Telsa Dome by Ford today's WSJ

[grladams at teleport.com]

Long-Dead Inventor Nikola Tesla Is Electrifying Hip Techies 
His Name Is Branding Magic; Thomas Edison Is 'So 20th Century'
By DANIEL MICHAELS 
Decades after he died penniless, Nikola Tesla is elbowing aside his old
adversary Thomas Edison in the pantheon of geek gods.

When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 electric
sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip
producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a new line of advanced processors,
they called them Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom Entertainment
in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships
for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was a scientist and inventor who achieved fame and fortune in the
1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current work on a grand
scale, electrifying the world. He created the first major hydroelectric
dam, at Niagara Falls. He thrilled packed theaters with presentations in
which he ran high voltage through his body to illuminate a fluorescent
light in his hand. His inventions helped Guglielmo Marconi develop radio.

And his rivalry with Edison—called the Battle of the Currents because
Edison had bet on direct current—was legendary. Tesla won the contest, when
his AC equipment powered an unprecedented display of electric light at the
1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Fifty years later, the 86-year-old Serbian emigré died in obscurity at a
New York hotel, unmarried, childless and bereft of friends. Meanwhile,
Edison was lionized for generations as one of America's greatest inventors.

But Tesla has been rediscovered by technophiles, including Google Inc.
co-founder Larry Page, who frequently cites him as an early inspiration.
And Teslamania is going increasingly mainstream. 


Inventors and Their Brainstorms
An early hint was "Tesla Girls," a 1984 single from the British technopop
band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson
has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized
version of him in the 2006 film "The Prestige," alongside Christian Bale
and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent
documentary film as "more of an artist than a scientist in some strange
way."

Tesla, in short, is cool.

"He was a kind of crazy, interesting dude," says Melody Pfeiffer,
spokeswoman for the Dark Void game's distributor, Capcom Entertainment.

Edison, meanwhile, is less au courant than he used to be, says Paul Israel,
director of the Thomas Edison Papers, a scholarly project at Rutgers
University, in Piscataway, N.J.

Many significant Edison inventions—including the phonograph and the
motion-picture camera—are becoming historical curios. The European Union
has banned old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, another Edison
innovation. The EU is urging consumers to replace them with more-efficient
fluorescent lights descended from those Tesla favored.

"Edison is so 20th century, much like Henry Ford," says Bernie Carlson, a
professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Virginia.

Once, Edison was revered as the Wizard of Menlo Park, after the New Jersey
town—since renamed Edison—where he built a laboratory and movie studio. But
Edison biographies have started focusing on his role in establishing
monopolies in the electricity and movie industries.

 Auto Show: Tesla's All-Electric Roadster Sport
2:04
Tesla shows off its all-electric, zero-emission vehicle, the Roadster
Sport, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. WSJ's Lee
Hawkins reports.
Recent portrayals of Edison have highlighted his darker side. In the 1998
HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," Tom Hanks plays a French
filmmaker who was financially ruined when Edison secretly copied and then
released his 1902 epic, "A Trip to the Moon," without paying its creator.

The Tesla-Edison rivalry was intense partly because the highly educated
young engineer sailed to America in 1884 to work for Edison. But after less
than a year in Edison's labs, Tesla quit in a spat over pay.

Tesla-boosters note that in Edison's effort to discredit alternating
current a decade later, his staff deliberately electrocuted a murderous
circus elephant and profited from a popular film of the killing. To sully
Tesla's ideas, Edison's men also helped orchestrate the first execution by
electric chair.

"I can't imagine writing a song about Edison
too boringly rich,
entrepreneurial and successful!" said Andy McCluskey, a founder of
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, in an email. He calls Tesla "a romantic
'failure' figure."

In 1895—after selling his AC patents to industrialist George Westinghouse
for a mint and harnessing Niagara Falls—Tesla hobnobbed with Mark Twain,
J.P. Morgan and French actress Sarah Bernhardt. But troubles soon began.

Tesla's laboratory in New York was destroyed by fire, along with years of
work and notes. The secretive experimenter then burned through much of his
fortune testing radio transmissions in Colorado Springs, Colo. In 1898, he
demonstrated a pair of small radio-controlled boats—decades before guided
torpedoes—but was rebuffed by the U.S. military. When Marconi changed the
world with a trans-Atlantic radio transmission in 1901, Tesla wasn't
mentioned.

Inventor Nikola Tesla pictured in Colorado, achieved fame and fortune in
the 1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current on a huge scale.
A contemporary of Edison, Tesla died in obscurity but is now being
rediscovered and hailed by technophiles, such as Google co-founder Larry
Page.
Undaunted, the scientist continued to be far ahead of his time. His papers
suggest he stumbled upon—but didn't pursue—lasers and X-rays, years before
their recognized discoveries. He proposed transmitting electricity through
the upper atmosphere. He sketched out robots and a death ray he hoped would
end all wars.

"There's a sort of science-fiction aspect to Tesla," says Prof. Israel at
Rutgers.

For marketers at chip makers Nvidia, who were targeting the
techno-cognoscenti with a new product line, that aura is priceless.

"A mythology has built up around Tesla that catches people's imagination,"
says Andy Keane, general manager of Tesla Products at Nvidia.

Tesla's more outlandish pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he
could use electricity to cause earthquakes and control weather. He claimed
to have detected signals from Mars while he was in Colorado.

Unlike Edison, who died in 1931 with 1,093 patents to his name, Tesla left
few completed blueprints. The shortcoming undercut his legacy but added to
the air of mystery surrounding him.

"Tesla's work is incomplete, so people can read into it what they want to,"
says Prof. Carlson at the University of Virginia.

Christopher Priest did just that in writing "The Prestige," his novel and
then movie about rival magicians in Victorian London. In it, one of the
magicians visits Tesla in Colorado and pays him to create a machine unlike
anything the real Tesla ever mentioned.

"I wanted an ambiguous, mysterious genius," says Mr. Priest. "Tesla was the
man for the job."

The electric Tesla Roadster Sport, which boasts a top speed of 125 mph and
a range of 244 miles on a single charge.
Creators of the Dark Void videogame needed a mentor for their hero, Will,
who falls from our world into a parallel realm ruled by sinister aliens
bent on annihilating humans. 

"We quickly decided that tapping into the conspiracies and geek mystique
built up around Nikola Tesla would be awesome," says senior producer Morgan
Gray. "What is cooler than having Tesla reverse-engineer alien technology
to build weapons of super science?"

At Tesla Motors, the branding isn't simply an effort to ride the name's
nerdy snob appeal, says spokeswoman Rachel Konrad. The Tesla Roadster uses
an AC motor descended directly from Tesla's original 1882 design, which he
said came to him in a vision.

Still, for all Tesla's cachet, Edison's legacy remains inescapable. Ms.
Konrad says customers note with irony that Tesla Motors' main showroom is
in Menlo Park, Calif.

To help boost the Tesla name, the automotive start-up has launched a
promotional sweepstakes with Capcom around the release of Dark Void. The
prize: a Tesla Roadster.

For Nikola Tesla himself, Ms. Konrad says, the prize is overdue
recognition. 

"You know you've gone into mainstream pop glory when you're in a videogame
aimed at 18-year-old boys," she says.

Write to Daniel Michaels at daniel.michaels at wsj.com 



Original Message:
-----------------
From: Henry Musikar scuffling at gmail.com
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:38:20 -0500
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: Telsa Dome by Ford


Would that the video was half as interesting as Robin's description of it.
It's one of the most boring videos I have ever seen!

Henry Mu
Sr. IT Consultant
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20/ 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Robin Landseadel
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 7:14 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Telsa Dome by Ford

Heavens, but was that self-consciously orgasmic or what?

It's like these yuppies are worshiping the Focus on some deep, tantric  
level.

It's like a clutch of Na'vi wannabes "grocking" some tepid, generic  
econo-beast with their USB 4's.

It's like long iridescent streams of electro-jizz lighting up the  
midnight sky.

On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:26 AM, David Morris wrote:

> http://www.focus.ford.eu/?locale=de-de


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