Nikola Tesla – A Genius Ahead Of His Time

To be a genius is a gift to humanity, but to be a genius ahead of your time is a series of missed opportunities for humanity. Nikola Tesla was a genius who was undoubtedly ahead of his time. The thing that surprises me the most is that until this day no one has revived his work. Perhaps it is because most of his work and records are in the possession of the FBI. Nikola Tesla was not only a genius, he was the greatest inventor of all time. If during his time they had given his work more esteem, we would be in a much better place today, you might say utopian.

Albert Einstein was once asked by a journalist, how it felt to be the smartest man alive, and Albert replied “I do not know, you will have to ask Nikola Tesla”.

Inventing things requires a developed imagination and a broad perspective on things that do not exist yet. This can become a problem if those inventions are far beyond the reasonable logic of society, because then society perceives you as insane. Nikola Tesla lived between 1856-1943. He was an American inventor, physicist and electrical engineer of Serbian descent. In the US he was called “the wizard from the west”, but he was far beyond a wizard, he was a genius who knew how to explore and invent the impossible and believe in the impossible, even when no one else did.

During his lifetime he invented and registered more than 300 different patents. Among them were the development of alternating current, many transformers and motors, the first electric lamp without a filament, a coil that allows the transmission of radio waves, power generation from Niagara Falls, a boat controlled by remote control, X-rays and many others. His inventions are the basis of the life as we know it today. They have been used and improved in many fields since then and are still used today.

But the most significant things he wanted to do were not  appreciated.

Tesla perceived and worked on a futuristic discovery called free energy. There is an electromagnetic field in the air around us. Tesla discovered and showed that the earth can be used as a conductor for this energy. With its help, we can harness this field to generate electricity anywhere. He was able to turn on 200 cordless lamps from a distance of 40 km. He created a man-made lightning bolt, which produced 41-meter flashes. In addition, he was able to demonstrate a 28-mile electricity power transmission. His aim was to connect the entire world to free unpaid electricity and provide world-wide communications from a central power station.

In 1900 Tesla spent most of his time in Colorado, where he experimented with a coil he created operating in the mega-volt range.

During his time in the lab, Tesla observed unusual signals from his receiver, which he thought were communications from another planet. He shared the scientific achievement and the message he received from the other world, but of course it did not help his popularity and he became an object of ridicule in many journals. In 1996, scientists conducted a study that replicated Tesla’s experiment and showed that the signals Tesla had received had actually come from the moon ‘Lu’ which passes through the magnetic field of Jupiter, so he was right.

Nikola Tesla wasn’t a good businessman and therefore always faced financial crisis, he sold his inventions cheaply and relied on businessmen’s financing by selling shares and percentages of his patents and company. Tesla’s work scared people and journalists turned against Tesla’s project, claiming it was a prank. I suppose that the businessmen (some of whom owned a copper company) also wondered if his achievements would be profitable and if his success would benefit them. He perpetrated many projects and experiments in the field of wireless systems, but unfortunately all of these projects were stopped in the middle due to the cessation of funding.

He tried to find additional funding for his project of wireless transmission of information and electricity, but without success.

For a decade after the cessation of funding for his latest project in the field, he maintained the property where he built the Wardenclyffe Tower that was to be the transmitter facility. He did not give up and looked for investors, but without success. He mortgaged the property in order to repay the debts he had accumulated in the construction of the tower, but eventually the property was foreclosed and the tower was destroyed.

Even after this defeat, Tesla continued to invent and improve patents, but his financial situation continued to deteriorate. He won awards and medals, but in my opinion he did not get the real appreciation or acknowledgement that he deserved. He was not paid for work he did and was unable to win lawsuits when he sued for patent infringement. Due to lack of funds most of his ideas remained in his notebooks.

Tesla was a pacifist, all his life he sought technology that would put an end to wars.

He believed that if he produced deadly weapons, he would be able to negotiate with the world nations for world peace. At the end of his life he worked on ‘death rays’ that would be able to blow up planes in the air. He did this in order to make war impossible by offering each country protection from the rays on the condition of disarmament. This matter provoked controversy and he did not find funding for this project either.

He met his death in a hotel room where he was staying. After his death, FBI agents raided his hotel room and confiscated his documents and equipment that was there. When his nephew arrived and found that a lot of papers, drawings and equipment were missing from his uncle’s room, he tried to retrieve them, but without success. Some of the charts were later transferred for preservation at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Serbia, but not all of them.

From the moment I heard about Nikola Tesla and his work I have wondered where we could have been now if he had received the appreciation and funding needed to implementation his ideas. I imagine we probably would not be struggling with a climate crisis right now. I am hopeful that one day we will revive his work. He left behind many books and patents and I hope that in them we will be able to find the required knowledge. However it won’t happen if people do not have knowledge of the man and his work. So I wonder, why we are not taught about him in school along with the rest of the geniuses of his generation.

If you know people who have never heard of Nikola Tesla, I would appreciate it if you would share this post with them and maybe we wil