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."
Yet another example of why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tesla was a freakin genius.
Our entire modern world wouldnt exist without him. And he never got any credit while he was alive.
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
Free advertising going too far (Score:4, Insightful)
So the guy predicted text messaging. Impressive. But why does everything have to be a product placement nowadays?
This case is especially stupid, since what really enables worldwide access to messaging are $20 phones.
Blackberry? (Score:3, Insightful)
Blackberry Advert (Score:4, Insightful)
Tom
Funny, I heard that one differently. (Score:5, Insightful)
Way back in the day when I was in high school I heard Tesla predicted the Internet, using exactly that quote. There's no arguing that Tesla did a lot of amazing things but he's no technological Nostradamus, no matter how much people try to shoehorn him into the role.
Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Tesla was talking about the Nokia N900, but the submitter never heard about that one.
Re:Blackberry Advert (Score:4, Insightful)
Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
That stuff is either genius or failed experiments. How would you know the difference?
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.
So he was wrong about how long it would take, and he threw out at least one other idea in that article that we haven't seen happen, and have no evidence can happen.
I like Tesla as much as anyone else, but I'm not sure how to call this one. Fuzzy, at best. I think Orwell had it closer.
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:4, Insightful)
You're forgetting that he said it in a day and age where most people simply didn't have a telephone line at all, and if they did have one, they usually had a party line that they shared with their neighbours. Not only did he predict that communications devices would be smaller and mobile, he also said that everybody would have one, and that they'd be networked globally. That's a fairly big leap, and while you can argue in hindsight that the writing was on the wall, it's akin to predicting netbooks in 1943.
And there's a few things that Tesla got wrong in his prediction... he said that it would be possible and easy for a single tower to control millions of devices from thousands of miles away. In reality there's millions of cell towers in the world, and each may have a few thousand phones on it at a maximum. There's a few orders of magnitude difference there.
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:2, Insightful)
And there's a few things that Tesla got wrong in his prediction... he said that it would be possible and easy for a single tower to control millions of devices from thousands of miles away. In reality there's millions of cell towers in the world, and each may have a few thousand phones on it at a maximum. There's a few orders of magnitude difference there.
Can you really say he got it wrong though? Also note that he was talking about devices "no bigger than a wristwatch". My Palm Pre is significantly larger than a wristwatch, as are ALL mobile phones, smart or otherwise.
Perhaps it is more correct to say that his vision hasn't been fully fulfilled yet, but that we are, for the first time, able to fully comprehend what he was talking about.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:3, Insightful)
Any persons predictions will come to fruition if given enough time.
I predict the world will end in a fiery death. And I am right, simply wait around a few billion years to witness the sun eating our planet.
Predictions of flying cars will come to life the second that they can perfect the auto flying system. Because everyones worse nightmare is the current crop of idiots on our highways, piloting a "flying car" in 3 dimensions.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:1, Insightful)
I think Ericsson and Siemens also deserve a lot of credit.
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is Alan's view on the iPad... http://www.tomshardware.com/news/alan-kay-steve-jobs-ipad-iphone,10209.html [tomshardware.com]
Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:2, Insightful)
Edison invented the modern Research and Development lab.
And he was very successful in commercializing his invention.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:2, Insightful)
His prediction was for central switching stations
Which basically accurately describes the idea of the radio telephone--a telephone with some connection over radio, but switched at a central station, i.e. like phone service of the time. Early taxi-cab radio systems worked similarly, except frequencies were manually switched by the operator. Automatic cellular handover would be the next logical step....
He may have indeed realized this, but dummed it down for the audience of 1909 Popular Mechanics. In the same few paragraphs, he also predicts the idea of radio facsimile--an idea not realized until almost 15 years after the article.
Stupid Humans (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I thought that JP Morgan was the evil one (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only did J.P. Morgan suppress Tesla's most revolutionary work (by halting the flow of money)...
That's like saying the lead investor suppressed Pets.com by halting the flow of money to it.
Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:4, Insightful)
It would not be utterly misguided to view the history of electrical engineering in the last 100 years as the attempt to document and render reproducible that which Tesla intuitively grasped and understood.
I didn't bother mentioning to the man that if it wasn't for that raving lunatic who had contributed nothing that he would a) be working in a room powered by candlelight or b) that we would have DC power generators on every city block providing electricity .....At the rate we are going we will still need another 100 years to catch up to where Tesla was 100 years ago....He managed to pull these things off *without* a body of knowledge composed by millions of people working together, around the world, for the last 100 years-without modern theories, without modern equipment, without decent funding, etc.
And our geniuses of today nitpick and dismiss what Tesla did, because we are oh so much smarter nowadays, give me a friggin break...
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, the number of distractive (e.g. straw-man) fallacies in that little comment, is astonishing. ^^
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 /. story, is a mobile phone. QED.
Really, I didn't realize that Blackberrys could be used as communication devices when they were thousands of miles from the nearest cell tower (which he also talks about in the article).
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:2, Insightful)
And he was right.
That day I dropped out of my Electrical Engineering major. I figured that if the supposedly brightest minds in our department were a) so utterly ignorant b) so obnoxiously arrogant and c) whose imaginative capacities were dwarfed by common ants, that I had nothing to learn from them.
Yes, you were smarter as a freshman than the sum of all the professors in your college. At least you and Tesla had something in common.
He had patents on things that couldn't see use for 50+ years. He worked on things to commercially unviable that he died a pauper with no one willing to fund anything he did. The only lasting contribution is a crap character to insert in movies like The Prestige and alternating current (though use of AC predated Tesla, his improvement of the application of it catapulted it ahead). All the rest is myth and failed (either scientifically or commercially) experiments.
When the world is united under one socialist government (like, say, the Federation from Star Trek) then we'll dust off his wireless power distribution where no one can ever be metered and it's available everywhere. It works great, but it costs to make it work, and you can't tell who's using it, so it has to be done pretty much at a global socialized scale. And despite the ravings of the Tesla nutjobs, it's well understood tech that just hasn't had a lot of research because it's so obviously uncommercial.
That Tesla put his curiosity above the ability to put food on his plate is what the nutters cling to showing his greatness. Everyone else on the planet points to it as the reason he became irrelevant.