Elon Musk is the world’s top maker — no contest — and his goal is to save the Earth from global warming. To celebrate that, I’m building a giant diorama of Elon Musk’s spaceships, Tesla cars, Hyperloop transportation, Solar City energy, Paypal, Boring company, a colony on Mars, electric aircraft and whatever he invents tomorrow. […]
This week: Funding for engineering startups, the struggle to fix a Tesla, and how to quit your job.
A team of Russian physicists want to revisit Tesla’s greatest unrealized plan, update it with modern technology, and try to make his theoretical world-wide wireless power transmission system a reality.
Tesla Motors will no longer enforce any of its patents against anyone who wants to create electric cars.
Writer Michael Chabon found a vintage gem at The Journal of Irreproducible Results’ booth in Expo Hall. Norman Sperling of JIR is not only sharing his fab science humor magazine, but he’s also selling classic, out-of-print sci & tech books and miscellany like this biography of Tesla.
Here’s yet another delightful mechanical curiosity from among Nikola Tesla’s nearly 300 known patents. Shown above is the sole drawing page from US patent #1,329,559, “Valvular Conduit,” issued 1920. You may have to stare at the upper section, for a moment, to figure out what’s going on: Flow from left to right, as illustrated, is against the valve’s bias—the stream is broken up and diverted in circular paths that return to interfere with each other. Flow from right to left, however, is not so impeded.
The man behind the world’s largest Tesla coil (the 30,000-watt Electrum) is once again upping the ante on machine-generated lightning. Greg Leyh and his group Lightning On Demand (LOD) have launched a new a project, The Lightning Foundry, that will try to re-create super-long discharge effects normally found only in lightning.
