WIRELESS WORLD: THEN AND NOW

TESLA’S INNOVATIONS BEAR FRUIT GLOBALLY OVER 100 YEARS LATER

This is what advanced “high tech” looked like in 1890. It was a telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, which supported 5,000 lines (right). At about the same time, a 35-year old Serbian immigrant to the United States, Nikola Tesla, born in Smiljan, today’s Croatia (left), then part of the Austrian empire, started to work on wireless telegraphy and telephony.

Tesla gave his first public lecture and demonstration of Alternating Current Theory in May 1891. Two years later, he demonstrated for the first time how wireless energy worked at a meeting of the Notional Electric Light Association in St. Louis.

In 1901, Tesla proposed using large-scale coils to transmit electricity through the troposphere to power homes. He started building in Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island in 1901, the very first telecommunications tower that would also test his idea for wireless power transmission (above right).

But his contemporaries weren’t interested in innovations that would bridge world and provide pollution-free energy. They were protected their investments in legacy technologies. Much like oil and gas giants today are trying to suppress the solar and other alternative sources of energy.

But Tesla’s work started to rise in prominence after his death in 1943, with the advent of computer technologies. And today, his vision of a world interconnected with wireless technology has come to pass.

This is what the world looks like now, in 2015…

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TESLA

“In many ways the story of Tesla is the story of idealistic men and women who care only about the welfare of humanity,” writes Lawrence Wilson in a Jan 2010 article.  “They are often ridiculed, persecuted, and their work discredited.  Tesla lived to see the world transformed by alternating current, radio, television and radar.  However, he died broken-hearted that humanity missed the opportunity to bring free, non-polluting energy to everyone on the planet.”

For more on Tesla, also see.. https://entjournal.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/nikola-tesla-and-his-discovery-of-wireless-technology/

TESLA FAMILY ORIGIN

Nikola Tesla was born on 28 June 1856 (St Vitus Day – Vidovdan) into a Serb family in the village of Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia). Tesla’s father, Milutin Tesla, was an Orthodox priest. Tesla’s mother, Đuka Tesla (née Mandić), whose father was also an Orthodox priest, had a talent for making home craft tools, mechanical appliances, and the ability to memorize Serbian epic poems.

Đuka had never received a formal education. Nikola credited his eidetic memory and creative abilities to his mother’s genetics and influence. Tesla’s progenitors were from western Serbia, near Montenegro.

Nikola Tesla was also a polyglot, speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.

During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions. Often, the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; at other times they would provide the solution to a particular problem he had encountered. Just by hearing the name of an item, he would be able to envision it in realistic detail. Tesla would visualize an invention in his mind with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before moving to the construction stage, a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. He typically did not make drawings by hand but worked from memory. Beginning in his childhood, Tesla had frequent flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life.