The English version of Wikipedia is already more cautious. According to her, he only contributed to its discovery. That’s more accurate.
How was it with the asynchronous motor
Walter Baily invented the asynchronous motor and Galileo Ferraris came up with it at the same time as Tesla. Nikola Tesla improved it, but he filed the patent for the entire system, not Baily or Ferraris. Tesla sold his system in 1888 for a large sum to Westinghouse. In the same year, British engineer CEL Brown and Russian engineer Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky were able to demonstrate something similar to Tesla. They achieved the same electrical output when they transferred electricity from Laufen, Switzerland to Frankfurt, Germany, a distance of 108 miles. Although Dolivo-Dobrovolsky tried to appropriate this invention, his colleague Brown openly admitted that they used Tesla’s patents.
Six years later, Westinghouse installed the system at Niagara Falls. Tesla shared his patent for the technology and installation used here with three other engineers. When it comes to wireless transmission of electrical impulses, Tesla was not the first. Mahlon Loomis had done it twenty years before him.
Nikola Tesla as God, Genius or Devil?
There is no doubt that Tesla was intelligent and playful, but both the esoteric and scientific scenes made Tesla an idol, an inaccessible deity on a pedestal, an esoteric guru, a saint of plotters and conspirators. No, Tesla was not a lone genius. He built on the work of others, that’s why he learned foreign languages. He went to Prague to learn Czech, why did he need Czech? The devil knows, but maybe he wanted to get to the work of some Czech inventors who were not so well known. Because if someone here comes up with something really innovative, usually not even a dog will bark at him on purpose. While it is only after his death that the vultures begin to flock, or someone takes his work, packs it in a briefcase and starts showing off other people’s feathers.
The Czech way to inventions and strange behavior towards inventors
The problem in the Czech Republic is the enormous obscenity that the local environment is characterized by, because it gives endless space to shameless people, and they try to pretend that this is the absolute standard and in order, and that you have an obligation to defend yourself against that obscenity head-on and do nothing else. And if you don’t, you’re a fool. But if you’re working on something worthwhile, you’ll have a hard time resisting the insolence of your fellow citizens from morning to night. That makes sense. Therefore, if you resist obscenity, it is difficult to invent something, and conversely, if you create something, it is difficult to resist obscenity. You can’t do both. It’s like if someone sent you into a swarm of wasps and told you to invent an invention or paint a beautiful picture, and if you instead fought off the wasps, they would accuse you of not inventing or painting anything, and if you did invent or painted, the wasps would sting you in the meantime. So please, it’s a nice environment in the Czech Republic. You can’t work here. The wasps and hornets have somehow multiplied here. I’m telling all the outrageous wasps that bug spray is on the way. They don’t even bother after him.
Such an example of a person who was the embodiment of innovation, but did not have time to defend it, is Josef Sousedík, the inventor of the electric motor, which already powered the innovative Slovak bullet train in the 1930s. And who knows, perhaps because of the Nazis, who eventually killed him, his patent for an electric car ended up somewhere in the USA, which the Tesla company boasts about today.
Tesla had a similar experience with inventor Guglielmo Marconi. He even received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of radio. Obviously, Tesla preceded him and so this Nobel Prize was an understatement. Tesla decided to go to court to invalidate Marconi’s American patents. However, American entrepreneurs needed a patent for their production. Eventually, Tesla ran out of money and went bankrupt. The right to a protracted trial was awarded to him only after his death. Wouldn’t God’s mills?
What certainly cannot be denied to Nikola is the fact that he was a great showman. His electric show with phosphorescent hands and fluorescent tubes, but simply Tesla knew how to attract the attention of the crowd. His experiments in the lonely places of America over a town full of surprised country rednecks, who thought he was a wizard and feared every day that aliens would land on their fields because of him, became proverbial displays of his circus talent.
In turn, the attention of the media attracted the attention of the crowd. Titles like New Science Review, Outlookand of course the diary New York Times they published celebratory articles about him as one of the greatest electricians of all time. Tesla began to earn money from his work, then alternately found himself in situations where his work was completely destroyed, his laboratory burned down just in one rare moment when he went to lie down and took a little nap, but thanks to the investments of those who believed in him, he could keep playing and trying your bizarre projects.
In 1937, Tesla gave an interview to a newspaper New York Times, in which he convinced a reporter to publish that Tesla had created an apparatus that was capable of sending concentrated beams that accumulated such a huge wave of energy that they were capable of shooting down ten thousand enemy aircraft simultaneously at a distance of 250 miles. Tesla was never able to cash in on these proposals and even his efforts to obtain compensation from his plagiarists bankrupted him. In some cases, on the contrary, he had to pay himself. His own patent attorney took him to court for not paying him $900 for work he did for him. Apparently he didn’t do it properly. He was seventy years old at the time, and it reeked of public shame for him. Westinghouse threw him the ropes, quietly hiring him as a consultant and giving him a monthly pension of $125. Tesla used these funds to rent an apartment in the New Yorker Hotel, where he lived until his death. His relative, the Yugoslav ambassador to the US, still had to pay for him the amount owed for the storage of his belongings in Manhattan.
Nikola Tesla was a big fan, but when it came to taking care of his own health, he clearly overshot, because he only ate boiled vegetables. To make matters worse, he was hit by a taxi in 1937 and refused treatment. In 1942, he was de facto confined to bed and his mental abilities declined considerably. He even wrote letters to his colleagues whom he knew were long dead.
Tesla died at the age of 87 in his hotel room of cardiac arrest. No, there’s really no need to believe that the FBI agents who burst into the room soon after secured some secret military or other plans. Tesla was ahead of his time in his personal marketing more than in his scientific experiments.
What is certain is that he wanted to get to the future at all costs. Together with Elon Musk, he succeeded in this in the company Tesla, which somewhat copies Tesla’s mental mode of being. Much ado about nothing. An electric car based on knowledge that has long been known, while customers, thanks to marketing hype, buy a car with a castle that structurally, let’s say decently, resembles cars from the eighties. Tesla would be satisfied, and if he lives reincarnated in Elon Musk, then he is finally paid for his work.
Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each of us according to our work and results. The present is ours and the future I work for is mine.
Was Nikola Tesla a genius?
At worst, he was a really capable compactor who was able to put together the knowledge of others and create new combinations from them. A genius is one who creates completely independently and new things ex nihilo, out of nothing, the quality of which is completely new and does not simply build on the previous results of others. Even if, for example, a genius cook cooks from ingredients that others prepare for him, they would never have put together such a delicious meal without him.
Was Tesla a compactor or a genius? Who knows. If you’re not a genius, you can at least try to give the impression. And that’s what Tesla apparently wanted to achieve. He was certainly not a genius of self-promotion, we know his tricks from others, and we have no reliable evidence about whether he was a scientific genius, only speculation and fantastic stories.
So Tesla’s possible genius still remains a mystery.
The Truth About Tesla. The Myth of the Lone Genius in the History of Innovation. Race Point Publishing (2015)
Josef Sousedík: Genius of Wallachia (2023).
