Today is not only the birthday of Lucille Ball, Alfred Tennyson, and Andy Warhol, it’s the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. What else has happened on this day?
In 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia met for its first day. In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire formally went out of existence. In 1890, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in an electric chair. In 1914, World War One began. In 1962, Jamaica won its independence from the United Kingdom. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. And, in 1984, Prince released Purple Rain. Which one of those events strikes you as the most important?
Darnit. That would have been an easy one if you hadn’t mentioned Purple Rain.
Lucille Ball?
Except for Prince, everything in the last paragraph is important, as, of course, was the bombing of Hiroshima.
But I’ll note that Kemmler’s death was supposed to mark the end of the “Westinghouse current,” thanks to Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan. Kemmler’s electrocution was staged by no accident in Buffalo, at the time when the International Niagara Falls commission was leaning towards building a direct current power plant, rather than the one they ultimately built, a plant to generate alternating current, thanks to the partnership of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse.
Despite red eight-page booklets warning of the dangers of being “Westinghoused” by alternating current, in the end, sanity prevailed.
Direct current is not that safe (the direct current plant in Morgan’s basement blew up!) and certainly not efficient. You’d have needed a power plant every mile. Edison was no visionary, and could not imagine a way to make AC safe.
Tesla could, and did, and Westinghouse was smart enough to realize it and snap up Tesla’s patents.
Can you tell I’m working on a script about these events?
I saw a show about the AC/DC controversy and Niagara Falls. I hope your script is just as interesting.
Interesting, definitely. Compelling emotional story? Still working on that!
Lisa, I’m delighted to see someone who’s also interested in probably the most underappreciated and misunderstood genius in American history.
Fascinating too that within only a little more than a decade from discovering and developing his AC polyphase motor, he was already hard at work on what would have been an even more revolutionary invention — wireless delivery of unlimited power (and communications).
Good luck with your script …
Yes. That’s why it’s so hard to write about him, and why several movie studios have had Tesla projects in the works for years, any why none of them succeeded. Most people are famous for one thing. You can focus on one event and make a good two-hour story of it.
But Tesla – he did so much! To focus on any one thing is to cheat him of his genius.
The Toyota hybrids are using Tesla turbines. Some company is now trying to do what Tesla proposed in the 1930s – a floating geothermal plant to generate energy from the temperature differentiation between the surface water and deeper waters.
And in 2006, at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics show, the first wirelessly powered devices were exhibited – modest replicas of something Tesla did well over 100 years ago.
Nokia is even demoing a phone that recharges itself – too slowly yet, but give them credit for trying – from ambient radio waves. Pretty cool stuff.
He railed against the burning of fossil fuels 100 years ago, and wrote a landmark article at the turn of the previous century re the problem of energy.
Way ahead of his time. And hardly anyone in America knows his name, although elsewhere he’s extremely famous. He was famous here for a while. Made the cover of Time on his 75th birthday, thanks to birthday greetings from famous friends like Einstein…!
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(TIME) July 20, 1931 – Nonetheless the late John Pierpont Morgan believed in the possibility of such wireless power. That was at the time when Mr. Morgan was creating U. S. Steel Corp. and International Mercantile Marine. He was not averse to world control of power and communications. (The House of Morgan is banker for American Telephone & Telegraph, International Telephone & Telegraph, Western Union, United Corp., and many another electrical utility.) Banker Morgan gave Genius Tesla great amounts of money for experiment.
Click for Tesla biography"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
On Time for BooMan’s Party?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."As for the thread question, I’ll go with Hiroshima. Unwise and hasty decision by HST, whose policy on the bomb led to an easily predictable arms race with the Russkies and many decades of high tension, distrust, and brinksmanship in US-USSR relations.
The decision to use the weapon also probably led to the inevitable go decision on developing the “super” or hydrogen bomb in 49-50, again a decision made without much thinking by Truman.
Too bad FDR didn’t live longer because I doubt he would have decided to use our new weapon. The Truman admin was stupid and stubborn with its unconditional surrender terms, and in the end, after dropping the two bombs, we gave Japan exactly the one thing they had wanted all along — keeping the emperor.
Shouldn’t that read: the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince and now known, once again, as Prince?
today is also the eighth anniversary of the infamous “bin laden determined to strike in u.s.” briefing
My wife once bumped into Lucille Ball at the LA airport. She was waiting for her luggage, it wasn’t coming, and she was pissed as hell.
Followers of Glenn Beck and other right wing agitators broke up town meetings around the country to demonstrate their opposition to health care reform, comparing President Obama to Hitler, and calling us the fascists.
This was a corner turned on August 6, 2009, signaling the end of democracy in the United States and the ascendancy of rule by right-wing thugs.