Read in the Wall Street Journal decades after Tesla died penniless that he is now pushing aside his old rival in the ‘pantheon of geek gods,’ Thomas Edison. Their rivalry was called the Battle of the Currents because Edison bet on direct current and was ahead for a time, but Tesla won the contest when his AC equipment powered an unprecedented display of electric light at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
50 years later, the 86-year-old Serbian émigré died in obscurity, unmarried, childless, and bereft of friends. Meanwhile, Edison was lionized for generations as one of America’s greatest inventors. BUT Tesla has been rediscovered by technophiles, including Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, who frequently cites him as an early inspiration. Teslamania is increasingly going mainstream!
David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film “The Prestige,” alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary as “more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way.” In short, Tesla is cool!
Meanwhile, Edison is less au courant that he used to be, says Paul Israel, director of Thomas Edison Papers, a scholarly project at Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ. “Edison is so 20th century, much like Henry Ford,” says Bernie Carlson, professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Virginia.
The Tesla-Edison rivalry was intense partly because the highly educated young engineer sailed to America in 1884 to work for Edison and after less than a year quit in a dispute over pay. ‘Tesla’boosters note that in Edison’s effort to discredit alternating current a decade later, his staff deliberately electrocuted a murderous circus elephant and profited from a popular film of the killing. To sully Tesla’s ideas, Edison’s men also helped orchestrate the first execution by electric chair….
“In 1895, after selling his AC patents to industrialist George Westinghouse for a mint and harnessing Niagara Falls—Tesla hobnobbed with Mark Twain, JP Morgan and French actress Sarah Bernhardt.”
In 1898, Tesla demonstrated a pair of small radio-controlled boats—decades before guided torpedoes—but was rebuffed by the US military. When Marconi changed the world with a trans-Atlantic radio transmission in 1901, Tesla wasn’t mentioned. Undaunted, Tesla continued to be far ahead of his time.
Tesla’s papers suggest he stumbled upon, but didn’t pursue: lasers and x-rays years before their recognized discoveries. He proposed transmitting electricity through the upper atmosphere. Sketched out robots and a death ray he hoped would end all wars. “There’s a sort of science-fiction aspect to Tesla,” says Prof. Israel at Rutgers.
“A mythology has built up around Tesla that catches people’s imagination,” says Andy Keane, GM of Tesla Products at Nvidia. Tesla’s more outlandish pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he could use electricity to cause earthquakes and control weather. He claimed to have detected signals from Mars while he was in Colorado. “Tesla’s work is incomplete, so people can read into it what they want to,” says Prof. Carlson of University of Virginia.
Rachel Konrad, spokeswoman for Tesla Motors says: “You know you’ve gone into mainstream pop glory when you’re in a videograme aimed at 18-year-old boys.”
Here’s to my old friend Venus, who has always thought of Tesla as one of our own!!! You were right. Everyone is finally getting the picture. :)
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