There have been a number of Great Engineers between the 19th century and now. To name a few, James Watt, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, R. Buckminster Fuller, and, of course, the topic of this post, Nikola Tesla.

Let me start off by telling you that engineering is creative work. Some people seem to miss that point, because it is mixed with a high level of methodical thinking, but it is still creative. As such, engineers need to allow their minds to wander from time to time.

Many engineers, like other types of creative thinkers, keep diaries or idea books in which they write down whatever they may be thinking about, so that when an opportunity arises to use one of these ideas, it can be looked up. Fuller is the example of taking this to a ridiculous extreme, having produced a pile of documentation called the Dymaxion Chronofile, in which he documented everything in his life in fifteen minute intervals from 1915 to 1983.

The downside to this is that some of the ideas that get documented are not meant to be used. They are dead ends. They are ideas that the engineer has explored, but decided not to follow. However, once the engineer has decided not to follow an idea, it is not worth the time it takes to look it up and note this fact, hence, these ideas remain in the journal in a form that suggests they may still be meaningful. They are not.

Tesla was full of great ideas. He was also full of dead ends. He tried some things out that seemed truly crazy at the time, and yet, worked out better than whatever else was being done at the time. His idea for a polyphase alternating current power grid is with us today in the form of our -er- polyphase alternating current power grid. His idea for a three-phase alternating current motor was so good that an electric car that bears his name uses exactly such a motor.

Compounding Tesla’s plight is that many of his experiments were impressive. He is known for working with very high voltages, and producing large arcs. His various apparati tended to contain enormous coils used to convert electricity to electromagnetic fields or vice-versa. Still, they are dwarfed by their modern equivalents, such as the Large Hadron Collider.

Now, this site is not my sole web presence. I also moderate a forum on tribe.net for the discussion of renewable energy. Time and again, discussion of Tesla’s “secrets” has come into the flow of the discussion, and I find it endlessly and needlessly annoying.

You see, the problem is this: We know the situation we are in. We have built a society in which abundant, cheap energy is the norm. Our supply of that energy is running out and getting expensive as it does so.

Further, we know already what we need to do to fix this: Solar radiation floods the planet with more energy than we know what to do with; it causes waves and winds and makes plants grow and keeps us warm. If we want cheap, abundant energy, all we have to do is capture it.

Trouble is, that would take work. We can’t have that now, can we?

Instead, the crackpots would prefer to talk about free energy — energy from nothing. Perpetual motion machines. Over unity devices. Sorry, folks, it can’t happen.

Since Tesla had done a lot of work with energy, his notes are often referred to by these crackpots. In the process, they are sullying the name of a brilliant engineer.

Enough, already.