Every day we interact with a world that, were it not for one mans overly inventive mind, would never have existed. If you use anything electronic, if you use anything other than your feet to get from one place to another you are using the invention of one man whose work is quite literally in everything we use.
His inventions include the motors used in everything from washing machines to cars, radio, radar, flourescent lighting, the ac electrical system, vtol aircraft and even the wireless transmission of electricity yet few people are aware that all this is the work of a single and somewhat eccentric man born over a hundred and fifty years ago.
Nikola Tesla was a man who even in his own lifetimes was considered a mad scientist, an eccentric genius he was always immaculately dressed and everything he invented was always completed in his mind, down to the smallest detail, before committing it to paper.
Born in Serbia in 1856 Tesla was always a quick learner, his photographic memory enabled him to recall things at will and he was known to recite entire books from memory. Although he could speak eight languages he didn’t always find it easy to understand people and showed signs of having obsessive compulsive disorder such as having to do everything in threes. This included only staying in hotel rooms that had a number which was divisible by three.
In 1884 he moved to America where in 1891 he became a naturalised American citizen. On arrival fellow inventor Thomas Edison employed him but less than a year later Edison and Tesla had a falling out when Edison offered Tesla fifty thousand dollars to redesign Edisons inefficient motors and generators. Tesla spent months working on the problem and when he succeeded and asked for payment Edison told the young genius that he had been joking. He offered Tesla a wage increase of ten dollars per week but the furious Tesla declined and immediately resigned. It was the beginning of a bitter and lifelong rivalry between the two men.
Edison had invented a system of electrical power known as dc (direct current), it had a number of problems such as only being able to carry electricity for a mile and a half between power stations. Tesla came up with a rival electrical system known as ac (alternating current) that could not only carry electricity for hundreds of miles more than Edisons but which was also more efficient and despite a bitter campaign by Edison in which he went so far as to electrocute an elephant with Teslas system in order to portray it as deadly it was the alternating current system that went on to win the battle and is now used around the world.
Tesla invented the logic gate, something essential to every computer. Patented in 1898 it is a crucial part of any device that needs to make a decision, it allows it to make a choice between two or more inputs. Tesla invented and patented all the things that are needed for radio.
Marconi later submitted some similar patents which the US patent office refused to allow because Teslas patents had already been submitted and awarded yet, after three years of campaigning (funded by wealthy investors such as Teslas rival Thomas Edison), the patent office decided to cancel Teslas patents and allow Marconi’s instead though the reason reason for their decision was never made clear and was overturned in 1943 when they reinstated Teslas original patents and cancelled those of Marconi, reinstating Tesla as the father of radio.
The Serbian genius also invented the first flourescent light, demonstrated at the worlds fair in Chicago in 1893 and would continue to patent many inventions crucial to modern day technology right up until 1928 when, at the age of seventy two years, he patented a design for a vtol (vertical take off and landing) aircraft.
Along the way he invented the first radio controlled device, designed and built the worlds first electrical lamps that were powered without wires, created the induction motor, wrote in detail about radar (his work was used to create the worlds first radar system by Emile Girardeau in 1934, Girardeau stated that his work was based on that of Nikola Tesla) and of course invented the infamous Tesla coils used in many modern inventions (an oil filled tesla coil, better known as an ignition coil, is used by every vehicle that has a combustion engine to provide the high voltage that fires its spark plugs).
As with many people blessed with genius Tesla was far from perfect and had a number of eccentricities and views that today would cause some to judge him as at best very un pc, and at worst a man with unpalletable beliefs. He supported the idea of eugenics through the use of sterilisation (an idea also supported by Adolph Hitler but unlike Hitler Tesla never believed in harming anyone only in the idea of getting rid of genetically inherited problems through sterlisation), he disliked overweight people (going so far as to fire one secretary because of her weight) and was very critical of anyone who dressed in a manner he disapproved of, and often alienated himself preffering his own company.
However when he did socialise he was reputed to be very charming and knowledgeable, a connoisseur of music food and drink and went on to become close friends with the author Mark Twain who was often found in his company.
The last years of his life were spent living in his hotel room with an extreme sensitivity to light and sound. The lifelong bachelor, who remained celibate despite being the attention of a number of women, died alone in his hotel room on the seventh of January 1943 aged eighty six from heart thrombus.
Tesla had been working on a number of inventions that while useful to humanity, such as a method of taking electricity from the world around us at no cost, had significant military possibilities too (such as his infamous “death ray”, he caused a small number of earthquakes during the course of his work including one in Alaska in 1899 and one in New York) and, perhaps because of this, his work was seized by the American governments alien property custodian office (despite the fact that Tesla had become a naturalised American citizen fifty years earlier and was therefore no longer an alien) and were declared top secret.
As a result many potentially priceless inventions never saw the light of day with over eighty trunks full of documents being taken away in a convoy of trucks and sealed away although not, as legend has it, by the FBI. To this day his unpublished work remains in possession of the US government and this, combined with his proclivity for invention and his mad scientist image, has fuelled speculation of a government cover up.
Believe what you will but the one inescapable fact is that were it not for Nikola Tesla I would not be writing this on a computer, you would not be reading it, getting from A to B would be a lot more difficult (the world would be a much less travelled place without engines) and we’d all be up close and personal with direct current power stations less than a mile away.
The at times quirky and sometimes down right odd, but always intelligent, Nikola Tesla made arguably the biggest contribution to life in the modern world and yet his name remains little known by many.
A great, odd, but cultured man opposed to war and ethnic cleansing (someone once tried to get him involved in the ethnic conflict going on at that time in Yugoslavia to which he replied “if your hate could be turned into electricity it would light up the whole world”) he built the very foundations of modern technology and yet, for some, remains a footnote in the pages of history.
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