

Happy birthday, Nikola Tesla: thanks for the electricity - ftse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/10/tesla-electricity-inventor-birthday-anniversary

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dejan
Jesus! The comments are terrible! They made Tesla as if he was crazy, stupid,
mad...

Most of them heard about him from the movies. I guess that is what you get
when you are not looking into making the world's biggest companies, but into
contributing the society. No one will hear about you.

In Tesla's museum in Belgrade, his notes are absolutely stunning. He invented
the radio (later development leading to TV), remote control (tele-commanding a
boat model), generator and polyphase AC... It is interesting to note the work
that is leading towards the revolution Einstein is known for.. Tesla was a
mean hundreds of years before his own time, and while moving towards the final
"theory of relativity", his work suddenly stops, and is being scratched off.
He never was an inventor of weapons, and it is claimed that he knew where such
invention could lead. After all, what good did Einstein do? Millions killed,
and devastating nuclear waste from energy extractions.

The only war-kind of invention was the EM shield that could protect a whole
country from attacks, and he was proposing it to the Serbian king in Belgrade.

Basically he is behind everything we geeks care about today. Yet, he is
considered "American"??? Until his last day he was loyal to the king, the
kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians later to be Yugoslavia. He was not
born in Austro-Hungaria, as the region was invaded by them at the time after
the lengthy wars, later to evolve in the WWI. He was a Serbo-Croatian.

Americans used him, stole all of his patents and made an image of him in
public as a crazy man. Not a monument or anything until much later at Niagara
through the efforts of the Yugoslavian immigrants in the US.

I want to high school in the US (senior year). Not one single person knew who
he was, and everyone thinks Edison invented "electricity." Not much to
complain actually, they also don't know who Alessandro Volta is, speaking of
US education.

Thank God we've all heard of P Diddy.

~~~
dchest
I agree with many points of your comment. However, here are a few excerpts
from the Wikipedia article on Tesla:

On weapons:

 _At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing his work on the
teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US
War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his
research into ball lightning and plasma, and was imagined as a particle beam
weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe.
After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to
be top secret. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential
advisers; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature
of Tesla's inventions and patents.[102] One document stated that "[he] is
reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and
plans having to do with his experiments [...]"._

On health:

 _Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder,[93] and had many
unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about
staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three._

~~~
dejan
I am aware of this story. However, if you were to take a look into what he was
writing about (as mentioned in some of the left notes), you'd see such claims
are just plain silly. If he were to build a weapon, the history would have
taken a different shape.

The health, yes that is a fact, he was "weird", but show me a great mind that
wasn't - Mozart, Beethoven? However, he didn't hurt anybody, unlike Edison,
who invented the electric chair "just for fun."

Thus, I wouldn't trust anything US and War departments says. They knew he was
capable of a lot of stuff, so they normally seized everything.

Thus, you have to understand that such claims that he was working on some kind
of "weapon" were coming only from the government of the US. If I were Tesla, I
would have been going crazy myself - everything stolen, no credit, no name, no
money, no support and publicity of crazy scientist - this was of course a
great plot to demoralize and ruin credibility of Tesla and takeover his
patents, since no one would support or fund "a crazy guy". Edison was taking
the credit for his work for years before.

You know the US govt credibility? The same guys who said that there are
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, that socialism and
communism were the same as witchcraft while adopting all the systems, that
broke Yugoslavia apart, that Serbs were doing mass killing of Albanians in
Kosovo, bombed Serbia, with depleted uranium and cassette bombs, schools and
hospitals, passenger trains, biggest factory of cigarettes (later bought by
Philip Morris for $1), and of course denied everything...The list is long, and
this is only my perspective, there are many others.

Since the Kennedy assassination, US has been the most corrupted country and
non-democratic in the world, so I wouldn't trust what they say about the
greatest scientist of our time. For the name of God, they've named a corner
after him, yet have done everything to "fight immigration" while they have
become what they are because of the immigrants.

Sorry for the rant, the topic is just distasteful once you gather a lot of
facts. Also, encyclopedias are not really based on facts, but on what majority
agrees (public opinion), and you have to keep in mind he was left as a "mad
scientist" in the public eyes.

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Bjoern
We owe Nikola Tesla a lot. He was a genius and is one of my inspirations. If
you don't know so much about him, see this:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1LqxG49DLk>

Wireless power was one of his ideas and we are still only scratching the
surface of that. There are so many more...

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poolboyz
Belated happy birthday Mr. Tesla

