Calculation Quotes
Edison was a great inventor but not really a scientist. He had tremendous perseverance but went at each problem with brute force and trial and error. Tesla in contrast was designing and inventing on such a large scale that there was never enough money or manpower to implement trial and error; He had to derive his work from theory and vision using mathematics extensively. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
Fuller, though a slave was recognized as a mathematical prodigy even by the Southerners, so biased against Blacks. Fuller was what today we call a mathematical savant. It is very puzzling how so many could maintain the doctrine of low Black intellect when in their midst was a well known Black mathematician who was not only superior to all the whites in the area but who thy put in the same league with Newton—the greatest mathematical genius of the era. For other quotations on the sophistication of the Blacks of the era at mathematics. Fuller’s skills are corroborated by other documentation {612507}. See {610913} and {594083} for more quotations regarding Black mathematical prowess. The Centinial was a pro abolitionist publication.
He went on to develop and invent logarithms and caluclating devices and the precursor to the slide rule.
Fifty years later there would literally be hundreds of millions of computers in the world each one of which computed more things about the affairs of people than all the computers in the entire world were capable of when Bush wrote this.
