Innovative Minds: Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla has been called one of the most important contributors to the commercial electrical revolution. Engineer, inventor and innovative mind, Tesla’s patents and ideas were responsible for ushering in the second industrial revolution.

Throughout the course of his life, Tesla patented  over 300 hundred inventions and developed countless theories that have shaped the future in the decades since his death in 1943. He patented the first radio, proposed radio-controlled torpedoes to the military and fought with Edison over the efficiency of alternating current versus Edison’s direct current system.

One interesting theory Tesla proposed was a flight vehicle that operated with wings, an airplane engine, on-board fuel or a propeller. The shape of this theoretical vehicle resembled a cigar and operated similarly to an ionocraft. Conspiracy theorists might argue that many of the UFO sightings that have occurred during the last sixty-years were developed using Tesla’s design.

Tesla also proposed a theoretical death ray, which he coined the “teleforce weapon.” He attempted to market this idea to the U.S. Military, but at the time they found it to be improbable and too costly to design. Today the military is actually working on death ray weaponry, testing prototypes for the invisible laser blaster.

A walking conspiracy, or so it would seem, some of the juiciest information about Tesla surrounds his troubled relationship with fellow-inventor, Thomas Edison and the numerous trunks of research the government confiscated from Tesla’s surviving family after his death. Declared “top secret” by the U.S. War Department and the FBI, trunk upon trunk of Tesla’s lifetime of research and theorizing was taken into custody and locked in storage to “protect” the general public.

After years of battling the system, Tesla’s nephew regained control of his uncle’s research, and much of it is now on display in the Tesla Museum.

This is literally only the tip of a very large iceberg, and the more I read about Tesla, the deeper I find myself drawn into his mind. I think about the number of things he contributed to the world, things that obviously power the technology that literally governs our every day lives in the here and now. I find myself wanting to write about his life, twisting him into some exciting science fiction story, because it’s obvious he shaped the future of a world unready to embrace his ideas.

I see him in these fiction stories working with secret government organizations developing super weapons and alien spacecraft, maybe traveling to the moon decades before the actual moon landing… and emissary to the Venusian race that we all know doesn’t exist, but could if we suspend our disbelief.

And that’s the truly exciting thing about innovative minds like Tesla’s. He thought beyond the realm of possibility, actualizing ways to bring his inventions and dreams to life.

Don’t tell my fiance, but I think I secretly love that man.