Supressed/rejected scientific breaktrough and geniuses?

[K. A. Pital]

Just for grins, I pulled out my 1980 edition of my 11th grade textbook, Modern Physics. No mention of Tesla in the index, the glossary, the chapter on magnetism, the chapter on electromagnetic induction, or the chapter on alternating current! No mention at all. Thomas Edison is pictured and cited three times, and the first citation is a picture of Edison with Charles P. Steinmetz.

Wow... that's pretty bad, yeah.

[Count Chocula]

^ I was 25 before I knew who Tesla was, and what he'd accomplished. And my text was from my supposedly superior curriculum at a Catholic high school in northern Virginia. Shit, I'd be surprised if the average high schooler these days knows anything more than "some guy named Franklin flew a kite with a key on it in a thunderstorm and discovered electricity and shit and now I can play XBox all frickin night!"

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but the same guy has probably never heard of any physicists except Einstein (and possibly Newton), has never heard of any chemists, and knows of no biologist more or less recent than Darwin. For a scientist, getting onto the list of people that even the random jackasses in the middle of nowhere have heard of is a very high honor, and one that Tesla arguably doesn't rate. If Tesla deserves it, Faraday does too, because Faraday made Tesla possible... and Faraday is at best known to well educated people. A high school education is not a guarantee that you will know or care who he was.

[ray245]

Same here. I only came across Tesla after watching the movie "prestige". Hell, they taught us DC and AC current back in secondary school, but the only inventor they bothered to mention is Edison.

[Thanas]

Then your physic education sucks, because we sure as hell learned about Tesla in high school. Our physics book had these neat boxes on some pages where they would show a picture and give a brief biography of the relevant inventors.

[K. A. Pital]

Then your physic education sucks, because we sure as hell learned about Tesla in high school. Our physics book had these neat boxes on some pages where they would show a picture and give a brief biography of the relevant inventors.

Same here. These boxes usually are in the same place as the relevant study field, and contain the entire necessary information. So that a schooler doesnt gloss over them, they are always referenced in the text.

[ray245]

Then your physic education sucks, because we sure as hell learned about Tesla in high school. Our physics book had these neat boxes on some pages where they would show a picture and give a brief biography of the relevant inventors.

We have those boxes in our textbooks. The problem is our teachers didn't even bother to say their name at all.

Still, it is not as bad as our humanities class. Half of our "historical" knowledge requires you to read up on yourself.

Guess where did I learn about Newton and his 'falling apple' story? I learn it in my Chinese language class. Hell, we don't even learn about any European powers that existed before the 20th century, with the exception of learning Venice in our social studies class. We don't even need to talk about ancient Europe.

Ancient Chinese history? Other than learning that the Chinese have certain beliefs, and they do wage wars, we didn't even learn the name of a single Chinese emperor with the exception of Qin Shi Huang. Most of our knowledge about Chinese history came our Chinese language class, and half of those stories we knew aren't even historical.

Ancient south east Asian history? Other than learning the names of the kingdoms and empires, we knew nothing about them.

Singapore History? It is as good as useless. Half of the information regarding Singapore's independence movement is not even covered.

Modern history? Forget it. The only time you learn about the history of the modern world is when you are in secondary three, and history class is an optional choice. Hell, most people didn't even knew that the allies were already winning the war before US drop the bomb on Japan.

[Wyrm]

Nicola Tesla somewhat deserves his relative obscurity. While he did have hints of good ideas, he misidentified which ideas were truly revolutionary and which were useless junk — patenting the junk and not patenting the useful stuff. It took others to separate the chaff from the wheat and develop them to a useful level.

• Alternating current is the only invention of Tesla's that he could be credited for serious development and that invention to have seriously impacted our lives. However, it took George Westinghouse to prove to the public that a large-scale power-transmission infrastructure based on AC was practical, starting with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. (Check your source, Chocula!) For this, Westinghouse gets a half-dozen companies named after him.
• Meanwhile, Tesla was wasting his talents on his wireless transmission of electrical power boondoggle. I don't think Westinghouse would've been in any way "pissed off" or intimidated by the demonstration. Rather, I think he would've taken one look at the size of generator needed to make an incandecent light flicker and immediately conclude that the mechanism was hopelessly inefficient. There is no way in hell that Tesla's mechanism could be even comparable with wired power transmission, and as such is confined to party stunts and nerdgasms. Darn that pesky inverse-square law!
• Tesla may have held the radio patent in the US, but that in no way translates to being well-known. Guglielmo Marconi gets the recognition of being the "father of radio" (note, not inventor) by turning it from a laboratory curiosity into a practical means of long-range wireless communication. This included ships, which enabled troubled ships at sea to call for help. Actually saving lives helps a great deal with recognition.
• Tesla could not in any way be credited for the discovery of X-rays any more than we credit plants for the discovery of oxygen. Although his setup certainly did produce some X-rays, he did not investigate its emissions, and in particular, did not identify X-rays with a set of characteristic properties. It was Wilhelm Roentgen who first systematically investigated X-rays, and therefore gets credit with the discovery.
• While Tesla demonstrated a model boat could be controlled remotely, and filed at least one patent to that effect, none of his devices could be in any way considered practical. Others turned the laboratory curiosity into a practical technology, and only after radio had been fully developed as a means of long-range communication, in which case applying it to control is only a small step anyway.
• Tesla first established principles regarding which frequencies to use and how much power is needed in early radar systems, and hinted that the concept should work to detect ships and such. However, this hardly constitutes a full "theoretical groundwork" for radar, especially since the basic principles were already well known and it was others that turned this vague concept into a practical device.

As such, Tesla's achievements are such that, while he played a role in several important technologies, none of his achievements would have stuck without others to do the heavy lifting.

[Simon_Jester]

Then your physic education sucks, because we sure as hell learned about Tesla in high school. Our physics book had these neat boxes on some pages where they would show a picture and give a brief biography of the relevant inventors.

Same here. These boxes usually are in the same place as the relevant study field, and contain the entire necessary information. So that a schooler doesnt gloss over them, they are always referenced in the text.

So did mine, and I went to school in the US... I think it's a problem with a specific book or school, not with Tesla getting a nation-wide coverup.

[Prannon]

The best example of sound scientific progress being repressed for an unsound scientific model that I can think of is the Big Bang vs. Steady State debate. This was a debate on what model of the Universe the scientific establishment should accept, and it was particularly heated during the mid-1900s. Without going into too many details that I can't remember off the top of my head, the Big Band model proposed that the universe began around 13 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since, while the Steady State model proposed that there is no finite beginning to the universe, that it has been expanding forever, and that as expansion continues new matter is created to fill in the space.

There was a lot of evidence pointing to the Big Bang Model that many established scientists didn't accept because the model that they had worked on their entire lives was undermined by it all. To a certain extent, it was kind of like telling a Christian that their god didn't exist, since it undermined their entire understanding of the world around them.

There's a really good book by Simon Singh (Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe) that details the origins of the Big Bang theory and explains it quite well. It actually points out the recurring trend of sound scientific evidence being suppressed throughout history, at least in astronomy and related fields.