Nikola Tesla was a great scientist. Great, because he did not steal ideas from others but devised them himself. And he gave his ideas to others. He was not rich, and he could not afford to patent all his inventions. He believed in what today is called “open source,” the free market of ideas. For Nikola Tesla, inventions were meant to serve people, society, and not to line one’s pockets. Today it is hard to find a Nikola Tesla—not only someone with this genuine spirit of service to society, but also someone who carries forward his thinking. His ideas were so far ahead of their time that even today many of them have not been put to use or studied more thoroughly. And yet he would still have so much to say to today’s industrialized world when it comes to renewable energy. Nikola Tesla dreamed of harnessing energy sources in such a way as to provide free energy to the world. The idea did not please the energy industries, and Tesla never found much financial support for his research!
Tesla experimented with the wireless transmission of electricity, which even today could be studied much more thoroughly.
Tesla experimented with the earth as a source of electrical energy; he discovered that the earth responds to certain electromagnetic resonances and therefore could become an almost inexhaustible source of energy. These theories too have still not been put to use today.
Other discoveries of his were “stolen” by others, for example the transoceanic radio transmission by Marconi, to whom Tesla had confided his own research a few months earlier. Tesla was almost ready to carry out the first actual experiments when the news arrived that Marconi had just done it.
Tesla is the figure of a sincere and humble man, but with the mind of a giant. Even recently nVidia (a manufacturer especially of GPU processors and graphics cards) named one of its most powerful GPU processors “Tesla” in his honor.
How I would have loved to know him and work by his side. How I would love to be able to devote myself more to experiments with electrical energy. Who knows, with time and if circumstances allow, maybe I too will do a little something… At least to get to know him better and make him better known!
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