Hi,
This thread has two useful purposes:
1) It keeps my post count up.
2) Maybe those people who read it will have a bit of fun and learn something too!!
Every so often I'll add a post giving a few details about someone who rather unfairly has been almost lost from history. Heard of people like Newton, Einstein or Florence Nightingale? Good. What about Leibniz, Dirac or Heaviside? People who also deserve to be famous but for some reason aren't.
My first person to pick is Nikola Tesla, who by a strange twist of fate died 67 years ago today. Actually, you've probably all just about heard of him if you ever played Command and Conquer: Red Alert since the Tesla Coil is one of his quirkier ideas.
But apart from invent a deadly electric turret that zaps people and makes them look funny, what did Tesla do?? Well, quite a few things:
- He invented the radio, two years before Marconi did. (Marconi got the patent but Tesla won it back in 1943), and the radio transmitter.
- He designed, built and patented the first useful Alternating Current Generator, and so gave birth to the first useful Electric Grid. The entire Western World is built on AC electricity, and Tesla started it all. And in a stroke of inspiration, too!!! It's said that he came up with the design by drawing it in the sand in a park after a vision.
- He discovered X-rays, 3 years before Rontgen.
- He even, 100 years before it was developed, foresaw the internet:
"As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind."
Eerily accurate, I think you'd agree.
Tesla disappears from the fame books due to Marconi winning the patent for the radio in 1904 and the fact that he lost all his money. The rest of his life saw him withdraw from the world.
But let's not forget, this man invented the modern world, and let's be thankful that he did.