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Who was more important Edison or Tesla?

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Steve Conner

Tue Mar 06 2007, 04:36PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

I bet Edison would have lasted longer in the Big Brother house.

Bored Chemist

Tue Mar 06 2007, 06:25PM

Registered Member #193 Joined: Fri Feb 17 2006, 07:04AM
Location: sheffield
Posts: 1022

"I bet Edison would have lasted longer in the Big Brother house."
Is that a good thing or a bad thing.
Anyway, the question is probably meaningless. If Tesla hadn't spotted the advantages of AC power distribution, someone else would. Same goes for Edison's inentions.

Bjørn

Tue Mar 06 2007, 07:05PM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

If Edison was alive I am sure he would have been on a forum that manages to mention MTV, The Discovery Channel and Fortune Magazine on the front page.

Bored Chemist has a good point, it is far easier to be a genius when even basic things and properties have not been discovered yet.

Coyote Wilde

Tue Mar 06 2007, 10:00PM

Registered Member #175 Joined: Tue Feb 14 2006, 09:32PM
Location: Sudbury, ON
Posts: 111

Just playing devil's advocate here, but if Edison had won, we'd have distributed power generation and an everlasting battery bank in every basement, tuned to some sort of generator in the garage or at the end of the block. Windmills, perhaps.
So does the Westinghouse/Tesla victory really pan out in the long run?

Alex

Tue Mar 06 2007, 10:16PM

Geometrically Frustrated
Registered Member #6 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 04:18AM
Location: Bowdoin, Maine
Posts: 373

wrote ...
It is far easier to be a genius when even basic things and properties have not been discovered yet.

I think that's true to some extent, but such statements are often disproven when given enough time.

Take chaos theory: Scientists thought they had the basics all figured out, but this new understanding of dynamic systems blew a lot of previous science out of the water. Hardcore scientists were writing journals about things as seemingly well-understood as pendulums. So much for basic things and properties in that case. There is still a lot of work to be done in the field of chaos theory, but with time it will probably be considered as simple and mundane as the theories it replaced.

..end ramble.

[edit to reply to the above post that I missed while typing this one]

That's a very interesting thought. I really don't think it would be possible though. Enormous amounts of raw materials would be needed for such a system, and think of how many things would require ac conversion, or dc/dc conversion. Maybe power would come to your house at an extremely high voltage, and everyone would have a massive voltage converter to give them the various voltages they need for all their electrical devices, from CRTs and refridgerators, to computer systems and stereos. I just don't think that could be done feasibly in a widespread fashion. All other functions of survival in modern society are provided by big companies. People can't live the way we do now if they have to grow their own food and provide their own medical care and water and fuel and clothing and *. What makes you think the production of electricity would be any different (granted they would still provide power, but a lot of the system would be at your own home)?

Steve Conner

Wed Mar 07 2007, 12:14AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Bjorn, who knows what people will be calling "basic things" in 50 years time? What Tesla was doing was as cutting-edge and difficult in its time as chaos theory, high-energy physics or artificial intelligence is now.

Alex and Electroholic, this is a subject close to my own heart since I did my PhD in the theory of distributed generation. The argument usually given in favour of it is that, once the oil runs out and everyone realises how horrid nuclear fission is, there will be no reason to have large centralized power plants any more. Renewable energy is diffuse by nature, so renewable energy plants work just as well spread out over the place as they would if they were all lumped in one spot. Therefore there is no reason to bother with a national grid any more. Power distribution, such as it was, would be done with lowish DC voltages, so Edison would effectively have been right all along.

My goal was to create a kind of nanogrid Lego set that people could assemble in chunks of whatever size they needed, from a single house to a street or maybe even a neighbourhood, that would self-discover and optimize to move power around as efficiently as possible. Apart from the fact that it didn't work, and nobody would buy it if it did, it was great :P

I found out one particularly uncomfortable fact while trying to write software to control a smart battery storage unit. I programmed it to maximise profit by buying free surplus energy from my PVs and reselling it to the consumer at grid prices. It immediately shut itself off and refused to do anything. I thought I had messed it up, but I worked through the calculations by hand, and found that storing the electricity in lead-acid batteries makes it 20 times more expensive than current grid prices, even if it was free to start with. This is due to the price of batteries and the fact that they wear out. So my algorithm realised it could never make a profit and gave up.

Bjørn

Wed Mar 07 2007, 12:46AM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

Basic things like lightbulbs, electric motors and computers. Things that a single person without relevant eduaction could invent and build with no money, things that would directly influence the life of almost every single person on earth.

Those things does not exist to be discovered anymore. There are many true geniuses today but what they do never affects people directly and most of them do things that may never influence society in any way. Who cares about chaos theory? The answer is nobody, who cares about light in their homes? Everyone.

So it was much easier to be a genius 100 years ago than today. You are not going to find some weird guy in some backyard in Glasgow that will change the world completely in several different ways with several different original inventions.

Coyote Wilde

Wed Mar 07 2007, 01:21AM

Registered Member #175 Joined: Tue Feb 14 2006, 09:32PM
Location: Sudbury, ON
Posts: 111

Alex: I think that alot of the system would be in your own home because in the early days, when Edison was electrifying NYC, that is how it was being done. Block by block. Coal fired, mind you, but people would pretty soon decide they didn't want any of that nonsense. The Jacobs and Windcharger companies that popped up in the 20s to sell wind turbines to Rural farmers would have been able to jump into that market, and voila! Clean, renewable power, a century early.
This is, of course, the most extreme best-case scenario imaginable. But it could have happened.

Steve: I wonder what your algorithm would say if it took a look at Edison cell batteries? I've always had a soft spot for those, since(Nickle-Iron alkaline cell) as far as I know, they do not wear out. Period. Leaky as old pantyhose, though. Reminds me of something out of the Hitchhiker's Guide... I can only hope my graduate work will be as entertaining.

Mike

Wed Mar 07 2007, 01:40AM

Registered Member #58 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:40AM
Location: Tri-Cities, Washington, US
Posts: 317

I see this is starting to turn into a AC vs DC battle. I would half to go with AC as being so much far superior, as already pointed out, that a simple transformer is all that is needed to go from AC to AC, or AC to DC using a rectifier. Otherwise things would require much much more circuitry to accommodate this problem. But anyways, they were both needed/not needed in a sense since others would have probably discovered these things (maybe)

Hazmatt_(The Underdog)

Wed Mar 07 2007, 03:24AM

Registered Member #135 Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 12:06AM
Location: Anywhere is fine
Posts: 1735

They both have served their purpose, 'nuf said.

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