Nikola Tesla - The Genius You May Not Know About

Have you ever heard the name Nikola Tesla before? if you haven't there's no need to feel bad. Many people have never heard of the Croatian born Tesla, who was what some would say "the greatest inventor" of the modern age.

David Bowie portrayed him well in the movie The Prestige. In fact I didn't even recognize that it was Bowie until the credits started rolling - that's how admirable his performance really was.

Tesla was most notable for his famous Tesla energy coil that used high frequency energy to create electricity, developed some time around 1891. However he also had hundreds of patents for some truly mesmerizing inventions, with some going on to become the inspirations for much of the technology that we use today.

But why don't more people know him as the household name that he surely deserves if he contributed such amazing work to society? That's simple - his name was smeared like mud by companies that felt threatened by him as well as some of his peers who labeled him as "crazy".

You have to remember, that at this time, Tesla was working with some really "frightening" things. Harnessing energy was something that was really intimidating to most people. In fact, I remember reading a story about great American satirist and author James Thurber's mother (grandmother?) once, where she believed that a socket with no light bulb would cause electricity to leak into the room and do hazard to people's health. Things like this were just a common belief at this time.

So, it didn't take much work for other inventors and major corporations at this time to turn the general public against Tesla. Companies claimed that his ideas on energy were dangerous, even though we know better today, but perhaps it was this next step that really put the nail in the coffin.

Tesla was all about "free" energy. He had great plans to have his energy coils developed all over the world to provide free energy to homes every where. This meant no money for the electric companies if he wouldn't have gotten his way. So they started a marketing campaign to paint him out to look like a lunatic. Even to this day, people seem to treat him as a "strange wizard".

Side note: Here's a hilarious article that I found on 7 inventions stolen from Nikola Tesla.

You can also read about the REAL lost inventions of Tesla here.





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