AtD deep context: the time of Tesla

[Robert Mahnke]

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/07/my-day-magister-ludi-or-from-econ-115-to-tesla-to-gernsback-to-the-skylark-of-space-to-oliver-wendell-holmes.html


"My day starts with the fall course: Econ 115, Twentieth Century
Economic History. The question is how to teach the acceleration of
global and North Atlantic economic growth around 1870. Before 1870 the
capital- and resource-corrected efficiency of labor in the North
Atlantic region looks to have grown by only some 0.4% per year--a pace
at which it would take 180 years for the efficiency of labor to
double. America supports real income growth of some 1.0% per year
before 1870 only by conquering and expanding across the continent,
greatly increasing the stock of natural resources the economy has at
its disposal faster than its population grows.

"Then around 1870 the frontier closes: natural resources per capita
begin to fall. But real income growth does not fall: it doubles.
Post-1870 real income growth is driven by (a) much faster increases in
the efficiency of labor, and (b) capital deepening made possible by
inventions that cheapen old and make possible the production of an
entirely new range of capital goods. And both of these processes are
in turn driven by (a) the application of science to technology, and
(b) the scent of profit in the nostrils of financiers and
entrepreneurs opened up by the possibility of applying science-based
technologies to make both old goods (i.e., dyestuffs, steel, etc.) and
new goods (electric lights, airplanes, etc.).

"And I decide that the right way to teach this is to make them wake up
by telling them about the life of autism-spectrum genius inventor
Nikola Tesla, known for, according to Wikipedia: the Tesla turbine,
teleforce, Tesla's oscillator, Tesla electric car, the Tesla
principle, Tesla's egg of Columbus, Alternating current, Tesla's AC
induction motor, the rotating magnetic field, wireless beamed-power
technology, particle-beam weapons, death rays, terrestrial standing
waves, the bifilar coil, telegeodynamics, and electrogravitics;
recipient of the Elliott Cresson Medal (1893), the Edison Medal
(1916), and the John Scott Medal (1934). . . . ."