If it were a simple popularity contest, Thomas Edison would win a second. Ever since the first school classes, we find out that Edison was the greatest American inventor and many inventions are assigned to him, some rightfully others are not. The Incandescent bulb, phonograph or film, to recall just a few of these inventions.
On the other hand, Nikola Tesla’s name is less well known, even if it belongs to some inventions and ideas without which our life would have shown altogether if we think about X-rays, remote control, the radio or electric motor among many, many others.
Although it can be said that Tesla revolutionized science at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the last century, there are also many voices who claim that in reality, he was just a mad scientist.
Nikola Tesla has made numerous enemies, including among his colleagues. Among the most ardent challengers, there were even three equally well-known scholars, Thomas Edison, John von Neumann and Guglielmo Marconi.
"My supreme ambition and my burning desire were to see America, to get in touch with the great Thomas Edison. So we started on this journey. After I lost my money and tickets, after a series of unpleasant adventures, including a revolt, in which I was about to lose my life, I arrived at these wonderful realms with only four cents in my pocket." - Nikola Tesla
Wireless electricity – a concept that is no longer utopian
If the discovery of the alternating current is an invention that has greatly influenced today’s life, another electric invention, which Tesla was convinced it to work, remained for a long time in the project phase: wireless electricity.
Measuring the waves of a storm and the electric discharge cycle, Tesla assumed that Earth and the atmosphere possessed electricity and transformed the planet into an unlimited conductor that allows transmission of wireless telegraph messages and even transmission of electricity at any distance without resonance loss.
In his laboratory in Colorado Springs, he experimented with an enormous coil, with which he could create electric arches up to 7 meters and fireballs – a rare atmospheric phenomenon that the researchers could not reproduce in the lab.
