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Did Tesla invent the radio?

tracer

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T
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In this thread, peptoabysmal wrote:
Much as I love to read about Tesla, anyone who lists him as the inventor of radio is a certified woo-woo.

LOL the device shown looks like something that fell off of my '87 Ford station wagon that caused the transmission to stop working.
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It is my understanding that the "radio" Marconi is usually credited with inventing merely emitted a blast of what we would nowadays call "noise" (or "static") splattered across a huge range of radio frequencies. A Morse-code style key was used to turn the emitter on and off, so that one could send dot-and-dash coded blasts of noise.

If that's all Marconi's invention really was, then surely Tesla must have invented something that splattered radio energy as well. (Heck, even his famous Tesla coil can interfere with nearby radio reception quite nicely.)

So, should the device usually credited as Tesla's "radio" (whether it fell off an '87 Ford station wagon or not) be considered enough to credit Tesla with the invention of radio?
 
I refer you to the book, "Wizard: the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" by Marc J. Seifer.

The comment that "only a woo-woo" would think Tesla invented radio is absurd. 3 years after Tesla's death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Nikola Tesla was, in fact, the inventor of radio. The fact that that information did not make it into the history books says more about Tesla's capacity for pissing people off than it does about radio itself.

Marconi may have improved it, but the ideas came directly from Tesla's work.
 
The ideas came directly from Tesla's work?

Funny, I had been under the impression that Marconi's work derived from that of Hertz, who first demonstrated the existence of the propagating electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.

Marconi certainly wasn't the first to produce a radio communication device. Thomas Edison patented a device called the "grasshopper telegraph" around 1885, which permitted transmission and reception of telegraph signals from a moving train; the system worked by electrostatic induction and appears to have been a crude form of short-range radiotelegraphy. Edison also proposed a system of wireless telegraphy for ships, but apparently never arrived at a working model.

There's a new book out about Marconi and his work, which I passed up on my last visit to the bookstore. I read enough to see that it covers the contemporary work of other radio experimenters. I'm gonna buy that book this time and see if the author traces any connections to Tesla.

It's quite understandable that many of us are skeptical, or even downright suspicious of claims that "Tesla did this" or "Tesla did that", since the poor guy has become a posthumous icon and patron saint of every electrical crank under the sun.
 
Mark said:
I refer you to the book, "Wizard: the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" by Marc J. Seifer.

The comment that "only a woo-woo" would think Tesla invented radio is absurd. 3 years after Tesla's death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Nikola Tesla was, in fact, the inventor of radio. The fact that that information did not make it into the history books says more about Tesla's capacity for pissing people off than it does about radio itself.

Marconi may have improved it, but the ideas came directly from Tesla's work.
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There's no doubt that Tesla got screwed royally from J.P. Morgan, Westinghouse and even Hertz.

You might want to read this before you go repeating that bit about the Supreme Court decision again.

From this examination of the actual 1943 Supreme Court documents, we see that the statements about the Supreme Court ruling by the Park Service flier, the New York Times, Lee de Forest, and Hugh Aitken are, in varying degrees, inaccurate. The Supreme Court never determined that Tesla invented radio. Contrary to Aitken's account, the validity of the Lodge patent was not in dispute before the Supreme Court; it was upheld in the Court of Claims where it was ruled that the government had infringed the patent. The matter was not appealed. Lee de Forest, though, came closest to the actual Court documents, but he did not acknowledge that Tesla was ahead of Stone in using four tuned circuits, even if Tesla failed to provide a variable inductance for adjusting them.

What can we learn from these discordant interpretations? A court opinion in a patent case can be difficult reading, and historians should be mistrustful of secondhand analysis. In particular, historians should be skeptical about claims made for Nikola Tesla as an inventor by zealous devotees. As a recent Tesla biography states, he is "Revered as a demigod by some in the New Age community."
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Misreading the Supreme Court: A Puzzling Chapter in the History of Radio

Tesla initially had no interest in transmitting information, his interest was in wireless transmission of electric power, an idea which died at Wardencliff.
 
peptoabysmal said:


There's no doubt that Tesla got screwed royally from J.P. Morgan, Westinghouse and even Hertz.

You might want to read this before you go repeating that bit about the Supreme Court decision again.

Misreading the Supreme Court: A Puzzling Chapter in the History of Radio

Tesla initially had no interest in transmitting information, his interest was in wireless transmission of electric power, an idea which died at Wardencliff.
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Oh, great. Now I have to go back and reread everything.;) But it appears I stand corrected on the court decision.

But obviously the whole notion that "only a woo-woo" would think Tesla invented radio is still absurd. At worst, I would say reasonable people can disagree. I do agree that his efforts started with the notion of transmitting power.
 
Mark said:


Oh, great. Now I have to go back and reread everything.;) But it appears I stand corrected on the court decision.

But obviously the whole notion that "only a woo-woo" would think Tesla invented radio is still absurd. At worst, I would say reasonable people can disagree. I do agree that his efforts started with the notion of transmitting power.
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Okay I take it back. Feel better now?
 
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