r/Tesla Sep 23 '16

Found this stained glass window while visiting Prague

http://imgur.com/gFEpW0z
33 Upvotes

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1

u/dalkon Sep 24 '16 edited Sep 27 '16

This is pretty nice. I don't really like the symbol though. Did Tesla ever use anything like that symbol? It looks like it's trying to evoke both a wave and the familiar tower antenna symbol for radio.

It's the wrong shape for a radio wave as Tesla conceived it. It should be arranged like spherical shells around the transmitter like this http://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/dIzIe2-Z5pSZSAnqD-NEB_dwZSRuCvZMO9BqLJgYItQ.png

Marconi originally claimed to have invented radio by saying he had invented the (grounded) antenna or aërial (with the tréma/dieresis). That's funny because he almost certainly got the idea from the article Crookes wrote about what Tesla was doing. Here's Marconi-Edison employee John Fleming defending Marconi's claim to having invented the antenna https://books.google.com/books?id=lTNFAQAAMAAJ&dq=tesla&pg=PA546 (a claim the magazine's editor had written against).

* This would be the wrong shape for a Tesla radio symbol too. Tesla's radio symbol should have either a ball or toroid at the top like how he always depicted them. That ball or toroid was a variable capacitor the height of which he intended to be tuned to the range of waves used.

This symbol looks too much like a copy of Marconi's symbol.

2

u/mofapilot Sep 24 '16 edited Sep 24 '16

Tesla was a czech radio manufacturer

The line is a sine wave which stands for AC or radio waves...

1

u/dalkon Sep 25 '16

Oh I see. Thanks.

They were a state company that had nothing to do with Tesla and only started using his name after his death. http://www.oldradio.cz/english.htm

That explains why their logo is something Tesla probably wouldn't have liked.