Today, the name Tesla is represented in popular culture as the emblem of a real-life nerd’s superhero. The "Superman" of science, so to speak, lives on to a degree with his namesakes of Elon Musk’s revolutionary electric car company, Tesla Motors, and as the standard unit of magnetic flux density, as well as his famous Tesla tower, a pylon which can generate immense amounts of static electrical energy in short, extremely fast bursts. Tesla is also remembered as the underdog in the “War of the Currents” between him and Thomas Edison.
Edison, already famous throughout the world and very wealthy, employed a laboratory full of young brilliant minds to do the majority of his work for him, Tesla being one of them. At the time, consumer electricity was on the rise, and Edison was trying to corner the market with his direct current (DC) system. However, Tesla, ingenious as he was, developed a much more efficient system, the alternating current (AC) system.
Edison’s system necessitated huge power stations to be placed every few blocks of New York City which channeled electricity to streets and residences through huge cables a full foot in diameter. Tesla’s alternating current, however, was able to cut down the diameter of wires and make the entire system much more feasible by literally alternating currents within the wires, instead of having separate ones doing only one job. In fact, his system was so efficient that the electrical wires we use today, such as the wire of every computer charger, is the same diameter as that of Tesla’s first prototypes.
Unfortunately, as frequently occurs in our unjust world, the spoils at the time went to the combatant with the deeper pockets, as Edison used his fame and resources to slander and defame Tesla’s name and inventions as thoroughly as possible, which is why it was only when the underdogs of the world took to the 21st century internet and social media and proclaimed the Serbian inventor as their hero.
While the resurgence of interest in Tesla’s life is definitely a very positive thing, it is still a very superficial interest. The really amazing achievements which were this man’s life works are still forgotten, many of them cast away as buggery or conspiracy theories, simply because they are too incredible to be considered possible, especially a century ago.
Why is it so difficult to accept that a single ingenious man might have been a century ahead of his time? Leonardo da Vinci, with his designs of automatic machine guns, tanks, helicopters, and parachutes, was half a millennium ahead of his time and yet even his contemporaries did not doubt his claims, neither do present-day experts, hailing him as an inventor yet unsurpassed in humanity.
Tesla was very much like da Vinci in the methods with which he presented his inventions. There is a tale that speaks of how da Vinci had mounted a miniature telescope to a custom long-barreled rifle and presented it to Lorenzo de Medici, his patron, who did not believe his claims. da Vinci then took his own weapon, and even though he was evidently a devout pacifist, shot an enemy soldier down at 500 yards from the castle wall, proving his invention.
Similarly, Tesla created a resonance oscillator, a machine which essentially worked as a huge, powerful tuning fork. Once a resonant frequency was found, the machine would send tremors through it, quickly being dubbed the “earthquake machine”. In order to prove the validity of his claims, Tesla tested it out on the building which held it, his Manhattan laboratory, and almost brought the entire building down in the process, forced to destroy the machine to save the shaking building from crumbling to the ground.
Tesla’s biggest weakness, and most striking difference from da Vinci, was his extreme aversion to people and lack of social skills. Tesla worked for the world and for himself, and apparently also detested pearl jewelry and could not stand the sight of overweight women, which did not really work to his advantage. Most importantly, he always picked the absolute worst patrons. His Wardenclyffe tower experiments are among the most infamous, as it was there he conducted the first successful trials of wireless energy transfer. By channeling electric energy through the natural telluric currents underground, Tesla was able to power light bulbs stuck into the soil over two miles away from the tower.
He attempted to channel energy in a similar way through the electrically-charged ionosphere, even making an official attempt to send a transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, which supposedly failed. Though, conspiracy theorists mark the fact that the still-unexplained Tunguska event happened around the same time, leading some to believe that Tesla’s geographic calculations were simply off and he overshot his target, causing the massive, inexplicable explosion in the middle of Siberia in 1918. Either way, his Wardenclyffe tower was surely a structure of the future, with wireless energy transfer only now being realized by companies such as Powermat.
This tower, however, was funded by no other than J.P. Morgan, the energy magnate and robber-baron of the early twentieth century. When Tesla foolishly informed his employer of the tower’s potential to provide free electricity to the whole world by sucking it down from the ionosphere, the tower was promptly defunded and all potential investors convinced to steer clear of the Serbian-American “mad scientist."
Upon his death, the FBI stormed his residential room in the New Yorker Hotel and raided his safe, which contained all of his personal documents and unpublished schematics and plans, tucking them away from the public eye; none of the seized documents have ever been made public.
To this day, the greatest of Tesla’s genius is yet unseen, largely unknown, and we, a people who finally have the capability to truly appreciate his work, are satisfied with only maintaining his pop culture connection to the engineering sciences and care little to uncover the greater truths about the inventor’s incredible discoveries.
