FobzyWho the GOOGLE is Nikola Tesla?
July 10th 2009 00:07
Ah, I knew you wouldn't know, but fobzy does, not just a pretty face, you know, or a handsome brow!
The above is a picture of the Tesla Roadster supercar and it's all electric.
The 240-horsepower, battery-powered sports car goes from 0 to 60 in about four seconds, has a top speed of around 130mph, and costs a penny per mile to drive, according to Tesla executives. This venture began in 2000, when Elon Musk, PayPal founder and chairman of Tesla Motors, approached an electric car company with the idea of creating an electric sports car.
So now you're coming up fast with the google picture of the day, all that sparking electricity.
Nikola Tesla - from: link to this article
The history of technology is populated with a marvellous cast of characters. On the one hand you have the colourful, hard-working inventors like Thomas Edison who slaved away morning, noon and night to produce many of the wonders that we take for granted such as the incandescent light, the telephone, and the garlic peeler. On the other you have the moonbat crazies who show up at the patent office with a cardboard box stuffed with wires and a torch battery claiming that they've made contact with John Kerry's charisma. And then there is that rarest of creatures: Nikola Tesla, a man who was both a certifiable genius and just plain certifiable.
Born in Smiljan, Croatia, Tesla was educated at Graz and Prague, worked for the Continental Edison Company in Paris, and emigrated to the United States in 1884. There he worked briefly for Thomas Edison until the poetic Tesla and the pragmatic Edison fell out. Tesla then went on to sell his patents for a series of alternating current devices to the Westinghouse Electric Company, making Tesla a relatively wealthy man able to set himself up in his own laboratory.
So far so good; sounds like the biography of many a successful Victorian electrical engineer. But Tesla was a different kettle of mackerels from your average solder jockey. He was a first-class ego case with aristocratic pretensions. He was a tremendous showman who excelled at giving spectacular demonstrations of what electricity could do. He was an intuitive genius who could visualise all sorts of revolutionary new devices even though he didn't fully understand the principles behind them. He had a remarkable memory coupled with an intense dislike of writing things down, so that much of his work has come down to us as a mystery. He was a man with no money sense who was able to persuade many an investor into pouring money down many a rat hole. He was also a visionary who, as time went on and his professional fortunes ebbed, became prone to wilder and wilder assertions about what marvels he would perform and how he could single-handedly change the world or destroy it.
Tesla's real achievements combined with his flamboyant dreams made him a regular source for reporters looking for sensational copy and a lightning rod for nutcases who were convinced that he was really an emissary from the planet Venus. Even today a quick google of the Internet will return any number of sites dedicated to Tesla and more than a few of these are filled with claims that Tesla really had built death rays, power broadcasters, and weather control machines; contacted other planets; built electric space ships which he used to visit Mars; could project thoughts; and Lord knows what else. And why don't we enjoy these Teslan marvels today? According to his modern disciples, Tesla's inventions have either been lost to history, suppressed by the government or corporations, or are the product of an alien technology for which we are Not Yet Ready.
Pretty good for a man whose best friend was a pigeon and had a life-long horror of germs that would have done Howard Hughes proud.
For an even more fascinating account go to the link - click here
so what's it all about, alfie? The electirc car and the history of the inventor whose inspiration resulted in the greatest electric car ever invented.
Jon, of Orble fame is impressed with it too.
What guy or environmentalist wouldn't be, but then again I think the greenies like push bikes.
May modern technology shorten their journey
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