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Monday, March 19th, 2007
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1:38p - Tesla lights up my brain
Watching Christopher Nolan's excellent movie The Prestige this weekend sent me on a mad quest to read as I could about inventor Nicola Tesla, who plays a small but vital role in the plot of the film. Good god, what a world this would have been if only we'd listened to this guy. Tesla not only invented AC power, he came up with the first ideas for radio (not Marconi, as the history books have been rewritten to say), robotics, and so much more. And yet business success eluded Tesla his entire career, and the world eventually saw more to ridicule than praise in his genius.
Still, you have to admire a man who realized the world was not ready for what he had to offer and decided to hold back several of his inventions. My favorite Tesla story details his invention of an electric car which ran on a mysterious source of AC power and drove 90 miles an hour -- this was back in 1931, mind you -- but he never told anyone how it worked. Accused of being either mad or in league with the "sinister forces of the universe," Tesla packed up his invention and went home.
Tesla's story doesn't end well. He spent most of his life being mocked. He never achieved the funding necessary to prove most of his ideas. He died in poverty, alone, and the government swooped in and stole most of his papers, only a portion of which were ever recovered. His achievements have been virtually forgotten or ignored in favor of better businessmen or better PR vultures like Marconi and Edison. Still, he persevered, and kept up the good fight for most of his life. How many of us can say that?
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