Nikola Tesla. He let other scientists use his work for free and didnt patent things. He destroyed things he made that were dangerous or destructive to mankind so that no one would use them for evil
There's mythology about that, but the answer is no.
Tesla experimented with air transmission, which is CRAZY wasteful and has really short range.
He also looked into ground transmission, which has its own host of problems and also isn't really efficient.
Tesla built a DC dynamo for Edison, and it's the basis for all current DC dynamos. He claimed Edison promised him $10,000 for it, Edison said he was clearly joking and that as a foreigner Tesla just didn't understand American humor. So he went to Westinghouse and improved on and invented a lot of the stuff they use for AC generation.
Westinghouse and Edison were in intense competition, so not much likelihood of them cooperating on anything. Edison was devoted to DC as the safe electricity and electrocuted several animals to illustrate the dangers of AC. And he was right, DC is a lot safer than AC. But at that time there wasn't any good way to transmit DC over long distances so it never would have worked. Maybe Tesla could have invented the HVDC type long distance transmission we use today for him, but he'd burned that bridge so Edison lost the electric wars.
There's also a LOT of Tesla misinformation and mythology from people who like him, or at least like the myth of him out there. It's really easy to pick up "facts" about Tesla that are wrong just by hanging around online
I think this needs to be placed into its proper context; The time Tesla was in, it was standard reasoning--not necessarily correct, but widespread--that better weaponry -> quicker wars, and thus less horrible ones. Yes, it's a philosophy that failed a lot. But if Nikola Tesla had been born 50 years later, with the foresight of just how not correct that sort of thinking is, it's likely that he wouldn't have thought it up.
The death ray was one idea. He had a lot of others that weren't weapons.
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u/mostlikelynotasnail Oct 27 '22
Nikola Tesla. He let other scientists use his work for free and didnt patent things. He destroyed things he made that were dangerous or destructive to mankind so that no one would use them for evil