Nikola Tesla Quotes
It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.
Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Experimenter Publishing Company, 1919, p. 61.
What is ironic about this fact is that 1000 years ago, the Muslim Middle East was scientifically and mathematically far in advance of Europe. However, after about 1100 AD, the Muslim religion began to lose its intellectual tolerance and cultural appreciation for science and innovation to the point where innovation of any kind was regarded as heresy, and the logic and empiricism that was present in early Islam disappeared, and there has been little scientific innovation and progress in traditional Arab Islamic nations ever since.
Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances. Tesler was the first scientist to conceive of an try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
