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The legend goes that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. (He definitely didn't.) There is also a legend that Nikola Tesla burst forth from his mother's womb at the stroke of midnight as July 9th gave way to July 10th in the year of our Lord 1856. (He probably was.) The heroic figure that Thomas Edison is and shouldn't be rightly belongs to Nikola Tesla, who was the only true genius of the two. Nikola Tesla arrived in America in 1884, more than virtually penniless, but with a head nearly bursting from radical ideas that most considered verging on the lunatic. The most unfortunate decision of Tesla's life was to go to work for Thomas Edison, a man known by those who worked for him more as a thief of ideas than as an inventor of anything that was in any way useful.
Edison was notoriously disdainful of those whose brilliance outshone his, and the Tesla alliance lasted not long. By May of 1885, George Westinghouse (yes, that Westinghouse) had purchased patent rights to a slew of inventions that had come about as a result of Tesla's brilliance. Westinghouse apparently was just as big a thief and jerk as Edison, resulting in Tesla losing the rights to nearly everything he invented while in the employ of George, and just what is about guys named George, anyway? (For the record, my birth name was George, but was legally changed when I was still a very young child for reasons even I don't fully know.) After freeing himself from the mercenary intrusions of a second second-rater, Nikola Tesla finally established his own labs in 1895. During this frenzied period, Tesla worked on furthering X-ray technology, as well as inventing the Tesla coil, a device still used in many wireless products today. There is no denying that Nikola Tesla was a genius when it came to invention, but he definitely lacked something Edison actually did possess: the ability to manipulate public opinion and intimidate others. Never one to let products that were actually superior in every way to his own gain a foothold with the American public, however, Edison saw Tesla merely in terms of being a rival to his own desire to become America's greatest inventor. As one of the few willing to publicly admit the truth about Thomas Edison, Tesla refused to share a Nobel Prize for Physics with Edison because he accused (accurately) Edison of using underhanded methods to get his direct current means of providing electricity adopted. Tesla's alternating current had been proven time and time again in public demonstrations to be ridiculously superior to Edison's direct current. As a result, though both Tesla and Edison were proposed to win the Nobel Prize, what actually occurred was the unthinkable no matter which way you look at: neither Edison nor Tesla can be found on a list of Nobel Prize winners.
Today, thanks to David Bowie's genuinely engrossing portrayal of Tesla in the film The Prestige, Tesla is mainly known for his more outlandish theories, such as terrestrial stationary waves. Tesla theorized that our planet could potentially be utilized as a giant conductor. As in the movie, Tesla was capable of illuminating 200 lamps without a single connecting wire from as far away as 25 miles. His experiments in creating lightning bolts were also quite shocking to those who were lucky enough to see it. The story goes that Tesla had great fun creating electrical storms inside his own lab. Because he dared to expand upon the reaches of the severely limited world of Edisonesque experimentation, he was greeted with sarcastic critiques from most during his lifetime. The result was the death knell for all inventors: a lack of adequate funding. For that reason, a great many of Nikola Tesla's ideas remained locked onto the pages of his notebooks until they could be realized by future generations. That has meant a delay in many technological advancements that could have changed the world.
But, hey, at least we had Edison's light bulbs that burned out after twenty hours of use for the better part of a century.
Edison was notoriously disdainful of those whose brilliance outshone his, and the Tesla alliance lasted not long. By May of 1885, George Westinghouse (yes, that Westinghouse) had purchased patent rights to a slew of inventions that had come about as a result of Tesla's brilliance. Westinghouse apparently was just as big a thief and jerk as Edison, resulting in Tesla losing the rights to nearly everything he invented while in the employ of George, and just what is about guys named George, anyway? (For the record, my birth name was George, but was legally changed when I was still a very young child for reasons even I don't fully know.) After freeing himself from the mercenary intrusions of a second second-rater, Nikola Tesla finally established his own labs in 1895. During this frenzied period, Tesla worked on furthering X-ray technology, as well as inventing the Tesla coil, a device still used in many wireless products today. There is no denying that Nikola Tesla was a genius when it came to invention, but he definitely lacked something Edison actually did possess: the ability to manipulate public opinion and intimidate others. Never one to let products that were actually superior in every way to his own gain a foothold with the American public, however, Edison saw Tesla merely in terms of being a rival to his own desire to become America's greatest inventor. As one of the few willing to publicly admit the truth about Thomas Edison, Tesla refused to share a Nobel Prize for Physics with Edison because he accused (accurately) Edison of using underhanded methods to get his direct current means of providing electricity adopted. Tesla's alternating current had been proven time and time again in public demonstrations to be ridiculously superior to Edison's direct current. As a result, though both Tesla and Edison were proposed to win the Nobel Prize, what actually occurred was the unthinkable no matter which way you look at: neither Edison nor Tesla can be found on a list of Nobel Prize winners.
Today, thanks to David Bowie's genuinely engrossing portrayal of Tesla in the film The Prestige, Tesla is mainly known for his more outlandish theories, such as terrestrial stationary waves. Tesla theorized that our planet could potentially be utilized as a giant conductor. As in the movie, Tesla was capable of illuminating 200 lamps without a single connecting wire from as far away as 25 miles. His experiments in creating lightning bolts were also quite shocking to those who were lucky enough to see it. The story goes that Tesla had great fun creating electrical storms inside his own lab. Because he dared to expand upon the reaches of the severely limited world of Edisonesque experimentation, he was greeted with sarcastic critiques from most during his lifetime. The result was the death knell for all inventors: a lack of adequate funding. For that reason, a great many of Nikola Tesla's ideas remained locked onto the pages of his notebooks until they could be realized by future generations. That has meant a delay in many technological advancements that could have changed the world.
But, hey, at least we had Edison's light bulbs that burned out after twenty hours of use for the better part of a century.
) and one of my top five scientifics.
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