Apparenty, wear and tear on records was a big deal back then.

Edison cylinders (and his short-lived disk machines, introduced just a little while before the bitter end of the Edison empire) used vertical ("up and down") recording rather than lateral (side to side) recording.

That is, if you looked at the grooves, they'd appear even and straight. Not wiggly like the (relatively) familiar 45 single and 33 1/3 LP disk records. The sound was recorded via varying depth of pits along the track.

Secret Ingredient for recording media. Oh, I like that.

Edison, while not nuts, was entertainingly cranky in his own way.

I did a short paper on the history of the Phonograph in collitch. Edison bungled the marketing of his version badly, at first insisting it only be used as a dictaphone, and then sticking with cylinder recordings until the late '20s.

One book I read had a bit of copy from an Edison house-organ, which described how Edison would each day personally pour a measure of Secret Ingredient out of a paper sack into the vat of composition used to make his extra-durable cylinder records.

Actally, he did have funding , big funding (JP Morgan) for broadcast power, but early on JP realized that it would be impossible to meter and properly bill customers for their power use over the air - so he pulled the plug (he he) on his cash.

But he kicked Edison in the nuts when it came to inventing.

For some reason, that produced a very pleasing image in my head. I see it as a Robert Smeigel cartoon with Edison wearing a crappy, rumpled brown suit as he get kicked in the nuts. I'm still into the inventor-as-hero mythos but Edison's campaign against AC really burns me.

This should be the direct link:

http://www.diepunyhumans.com/2003_03_30_archive.html#200066834

So....where's the article about Tesla? The Boing Boing link goes to a page mostly filled with doctored monkey pictures. Which are nice but don't have anything to do with Tesla, unless there's a lot I'm not currently aware of.

How 'bout posting that link here, my argumentative friend?

And I suspect a lot of the nutcase ideas were cooked up solely to create press, which Tesla felt would aid him in his constant search for funding. He was undoubtedly slightly mad, but that just doesn't write away AC, radio and the rotating magnetic field etc.

Tesla/Biefeld-Brown is really just a jumping-off point for the real meat of the book, but it's been fun to play with anyway.

Tesla was a bit of a nutcase, but I think his naysayers overplay the times where he held forth with some cuckoo ideas and ignore the multitude of times he was truly ahead of his time. There was plenty of wheat along with the chaff. In the 1800's he built a working remote control submarine complete with torpedo launch, he was a radio master before Marconi got into the game (in fact, it was later proven that Marconi was using Tesla designed devices in his own early experiments). Tesla loved the limelight, for sure, but his major problem was that unlike Edison (his lifetime nemesis) he had no solid business sense. But he kicked Edison in the nuts when it came to inventing. Edison was like the Bill Gates of the time, and Tesla was like Stallman, K&R, Woz, Ted Nelson and and John C Lilly all rolled into one.

No need to thank me. I'm getting paid quite a lot of money, after all.

I like things that are more original than stuff that reads like it was lifted from someone's cult page. But thanks for playing.

Or, you know, you could try reading it first...

Sorry. Should've seen the big flashing "satire" sign. It read, however, just like thousands of Tesla cult writings, so it's not very original fiction.

It's fiction, sunshine. Everyone knows Tesla was a press fiend who talked shit for "fame".

Repeat after me. Fiction.

Wow, Warren, like many Tesla fans, is even wackier than Tesla was, only without the engineering talent. Tesla, long popular with "free-energy" and other pseudoscience promoters, did some good stuff, some stuff that was practical in limited ways but not on a massive scale, and some just plain bogus BS. (His "solar panel", for instance, was not a workable device, to put it charitably.) He was great with demos, less great with proper experimental controls, and really bad on follow-through.

He was not unlike Bucky Fuller -- another very clever person who devised a great many things which were quite impractical and then bailed on them during the production end. Tesla did have a terrific knack at engineering, but also seemed to lack the ability to edit his ideas -- to separate the workable and real from the unworkable and unreal. The cult that's built up around him just assumes that all his ideas -- the real and the unreal -- were equally possible, and that is just silly.