Tesla Built the First Wireless Remote Control
Tesla Built the First Wireless Remote Control
特斯拉制造了第一个无线遥控器
In 1898, years before radio broadcasting existed and decades before anyone used the word “electronics,” Nikola Tesla stood in front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden and did something that looked like magic. In a large pool of water sat a small iron-hulled boat. With no wires connecting them, Tesla sent commands through the air and the boat obeyed, turning, stopping, and blinking its lights on demand. 1898年，在无线电广播出现之前，在人们使用“电子”这个词的几十年前，尼古拉·特斯拉站在麦迪逊广场花园的人群前，做了一件看起来像魔法的事情。在一个大水池里，漂浮着一艘铁壳小船。在没有任何电线连接的情况下，特斯拉通过空气发送指令，小船便听从指挥，按要求转向、停止并闪烁灯光。
Spectators were so unprepared for the idea that some accused him of hiding a trained monkey inside the hull, or of controlling it with his mind. What Tesla had actually built was the first wireless remote control, and it is the direct ancestor of every connected device we make today. A machine that took commands through the air Tesla called his invention a “teleautomaton,” from the Greek for “remote” and “self-acting.” 观众们对这一概念毫无准备，以至于有人指责他在船体内藏了一只训练有素的猴子，或者是在用思维控制它。特斯拉实际上制造的是第一个无线遥控器，它是我们今天制造的每一个联网设备的直系祖先。特斯拉将这种通过空气接收指令的机器称为“远程自动机”（teleautomaton），该词源自希腊语，意为“远程”和“自动”。
The boat carried a radio receiver, a set of relays, and a battery driving its motor and rudder. From a control box on the side of the pool, Tesla transmitted radio signals that the receiver decoded into physical actions. Press a control, and a coherer-based circuit closed a relay, which in turn stepped the boat’s steering and switching mechanism to a new position. The patent behind the demonstration, US Patent 613,809, “Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles,” was granted in November 1898. 这艘船载有一个无线电接收器、一套继电器以及驱动其电机和舵的电池。特斯拉在池边通过一个控制盒发送无线电信号，接收器将其解码为物理动作。按下控制器，基于金属屑检波器（coherer）的电路闭合继电器，进而带动船的转向和切换机构移动到新位置。此次演示背后的专利——美国专利第613,809号《控制移动船只或车辆机构的方法及装置》于1898年11月获得批准。
Read today, it is startling how modern the thinking is. Tesla was not just wiggling a boat around a pool for show; he was describing a general system for sending control signals to a remote machine and having that machine act on them without a human physically present. That is the exact problem statement behind modern IoT, just with vacuum-era hardware. 今天读来，其思想之超前令人震惊。特斯拉不仅仅是为了表演而在水池里摆弄小船；他是在描述一种通用系统，即向远程机器发送控制信号，并让机器在没有人类在场的情况下执行这些信号。这正是现代物联网（IoT）背后的核心命题，只不过当时使用的是真空管时代的硬件。
Why nobody knew what to do with it Tesla saw enormous potential. He imagined remotely piloted vessels, automated vehicles, and machines that could carry out instructions from miles away. He even pitched the concept to the US military as a radio-controlled torpedo. The reception was cool. The technology was so far ahead of its context that the people who might have funded it could not picture a use for it. Radio itself was barely understood, and the notion of trusting a machine to act on invisible signals struck many as a parlor trick rather than an engineering breakthrough. 为什么当时没人知道如何利用它？特斯拉看到了巨大的潜力。他设想了远程驾驶的船只、自动驾驶车辆以及可以从数英里外执行指令的机器。他甚至向美国军方推销了无线电遥控鱼雷的概念。但反响冷淡。这项技术远远超出了当时的背景，以至于那些可能提供资金的人无法想象它的用途。当时人们对无线电本身知之甚少，而信任机器去执行不可见信号的想法，在许多人看来更像是江湖把戏，而非工程突破。
That gap between invention and application is a recurring pattern in technology history. The same wireless-control principle would eventually reappear in garage-door openers, television remotes, drones, and industrial automation. But in 1898 the surrounding ecosystem of reliable radios, compact power, and cheap logic simply did not exist yet. The idea had to wait for the rest of the stack to catch up. 发明与应用之间的这种鸿沟是技术史上反复出现的模式。同样的无线控制原理最终出现在了车库门开启器、电视遥控器、无人机和工业自动化中。但在1898年，可靠的无线电、紧凑的电源和廉价逻辑电路等周边生态系统根本不存在。这个想法必须等待整个技术栈的成熟。
The direct line to modern IoT Strip away the brass and the coherer, and Tesla’s boat is doing exactly what a connected device does now. A sensor or a control surface generates an intent. That intent is encoded and sent wirelessly. A receiver on the far end decodes it and actuates something physical: a rudder, a relay, a valve, a motor. Every smart switch, every remotely managed industrial controller, and every fleet of connected robots is a descendant of that single loop of “send a signal, move the hardware.” 通往现代物联网的直接路径：剥去黄铜和金属屑检波器，特斯拉的小船所做的正是现在联网设备所做的事情。传感器或控制界面产生意图，该意图被编码并通过无线方式发送。远端的接收器对其解码并驱动物理部件：舵、继电器、阀门或电机。每一个智能开关、每一个远程管理的工业控制器以及每一个联网机器人集群，都是那个“发送信号，驱动硬件”单一循环的后代。
What has changed in the intervening century is not the concept but the economics and the layers on top of it. Tesla needed a hand-built receiver and a room-sized imagination. A modern engineer reaches for a two-dollar microcontroller, a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radio, and a lightweight protocol like MQTT, and gets far more reliable remote control than Tesla could have dreamed of. The addressing, the security, and the cloud dashboards are new. The core act of steering a machine you are not touching is not. 过去一个世纪改变的不是概念，而是经济成本及其之上的应用层。特斯拉需要手工制造的接收器和房间大小的想象力。而现代工程师只需一个两美元的微控制器、一个Wi-Fi或蓝牙模块，以及像MQTT这样的轻量级协议，就能获得比特斯拉梦想中更可靠的远程控制。寻址、安全性和云仪表盘是新的，但远程操控机器的核心行为却从未改变。
Building on a 125-year-old idea There is something useful in remembering how old the fundamental idea is. When a client asks whether a piece of equipment can be monitored and controlled from anywhere, the honest answer is that the concept was proven in a Manhattan exhibition hall in the nineteenth century. The interesting work today is not proving that remote control is possible; it is making it dependable, secure, and affordable at scale, from the silicon up to the cloud. That is the work we do at Fluidwire. 基于125年前的理念：记住这一基本理念的古老程度是有益的。当客户询问某台设备是否可以从任何地方进行监控和控制时，诚实的回答是：这个概念早在19世纪的曼哈顿展览大厅里就已经被证明了。今天有趣的工作不是证明远程控制是否可行，而是从芯片到云端，使其在大规模应用中变得可靠、安全且经济实惠。这正是我们在Fluidwire所做的工作。
Whether you are prototyping a connected product, wiring up sensors for a thesis project here in the Philippines, or bringing an industrial system online, the challenge is the same one Tesla was solving on the water in 1898, just with better tools. If you have a device you want to make smart and remotely controllable, get in touch and we will help you close the loop from silicon to cloud. 无论您是在开发联网产品原型，还是在菲律宾为毕业设计连接传感器，亦或是将工业系统上线，您所面临的挑战与特斯拉1898年在水面上解决的挑战是一样的，只是现在有了更好的工具。如果您有想要实现智能化和远程控制的设备，请联系我们，我们将帮助您完成从芯片到云端的闭环。