• JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I feel bad for Nikola Tesla having his name associated with all this nonsense. Not even death let him escape from rich assholes taking credit for the work of others.

        • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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          55 seconds ago

          https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100-130299355/

          The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

          Oof, that’s a tough read.

          • Krudler@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            Imagine disregarding the entire domain of Tesla’s work - changing the entire world as we know it with his research and innovations - and the comment they need to make for online points is some virtue-oriented pat-me-on-the-back-im-ethical blorp about random social norms of the time. lol but cry.

              • Krudler@lemmy.world
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                20 minutes ago

                I think he was just intuitively good at seeing what exactly is the portrayal of electricity and magnetism. A unique genius with a certain insight.

                I sometimes feel that there were many businesses concerns that grew around his early research and they were so successful that his newer research must have been a threat to that.

                Through all the mystery, half-truths, and frankly magical thinking people have with this man, it’s really hard to know what he was up to in his final days of work, before he became a homeless bag-man. I somehow feel, without making any kind of declarative statement, that he was working on transmission of energy with longitudinal (vs transverse) waves, and discovering methods of conveying and extracting electrical potential from and through Earth.

                The word “free energy” always obliterates any form of rational discourse. But there was something to it in a way, but to clarify, not in a literal way. Not in the sense of violating fundamental laws of conservation, rather seeing the “other side of the coin” that if the Earth is effectively infinite Ground then it’s also effectively an “infinite” source of power if harvested.

                I’ve never really “researched” the man directly but what I do know comes from quite a bit of my casual STEM self-study over decades.