Happy Birthday, Tesla: Nikola Tesla was born during a lightning storm at the stroke of midnight on the 10th of July 1856. His midwife exclaimed, “He’ll be a child of the storm,” to which his mother replied, “No, of light.”
Image: A publicity photo taken in 1899 at Nikola Tesla’s laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the inventor worked before he established his Wardenclyffe laboratory on Long Island. The photo was a double exposure — his pose and the sparks recorded at different times — helping him avoid electrocution. The “magnifying transmitter” pictured here was said to produce millions of volts of electricity.
Credit: Yugoslav Press and Cultural Center, caption from New York Times.
#teslatuesday
madame scientist's not-so-mad musings 
welcome back! and a beautiful reminder. Tesla remains one of my all time favourite geeks. Enigmatically, he was a child of both storms and light. Me and my buddies tried to make a Tesla Coil in High School. Such blind ambitions when one is a child. Now, I just read about the stuff.
Hi Suhail Manzoor , is it not stunning to think this picture was captured well over a 100 years ago? When I read the anecdote of his birth it was almost too good to be true..I googled several sources to confirm.
It is good to be back on G+, picking up all these tasty morsels to feed my brain 🙂
and I believe Sputnik was launched today some 50 years ago.
55 years ago on Oct 4 according to http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/ Growing up in India, we used to read a children’s magazine called Sputnik. Looking back, it was probably a lot of Russian propaganda, but we loved it!
i remember Sputnik, i used to read that when at my cousin’s place when on vacation to India. There was also the magazine Soviet Union. And boy, those soviet text books were so cheap, especially by the likes of Landau and Zeldovich. Not much has changed exceptmthe channel, I get my posion from CNN and The Economist nowadays.
Good morning Feisal Kamil . Is this picture not a fabulous composition? Here is another strange one: http://www.informantnews.com/uploads/image/nikola-tesla-and-his-wardenclyffe-tower-and-laboratory4.jpg
Look what I found, Suhail Manzoor : http://www.filestube.com/s/sputnik+magazine
I don’t know if this is a safe download but it sure would be fun to go down memory lane. I recall finding one issue online and sharing it with my daughter who was doing an assignment for Russian class.
Cool find Rajini! I shall have a look and see if I can download 1968 and see what was hip behind the iron curtain that year (besides the invasion of Czeckoslovakia and on an aside of an aside, the said country had the best looking stamps ever made, works of art I tell you), thanks again! You are a star!
Feisal Kamil , I would not know about the noise since my experimentation has been with smelly chemicals and toxic biologicals 🙂 But Prabat Parmal once mentioned that high voltage generators have quite a hum! Suhail Manzoor , if you find a link t these stamps, do let me know. Just the other day I met a young student from Czech Republic and made the horrible faux pas of referring to Czeckoslovakia ..he seemed good natured about it, though.
let me see if I remember : at a million volts, a foot of air become a contuctor. the one project Tesla tried to do and was convinced was possible was to tranmit electricity through the air. We do some of that now and there are plans afoot to do that on an industrial scale.
Suhail Manzoor As I understand it Tesla’s idea was to to use the ground and ionosphere as plates of a big capacitor in a global resonant oscillator fed by Tesla coils placed around the Earth. Thus people could erect antennae resonant to the frequency of the planet sized oscillator and draw power without wires anywhere in the world.
A big idea but I suspect that having coherent electromagnetic radiation on that scale would impact life in unexpected ways.
I just watched a biography about him!
How on earth did he create all those patents and still die penniless?
Mike McLoughlin , he forgot the old adage: An apple a day…
Mike, the man didn’t have Apple’s lawyers either.
Respect! We probably would have commercially viable wireless electricity available today had it not been for an accident (or sabotage?) which burned down Tesla’s lab and most of his work – including the Tesla Generator. This was shown in Inside Job which I thought was a great movie, few conspiracy theories aside.
Rahul Joshi Edison.
also in the final act
…..
You are still making up your mind about G+, aren’t you prabhat parimal ? 🙂
I’m sure you will figure it out 🙂 In any case, enjoy your time here, there is so much to appreciate.
Hello, i noticed that most of the comment section dates back to 2012 and i just want to et you know that you are all great people, and that tesla is still appreciated in this year, by the very few numbers of us.