Life Vs. Legacy

July 10th, 2009 – Since all world news services just won’t stop talking about Michael Jackson and since Google is commemorating a birthday with their logo today, this blog entry will celebrate the life of Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Well-known, cherished and admired by some, he remains little-known by the public due to his eccentricities and due to defamation by his principal rival and contemporary fellow scientist, Thomas Edison.

Edison was a highly intelligent man and his mental capacity applied to much more than science. Intimidation, blackmail, extortion and plain theft led to this man accumulating over 1000 patents in his lifetime, from the lightbulb blueprints he forced someone else to sell him to the breakthroughs in electricity he directly stole from Tesla by having his laboratory raided.

Both Edison and Tesla gained respect and lucrative contracts in America at the turn of last century but whereas Edison turned his profit into more profit, Tesla ruined himself with increasingly bizarre experiments, some of which would eventually revolutionise the fields of magnetism and electricity and indeed usher in the second industrial revolution of mechanisation. In fact, our old television sets still use Tesla coils in them to regulate the image and Tesla, while working for Westinghouse, developed AC or Alternating current, the form of electricity still used by most of the world as a safe means of powering our homes. AC was deemed safer than DC or direct current (without any surge control) that Edison was pushing and eventually, Tesla’s undeniable testing results proved the preferable viability of AC.

Surprisingly, most of your day is made possible by this unknown Serb. It should be noted that Edison did not give up discrediting Tesla and AC at this point. In fact, he strapped copper sandals to an elephant in New York and proceeded to electrocute him using AC (the elephant had been sentenced to death for killing his trainer). The specific intent of this stunt was lost on the public because they still opted for Tesla’s admittedly safer electricity. Edison’s innovative euthanasia of the pachyderm only led him to patent another invention, a truly original one this time, the electric chair was commissioned by the American gouvernment for prisoner executions.

Never satisfied with fame or fortune, Tesla became increasingly reclusive in his old age, isolating himself in laboratories full of electric coils (the kind that shoot bolts of lightning 10 meters out of a chrome disk). Sitting amongst active lightning said it stimulated the thought process. Despite his status as a renowned “mad scientist” by this point, he was posthumously assigned the invention of the modern radio, of magnetic measurement scales, of robotic designs and of nuclear theories as well as his electric contribution.

Nikola Tesla died penniless and ridiculed yet we remember him today as an eccentric scientist whom virtuously gave up all personal ambition in the name of science, science from which we all benefit today.

(A charmingly eccentric Nikola Tesla - Don't let the "old-man" aspect of Thomas Edison fool you; he was a worse crook than Al Capone.)