Recent comments in /f/history

Caveman108 t1_j97z5a0 wrote

Reply to comment by ManOfDiscovery in 'The wound hasn't healed': Activists recount 1898 Wilmington coup that terrorized Black residents by janjinx

What year did you graduate? Class of 2014 here, I remember a lot of talk of the Civil War and ending slavery in my US History year. However there was very little to no discussion of the reconstruction and race struggles afterwards. I remember a little bit of stuff about sharecropping and some other stuff. No more real talk of race issues until we got to the civil rights movement.

This was in a very rural area of a pretty red state, for reference. The ironic thing is my state, Indiana, was on the side of the North and never had much slavery. Now you see all kinds of idiots flying confederate flags, and I remember kids in my class at the time saying we should never have given black people freedom. Specifically remember a particular dirtbag say “them n*****s should still be slaves today” in class, out loud, and not even getting detention for it.

11

jezreelite t1_j97pieq wrote

Reply to comment by Jaredlong in Weekly History Questions Thread. by AutoModerator

The relationship between monarchs and their nobility was often extremely fraught, so much so that most of Asian and European history involves monarchs and nobility trying to curb the power of the other.

If enough of the nobility decided that the current monarch was not to their liking for whatever reason, they could and often did choose to back someone else, who could be a relative of the current monarch or someone else entirely. Most of ancient and medieval history in much of Europe and Asia is that happening over and over again.

China did away with its warrior aristocrat class first and replaced them with scholar officials, but that didn't prevent the eventual toppling of all subsequent dynasties when economic and political troubles inevitably occurred.

3

zerepgn t1_j97nzb0 wrote

Reply to comment by pier4r in Why Nikola Tesla is So Famous (and Westinghouse is not) by pier4r

Ok so it seems like Tesla ‘only’ had 14 patents after 1903 (I chose 1903 because apparently the wireless ‘race’ is a big deal to popsci enthusiasts). According to a study published in 2017 in the journal Scientometrics, Nobel Prize winners in physics held an average of 2.9 patents each. Seems to be above average in that respect even after the arbitrary date that ‘Nobelitis’ is claimed.

As far as a race to get some sort of signal across the Atlantic, Marconi very much could have ‘won’. This signal was extremely crude and capable of nearly nothing in terms of data transfer or anything useful. The year before, Tesla was serving a deposition for a patent dispute regarding what we now know as the ‘AND’ gate.

Essentially, multiple coils were employed, each with their own characteristic resonant frequencies. Only when all resonant frequencies were sensed by the system, did the system respond. The and gate is currently described as “when both inputs are true, the output is true.” That is what is happening here. It is not commonly known that Tesla was the first to do this.

What Tesla was trying to do with wardenclyffe is often highly misconstrued. It consisted of an elevated terminal where voltage would be oscillating at very large values and a ground interface system (think like the ground rod that nearly every house has for their electrical system, but optimized) where the voltage was low but the current was massive. This system was much different than common radios at the time which Marconi was more alike. The difference was whether or not the system was optimized for radiation (common today for data and signals) vs conduction (through the earth itself, acting more as a compression wave than a transverse wave).

If you choose to research Tesla with an open mind, there is much more to be found than what is considered in this underselling article.

1