BlackBerry Predicted a Century Ago By Nikola Tesla 253
andylim writes "According to the Telegraph, the BlackBerry was first predicted more than a century ago, by Nikola Tesla, the electrical engineer. Seth Porges, Popular Mechanics' current technology editor, disclosed Tesla's prediction at a presentation, titled '108 Years of Futurism,' to industry figures recently in New York. Recombu.com has published the original Popular Mechanics article in which Tesla predicts a mobile phone revolution."
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:1, Informative)
Not even that. The submitter completely made up the "BlackBerry" part! It would be better to say Tesla predicted the early smart phone, although it appears at one point he's suggesting speech-to-text as well.
Sadly he was preoccupied with ... (Score:3, Informative)
At the turn of the century, Marconi, Tesla and Jagdish Chandra Bose demonstrated wirelessly turning on a switch over a distance. Marconi could never get the resonance circuit working right (what he called coherer). Got the idea from Bose in a conference, (or stole Bose's notebook depending on where you hear it from). Bose was an idealist and never thought of commericializing his inventions, and was stuck in Calcutta, India anyway. Marconi went into wireless signal propagation and Tesla went into wireless power transmission.
Despite his visionary predictions about wireless communications, Tesla's dream of wireless transmission of power has not yet been realized.
Re:Free advertising going too far (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:1, Informative)
In fairness to the submitter, the article writer made it up too (as do quite a few others [google.com])
I can't seem to find the original source (AP I assume) but here's [thehindu.com] a version substituting "SMS" for "Blackberry"
Re:Sadly he was preoccupied with ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Blackberry Advert (Score:5, Informative)
TECHNICALLY, a satphone only transmits up to the closest satellite. Single sideband (PSK31 if you want data) on the HF bands can transmit all over the world.
Tesla didn't predict this at all (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:5, Informative)
Note that this article predicts both the Internet and wireless technology, but with no mention of the digital aspects. It also predicts wireless power, such that a ship could be sent across the Atlantic, powered by a single wireless power station on one side. It predicted all of this would happen in something like 5 years.
Tesla was, for the greater part of his life, badly hampered by a severe lack of money to carry out his more expansive projects. Some of this was due to his overgenerous nature, as when he gave up entirely the royalties Westinghouse owed him on the power-generation devices Tesla had designed, some was due to his lifelong habit of chasing ideas off in odd directions without consideration for their economic utility, and some was due to his inability to obtain funding from others -- Westinghouse, for example, refused to fund Tesla's development of a broadcast-power system after Tesla admitted that there would be no way to determine how much power any given end-user consumed, so there would be no way to bill them for it.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nokia V apple (Score:3, Informative)
that's the funny thing. Blackberry is a late comer "mee too" copycat.
Motorola had the first QWERTY data phone.. the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.
Nokia was next with their Mobira Senator.
Then IBM had the personal communicator.
I had the first real smartphone the QCP6035 from kyerocera. It predated the first blackberry by 2 years.
Blackberry did not invent anything. They simply copied others ideas and patented them as their own.
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:3, Informative)
Kay proposed his Dynabook in 1972... but before that Gene Roddenberry and company proposed the PADD in Star Trek circa 1966. The iPad looks (and sounds) a lot more like PADD than the Dynabook.
Hey, credit where credit is due!
Re:Surely you understand the difference (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:2, Informative)
And its Marconi that invented the Radio, not Tesla. The argument was concluded in European and World courts over ten years ago.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:3, Informative)
sounds like a car phone to me, those pre-cell phones that had a limited number of channels covering a whole city.
Re:Tesla didn't predict this at all (Score:3, Informative)
He thought that you could easily transmit stuff directly to other devices even if they are hundreds of miles away and even if there are millions of them being used at the same time. This isn't true [..]
Actually, it is very true. There are ways to have several radio-devices communicating to each other directly using various multiplexing methods such as time division, frequency or just have packets collide and then detect the collision, like in Ethernet. And yes, the devices can and often are, hundreds of miles apart.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:3, Informative)
If Tesla had been a science fiction writer (similar to, say, Jules Verne) I would be willing to allow that he predicted modern cell phones (and if that is all you want to make of it, OK). But as a technical innovator, his concept of mobile communication devices is based on a completely different technical paradigm. A technical paradigm that would never have led to the devices we know today.
Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:3, Informative)
Edison was one of the great inventors of all time. Not the greatest. Not the most prolific either. But nobody I know would argue against him having a place in the top 20 inventors of all time.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:5, Informative)
But he did. Telsa was the inventor of the AND logic gate. [tfcbooks.com] When computers started to catch on and research was done and people went to patent their inventions, some of them found out that Telsa already had the patents some more than 50 years earlier because he was already developing the same techniques while trying to control devices wirelessly. So, he did do that, it just wasn't mentioned in the article probably because it wasn't seen as important at the time and because it was quite simply beyond everybody else.
When Tesla developed weapons for the military and displayed them at a World's Fair, he demonstrated remote controlled submarines and torpedoes and tried to explain how both the submarines and torpedoes could be controlled and guided wirelessly by operators far away. In a time where a simply wireless system that allowed ships to talk to each other reliably, submarines, or torpedoes would have been a major military breakthrough, the army and navy just couldn't even comprehend what he was talking about let alone figure out how to use remote drones effectivly.
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:2, Informative)
Classic bias error (Score:3, Informative)
He did some amazing stuff, and figures out AC. No real argument there.
But he also predicted a ton of stuff, was a little mad, and everyone ignores the crap that didn't seem to pan out.
At this point he is becoming Nostradamus of technology.
Did some really advance stuff, but people only talks about his wild ass guess that may or may not have claimed with the person reading them says that claim.
Re:Loser (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Surely you understand the difference (Score:3, Informative)
Most normal people simply say, "just a sec, I got a message on my phone." What wierdos call it a blackberry?
The same weirdos who ask for a Kleenex instead of a facial tissue? Or who ask "Would you like a coke?" when they're asking if you'd like a carbonated beverage? Or who ask for an Aspirin instead of a tablet of acetylsalicylic acid?
Re:Loser (Score:4, Informative)
This would be the same Edison that resisted our modern electrical transmission standard tooth and nail until he finally hijacked it from Tesla.
Re:Tesla didn't predict this at all (Score:3, Informative)
Do you not even feel ashamed for the amount of straw-man fallacies you use in there?
As I did already said somewhere up there: /. story, is a mobile phone. QED.
He specifically talks about handheld devices “not bigger than a [wrist]watch” (last paragraph of the first column), used for communication. Which is exactly what mobile phones are. The BlackBerry that was stated in the title of the
Everything else in your comment is a made-up hallucination of your mind and fallacy over fallacy, too many to even list.
And “This isn't true, just like the other things in the article are not possible with our current understanding of physics.” is a plain and simple lie. Or, no... wait, let me quote you to explain how you came up with this:
I'm not very knowledgable about science,
Aaah, that explains everything.
Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:2, Informative)
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/04/25/1143225/Dont-Talk-To-Aliens-Warns-Stephen-Hawking?art_pos=1 [slashdot.org]