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The history of technology is populated with a
marvellous cast of characters. On the one hand you have the
colourful, hard-working inventors like Thomas Edison who slaved away
morning, noon and night to produce many of the wonders that we take
for granted such as the incandescent light, the telephone, and the
garlic peeler. On the other you have the moonbat crazies who
show up at the patent office with a cardboard box stuffed with wires
and a torch battery claiming that they've made contact with John
Kerry's charisma. And then there is that rarest of creatures: Nikola
Tesla, a man who was both a certifiable genius and just plain
certifiable. Born in Smiljan,
Croatia, Tesla was
educated at Graz and Prague, worked for the Continental Edison Company
in Paris, and emigrated to the United States in 1884. There
he worked briefly for Thomas Edison until the poetic Tesla and the
pragmatic Edison fell out. Tesla then went on to sell his
patents for a series of alternating current devices to the
Westinghouse Electric Company, making Tesla a relatively wealthy man
able to set himself up in his own laboratory.
Composite photo
of Tesla making it appear as if he's sitting serenely in a barrage of
lightning.
 So far so good; sounds like the biography of many a
successful Victorian electrical engineer. But Tesla was a
different kettle of mackerels from your average solder jockey.
He was a first-class ego case with aristocratic pretensions. He
was a tremendous showman who excelled at giving spectacular
demonstrations of what electricity could do. He was an intuitive
genius who could visualise all sorts of revolutionary new devices even
though he didn't fully understand the principles behind them. He
had a remarkable memory coupled with an intense dislike of writing
things down, so that much of his work has come down to us as a
mystery. He was a man with no money sense who was able to
persuade many an investor into pouring money down many a rat hole.
He was also a visionary who, as time went on and his professional
fortunes ebbed, became prone to wilder and wilder assertions about
what marvels he would perform and how he could single-handedly change
the world or destroy it.
Tesla's real achievements combined with his
flamboyant dreams made him a regular source for reporters looking for
sensational copy and a lightning rod for nutcases who were
convinced that he was really an emissary from the planet Venus.
Even today a quick google of the Internet will return any number of
sites dedicated to Tesla and more than a few of these are filled with
claims that Tesla really had built death rays, power
broadcasters, and weather control machines; contacted other
planets; built electric space ships which he used to visit Mars; could
project thoughts; and Lord knows what else. And why don't we
enjoy these Teslan marvels today? According to his modern
disciples, Tesla's inventions have either been lost to history,
suppressed by the government or corporations, or are the product of an
alien technology for which we are Not Yet Ready.
Pretty good for a man whose best friend was a
pigeon and had a life-long horror of germs that would have done Howard
Hughes proud. |
