I am utterly stoked today by Google commemorating on their homepage the birthday of Nikola Tesla! Yay Google! Perhaps this prompted a few dozen people to digress from their purpose in booting the big G long enough to click through to the Wiki page and discover the brilliant and sadly under-rated (and occasionally just totally nutty) works of this amazing engineer and inventor. I hope they're now feeling a richer connection to their computer screen, and considering digressing more often (you know I'm already a fan).
I've been laboriously trudging my way through "A Brief History of Time" (which I know even Hawking says is outdated now) and I can't help but wonder today what Tesla's incredible and intuitive brain might make of our modern world and in particular of the wealth of advances in theoretical and applied physics. How valuable his creativity and inspiration would be to us, when we have more chance of understanding him than those dazed and confused Victorians.
In 1891 Tesla could create illumination without wires, and believed that this was merely the beginning of a field of industry. In Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency in February 1892 he wrote "Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe".
Not "...at any point of the world", "of the universe" the man had a real scope to his vision that I find inspiring. This was just one of his strands of enquiry. I wish more of his work survived the inevitable fires that came with his experimental conditions and most of all, I wish that he had found a helpmate during his life to take care of the practical things, so his eclectic genius could soar higher and further.
Happy Birthday Nikola Tesla, and thank you for persevering with us as long as you did.
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