- #51
russ_watters
Mentor
- 23,691
- 11,130
FYI, one of the sortascience channels did a series on trying to build Tesla's Death Ray. I watched a few episodes and while it was kinda interesting to start, it got old fast.
They had two teams working simultaneously:
1. Team 1 was engineers who were building the Death Ray.
2. Team 2 was historians researching Tesla lore and looking for clues about how the Death Ray might have been constructed/worked.
Obviously we have a problem here: how can the engineers build it until the historians find the documentation first? Clearly, they can't. So what did they do?
a. Build a tesla coil that doesn't qualify as a Death Ray the way lore suggests.
b. Fry things with arcs and somehow manage not to kill themselves.
And the historians? Well, they spent most of one episode looking down a well. Seriously. In other episodes they interviewed relatives of guys who knew people who once met Tesla. Walked around property where experiments were performed. Dug holes looking for tunnels that GPR told them didn't exist or were collapsed. Looked at documents in libraries. Ok, that last one was useful. What they found is what we already know: Tesla was a terrible documentor/communicator.
All-in-all, too much drivel to hold my attention.
They had two teams working simultaneously:
1. Team 1 was engineers who were building the Death Ray.
2. Team 2 was historians researching Tesla lore and looking for clues about how the Death Ray might have been constructed/worked.
Obviously we have a problem here: how can the engineers build it until the historians find the documentation first? Clearly, they can't. So what did they do?
a. Build a tesla coil that doesn't qualify as a Death Ray the way lore suggests.
b. Fry things with arcs and somehow manage not to kill themselves.
And the historians? Well, they spent most of one episode looking down a well. Seriously. In other episodes they interviewed relatives of guys who knew people who once met Tesla. Walked around property where experiments were performed. Dug holes looking for tunnels that GPR told them didn't exist or were collapsed. Looked at documents in libraries. Ok, that last one was useful. What they found is what we already know: Tesla was a terrible documentor/communicator.
All-in-all, too much drivel to hold my attention.
