For Every Faceless Company … There’s a Mighty Tesla
For Every Faceless Company … There’s a Mighty Tesla
I fell in love with electricity when I was a child. It also helped that my Dad and his father were both electricians. We all remember things from the past, and I vividly remember my father showing me that the resistance of water was low, and that was the reason that you could get a short circuit when something was wet, and in him showing me — with a real-life demonstration -on how a fuse actually worked. My father wasn’t a professor. He was an electrician, and to me, he performed magic.
When I was an apprentice, I’ll never forget the time — and I can’t believe this happened — when someone demonstrated how an earth leakage circuit breaker worked, by touching two ends of a live wire. And while I worked as an apprentice, those crazy three pinned monsters — the NPN and PNP transistors — came along and changed the whole world. In our modern world, we now have billions of those devices in the computer you are using now, but we seem to take it all for granted. A few years ago, I presented to a classroom full of new hopefuls, and I showed them a transistor, and said “What’s that?” … silence … “It’s in all your computers” … silence … “There’s billions of them in every computer” … still silence. I wondered if we have become a world of technology users, and who care little about how things actually work?
The Current War
Recently I watched the “The Current War”, and I watched in glory at the way that human minds have shaped our future. The film is an important coverage of the greatest achievement in our history — the generation and harnessing of electricity — but gives a flawed coverage of the people who really made the main contributions.
The hook
I appreciate that filmmakers must find a hook for the storyline, and stick to it. The beauty of Maxwell’s curl equations are never going to make a riveting film, so they must find a human element for the viewer to associate with. For this film, it boils down to George Westinghouse v Thomas Edison. It was a personal battle. And, while there was an undercurrent — (sorry for the pun) — of it being about AC v DC, and in creating the electric chair, it was all about two people fighting to create powerful companies, who aimed to dominate our world. But there was one person, who just kept popping up, and looking rather strange at times: Nikola Tesla. And while we are at it, where was Joseph Swan, and where were the mentions to the mighty Michael Faraday? In fact, JP Morgan — yes, the real JP Morgan — had more of a staring role than Nikola had.
I personally think that Nikola Tesla is so under represented in his contribution to our modern world. He was a true creator of ideas in a world of corporate copying. To me, he created the future and is only behind Maxwell and Faraday for this greatness in science. Virtually everything that we have in our modern world has Tesla to thank for its creation.
A Future Film
For a future film, I hope we will see people like Michael Faraday, John Napier (a personal one for me) and Nikola Tesla properly covered for their contribution, especially in this world of faceless corporations who spend billions on R&D, but often have to buy-out innovative companies — created by innovated people — in order to properly innovate.
Oh, I would love to see a film of John Napier looking our over his field on Merchiston, and contemplating his new discovery, and in revealing how natural logarithms explains so much in our world … the growth of our populations and electrical current flows, and show it as the foundation of modern cryptography. In fact, let’s have a film about Rivest, Shamir and Aldeman (RSA) … that would be great, and how the rained against government pressure and created the foundation of modern security.
Be More Tesla
The humanity in Tesla shines through as powerful as his contribution to our world:
And for those in government who see the laws for their land as being all and mighty:
So be more Nikola Telsa, and less Mark Zuckerberg. Our next generation will thrive on technological and scientific advancements, and not on an old models of law, finance and government. So I leave you with this …
So, don’t just look at those Rotten Tomatoes ratings, make up your own mind on the people who really built our world. We take our world for grant, so spend some time looking under the hood, and get our next generation to see the wonder of our world, and not get them hooked into a world of faceless corporations. A single great thought in a person’s mind is more powerful than the whole of Facebook.