Telsa Dome by Ford today's WSJ

[rich]

they forgot that 80s rock band named Tesla

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 5:02 PM, grladams at teleport.com
<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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