it was the turn of the 20th century; everybody was a eugenicist. that’s why we say ‘people from the past sucked’.
Imagine disregarding the entire domain of Tesla’s work - changing the entire world as we know it with his research and innovations - and the comment they need to make for online points is some virtue-oriented pat-me-on-the-back-im-ethical blorp about random social norms of the time. lol but cry.
yeah, dude was so good at electrical shit I literally cannot comprehend how he got to some of his ideas from where he was.
He had really bad autism. He was in love with a pigeon. Brilliant he was, but mad as a hatter.
see, I would argue that the pigeon kind of exhonnerated him for the eugenics. A race of superhuman pigeon-men, ruling over us pitiful full apes? I’d bend the knee, in my primitive forward jointed way.
I think he was just intuitively good at seeing what exactly is the portrayal of electricity and magnetism. A unique genius with a certain insight.
I sometimes feel that there were many businesses concerns that grew around his early research and they were so successful that his newer research must have been a threat to that.
Through all the mystery, half-truths, and frankly magical thinking people have with this man, it’s really hard to know what he was up to in his final days of work, before he became a homeless bag-man. I somehow feel, without making any kind of declarative statement, that he was working on transmission of energy with longitudinal (vs transverse) waves, and discovering methods of conveying and extracting electrical potential from and through Earth.
Inline Edit: To expand on the above paragraph: The Earth doesn’t really “absorb” electrons like a pillow absorbing a ping pong ball. The energy in the negative charges that the Earth grounds must move in waves, therefore they’re grounded but now the waves are bouncing around in the Earth; that energy still exists and may sum with other waves in an additive way. I believe, again without making a declarative statement, that Tesla recognized this and was pioneering research on how to transmit energy via, and gather momentum from those waves. There were successes transmitting energy and encoded information through Earth which can be repeated today with garbage dump salvage electronics. I believe he was discovering a few dangerous things as well: Harmonic discharges of electrical devices to ground could be captured (think telecommunications and military); and he was conducting novel elemental research on tapping Earth to harmonize and extract force(s) - what these things portended led to his complete scientific alienation.
The word “free energy” always obliterates any form of rational discourse. But there was something to it in a way, but to clarify, not in a literal way. Not in the sense of violating fundamental laws of conservation, rather seeing the “other side of the coin” that if the Earth is effectively infinite Ground then it’s also effectively an “infinite” source of power if harvested.
I’ve never really “researched” the man directly but what I do know comes from quite a bit of my casual STEM self-study over decades.
socially free, from a source nobody had ever even thought of, but not literally physically free. that is pretty fucking cool. I’ll have to ask an EE about this sometime, and see how dumb they think I am.
Careful. Most of what “we” are taught is complete horse-shit, or at the very least a severely simplified and perverted version of underlying reality. Many people, even those who work with electricity daily,are going to go cross-eyed hearing this notion. It requires real understanding I’m afraid.
People say that because they support it and they don’t think it’s a big deal. There were always anti-eugenicist movements (and always people opposed to fucking children, and having slaves, and even eating meat or going to war, and other morally shitty things justified with this excuse). That’s literally how the movements against these things came about - people throughout time have been against them. You just discount them because you align yourself with the other side, for some reason.
Tesla was not mentally well. But he had the power to make weapons, including a so called “Death Beam” https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html
And look, Trump connection:
After a three-day investigation, Trump’s report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating:
“His [Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.[233]”
In a box purported to contain a part of Tesla’s “death ray”, Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box.
https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html
An operation code-named “Project Nick” was heavily funded and placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla’s concept. Details of the experiments were never published, and the project was apparently discontinued. But something peculiar happened. The copies of Tesla’s papers disappeared and nobody knows what happened to them.
The morning after the inventor’s death, his nephew Sava Kosanovic´ hurried to his uncle’s room at the Hotel New Yorker. He was an up-and-coming Yugoslav official with suspected connections to the communist party in his country. By the time he arrived, Tesla’s body had already been removed, and Kosanovic´ suspected that someone had already gone through his uncle’s effects. Technical papers were missing as well as a black notebook he knew Tesla kept—a notebook with several hundred pages, some of which were marked “Government.”
P. E. Foxworth, assistant director of the New York FBI office, was called in to investigate. According to Foxworth, the government was “vitally interested” in preserving Tesla’s papers. Two days after Tesla’s death, representatives of the Office of Alien Property went to his room at the New Yorker Hotel and seized all his possessions.
Dr. John G. Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was called in to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody.
im saying you can’t really judge a non-expert for being the kind of shitty guy that was in vogue to be shitty at the time, especially if it’s not a primary thing. nicola tesla doing a eugenics? yeah whatever. his approximate contemporary, margaret sanger, you can give a lot more shit on the topic, because she was a fucking doctor.
this doesn’t just apply to history! as someone who has generally been on the right side of history, I have lived through this. several times. A current example, aside from the obvious nazi shit and transphobia, would be the whole push to equate large language models with “AI” and orient all of our society’s productive capacity towards making them like we’re a giant god damn paperclip machine. I can’t give any lay person who was into the tech in 2023 too terribly much shit about it-but if you were in any sort of information science, math, IT, or neuro-anything, and you were in favor of how it was being pushed for more than five minutes, I will mock you mercilessly until the day one of us dies, and then if it was you, ill graffiti the mockery on your fucking grave.
how strongly was he in favor of eugenics? did he have any ability to push the needle? did he care emotionally, or was it just a quick glance ‘yeah that sounds close enough and I trust the experts. anyway, back to stuff I actually care about’ kind of opinion?
It’s not about “judging,” it’s about not feeling sorry for Tesla’s name being attached to a shitty eugenicist since he himself was a eugenicist
I think being a shitty eugenicist non-expert in 1900 is a lot less egregious than being a shitty eugenicist who claims to be an expert in everything in 2025.
also, there’s plenty of other stuff for him to be ashamed of with this association.
