Telsa Dome by Ford today's WSJ

[Robin Landseadel]

	Today, PopSci salutes the Wall Street Journal and its hedcut
	engraver for finding the Venn-diagram sliver where David
	Bowie, Nikola Tesla, and stippled front-page portraits overlap.
	
	A story in today's Journal documents the rise of Teslamania --
	the transfer of adoration from square old Thomas Edison to cool
	Nikola Tesla among today's creative classes -- over a century
	after the inventors' initial battle over alternating versus direct
	current.
	
	From the WSJ article: "'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."

	Back in 1940, Popular Science celebrated Mickey Rooney (the
	Bowie of the prewar era) in his screen appearance as Young
	Thomas Edison.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/nikola-tesla-achieves-belated-wsj-fame-david-bowie

	Inside it is some do. Girls are singing "Don't Sit Under the Apple
	Tree," and if it ain't the Andrews Sisters it may as well be. They
	are accompanied by a dance band with a mammoth reed
	section. Laughing, sounds of glassware, multilingual chitchat,
	your average weekday night here at the great Conference. The
	hash is wrapped in tinfoil inside a moldering ditty bag. It smells
	really good. Aw, jeepers-why'd he forget to bring a pipe?

	Actually, it's just as well. Above Slothrop, at eye level, is a
	terrace, and espaliered peach trees in milky blossom. As he
	crouches, hefting the bag, French windows open and someone
	steps out on this terrace for some air. Slothrop freezes, thinking
	invisible, invisible .... Footsteps approach, and over the railing
	leans-well, this may sound odd, but it's Mickey Rooney.
	Slothrop recognizes him on sight, Judge Hardy's freckled
	madcap son, three-dimensional, flesh, in a tux and am-Iosing-
	my-mind face. Mickey Rooney stares at Rocketman holding a
	bag of hashish, a wet apparition in helmet and cape. Nose level
	with Mickey Rooney's shiny black shoes, Slothrop looks up into
	the lit room behind-sees somebody looks a bit like Churchill,
	lotta dames in evening gowns cut so low that even from this
	angle you can see more tits than they got at Minsky's . . . and
	maybe, maybe he even gets a glimpse of that President
	Truman. He knows he is seeing Mickey Rooney, though Mickey
	Rooney, wherever he may go, will repress the fact that he ever
	saw Slothrop. It is an extraordinary moment. Slothrop feels he
	ought to say something, but his speech centers have failed him
	in a drastic way. Somehow, "Hey, you're Mickey Rooney,"
	seems inadequate. So they stay absolutely still, victory's night
	blowing by around them, and the great in the yellow electric
	room scheming on oblivious.
	
	Slothrop breaks it first: puts a finger to his mouth and scuttles
	away, back around the villa and down to the shore, leaving
	Mickey Rooney with his elbows on that railing, still watching.
	GR, P388

On Jan 14, 2010, at 2:02 PM, grladams at teleport.com wrote:

> 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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