A man most curious

July 19, 2012

Yugoslav-born genius Nikola Tesla died in obscurity in 1943 at the age of eighty-seven, the owner of some seven hundred patents including that for the first electric power plant.

In 1899 he discovered a way of making manmade lightning by using a copper ball atop a three-hundred-foot mast, in effect charging the whole planet with several hundred times the energy of a lightning bolt. This phenomenon created a power source that could be tapped anywhere on the globe, a fact he demonstrated by lighting two hundred of Edison’s lamps at twenty-six miles distance without wires.

Tesla invented radar forty years before World War II, developed the idea of a radio-controlled rocket in the 1890′s, and built the first world broadcasting station on Long Island in 1900. He claimed he was in contact with extraterrestials and told the press in 1924 that he could destroy objects 250 miles away with a ray and form a force field around the United States from twelve strategic beaming stations.

His eccentricities have, until recently, overshadowed his accomplishments. He had a germ phobia that led him to use eighteen towels after bathing, a belief that drinking whiskey would let him live to be 150, and a penchant for lighting lamps by subjecting his body to massive voltages. A biography, Return of the Dove, claimed that he was born aboard a spaceship en route from Venus to Earth in 1856. 

Alien genius? Who Knows? Though we think the whisky idea could catch on.

Have a curious day.