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w M w
from London (United Kingdom) on 2002-02-21 06:31 [#00095646]
Points: 21419 Status: Regular
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Might want to skip the first section:
Nikola Tesla as one admiring scientist put it, “so far ahead of his time that the rest of us then mistook him for a dreamer.” He was also a scientific cult figure: some enthusiasts believed he had come to Earth from Venus and many thought him the inventor of a mysterious death ray. Tesla’s greatest invention was the alternating-current, or ac, motor, the central element of all the world’s electrical power systems. It permits the transmission of the high-voltage current that makes long-distance power transmission-and almost all household appliances-possible. He also invented the Tesla coil, which converts low-voltage electricity into a high-voltage spark.
A sickly child, he suffered from apparitions that took the form of flashes of light. He had a photographic memory, and as his apparitions became less frequent, he acquired an uncanny ability to visualize mechanical devices precisely, without drawing them. His inventions came to him fully formed. His alternating current discovery came when he was twenty-five. Strolling with a friend in a Budapest park, tesla was reciting poetry when suddenly he fell into a trance. When he emerged, he sketched an alternating-current electrical motor in the dirt. Essentially, it used changing magnetic fields to turn a rotor. There were almost no moving parts. Tesla hobnobbed with high-flying financiers and lived at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where his eccentricities were legion. He was afraid to be near women wearing pearl earrings and would not shake hands for fear of germs. Before eating, he calculated the volume of each dish and polished his silverware at each meal with eighteen linen napkins- eighteen because he favored numbers divisible by three. Tesla was also a compulsive showman. He aired all ideas, brilliant or half-baked, in the press rather than in scientific journals. His manhattan laboratory was a technological circus where giant tesla coils threw off huge sparks, and the inventor lit electric lights by holding
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flea
from depths of your mind (New Zealand) on 2002-02-21 06:33 [#00095648]
Points: 9083 Status: Regular
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yep
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