. Let's refer to Arthur C. Clarke's 3 laws of prediction, care of Wikipedia:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
   possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
   impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a
   little way past them into the impossible.
   
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Goodbye Wires

Generally, if MIT's doing it, it must be good. In an earlier post I mentioned Powercast, a new technology where a coin-sized receiver in a laptop or phone could charge itself when within range of a base station. Today I happened upon this article at physorg.com that describes the technology, coupling resonance.

Basically instead of sending the electricity wastefully radiating out in all directions, they make a small magnetic field of frequencies in the MHz range, which allows the electricity to pass through it. The first obvious application is for cellphones, and the inventor Soljacic credits a dying cellphone for his inspiration.

The author of the article does go on to wonder why no one thought of this before, it seeming like such a simple and good idea. I wonder why there is no mention of Tesla or any of his work. While I think he did try the radiation method instead, he was instrumental in developing our understanding of the science of resonance. No offense to the author of course, maybe he's a huge Tesla fan, and the site seems to have some other good stuff about him.

I guess what I'm getting at is that Tesla seems almost forgotten from the ivy-league technical schools and smithsonian type institutes while Edison is like a national hero. Maybe we're only now realizing how many things Tesla really did invent a hundred years ago. I think it will take several hundred years before we really understand all his work completely. It just seems that after Tesla's death, with the whole FBI intervention, and all his files and patents getting pretty much appropriated, there was also an effort to effectively scrub his name from the history books.

With sheer number of inventions, Tesla surpasses pretty much any inventor you can name. But it's the all derivative inventions and discoveries that wouldn't have happened without Tesla's experimental tinkering that really set him apart. Where would modern science be without alternating current, electron microscopes and flourescent lights?

Occult Ether Physics by William R. Lyne

Before the first real page of this book, it has already explained the UFO phenomenon pretty much entirely as well as how Tesla's work is both directly involved and obscured through hoaxes and misinformation. The description refers to flying saucers as "exclusively man-made" and based on 19th century technology by Nikola Tesla. It also outrightly accuses the government of a conspiracy to conceal these facts, by creating an entire industry of psuedo-science to throw people off the trail. Naturally I was interested in giving it a closer look.

Indeed, matters of the paranormal and supernatural have been a major cash grab for big media in recent years. I don't know how many bad UFO documentaries I've watched that start out expecting to find absolute proof of extra-terrestrials and then are surprised and disappointed when they come up empty-handed. But indeed, productions like this are nothing but a distraction from the real story.

William Lyne sets out to demonstrate that Tesla's space propulsion system eventually evolved into what we know as the Flying Saucer, by way of underground Nazi engineering. Legends of foo-fighters and other unidentified flying objects started coming from Allied airmen and it was pretty clear the Germans were up to something in the later years of WW2. Where the story blurs is post-war, with UFOs popping up over Roswell, New Mexico, it seems like the Germans aren't the only ones with the experimental craft.

In actual fact, a number of highly talented German scientists were brought into America somewhat under-the-radar. This is generally known as Operation Paperclip and several influential scientists like Werner Von Braun became instrumental in the American space program, not to mention intelligence. Taking into consideration the location of facilities like Area 51, and the time it took to resume research after dismantling the Nazi regime, it provides a perfect explanation as to why flying saucers started popping up in US airspace.

The capabilities of these craft did not match anything in the known arsenal of the US Air Force. The ability to reach speeds in excess of 5000mph, often in just a few seconds from a stand-still start, is probably what started rumours of advanced Alien technology. Whether the government started it or just chose not to deny it is almost irrelevant. Ascribing the technology to other-worldly visitors means not having to share it with other nations, or using it or related technology to overcome the energy demands of our time.

Photos from the Tesla Exhibit

Here are my photos from the aforementioned Tesla Museum of Belgrade's visit to Vancouver, BC. 2006 marks 150 years since Tesla's birth, and I had seen the ad for the exhibit in the Georgia Straight (great local newspaper) nearly a month ahead of time, so I was definitely looking forward to it. There was also a symposium at Simon Fraser University, but it was on a work day and some of it sounded way over my head.

The exhibit though was excellent, BC Hydro kindly lent the space in the lobby of their HQ downtown. I think one of the Hydro spokespeople joked it was the least they could do, seeing as how they practically owe their entire business model to him. Tesla, who had been experimenting with bladeless waterwheels and turbines since he was a boy, eventually conceived and devised the Niagra Falls power system, singlehandedly starting a hydroelectric revolution.


There was a working Tesla Coil that every few minutes would let off a loud zap as it discharged into a flourescent tube, another Tesla invention. He equipped his labratory with tubes that would light up if they were installed on the wall overhead, or even while being carried by hand from room to room.

Here is the full apparatus, it was about four feet tall. There were some other working models there but this was by far the most impressive. The real meat of the exhibit though were more than a hundred panels with a complete biography of Tesla with his major inventions and contributions along the way. A companion book was available for $7 and it was worth it as most of the exhibit's rare photos and tidbits are packaged in a light volume.

Some of that content includes honorary degrees awarded to Tesla, letters of his to family and friends, and newspaper articles about the inventor and his life. While underappreciated in his own time, he was a celebrity in New York City, and enjoyed the company of folks like Mark Twain, JP Morgan, George Westinghouse, John Jacob Astor, and several members of various royal families. While there were wealthy women after him all the time, he never married.

Tesla's "Apparatus for Aerial Transportation," or verticle take-off flying machine, was modeled in detail. Kind of a combination helicopter-plane, Tesla patented this in 1928. There was also a miniature model of his lab at Wardenclyffe. The plane though I think is a perfect example for one of the many inventions of his that went on to become succesful products for someone else. X-Rays also come to mind, Tesla having announced his discovery of "Special Rays" a couple of years before Roentgen.

Prof. Velimir Abramovich's Tesla Article

“The future is mine!”

- N. Tesla

http://blog.hasslberger.com/2007/04/teslas_creative_genius_intuiti.html

I was drawn to Sepp Hasslberger's site by the article about the spirituality of Werner Heisenberg and I was totally surprised to find a similar article about Tesla. This is an incredible read. I especially like the part about Tesliana, although I suggest Teslantis or maybe Teslatropolis instead.

Tesla's incomplete "World System" of wireless electricity really did end up as the Internet, not to mention radio and TV along the way. I also like the parts about Tesla's cosmology and how it contrasts with Einstein's. Resonance really is the basis of reality, and the electromagnetic spectrum still has many secrets to reveal.

Other interesting bits include the origins of faxing, atomic clocks, and the luminiferous ether. So many discoveries were made just as a result of Tesla's pioneering research that it really would be impossible to identify them all. One of the parts that really jumped out at me though was this:

Experimenters say that it is easy to excite mass emotions of people by means of corresponding oscillation of ionosphere, which includes harmonics of the collective subconscious state of all humankind. The ionosphere is a key to control mass feelings and thoughts. Tesla understood all this already as far back as 1899, living in Colorado.

Now, it doesn't say which experimenters, and other parts of this article like the time portals and green fog may be a bit much to swallow for some people. But I think in relation to HAARP, this passage is particularly lucid. The reasons for HAARP could be numerous, and Auroral Research is by all means a fascinating field (Tesla correctly identified the Aurora as cosmic radiation). One of the more nefarious purposes ascribed to it by those familiar with Black Budgets is over-the-horizon radar, a kind of NORAD of the world.

Another, more terrifying possibility is mind control. We all know about pressure changes and the weather affecting people's moods and health. We also know that the various states of the brain (Alpha, Theta, etc) can be initiated or influenced with electromagnetism. Everyone's experienced the 3am infomercial coma at one point or another. But what if you could in effect build a giant TV, or Tesla Magnifying Transmitter, in Alaska, no less, where it could easily blanket nearly all of North America in soothing, hypnotizing waves?

The Pentagon has been experimenting with microwave weapons in Iraq already and fully realize their potential for crowd control. Not only do they cause an itchy-under-the-skin, blood-is-boiling kind of sensation, but they induce emotional changes as well. The domestic potential to set up a relay of say 3 points around a huge protest group like the Seattle-WTO crowd and drive them all crazy would be too good to pass up. No more photos of a squad of riot police on the front page, just invisible radiation that no one could really prove without some sort of Geiger counter at the ready.

The honest truth is, while I'd like to believe that HAARP is an altruistic endeavor to further our understanding of the Aurora, there are just too many convenient exploitations of the system for that really to be the case.

High Voltage and Sparks

Found this set on Flickr searching for Tesla stuff:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmcybernetics/sets/72157594182019271/

Electricity really can be a kind of artistic medium.

Remote Cavitation

This is an area that is both fascinating and disturbing. The power of this technology is incredible. Behold the Death Ray:

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/04/navy_patents_ca.html

Remote Cavitation, from what I understand, creates a kind of pressure disturbance via two acoustic beams at high power, in this case underwater but I think a spot in the atmosphere would work the same way. A plane flying through such a spot would definitely encounter problems, as would a submarine or torpedo below the surface.

Obviously, the plan is a mobile weapons platform capable of roaming the oceans and disabling communications/craft of different kinds. The combination of radar and sonic force I believe has already been implemented on the latest F22 Fighter Jet, some sort of radar pulse that can disable enemy radio, electronics etc.

The oceans however are different due to the population of mammals using echolocation such as whales, dolphins, porpoises etc. There is already a lawsuit against the navy because of the large amounts of strandings and beachings that seem to follow large technical exercises in the sonar department. See this page:

http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/051019.asp

So surely the technology described in the above patent couldn't be good for any mammals passing through, not to mention with in range of the acoustic blast this sort of thing would put off. Water does convey waves of all kinds effectively. Of course, the official decree is that mid-range frequency broadcasts do not harm mammals, but I think its clear there is some correlation, if not obvious interference between the two systems.

Tesla on PBS

Found this the other day: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/

It's a pretty good site, actually. The Discussions section has answers to questions by Margaret Cheney and other Tesla biographers, and despite the first response being a question with a seemingly obvious answer, its a good read. The stuff about HAARP and the Philadelphia Experiment is interesting, I want to explore the connection of his technology to these projects on this blog extensively.

Steorn

Steorn is an intellectual property company from Ireland that claims to have done the impossible. At least as far as the laws of thermodynamics are concerned.

Their device, which they've named the Orbo, uses magnets in some sort of spin or perhaps orbit. This not only produces energy but apparently more than it takes to power the device itself. In otherwords, perpetual motion.

Now, of course, this is one of the most contested and controversial areas in science. Fraudulent claims of free energy are nothing new; some con artists may set up an impressive demo using smoke and mirrors that land them a big venture capital payout. But as of yet, no one has made this claim and been able to hang around long enough to prove it. Maybe they run too far into the red, or maybe they run from investors. Not to say they're all totally crooked, some could have discovered something by accident they didn't entirely understand, and couldn't understand it well enough to make good on their promises.

But frankly, Steorn seems to have it together. There is apparently a major technical announcement to come after a jury has examined the technology, which should be soon. And this video, credit and link to steornorbo.com, seems to validate the fact that they do have facilities in Ireland and are working on something: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP1So7PZM7s

Zero Point Energy, or energy from the vacuum of space, might be what they're tapping into. You can find a lot of research and psuedo-research on the subject, but I think they might be onto something. Tesla always believed in the Ether, or omnipresent energy. In fact he famously disagreed with Einstein on matters of relativity. If you could somehow harness time itself as an engine, you'd never need another power source. What time is exactly and how to harness it are entirely different stories, but the fact is that the universe is full of electromagnetic enigmas Tesla only just barely uncovered.

Tesla Down Under

Check out http://tesladownunder.com/

It's an Australian site by this guy Peter who looks like he's built pretty much ever Tesla project you could think of, and then some. He's got some great exposures of this Eye of Sauron thing that he surrounded his car with, along with all sorts of different coils.

Also, the ultimate dream, the Railgun. Ever since Quake 2 I've been interested in them. The US Navy is apparently investing a lot in getting them set up on battleships (or maybe aircraft carriers.) The appeal is that you only need a simple projectile, but the speed at which it is launched is going to more than obliterate your target. The trick is building up enough power first, and of course that's where massive capacitor banks would come in.

The Railgun has been featured in a few different movies/games but my favourite was Eraser. They made it able to x-ray stuff as well (very tesla) but most importantly it gave off a really cool trajectory/trail that while unrealistic, ruled.

The Tesla Exhibit

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, the Tesla Museum in Belgrade embarked on a travelling exhibit to recognize Tesla and raise awareness. In the Vancouver, BC area, there was a symposium at Simon Fraser University, and also an exhibit down at the BC Hydro headquarters. Hydro was nice enough to lend out their entire lobby to house the numerous panels detailing the history of his life and inventions.

They also had a few working models of a Tesla Coil and I think a bladeless turbine. A lot of the publicity was through the Croatian Cultural Center and all the writing was bilingual. I think one of the Hydro guys commented that they really owe Tesla for their entire business model, which kind of stuck with me because I realized yeah, they do. Tesla of course was the pioneer of hydroelectricity. It was the waterwheel he built when he was 9 that later matured into his turbine, that later turned into the whole Niagra Falls power generation system.

A few lesser-known Tesla inventions were in model form, like his vertical-takeoff flying machine that looks pretty sophisticated compared to the rickety Wright brothers. I'll need to double check the dates but I wouldn't be all that surprised if he had the whole thing out before them.

I meant to catch The Prestige afterwards, the movie with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman that also features David Bowie as Tesla. He has some sort of teleportation machine that the other guys are interested because they're trying to out-illusion each other... never got around to it but I will post a full review here when I do.

Tesla's Inventions

These are things Tesla either envisioned or invented. In Tesla's mind, these were basically one in the same. From a young age, he described vivid hallucinations of whatever he was focussing on mentally, so real that they were indistinguishable from their surroundings. He developed this to a point where he could literally construct machinery in his head, and then run them endlessly if need be to check for flaws. This practice made him famous for needing no diagrams or sketches, except for other engineers on his team.

Alternating Current - Despite Edison's Best Efforts
Flourescent and Neon lights
Wireless (radio, data, power) The Marconi Misconception
Electron Microscope - Not to mention the Electron
X-rays (accidentally, before Roentgen and with better results. One of his assitants had one of the first x-ray burns.)
Robots - The wireless boat, automatons, auto-wars
Artificial Intelligence
Tesla Coil
Bladeless Turbine
Verticle Take Off Flying Machine -- Pre-Wright brothers?
Meteorological Technologies

Weather Modification: HAARP

There is much to be said about weather control. Since the beginning, humankind have wished to be able to not only decide what kind of weather they have, but harness the weather to their benefit, like say ending a drought with a heavy downpour. Cloud Seeding is a technique where small planes go up and sprinkle low clouds with particles that encourage them to condense water and release it. The chemicals used in this process are often controversial. After all, who wants to eat a crop that's been artificially rained on?

Tesla, fascinated by lightning, would stretch out on his couch during a thunderstorm and mentally calculate the time between thunder and lightning, and also apparently the voltage of the lightning strike. Of course, his ultimate goal was to create lightning. If you've ever seen photos of a Tesla Coil, they produce what look like tiny bolts of lightning right into the air.

During storms, which are high in electrical activity, Tesla would perform experiments with his machines and try to discover the secrets of lightning. The old stereotype of the mad scientist working feverishly during the dark and stormy night probably came from him. I've been meaning also to examine the likeness of Dr. Frankenstein in the Shelley novel as a "mad" scientist who uses electricity to create life, which as far as I've read Tesla never tried but then again, you never know.

Tesla was also the first to identify cosmic rays. He demonstrated that the Aurora Borealis was electric in nature, and he went as far as to suggest a system whereby the night sky could be electrified to provide light. HAARP, or the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is essentially an array of Tesla Magnifying Transmitters in Alaska that use the Aurora as some kind of electrical relay. The complete intentions of the program have never entirely been clarified, as the potential for the system to be exploited by the military for over-the-horizon radar is almost too great to ignore.

Tesla's Name

Tesla is a pretty unique name. It should be more of a household word than it is. Amongst electricians, it's a unit of magnetic flux density. Tesla Motors I think is doing a great job with paying their respects, since they are pretty much poised to become a major electric car manufacturer in the next decade.

Having never married or had any children, Tesla didn't pass along his family's name. His nephew, Sava Kasanovic (sp) I believe was his closest family relation. But in Prodigal Genius (see previous post), John J. O'Neill explains a bit of the history:

"Tesla's surname dates back more than two and a half centuries. Before that time the family name was Draganic (pronounced as if spelled Drag'-a-nitch). The name Tesla (pronounced as spelled, with equal emphasis on both syllables), in a purely literal sense, is a trade name like Smith, firight or Carpenter. As a common noun it describes a woodworking tool which, in English, is called an adz. This is an axe with a broad cutting blade at right angles to the handle, instead of parallel as in the more familiar form. It is used in cutting large tree trunks into squared timbers. In the Serbo-Croat language, the name of the tool is tesla. There is a tradition in the Draganic family that the members of one branch were given the nickname "Tesla" because of an inherited trait which caused practically all of them to have very large, broad and protruding front teeth which greatly resembled the triangular blade of the adz."

I thought that was cool because I've never heard the name anywhere else, until this morning in the Georgia Straight there was a listing for an event and the contact person's last name was Tesla.

Wireless Power

For years, the idea of sending power wirelessly has intruiged me. Yes, wireless data transmission is an every day thing now. I'm using it right now, and I have to say for someone in pc support, wireless seemed like a hassle when it first came around. The idea of not having a physical plug that you can check on bothered me. WEP keys, signal strength, all was this invisible gamble that only worked half the time. Our office WAN still sucks.

But now, stronger routers and homebrew can-tennas (google them, really good use for a pringles can) have solved the signal issue, unless you're dealing with concrete or fishtanks. So what's the next big chapter in wireless development? Power. Electricity. Tesla, quite early on, realized this was possible and in fact invented flourescent tubes that could be carried around his lab and still be plenty bright. In fact most people don't know that the now ubiquitous neon sign is a direct result of this experimentation.

Furthermore, his whole grand World Wireless Plan was more about broadcasting power than information. Yes, the entire radio and television industry is pretty much in debt to him just for conceiving of it. But he was talking about shooting electricty half way or all the way around the world using the earth itself as a conductor. He also believed he could beam electricity to the moon or mars with little or no loss.

Now, some of that may sound pretty far out, especially for over a hundred years ago. But, I was reminded of the Tragically Hip song the other day that goes "yeah, you are ahead by a century..." because Tesla pretty much was. Here's proof:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403349/index.htm?postversion=2007033007

I'm impressed by the size of their receiver unit (about the size of a quarter I think it said). Also it sounds like they've already cooked up an alliance with the cellphone industry and with everyone carrying around blackberries and smartphones nowadays, the laptop market is the next obvious step.

Tesla Motors

Tesla Motors is in the electrical vehicle business. The Tesla Roadster, unlike other attempts at a full EV, is a real machine. Top speed of about 130, but where it really shines is the acceleration.

Apparently, the torque is a lot better due to the engine not needing as much time to reach maximum performance, making it a 0-60 in four seconds, roughly the same class as Porsche and Ferrari. No longer can the big oil companies make the old "golf cart" analogies to electric cars that are much more moon-buggy than mean.

The Tesla Roadster is impressive. Anyone who sees it on the site is bound to be shocked that such a machine would only require regular old AC to run it. In fact, this is more or less a realization of one of Tesla's many visions. I think the only thing that could really put it over the top would be if they could figure out how to charge the thing via wireless induction, like you park in on a special pad in your garage and it starts charging automagically.

Still, as-is, the Roadster takes 5-6 hours to charge or less if you get their special charging station. In terms of mileage, yes, there is still going to be a bit of a hangup about electric cars dying on you in the middle of nowhere. And yes, I expect to see smear ads to that effect by GM and so forth. There is some extra battery pack or something you can get that will get you over the last hump, but maybe in a couple more years the battery packs will be denser and you won't have that problem.

John J. O'Neill's Prodigal Genius

John J. O'Neill's Prodigal Genius is a biography of Nikola Tesla. Along with Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney, it is considered the best such material on the man. I found what seems to be the entire text online last week, and I haven't been able to stop reading it since:

http://uncletaz.com/library/scimath/tesla/prodigal.html

Now, I'm thrilled whenever I find such a complete and valuable text available online for free. I think the ability to refer people to it and spread the work around is in the author's best interest, but perhaps not the publishers. So here's the Amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Genius-Life-Nikola-Tesla/dp/1596057130/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-5691331-2818326?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175054104&sr=8-1

In fact I think the idea of buying the book along with Margaret Cheney's is fantastic. I've already got the latter and while it is a fantastic portal into the life of Tesla, O'Neill seems to get that much closer by being one of the rare few who can actually call themselves one of Tesla's friends.

Mark Twain is another of those who have had the pleasure of being able to call Nikola Tesla an actual friend. In fact it was Mark Twain's work that Tesla read as a kid when he was sick with cholera and malaria, that got him through the roughest spot and made him want to come over to America.