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Comment by cushpush | Hacker News Reader

What did he get wrong, out of curiosity

He was strongly convinced that electromagnetic waves as described by Maxwell and experimentally shown by Hertz were uselessly wrong theory and that Hertz didn't understand the results of his own experiment (According to Tesla electromagnetic waves were longitudinal, i.e. more like space contracting and expanding around the transmitter). His own theories generally are based around assumptions that the earth and parts of the atmosphere are really good conductors and energy would somehow flow through them almost losslessly if it just were done right. I don't think he ever published a unified theory on how exactly that would work. In contrast Maxwell's equations are still part of every physics curriculum.

It is sad because this is where Tesla went off the rails. If he had kept working on radio, he would have likely shared 1909 Nobel Prize for radio. Tesla wasn’t a good business man but could have revived his career.

I think a more basic way of describing it is that he was one of the last scientists to hold onto the theory of needing an "aether" for EM waves to travel through.

The Michelson Morley experiment was in the 1880s and Tesla held on to the "luminiferous aether" theory until he died in the 1940's I believe. I seem to remember that he thought all other theories were "flawed" like you said.

People will say "Tesla was smart but not a good businessman, etc" and obviously he was a smart guy but still a tragic figure for holding onto old theories some of which bankrupted him.

Well, he alternated between not believing in the existence of (EM) radio waves at all and claiming that they were useless for transmitting messages, which isn't the same as the luminiferous ether idea.

Belief in a luminiferous ether (that fills all of space) is consistent with the idea that EM waves can travel through space (after all, we can see light coming from the Sun, etc.) and that radio waves could be used.

But Tesla seems to have argued that working "radio" technology was really electrical currents traveling through the ground (or through the ocean in the case of radio on ships), which then somehow induced "reception" in the radio equipment located above the currents.

I think he is talking about Tesla’s wireless power transmission. If I’m reading Wikipedia right, he ignored Hertz’s work that described inverse-square and straight line propagation because didn’t fit his idea of long-distance wireless power. But Wardenclyffe was a failure and we now know could never work.

So I am open-minded and optimistic about Wardenclyffe, due to the fact that a wire hanging in the open air will conduct voltage from upper atmosphere to lower atmosphere. So there is a natural gradient that could be leveraged, somehow.

Ultimately, I think we will never know because funding for the project was pulled and the building demolished. Besides, Tesla made significant nonintuitive advances in his fields which does not make it easy to dismiss his ideas.

That part of the article ("The Magnifying Transmitter") is just gibberish. Tesla's mental health must already have been in steep decline by 1919. Or he was intentionally trying to bullshit people.

In what sense do you find this part of the article gibberish?

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