5 Nikola Tesla Innovations Way Ahead of Their Time
By
Born on July 10, 1856, Nikola Tesla was quite possibly one of the greatest inventors in modern history. Originally from Serbia, Tesla emigrated to the United States in 1884, where he became an employee of Thomas Edison. The two would become rivals over differences of opinion about money and electrical currents. Nevertheless, Tesla became one of the most prolific inventors of the 19th and 20th centuries, applying for 278 patents, in addition to coming up with a bunch of theoretical innovations. Sadly, Tesla passed away during World War II, virtually penniless. Here’s a glimpse at some of the stuff that Tesla came up with that the world just didn’t appreciate.
UPDATE: I’ve received a number of comments about Tesla’s ethnicity, so let me clarify. I said he was from Serbia, but he was actually born in Croatia. Tesla was, in fact, an ethnic Serb, though.
- Radio: Nikola Tesla first demonstrated radio in 1894. The world quickly took notice as a means to gossip with others from a distance. However, Tesla had other ideas in mind. In the late 19th century, Tesla demonstrated a radio-controlled boat to the U.S. military, expecting them to jump at the chance to control their equipment remotely. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and the world didn’t start taking radio-control vehicles seriously until the 1960s. Just imagine how different the World Wars might have been if the vehicles were controlled by radio…
- Wireless Energy Transfer: Tesla promoted the idea of being able to power machinery without the hassle of wires. I’m no electrical engineer, so I have no idea how it worked, but he was able to wirelessly power light bulbs as early as 1891. By 1899, Tesla was able to power 200 light bulbs using one electric motor 26 miles away! Here we are over 100 years later, and the closest we’ve come is an overpriced mat that requires special adapters to charge our electronic toys
Tesla with one of his inventions, a wirelessly powered light bulb
.
- Free Energy: Tesla also worked on the idea of using renewable energy in order to create electricity. He believed that energy could be harnessed from anywhere in the universe, such as the sun, and even the Earth itself. One of his more ambitious ideas was to utilize the environment in order to wirelessly power planes and boats. His ideas laid the groundwork for the current field of ocean thermal energy conversion, which includes technologies such as desalinization. With cheap and easy access to fossil fuels, though, Tesla’s contemporaries just didn’t see the need to research this innovation further.
- VTOL Aircraft: Long before the F-35 or the Harrier Jump Jet, Tesla came up with the idea for a plane that could take off and land vertically. You’d think his idea would be awkward, with rotors and such, making it look like the bastard child of a jet and helicopter. However, his idea is the basis of current versions of VTOL aircraft. What’s even more amazing is that Tesla patented his VTOL aeroplane in 1928, yet it didn’t enter into serious development until the 1960s.
- Death Ray: In 1934, Nikola Tesla claimed to have built a directed-energy weapon that he called a teleforce. Tesla’s teleforce was a charged particle beam projector which was intended for military use. Nobody invested in his idea at the time, so he never got to actually build it. To this day, though, the U.S. government is doing experiments related to Tesla’s “death ray.”
Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man, considered by some to be a mad scientist. However, upon his death in 1943, the U.S. War Department confiscated his materials, classifying them Top Secret. They then spent the following two years making copies of everything Tesla had on file, proving the value of his ideas. Tesla was truly one of the greatest inventors in history, and I’m not just saying that because I’m submitting this via wi-fi.
You may also like:
- A History of Big Ideas – BusinessWeek Who doesn't like big ideas? Check out the following article...
- 5 Random Things About 5 Forgotten Black Inventors Some things are just common knowledge. For example, everyone...
- What if Jimmy Carter Won the 1980 Election? Jimmy Carter did more to protect the environment during...
- Truth or Consequences…New Mexico The name conjures up images of Wild West showdowns, but...
I like the way you are describing Tesla’s work in non-technical approach .In particular Wireless Energy Transfer. As long as you are spreading the word about this (well hidden by western world) genius, you will have my 2 thumbs up.
Thank you! I figure there are plenty of other sites out there that describe the science. I just want people to know that Edison wasn’t the only 19th century genius.
Personally, I see Tesla as more of a genius than Edison. He dealt a lot with abstract concepts like Alternating Current, while Edison stuck to basic trial and error to figure things out. Edison certainly contributed a lot to science, but I think the public likes to exaggerate things a bit too much. It really bothers me that so many people are taught that Edison “invented the lightbulb,” while his company’s discovery was simply the first to find the right material for the filament. Sure, Edison and his employees were the first to make it *work*, but there had already been others working on the incandescent lamp before his time.
I enjoyed the post; anything about Tesla is worth a read.
Tesla was a Serb, true, but he was originally from Croatia.
Luckily that didn’t stop him from becoming a genius.
Why would that stop him? He was a citizen of the world….
redwall:
Look up Tesla’s work in the area of light bulbs. He came up with something very similar to the compact fluorescent bulbs we are switching to today because they are so much more efficient than incandescent bulbs. Once again Tesla’s ideas were better than Edison’s and 100 years later we are finally figuring it out.
My 6 year old daughter read a book about Edison and I took the opportunity to teach her about one of the most underrated scientists/inventors in history and break that “Edison is the greatest inventor in history” myth.
Good insights and useful information which i have sent to friends on Stunbleupon as it is important to see how outstanding people achieved as I found at http://myamazingpeople.com/
He certainly invented wireless energy transfer, but the reason it it hasn’t been implemented is because it’s dangerous. To transfer as much energy as is needed to power anything useful, the waves must be close to the wavelength of microwaves. We all know what microwaves are good at.
I don’t know about that. Tesla figured out a safe way to study X-rays and he lived to the age of 86…
…in highly controlled circumstances. Wireless energy transfer becomes a problem when it invades our living spaces.
wireless electricity is not dangerous it has just become possible again by another inventor using magnetics. watch it here
Well, tesla managed to make it to 86. While having his whole lab powered wirelessly. He didnt just invent it, he used it. Look up wardenclyffe (or something like that)
Wardenclyffe was a tragedy because it was never fully operational. Tesla owed a bunch of money to the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria and ownership was transferred to him and it was destroyed. It’s really sad because not only was it going to demonstrate wireless energy, but long distance wireless communication. We could have had wi-fi 50 years ago (complete speculation).
yeah, that’s not true, the old incandescent bulbs pulled a decent amount of wattage. if you look further into it, the technology was ready for implementation and could’ve been used to transfer electricity from niagra falls to nyc safely. it was put down by fear mongering. oh yeah and think about that reply, I don’t think dealing with extremely high voltage and frequencies wirelessly over 100 years ago could ever be considered highly controlled circumstances.
I don’t know Daniel I think you should check your facts, microwaves are non-ionizing, aka not powerful enough to damage DNA. Wireless energy is not a radiative energy though, it is powered by magnetic energy transfer. This magnetic transfer, demonstrated by MIT engineers, is no more powerful than the magnetic field of Earth that we live in every day.
The whole idea of “Mad Scientist” was based on him.
Are you sure? Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, almost 40 years before Tesla was born… Maybe the modern idea of the Cackling Mad Scientist standing in front of electrical machinery, but the “mad scientist” was around bore Tesla was born.
before* he was born. Pardon me for my lack of proof-reading.
You can go back even further than that. Archimedes was considered a mad scientist and he was born 2,000 years before Tesla.
I agree most depictions of Tesla emphasize how his labs would be run on wireless electricity, the idea that it hurts you because the are is electrified is just a misconception. You can grab a hot wire with loads of power on it and not be affected if your not grounding yourself out so being an electrician and working with it like I have I can tell you wireless energy transfer is safe. Plus it is really just perpetuated by the power companies because Tesla wanted power to be free for all further proving his compassion and genius Edison was a greedy dick end of discussion and he was wrong!!! AC power dominates the market. Tesla is truly one of the greatest minds of all time. I think some of the freak accidents in the Philadelphia experiment were from Tesla’s projects because people were fused in the hull of the ship like legs on the inside top half of body on the outside look it up they can do some nasty things and I think Tesla pointed the direction you would be blow away if you only knew. Also check out the Hutchinson effect very crazy stuff but it really happened and the government/military says they can’t reproduce the effect not even at NASA I think that is bull though. Keep up the great articles man GREAT READ MAN THANKS~!
OH and all the mad scientist crap was because A he was way way ahead of anyone in his field of expertise so most of his findings were simply unbelievable but his well documented experiments prove he was no liar. B Edison ran a smear campaign against him because he ripped him of stole his ideas and then tried to discredit him for this reason like I said he was a dick head but gets all kinds of praise cause he was an attention whore. The man changed the world and Edison only wished he could have been on Tesla’s level.
Very well said. I am so tired of hearing people praise Edison, and in the very next sentence, “Who is Tesla?” errrr
Just wanted to say, that Tesla actually isn’t born in Serbia, but was born in former Austria-Hungary, in a town called Smiljan, which now lies in Croatia!
Tesla also was touting using the upper layers of the earth’s atmosphere to transmit and receive energy. I would imagine this is where haarp comes from .
Too bad the world’s psychopath(et)ic leaders desire so much to control and kill each other, these discoveries could have propelled mankind into a much greater future.
Nikola Tesla was from Kosova!
Really? Because everywhere I’ve looked says Croatia.
haha its not from Kosova,Kosovo was in Serbia part of it(region) until 2009…and everywhere i’ve looked says Serbia.
His father was from Croatia, and mother from Serbia, he was born in Croatia, but Balkan is devided on the basis of religion and his father was Easter orthodoxy priest, so his origin was from Serbia. I’m from Croatia and we all love to tell that he’s one of us. But he’s American from Balkans.
missDreamy, I think you said it best. Thank you for clarifying.
Interestingly Italians claim radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi, Scots say it was James Clerk Maxwell and Germans it was due to Heinrich Rudolph’s work .This what makes us men great, we learn from each other highs and lows.
Croats, Serbs and Russians among many others are people of “Slavic Family” who are closely related not only culturally linguistically but genetically.
In 1943, the Supreme Court affirmed a 1935 ruling of the United States Court of Claims, essentially invalidating Marconi’s claim of having invented radio, and clarifying Tesla’s role in its invention. Roughly six months after his death.
Interesting aside: Tesla “lives on” as a fictional character in the latter books of Spider Robinson’s “Callahan’s” series.
To comment on the advancement of Tesla’s vision of wireless energy transfer, some innovative engineers at MIT have actually harnessed Tesla’s original design to build Witricity, a wireless source of electricity for home appliances. So far they’ve powered a tv, phones and other appliances all wirelessly. It appears the designers are still in the prototype stages of their creations but it’s amazing nonetheless!
Check it out here
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html
Wow, that video is incredible. Thanks for sharing!
Tesla was awesome. Read a biograpy about him, went into detail about how he and Edison were competitors. Edison was threatened by Tesla and used scare tactics to “discredit” him.
I am really sick and tired of people touting wireless energy transfer. Is it clever? Yes. Is it practical? Absolutely not! ANY time, ANY TIME, you convey energy from Point A to Point B wirelessly you are doing so at an ASTONISHING inefficiency compared to using a damn wire! Those special “charging mats” you can buy these days are a TREMENDOUS waste of energy, which is unbelievable to me when people are running around screaming about how a “wall wart” is sooooo inefficient and constantly wasting power. WIRELESS ENERGY TRANSMISSION IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF “GREEN”!! PLEASE people, STOP getting excited by it. It is a stunt, a trick, a slight of hand, that should almost NEVER be used in practical application. Take the time to plug your g0dd4mn cell phone in using the charger that came with it, ya lazy bums!!
Which doesn’t detract from Tesla’s brilliance in any way, so don’t anybody bother jumping down my throat. This isn’t about Tesla, this is about practicality. Tesla is da bomb.
STFU.
I concur with Bill. STFU!
Do you provide ANY source to back up your complaint? No.
SO SHUT THE FU¢K UP!
don is stupid. but don *knows* that he is stupid. and that ~almost~ makes don smart.
The internet is finally bringing Tesla’s genius and inventions to light. His fame, unfortunately, is long overdue. This is exactly why the internet must be kept free. If Edison could do that to Tesla, who else could be discrediting, discounting, smearing perhaps a genius today? Without the internet we wouldn’t have the opportunity to search out the truth for ourselves. Thanks for this great post.
“If Edison could do that to Tesla, who else could be discrediting, discounting, smearing perhaps a genius today?”
Please see:
http://waterpoweredcar.com/stanmeyer.html
It almost seems like big business doesn’t want cheap energy!!!!!
Tesla was originaly from todays Croatia, not Serbien, born in a village of Smiljani near the city of Gospic to a Serb father and a Croatian mother. Croatia was then a part of the Austrian (and then Austro-Hungarian) Empire.
Tesla’s notes about his work were confiscated by the government of the United States under the authority of the Office of Alien Property despite the fact that Tesla had been a naturalized citizen for over 50 years… his possessions were not returned to his family until 1952 – over eight years after Tesla’s death. Go figure.
My father John Logie Baird invented TV, fiber optics, and radar for ships and aircraft, for starters.
I have a list of inventions including many life saving ones, in fact one that will empty a skyscraper very quickly therefore saving thousands of lives. Nobody has even asked how I do it.
One fire hose I invented would save many lives of firemen. So I tried to get the fireman’s union in the USA interested in it and I was told it would have to very cheap as firemen were cheap to replace
This is now not past so I guess I will have to wait before any intrest?
Gordon Mays Baird
Unfortunately, you’ve run into the same issue that hinders most inventors: current alternatives are cheaper. Until you’re inventions are cost-effective they won’t be implemented.
May I ask what your skyscraper plan is?
@ wireless energy transfer: We can transfer energy through inductance or through microwaves today, sure. However it isn’t something practical because it is extremely lossy and it is hard to market because no one seems to like cancer.
Ever walk under a microwave tower or high tension power lines and your eyes or testicles start to hurt? Yeah… high power emissions will do that, its bad, and it can cause horrible pain and permanent damage. Those parts of your body are not able to dissipate heat quickly enough when exposed to high power RF.
When I am doing work with transmitter and a PA I always make sure there is some shielding between the radiating antenna and myself.
*I was specifically talking about far-field in my last post. Some of Tesla’s experiments were long range (here’s a fun thought: http://amasci.com/graphics/tesbeam3.gif) and did work, but those are the ones that would be lossy and dangerous. For near-field where wires are not practical, like in road charing, etc, that works – it isn’t as efficient as a wire (but its getting better), but it will work none the less when wires aren’t an option. Its just inductive coupling, the same concept as those flashlight charging stations.
Oh, and for the trolls who were demanding sources up there:
The kind that works, near-field: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5834/83
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/15/fulton_blender/
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/20248/page2/
What’s not safe and how to keep your balls from burning up:
http://www.arrl.org/news/rfsafety/hbkrf.pdf
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiofrequencyradiation/sears.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10795393
http://www.fcc.gov/oet/info/documents/reports/Welcome.html
http://www.arrl.org/news/rfsafety/eval/
So far-field power transmission through RF can cause some issues.
Edison was a thug!
[...] Click Here and/or Click Here March 19th, 2010 | Tags: High voltage, History, Invention, Nikola Tesla, People, Physics, Technology, Thomas Edison | Category: March 2010 [...]
Good to see Tesla getting recognition. I am currently a college student, and when I mention Tesla maybe 10% of students know who he is in my experience, which seems odd, but I must admit I didn’t know who he was until about two years ago. When I did discover Tesla, it blew my mind that someone like this was existent at one point in time. According to a biography I read Tesla was set to be one of the richest men in the world by means of royalties from the Westinghouse company which used his ac system. However, because Westinghouse would have gone broke if they had to pay Tesla the contracted amount, George Westinghouse came to Tesla and asked him to void the contract, which Tesla did and unfortunately money was a struggle for the rest of his life. Who knows what Tesla may have accomplished if he had unlimited capital. In my opinion, Edison is remembered because he was a better marketer and business man, but Tesla, by far, was a more creative genius.
p.s. Another interesting figure in history that seems to get lost in the mix is Edgar Casey
I found a small tesla coil in the storage builing of my Highschool. Never had soo much fun shooting sparks from my fingers and shocking the hell out of other students. Brings back good memories.
Truly the most underrated and responsible genius ever! There were certain things he wouldn’t do because of the potential harm it could cause to life in general. Check out this coil on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY-AS1
Heard a rumor in Hollywood that Tesla will be the protagonist in a long form web series where he is shot through time in a high voltage accident in his Houston Street,Greenwhich Village lab and lands in 2000. The guy told me the story follow a journal he kept for the next 12 months until he leaves on 9/10/01. What could he do here? Lots…can’t wait to see it!!
To sum it up – J.P. Morgan asked a simple question concerning the free wireless electricity source, “Where do you put the meter?” If there is no money to be made in a particular delivery method, they are not going to finance the construction. The government would lose out on all the tax collected and franchise fee’s, etc. Too bad cuz Tesla would have solved many world problems. Yet it is the same government forcing us to go green. (cap & trade) Also, Edison was an opportunist, not an outrageously over the top intellect like Tesla.