371 Re: Environments of fear and intimidation...

Message no. 371[Branch from no. 365] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, February 15, 2007 8:04am Subject: Re: Environments of fear and intimidation...

Hi Patrice,

Good question! As far as I know, while Edison wanted us to use home grown DC (direct current) electricity from renewable resources and store it in nickel-iron batteries, Tesla championed the use of AC (alternating current) electricity. The power companies chose Tesla's invention because it enabled them to transmit electricity at high voltage over long distances fairly inexpensively. That let them control the energy sources. The legacy that Tesla left us is that we now have centralized energy and the awful electric grid. If Edison had won, we would have all be producing our own electricity from sun, wind and biomass for over a hundred years.

It is ironic to me because I live near the place in Egypt where the largest solar energy station was built in 1912-1913. It was destroyed when, during the First World War over energy resources, the world powers decided that they could offer cheap oil at a profit and thus dismantled all alternative energy sources. http://www.solarenergy.com/info_history.html

You can read more about how both world war I and world war II were, like the war in iraq, more about control of petroleum than anything else, in this book:

http://internalcombustionbook.com

Check out the video on the subject here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9scQ6078TU

As for Tesla, his genius was always being abused by the political and business community. Not only did they corrupt his discoveries of AC power, but he died a paranoid and bitter man, fearing government and other conspiracies against him. Whether his ideas of using the earth's magnetism and ionosphere to create power will ever be realized is something we will have to wait and see!

For more links on our energy history, see below:

http://members.aol.com/historictacony2/profile_shuman.html

http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/envhist/5progressive.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/26663/en/4_3_4.html