The neighbor was a giant, the likes of which we have not had in history. He had a piece of both Edison and Tesla in him, the expert says

How does Josef Sousedík compare to such other greats as Thomas Alva Edison or Nikola Tesla regarding his famous intuition?

That is an excellent mention. In the contemporary press, Josef Sousedík was referred to as “Czech Edison” or “Moravian Edison” or “Edison from Moravia”, because that’s where the connections are – poor circumstances, lots of inventions. Specifically, he had 222 world and European inventions.

His enormous intuition connects him with Edison, but I would also add a bit of Tesla with his clear, open mind after my research and journalistic activities. The neighbor drew information from the space around us and from space, and with the help of his genius technical intuition, he was able to transform the information into concrete products, products of an electrotechnical nature.

He considered it his duty to put his intuition at the service of humanity in order to save human labor. He focused on rotating machines, engines that were the power units.

His genius technical intuition also represented the procedure that he first saw the projects with his imagination, he could feel them, he was able to imagine them in a functional state, only then he calculated them and drew them up. In his time, he only had a slide rule and a logarithmic ruler at his disposal, there was no computing technology.

His intuition was the main means by which he could convey electrical products to mankind. In this he felt his mission. He had a big bit of Edison and a bit of Tesla in him. I think that we have never had such a great man with such an open mind and such a brilliant intuition in history.

Let’s try, Mr. Engineer, to choose one of the 222 Neighbor inventions that fascinates you the most.

It is the ultimate one, in which he put all his experience and intuition to good use, and that is precisely the hybrid drive of the Slovak Strela railway car. This was a matter of genius in its time, which is again on the table today.

What he operated already in 1927 and in the 1930s in his hybrid electric car, and which he later capitalized on in the Slovak Strela, was technically perfectly executed. It is not just about the invention of the principle, but about the technical processing to make it usable.

At one time, when traveling between Bratislava and Prague, the Slovak bullet covered the route in 4 hours and 11 minutes, which is not dissimilar to today’s time…

Yes, during test drives it was even under four hours. The time of around 4 hours was surpassed only by either the powerful high-speed trains of today, or by the Pendolin.

The intention of operating Slovenská strela was to connect Prague, Brno and Bratislava; business, government delegations, military circles, merchants rode with her… It was not intended for the mass public. That was in the two prototypes, they had yet to catch the flies. Serial production was planned later, which did not happen, because the Slovak bullet was released in 1936 and in the following years completely different concerns arose.

One wonders why so few people know such a brilliant inventor and entrepreneur? Not much in textbooks. Not signed under technical drawings…

It is not in textbooks or technical drawings at all. The communist regime could turn this purely proletarian, poor boy, who worked his way up by his own efforts and who was killed by the Gestapo, into its hero, and attach its ideology to him. They didn’t do that, they did everything in their power to erase him from the nation’s memory.

Therefore, it has not appeared in textbooks since the mid-1950s. The documentation that was left after him was erased from the stamps, his name was erased and replaced by simply “MEZ Vsetín”.

What would entrepreneur and inventor Josef Sousedík do today? Would you start a start-up?

With your clairvoyant mind and your drive? Yes, either a start-up or another form of progressive business. But I don’t know if the competition would eat him up. He really thought of his business as a service to humanity. That’s not a stretch.

In 1919 he founded a workshop with two co-workers, within ten years he had a factory with 350 employees. English industrialists offered him 16 million if he would sell his factory to them. He said, “Gentlemen, it does not exist. I will always work for Czechoslovakia, for the people, for my homeland.”

I don’t know if he would succeed today with this approach. But it would be necessary for all our entrepreneurs, and not only entrepreneurs, to have this social approach, an intuition that must serve us, and not for us to just profit from it.

What led a successful entrepreneur, inventor to join the resistance? Why did he decide to run for mayor of Vsetín and how did he perform as mayor afterwards? He wanted to file further patents after the war, but he was murdered. What happened to them? Listen to the full interview.