[hristov]

It is absolutely stupid to talk about this as edisons revenge. If Tesla had the modern high power transistors needed to get high voltage dc out of the ac produced from a spinning turbine he would be all for high voltage dc too. Tesla understood that high voltage was needed for efficient long range transmission. He also understood that transformers were the inly remotely efficient way to climb up to and down from these high voltages. And transformers only work with ac. So he designed an ac system and even designed some better transformers for it.

If there was anything like a high power transistor back then he would have used that. High power transistors that are robust enough to handle the grid were designed inly recently over 100 years after the tesla/edison ac/dc argument.

[teleforce]

>It is absolutely stupid to talk about this as edisons revenge. If Tesla had the modern high power transistors needed to get high voltage dc out of the ac produced from a spinning turbine he would be all for high voltage dc too.

This!

The soon people realized these facts the better. The pervasive high rise buildings did not happen before the invention of modern cranes.

Exactly twenty years ago I was doing a novel research on GaN characterization, and my supervisors made a lot money with consulations around the world, and succesfully founded govt funded start-up company around the technology. Together with SiC, these are the two game changing power devices with wideband semiconductor technology that only maturing recently.

Heck, even the Nobel price winning blue LED discovery was only made feasible by GaN. Watch the excellent video made by Veritasium for this back story [1].

[1] Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED:

https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M

[ta9000]

Does that mean when we run out of Ga there are no more LED TVs?

[adrian_b]

Gallium is expensive to extract because it is extremely diluted in the environment.

It accompanies in very low quantities aluminum and zinc, so it is extracted only in the mines of aluminum or of zinc, as a byproduct.

However, the abundance of gallium is similar to that of lithium, while gallium is used in smaller amounts, so there is no risk to not have enough gallium in the near future.

On the other hand, all semiconductor devices with gallium also use some indium. Indium is used in even greater quantities in all LCD or OLED displays, to make transparent electrodes.

Indium is an extremely rare element in the entire universe, comparable with gold, so for indium there is a much greater risk that its reserves will become insufficient.

This could be mitigated by extracting such critical elements from the dumped electronic devices, but this is very expensive, because only small amounts of indium are used per device, so very large amounts of garbage would have to be processed in order to extract a sizable amount of it.

[AndrewDucker]

Why would we run out of Ga?

[mikkupikku]

There's a component of modern culture that trains and expects people to be extremely pessimistic about long term human development. It results in situations above, where without any further information people just assume by default that were going to run out of a thing and are on some collision course with not just a disaster, but every single conceivable one.

(Gallium is a byproduct of aluminum production. We aren't going to run out.)

[threetonesun]

My understanding of most elements is if we want more it’s either pretty easy to make from something else we have a lot of, or we need to redo the Big Bang, the latter being, in my opinion, a bit of a disaster scenario.

[nkrisc]

Even synthesizing helium is prohibitively expensive. Unless you want whatever heavy decay products we have from nuclear waste, synthesizing elements at industrial scale probably isn’t happening.

Unless by “make from something” else you mean extract the element from existing chemical compounds found in Earth, in which case we’re still just using existing deposits on Earth.

[bananaflag]

On the other hand, it is possible to run out of a metal when all of it is either somewhere in some device or scattered among landfills (i.e. not concentrated in a place like a mine).

[margalabargala]

It's a byproduct of aluminum production.

The earth's crust is 8% aluminum.

We will have bigger problems before hitting this one.

[nkrisc]

That’s still not running out. It’s still there, just more effort to get.

[pyrale]

> On the other hand, it is possible to run out of a metal when all of it is either somewhere in some device or scattered among landfills

The metal isn't going to disappear, but it won't be concentrated enough to be as easily retrievable.

[pwndByDeath]

Its concentrated in a place like a landfill that already has access for large vehicles.

[nancyminusone]

Except for gaseous hydrogen and helium, and some spacecraft, all other atoms remain on the earth and are recoverable with enough energy and effort.

[philipkglass]

One more exception: uranium. It actually splits into smaller atoms when it's used as fuel.

[myrmidon]

Sidenote: Whenever someone tells you that (vital) reserves of some ressource are going to run out soonish (implying drastic consequences), you should be extremely skeptical:

Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes).

This applies historically for oil, lithium, rare earth metals and basically everything else.

edit: I'm not saying we're never gonna run out of anything-- I'm just saying to not expect sudden, cataclysmic shortages in general, but instead steadily rising prices and a somewhat smoothish transition to alternatives.

[reylas]

I always add "cheap" to the sentence. It seems they are always talking about the cheap version of anything. Going to run out of water? Or are we running out of the "cheap" version of water that does not have to be processed?

[myrmidon]

This is a valid point: quickly depleting reserves often indicate that pricing is not sustainable. Which is bad.

But non-sustainable pricing is very different from "cataclysmic collapse", and too many people expect the latter for too many things, which is just not realistic in my view (and historical precendent makes a strong case against that assumption, too).

A society where water prices gradually increases to "reverse-osmosis only" (instead of "pump-from-the-ground-everywhere") levels is very different from a society where water suddenly runs out.

[mschuster91]

> Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes).

That's a classic example of the "preparedness paradox" [1]. When no one raises the alarm in time or it is being ignored, resources can go (effectively) exhausted before alternatives can be found, or countries either need to pay extraordinary amounts of money or go to war outright - this has happened in the past with guano [2], which was used for fertilizer and gunpowder production for well over a century until the Haber-Bosch ammonia process was developed at the start of the 20th century.

And we're actually seeing a repeat of that as well happening right now. Economists and scientists have sounded the alarm for decades that oil and gas are finite resources and that geopolitical tensions may impact everyone... no one gave too much of a fuck because one could always "drill baby drill", and now look where we are - Iran has blasted about 20% of Qatar's LNG capacity alone to pieces and blocked off the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano

[myrmidon]

I don't see the Guano industry as a straight counter-example, it even illustrates my point:

If you had made predictions/scenarios in 1850 based on Guano deposits running out within a decade or two, you would have mispredicted completely, because a lot of the industry just transitioned to sodium nitrate (before synthetic fertilisers took over). Nowadays media landscape would've gladly made such doom-and-gloom predictions for global agriculture back then.

I completely agree that quickly depleting reserves often indicate non-sustainable pricing for ressources (which is obviously bad long term), but that is very different from sudden collapse.

[bluGill]

I've seen articles from the 1880s claiming oil will run out by 1890. 140 years latter...

Yes we can run out of oil, but nobody really knows if or even when that will happen. Right now I'm guessing we won't run out because wind and solar is so much cheaper for most purposes everyone is shifting anyway - this will take decades to play out.

[mschuster91]

> Yes we can run out of oil, but nobody really knows if or even when that will happen.

We can run out of cheap and accessible oil very, very fast if the shitshow in MENA continues to escalate. Qatar already lost 20% of their LNG capacity in a single strike.

The US may have enough domestic oil production to sate its domestic demand, but the prices would still skyrocket even for them. Europe meanwhile, we're straight fucked here. Technically the oil hasn't run out, it's still in the oil fields of the journalist-butcher country and other sheikdoms, but that doesn't matter if it cannot be pumped out any more because the wells got blasted to pieces or if it cannot be transported thanks to Iranian mines, Europe is still running out of oil in practice.

[marcosdumay]

"Reserves" are the name of something that exists only at a set price. Change the price, and the reserves change too.

The people that rush to tell you that reserves are running out tend to omit what price they are talking about. That way of expressing oneself is normally called "a lie".

[mcbishop]

I've heard the EV charging has played a big role in the maturation of GaN / SiC.

[teleforce]

Yes, EV and high frequency electronics (microwave, mmWave, photonics) that require very fast switching capability.

[UltraSane]

And military radars love GaN

[asah]

> The pervasive high rise buildings did not happen before the invention of modern cranes.

yyy! if we're going to wander off-topic :-) then I should mention elevators, water pumps, fire suppression including fire truck ladders and more! :-)

[jibal]

https://shrunk.ai/research-journals/f/cranes-skyhooks-and-it...

[da02]

What are some novel processes or technologies you see becoming more important in the next 5-10 years?

[chrneu]

the internet really needs to stfu about tesla and get over that oatmeal comic that spawned a billion internet myths. dude was a decent inventor but suffered from chronic mental health issues and, in his lifetime, wasted so much time/energy/money and burned so many bridges with his horrible attitude. there's a reason most people didnt like him in his day, he was a depressed asshole who alienated everyone around him, and yes I know he was likely gay in a time when that wasn't cool. the fact still remains; his inventions are massively overblown by internet nerds.

the podcaster Sebastian Major from "Our Fake History" did a looonnngg patreon episode on tesla and debunked most of the weird myths around tesla. Sebastian doesn't have a vendetta or anything, it's just amazing how much of the Tesla stuff is just nonsense or is viewed through a very weird bias nowadays. Major also briefly touches on the weird Edison stuff and how the internet has twisted Edison into a villain.

[throw4847285]

Software engineers idolize Tesla because they see themselves as the Tesla (a selfless devotee of the abstract idea of technology) against evil Edisons (businessmen who only care about money and steal other people's ideas). They've basically projected the Jobs/Woz divide back onto two historical figures who, in reality, barely interacted.

The funniest part is that The Oatmeal comic didn't invent this concept, but drew on pre-Internet narratives put forward by The Tesla Society, who were mailing busts of Tesla to universities around the country since the 70s at least. And that organization is explicitly nationalistic and religious, tied to other Serbian-American heritage organizations, and doing events with the Orthodox church.

[balamatom]

> And that organization is explicitly nationalistic and religious

So are many Serbs (more so if emigrants from atheist-socialist Yugoslavia, or descendants of folks who moved before WW2) as well as many other nations and organizations (America itself lol). So are many Something-Or-Other-American individuals and communities.

I presume that the organization(s) sending Tesla busts, being American-rooted, have had no illusions about which matters will forever remain impossible to communicate to Americans. (Such as anything not reducible to paperclip optimization.)

Instead, I consider it more likely that the point of promoting Tesla was not to impress anyone in America, but to uplift Serbia and generally the South Slavs of the Balkans who'd only gained national sovereignty in Tesla's day: "look, our heritage has already produced an honest-to-god American inventor half a jebani vek ago, so you guys have zero excuse to act as if you're stuck in the middle ages - do join the cargo cult of mordorn civilization instead, will ya - we got value to extract from ya!"

>They've basically projected the Jobs/Woz divide back onto two historical figures who, in reality, barely interacted.

I'd rather say this has been projected for them, but by whom is anyone's guess; not like there's a shadowy cabal operating. Besides said Serbian-American heritage promoters and whatever their game is, I guess - but here we're not talking mid-XX century Serbian diaspora any more, but a "culturally nonspecific" audience.

Much safer to call it "a hivemind situation" when nobody knows where some idea comes from, and nobody is accountable for rebroadcasting it either, since it comes pre-tagged as Good and True and Useful and it is wrongthink to doubt those. Especially when the idea is so obviously Useful for excusing nonaction. ("I can't be bothered to learn the first thing about electricity, even the history of why I have access to it in the first place - but now that Tesla guy I've vaguely heard of, he was the great genius of the people! What better reason to Experience a Positive Emotion!")

[elar_verole]

People need heroes. It's like the Keanu Reeves or Musk era, all the ""badass"" stories about this or that soldier / local hero / w/e that are very often overblown and get further and further away from the initial facts every time they resurface. No hate here, just noticing there is a weird visceral need to distill stories to their most essential, good vs evil, and the Tesla v Edison thing embodies this perfectly I think.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Keanu Reeves and Nikola Tesla to a degree as well, are decent figures.

Aside from all the cult classics Keanu is part of like john wick and the matrix, even discounting that, he is a good person in it of itself who is genuinely humble and might be one of the best persons within hollywood.

What I feel pissed about is that people like Andrew Tate and others like them took the concept of Matrix and the contributions Keanu did within that movie and tried to capitalize on that cult classic decades after in the most toxic form that might be the issue if we are talking about an era

To be honest, Nikola tesla is also a great person within the context of his time. GGP's comment is still true but Tesla's contributions can hardly be reinstated and I'd much rather people believe these to be the heros (Keanu/Tesla) rather than Tate/Musk etc.

If I take anything from Keanu, I would like to take his humility/humbleness.

[giancarlostoro]

Tate is just attention hungry. It’s pretty obvious. If you feed no attention to him, he will go back to where he crawled from.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Whilst I agree that Keanu is a most excellent human, he was hardly responsible for the concept of the Matrix. In my opinion, Philip K Dick was a major influence (I'm a fan and consider him the prophet of the modern age), though Gibson's Neuromancer was likely a big influence too. (Also, there's the old Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin" which features the Matrix).

It always seems to me that the far right are bereft of original ideas and always co-opt other pre-existing concepts. There's exceptions, but I always find that right wing works are always lacking humour or irony (c.f. Ayn Rand's works).

[something765478]

> the far right are bereft of original ideas and always co-opt other pre-existing concepts.

That's not unique to them: Good artists copy; great artists steal.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Yes, but I'd have difficulty in pronouncing Andrew Tate as a good or great artist. Maybe con-artist would be the highest that I'd go.

[tomtomtom777]

"It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes. And he annexes everything."

- Oscar Wilde

[ngvrnd]

Except for Keith Moon. All the stories about him are true and if anything underplay the truth. :-)

[boomskats]

I mean yeah, but it's not like the guy's 'horrible attitude' came from nowhere. He naiively romanticised migrating to the US thinking the game was about scientific progress rather than capital, and so he got repeatedly screwed over by almost everyone around him for decades.

If I was in his position I'm not sure I'd have taken it as well as he did.

[wil421]

There’s no way he suddenly developed autism or whatever mental illness plagued him upon arrival to American. Like most absolute geniuses he struggled in other areas. He said he had visions as a child.

[balamatom]

But there is: his neurotype suddenly became considered "whatever mental illness" upon arrival in Eugenicsland.

[KaiserPro]

> he was a depressed asshole who alienated everyone around him,

enough Edison bashing!

Look, Tesla was a weirdo, but, he was a very good inventor who actually invented shit.

Edison was an industrialist, who knew the price of everything, and wasn't above spending a lot of money to destroy a rival.

Do I idolise Tesla? no, but I respect his understanding of high frequency electronics with really primitive tooling.

Do I despise Edison? also no, but he is a massive prick. Excellent buisness man, but an abrasive prick never the less.

[anonymousiam]

Tesla was an outstanding technologist, but a poor businessman. He had a "vision" (actually more than one) about how his ideas could transform the world. Some of his ideas were amazing, but he was swindled out of his patents because the investors knew he had a passion and wanted to see them in use. The polyphase AC motor or fluorescent light bulb could have made him millions.

IMHO, the vision he had about universal free electricity (transmitted wirelessly) was the dumbest. It was a novel idea, and he invested a lot (his time and other people's money) in it. The problem with his idea is that there was no way to monetize it (and profit from it). (There were also the technical issues of the power loss over distance (1/R^2), the harm to the environment, and the interference with radio communications.)

Edison was quite a villain. He stole many of his "inventions", and orchestrated a PR campaign against Tesla touting the "evils" of AC power. AFAIK, the electric chair was either invented or inspired by him.

I know these things because I've read many books on various topics related to Tesla, and all of this knowledge predates the Internet.

[fsh]

Essentially none of this is true. The war of the currents was between Edison and Westinghouse, not Tesla. Tesla's downfall was that he turned into a crackpot who rejected modern science, such as Maxwell's equations, and started defrauding investors. Edison was an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, and the electric chair used AC simply because it is much more deadly.

[anonymousiam]

Westinghouse was using Tesla's patents. Get your facts right.

Every so often, I see or hear a new narrative of history that does not align with reality. I used to wonder how this could happen, but one of my sons explained to me that in his college history courses (in multiple accredited universities), the professors would teach their version of history, using their notes as the course material. They circularly cite other like-minded revisionist material, and most of their students just accept what the professor says as fact. He has seen this again and again in both lower and upper division courses.

This is a disturbing trend, and aside from "woke culture" indoctrination, I don't know what's behind it, or why these professors are not held to basic academic standards.

https://geekhistory.com/content/george-westinghouse-used-tes...

[chipster_f00]

> The war of the currents was between Edison and Westinghouse [...]

Thank you for quashing the gross misinformation. I was going to post this, but searched and found your comment. `\m/`

(I learned of the "Current War" in the 70's, since the Edison Museum was in my "backyard" -- and was a common destination of local school field trips.)

[HWR_14]

Edison did not invent the electric chair. When the inventors were trying to choose between using AC or DC he helped them decide on AC as part of his PR campaign.

[anonymousiam]

These (and many other) sources cite Edison funding a campaign to use AC to electrocute animals, to show that it was more dangerous than DC.

https://www.energy.gov/articles/war-currents-ac-vs-dc-power

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-cruel-animal-testing-be...

[tibbydudeza]

Did he also not fall in love with a pigeon ?.

[aaronbrethorst]

We’re talking about Nikola Tesla, not Elon Musk, and I don’t think Musk is gay.

[beAbU]

I think you need to read the post you are responding to again.

[arijun]

Also, if anything would have been Edison's revenge it would have been HVDC, where they're sending power long distances with DC. (But as you said, even there it wouldn't make a ton of sense, since they were arguing in a different era).

[themafia]

The two primary reasons to do that are to allow the intertie of two AC grids that are not otherwise synchronized, and to take advantage of "earth return" paths when necessary to double the capacity of the line. The latter you may need to consider just to make the line cost effective over an equivalent AC span.

[Georgelemental]

It's just a fun title, you are overthinking it

[bryanrasmussen]

sure, and also Montezuma didn't actually plan on diarrhea ruining people's vacations, but vernacular usage being what it is we have the phrase Montezuma's revenge.

I only found Edison in the headline, I didn't find it anywhere in the body, nor did I find Tesla. Glancing through the article it almost seems like someone tried to make a catchy headline to get clicks.

[jacquesm]

Agreed, for the IEEE to go down this route is more than a little weird.

[fsh]

It was Westinghouse who pushed the AC grid against his rival Edison's DC approach. Tesla was a minor figure working for both of them for a bit.

[ghighi7878]

Title is clickbait. Edison is not mentioned anywhere else in article. I am okay with it.

[superxpro12]

Yeah this isnt an argument. It was far simpler to wrap some copper wire around a chunk of metal than it was to fire up a mosfet fabrication plant in the 1800's.

You can have the best idea in the world, but if you cant manufacture it you're SOL.

[amelius]

But there was an equivalent: a mechanical switch. Or an electromechanical relay. Or a spinning wheel with electrical contacts.

[dang]

Ok, we've deposed Edison from the title above.

[bluGill]

Tesla also design the modern induction motor which needs ac. Though these days we often run them on a phase generator which has a dc step.

[altairprime]

Note that one could email the mods to de-clickbait/enrage the title, especially with such a concrete point as this comment’s. (I haven’t done so as TIL is a poor basis for such an argument.)

[metalliqaz]

yes, this! thank you good post

[crimshawz]

Agree, clickbait.

[mr_toad]

> If there was anything like a high power transistor back then he would have used that.

Mercury arc rectifiers were used long before his death.

[crote]

Yes, but a rectifier only rectifies. That's not going to give you DC-DC conversion - let alone converting it to a higher voltage for long-distance transmission.

[wildzzz]

DC-DC before the transistor was difficult to do at scale. Vibrators and relays existed but were not reliable long term.