Nikola Tesla

Some say the reason savants are so good at a particular thing is their brain is putting all its effort into that one single task and leaving the others sorely lacking. Far from being a savant, Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever known, but there is no denying he was very peculiar. He would go outside and talk to pigeons while feeding them. One of the things which really disturbed Tesla was seeing pearls. If a woman approached Tesla and wanted to speak to him and was wearing pearls he would not acknowledge her. Tesla had an abnormal fear of germs. He was very hygienic and this was no doubt caused by the fact he almost died as a teenager from cholera. He was very particular about how he dressed and said to be successful you had to dress like you were successful.

I think we all know Tesla was the greatest of all electrical geniuses and if one was to study him realizing he was born in 1856 and then look up what he was studying and the types of inventions he created, one might think he was from the future, because he was thinking about many things we have today and some things we don’t yet have. Tesla believed energy could be directed at a target anywhere on earth if we had the proper equipment and created plans for a death ray which he tried to sell to the US Defense Department during World War II to be used in place of the atomic bomb. They turned him down, but his apartment was raided after his death and the government took all of his notes and papers. Some say the Russians built this death ray. Thinking about death rays when you are born into a horse and buggy era is very unexpected. Perfecting one is unthinkable.

Every time we pick up the remote control for our television we have Tesla to thank. As hard as it is to believe he was experimenting with a remote controlled model boat he built in 1898 and was controlling it with radio beams. Having an idea like this in the very late 1800s was scary. Radio waves were nothing new to Tesla as he has been credited with inventing the radio after a court awarded him the patents and took them away from Marconi. Tesla was a great man aside from his inventions. He wanted to do things which absolutely scared the rich industrial class of his time right down to the tips of their toes. Here is an example of what I am talking about. He wanted to use wireless electricity so that everyone could take advantage of free power. This scared JP Morgan, his backer, so much he withdrew his financial support. Tesla had his lab at Shoreham New York. He had built a huge tower there to transmit wireless electricity, but that had been taken down in 1917. I went there before it was being restored and there was an old film developing company which had abandoned the site and left it a toxic waste dump. One could see where the tower was. The building which had been Tesla’s lab was the one the photo developing company used, so the original building was still there. Due to the toxicity at the time I couldn’t get past a chain link fence. JP Morgan was the same man who bought rifles for 3.50 each and sold them to our troops during the Civil War for over $20.00 each after buying his way out of the service. The rifles were defective and blew the thumbs off of some of the soldiers.

The duel over which type of electricity would become the standard in the United States took place between Tesla and Edison. Edison backed Direct Current known as DC and Tesla backed Alternating Current known as AC. The advantages of AC were obvious even though Edison fought it tooth and nail. DC current had to be boosted by erecting stations all along the route while AC could travel much further without such a need. So what was Edison to do to fight this obvious flaw and get his system installed? He decided to tell everyone AC was far too dangerous. To prove his point he started electrocuting hapless animals and worked his way up to an elephant. This wasn’t enough for him so he convinced New York State to build an electric chair for executions to show how deadly AC was. The first execution took place in 1890 in New York and was a brutal event with the head of the victim catching fire after prolonged use of electricity. A little known fact was the chair was a modified version of a dental chair. This alone was scary enough. Anyway none of the scare tactics by Edison worked and today we use alternating current.

Many of the devices we use today have induction motors. We can thank Tesla for this. If it wasn’t for the fact he developed this, you might not have an electric shaver today or even an electric vacuum cleaner. Power tools use this type of motor as do numerous other devices. Without this motor the world would be a different place today. Because of all the devices he developed, robots became possible and some call Tesla the father of robotics. Is this accurate? In that you couldn’t build a robot without his motors, remote control devices and electrical transmission devices I guess I would have to say it is true.

In 1893 Tesla introduced the forerunner of the florescent lamp. This angered Edison because he wanted to be known for his light bulb, which was not really his invention, but a bulb based on the one invented by Swan in England.  It caused a break between Tesla and Edison.

There are other things Tesla was experimenting with and we may never know what all these things were. One thing we do know is that Tesla was very interested in cosmic rays and believed he could develop an automobile powered by them. This would have put the electric cars we are developing today to shame, since his car would have had unlimited range. When his papers disappeared so did some of his concepts, but we know enough about what he did to be confident to say he was one of the greatest scientists and engineers who ever lived.