Why did Thomas Edison electrocute an elephant?
science.howstuffworks.com
You may have heard of Topsy the elephant and her sad demise at the hands of Thomas Edison. But what's the real story?
  • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    11 months ago

    Topsy was also electrocuted at the request of the ASPCA because otherwise she was going to be hanged and it was seen as more humane, which always seems to get left out.

    To clarify, Edison wasn’t trying to ‘disprove’ Tesla, the War of the Currents was Edison vs Westinghouse. Tesla didn’t invent AC, he would’ve learned about that in engineering school, he invented the 3 phase motor, which made AC significantly more practical. Tesla had an argument with one of Edison’s managers over pay, not with Edison. Tesla and Edison wrote each other letters later on and generally spoke positively of each other in public.

    Tesla’s an interesting guy but unfortunately went off the deep end pretty steeply. His ‘death ray’ was a ‘blueprint’ he sold to his landlord instead of paying rent and is basically gibberish. Wardenclyffe tower was doomed by not understanding wireless transmission and is basically a Bond villain device. Turning the Ionosphere and Mantel in to halves of a capacitor would both take more energy than humans have ever generated and be really really really bad for anything tall and conductive, which would be basically everything with the energies involved.

    • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      Agreed, Tesla is way overvalued. It doesn’t help that he gets picked up by free energy cranks. When one shows up at my makerspace, they almost always cite Tesla somewhere.

      Not that Tesla did nothing, but people can’t leave it at his actual accomplishments. The fact that so much of his work can’t be reproduced is seen as deep magic rather than a failure of science.

    • bbuez@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Turning the Ionosphere and Mantel in to halves of a capacitor would both take more energy than humans have ever generated and be really really really bad for anything tall and conductive

      This is the first time I’ve heard of this hypothesis, as I’ve just generally avoided media talking about the secrets of Tesla’s free energy or whatever, but I am very curious how this would work and what such tripple really bad would happen, sounds like a sweet soft sci fi setting.

      • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        Tesla’s design [for Wardenclyffe] used a concept of a charged conductive upper layer in the atmosphere, a theory dating back to an 1872 idea for a proposed wireless power system by Mahlon Loomis. Tesla not only believed that he could use this layer as his return path in his electrical conduction system, but that the power flowing through it would make it glow, providing night time lighting for cities and shipping lanes.

        It’s a very Victorian / Steampunk idea that is also kind of horrifying. It’s working off theories of what electricity “is” that we now know aren’t accurate, but if you try to scale them to actually working every building and tree and person is now a lightning rod.