Tesla Shows You the Future
He dreamed big and made your world.
Some of the most influential inventors are forgotten. If you think hard enough, you could name a few mainstream inventors. Thomas Edison, or Alexander Graham Bell, for example. You might have barely heard of Nikola Tesla. He is not as famous as the others. His name gained recognition from Elon Musk’s company Tesla Motors. Nikola Tesla is more than an inspiration to Elon Musk. He shows you the future.
Alternating Current Electricity, Radio, Wireless Transmission, Turbines, Radar, and Solar Energy — all things that make your world into a technological wonderland. Tesla contributed to these inventions. He was a brilliant and prolific thinker. Ideas surged through his head really fast. Frequently, he couldn’t execute on them. There are endless papers and notebooks filled with his incomplete ideas.
In Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney describes the creative life of inventor Nikola Tesla. The biography explores Tesla’s mind as a birthplace of the future. With such an active mind, Tesla sometimes did not register patents for inventions and ideas. The patent fight over the radio is a good example. Tesla’s work on the radio was used commercially by Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi’s efforts became famous. In the US court system, there was a fight for patent attribution of the radio’s invention. A court ruled for the authority of Tesla’s patent.
Although the Modern era of invention was chaotic for patent attribution, Cheney shows that Tesla definitely had a formative role in many electricity inventions. Tesla even worked for Thomas Edison’s company. He fixed dynamos for electric plants, ships, and trolleys. Edison’s dynamos caused many problems. They needed to be redone. Tesla created new models and designs for them. Edison did not give Tesla adequate money for the successful designs. Tesla left to start his own company.
Tesla and Edison also disagreed about the use of Direct Current (DC) versus Alternating Current (AC) for electricity. Alternating Current changes directions and can convert to a range of high or low voltages. Edison argued that AC would be potentially harmful to people. The businessman George Westinghouse liked Tesla’s AC better than Edison’s DC. Westinghouse used Tesla’s AC patent to dominate the electrical industry. You see that Tesla’s creative independence made him unafraid of rebellion. He did not let Edison’s resistance stop him from pursuing crucial ideas.
By focusing on the creativity of science and invention, Tesla made the mechanical parts of the future. Tesla probably did not imagine the 20th and 21st century televisions. However, Margaret Cheney writes that he invented the Tesla Coil that is “a step-up transformer which converts relatively low-voltage high current to high voltage low current at high frequencies.” The Tesla Coil became a significant part in Modern radios and televisions.
When Tesla often worked hard on the micro-world of invention, he also dreamed big about the future. He received investment money to make an industrial park on Long Island, NY called Wardenclyffe. The park was an attempt at building a center for worldwide broadcasting. He claimed that he could broadcast over both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Wardenclyffe had a huge broadcasting tower. Tesla intended to make a broadcasting compound where people could work and live in the area. It was a dream for the future.
Unfortunately, Wardenclyffe became a failure. Tesla’s visions for the future were not always built for execution. Cheney cites a letter from Tesla to J.P. Morgan, an investor in Wardenclyffe, “So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.” The creative in Tesla was strong. Inventing was a creative process. Ideas passed through obstacles and conflicts. Tesla created like an artist and worked like a dreamer.
He also had a vision of a solar future. It started with a solar engine that worked with steam. It was simple and inexpensive. Cheney writes about Tesla’s solar engine, “All day long while the sun shone, with the chemical treatment making the water easily subject to heat, steam would be produced to run ordinary steam engines. These in turn would generate electricity for home and factory — enough, indeed, to supply a surplus, to be stored for cloudy days.”
How do you come up with the future? You dream in the present, like Tesla. Some might criticize Tesla’s business sense, but no one can deny his genius. With patents and concepts, Tesla inspired the technology of Modern electricity. He made more mass availability possible. He created as an inventor, and invented as a creator. He imagined an unbelievable future.
It might even come true. Some of it has already.
