Lighting up the world -- again

Lighting up the world -- again

KEVIN CHONG

Globe and Mail Update

Nikola Tesla harnessed the alternating current, invented radio technology and patented 700 inventions, including the wireless remote control and spark plugs. But by 1943, the inventor died alone of a heart attack in a New York hotel room -- a fringe figure, an also-ran in the scientific community. He was impoverished, obsessed with the number three and saw the Nobel Prize awarded to another man for an invention he had created years earlier.
"Nikola Tesla's ideas," The New York Times wrote in his obituary, "bordered increasingly on what some considered the fantastic as he advanced in age." Still, as Tesla once insisted: "The present is theirs, the future is mine."
That future, it seems, is now. This year -- the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth -- Belgrade International Airport will be renamed the Nikola Tesla Airport. On the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, a statue will be unveiled to honour the man whose work enabled the construction of the world's first hydroelectric power plant. And starting this month, scientists from around the world are recognizing Tesla at conferences in Serbia, Croatia, Australia, Canada and the United States.
Tesla is also the mad scientist of choice among hipsters. He's appeared in novels, plays, an opera and a Japanese manga comic and is the subject of numerous songs -- including a few by a popular 1980s band named after him. In Jim Jarmush's 2004 film Coffee and Cigarettes musician Jack White demonstrates the Tesla coil. Later this year, David Bowie will play the Serbian-American in The Prestige, a film directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins).
On the stroke of midnight July 9, 1856, Tesla was born to Serbian parents in Smiljan, Lika, in what is now Croatia. His father was a Serbian-Orthodox priest; his mother was the inventor of a number of household appliances including the mechanical eggbeater.
Tesla's own ability to visualize inventions in precise detail started in early childhood. When he saw a steel engraving of Niagara Falls, for instance, he imagined a wheel being turned by the water -- thirty years before a hydroelectric plant became reality.
After studying mechanics, physics and engineering in Austria and Czechoslovakia, Tesla worked as an electrical engineer in Hungary and France. He then emigrated to New York in 1884, where he joined Thomas Edison's laboratory.
Within a year the two had split over the alternating current. Edison tried to show the dangers of AC by using it to electrocute dogs and horses in public exhibitions. Tesla later responded with a demonstration at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. As Paul Auster writes in his novel Moon Palace, Tesla -- who was 6 foot 6 and cut an impressive figure in a black Prince Albert coat and derby hat -- performed "magic tricks with electricity, spinning little metal eggs around the table, shooting sparks out of his fingertips."
Tesla won the "war of the currents," of course. The industrialist George Westinghouse eventually purchased the patent for AC power. And as W. Bernard Carlson, a history professor at the University of Virginia who's writing a biography of Tesla, says, "He was as popular, if not more, than Edison."
Other battles proved more challenging. Though Tesla invented the radio in 1895, Guglielmo Marconi -- who used one of Tesla's oscillators to send signals across the English Channel -- snagged the patent in 1904 and later won the Nobel Prize. Despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that awarded the patent posthumously to Tesla in 1943, Marconi continues to be considered the father of the airwaves.
Radio proved problematic in other ways, too. In 1899, while experimenting with high-voltage, high-frequency electrical currents on a high plateau in Colorado, Tesla believed he received radio signals from aliens. This made him a laughingstock among his peers (though it did inspire cults who believed Tesla himself was an alien).
Tesla's reputation might not have deteriorated over his lifetime if his financial savvy was anywhere close to his scientific genius. Marconi, a wealthy Italian nobleman, had strong financial backing for his quest to win the radio patent. Tesla was so inept in his finances that he tore up his royalty agreements with Westinghouse -- foregoing millions -- when the industrialist went through a temporary financial crisis brought on by the costly P.R. battle with Edison.
Money troubles also prevented Tesla from continuing research on one of his great obsessions: the wireless transmission of electricity. Tesla's dream was to provide energy freely to everyone, but because financiers did not see much profit in this utopian scheme, the deed to his laboratory had to be sold to settle debts.
Tesla's revival first picked up steam around the 1980s, when his outlandish claims begun to make sense to scientists. Take those alien signals. Dr. Jasmina Vujic, a nuclear engineering professor at UC Berkeley says, "We now know that many stars -- pulsars -- do emit radio emissions."
Science historians also noted that Tesla's work on a "death ray" -- a final project that he claimed could destroy 10,000 airplanes from 260 miles away and that he hoped would end all war -- was similar to Ronald Reagan's Space Defence Initiative or "Star Wars" project. (Conspiracy theorists point out that, after Tesla's death, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI confiscated his research and other belongings.)
Tesla's work on robotics and wireless communications networks have proved prescient as well. And his designs for a bladeless turbine and a pump without any moving parts (modelled after a diode) still intrigue contemporary engineers. "I would say that most of Tesla's concepts have been built upon and extended," says Todd Wilkie, an electrical engineer who's worked with Intel.
According to Mr. Carlson, Tesla is especially relevant in 2006 because "technology is dehumanizing; it debases us. Tesla allows people to celebrate technological progress in a very intuitive, spiritual way."
Moreover, Tesla is a unifying figure in the Balkans. Serbia and Croatia both regard him as a "native son." He appears on the Serbian 100-dinar banknote. He's also been commemorated with his own stamp in the United States, and societies of Tesla admirers burnish his memory in over 20 countries -- including Greece, Brazil and Korea. The scientific community has even honoured him by naming a unit of magnetic-flux density, which is used to calibrate MRI machines, "the tesla."
Then there's the alternating current. Dr. Alan Bristow, a researcher in physics at the University of Toronto says, "AC motors are the workhorse of modern-day society, without which we would not have most of our household appliances or any forms of modern industry."
As for Tesla's presence in pop culture? "He was an inventor and an artist," says playwright Kevin Kerr, who co-wrote Brilliant, a play about Tesla. "He loved beautiful things. The objects he designed were highly practical and usually revolutionary inventions, but they also always had to be aesthetically pleasing."
The story of a visionary who died with his genius unrecognized is of obvious interest to artists too. Tesla appears as a doomed romantic figure in the Handsome Family song Tesla's Hotel Room. The inventor's final days are elegiacally called "the last days of wonder, when spirits still flew/round bubbling test tubes in half-darkened rooms."
In the end, it's not Tesla's now-recognized achievements that capture the public imagination, but his failures -- so idealistically and extravagantly conceived -- and his bold unfulfilled promise.
Kevin Chong is a Vancouver novelist and freelance writer.
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