Accomplishments Quotes
He didn’t have a lot of money and a number of other scientists and companies used his patents without any payment knowing that he did not have the resources to finance law suits for infringement. 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 which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and 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 work 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.
When Tocqueville studied the United States, it was inferior to the England and the other European aristocracies in science, the arts, literature, philosophy, theology and most other intellectual fields of culture and human endeavor. He did not have the opportunity to observe the interactive, long term effects of freedom, democracy, and public education. The US would become the dominant cultural nation of the world, with the English language in far greater usage than at the height of the British Empire. American Science, literature, art developed with more and more people participating in and being educated for those areas and were free to create without the restraints of government or even cultural norms. American creativity was demonstrated by more new religions being created that than in any other nation on earth.
