“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”
1927Nikola Tesla was born at midnight between two days in 1856, in a village in Lika, during a summer storm. He carried the lightning with him ever after.
His alternating current turned distant falling water into city light. In Colorado Springs he sat calmly in a room of artificial thunder, listening. At Wardenclyffe he raised a tower to give the whole world its signals, decades before the world knew to want them.
He died in a New York hotel room with pigeons at the window and a hundred notebooks of unfinished morning. Much of the modern day still runs on his patience.
A tribute, kept by Here After All.
The work they left
The alternating current system that lights the world is his: the induction motor and the polyphase system, patented in 1888 and proven at Niagara Falls, where his generators turned the falls into the first great power station. The Tesla coil followed, then radio-frequency work, remote control demonstrated on a small boat in 1898, and the vast unfinished dream of wireless power at Wardenclyffe.
His autobiography, My Inventions, is a short, strange, generous book: the inventor explaining how the pictures came to him whole.
The estate keeps ten tributes · Fyodor Dostoevsky · Franz Kafka · Alan Turing · Marie Curie · Arthur Schopenhauer · Emily Dickinson · Charles Darwin · Sigmund Freud · Vincent van Gogh