Re: kVA Effects on Broadway! (fwd)

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:52:50 -0700
From: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Tesla list <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: kVA Effects on Broadway! (fwd)

Tesla may not have had money but he was taken care of. Westinghouse was  
paying his bill.
 
As for him be remembered only people involved with power and distribution  of 
power and hobbyist are even aware of his name."

	Could that possibly be because that's the field in which Tesla made his really valuable contributions?

"Guglielmo Marconi gets lions share of credit for radio and Edison get lions  
share of credit when the only thing Edison contributed to electrical power is  
the light bulb. Even DC is disappearing with the advent of frequency  drives."

	Edison contributed a couple of other things to the electric power field.  He never claimed to have invented incandescent lamps but the work in his industrial research laboratory - his really important invention - resulted in a process to produce reasonably efficient and long-lasting lamps at an affordable price.  His Pearl street plant and its power distribution system - primative as they were - were important for first making power from a central station available in the US.   Not sure what the last sentence means as DC is certainly NOT disappearing [it's the wave of the future for long-distance power transmission] and I don't know what a "frequency drive" is supposed to be.

"Another example of people not getting credit is Hedy Lamarr, the  actress 
whose invention is used daily for cell phones."

	  She obviously was a smart lady and her particular scheme for controlling frequency-hopping transmission is ingenious but frequency hopping was already in use by that time in some secure communications systems - she invented a scheme to control it but not the concept per se.  As for cell phones, some use time division multiplexing and some use frequency division but none use programmed frequency hopping in the sense of her patent.  Her patent relates more closely to the widely-used secure communication systems in use by the military at this time. 
"Have Quick" [http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/equip/an-arc-164.htm] comes to mind but is only one of a number of similar systems.

Long way from Tesla,

Ed