A Few Words on Nicola Tesla

Nicola Tesla was an enigmatic figure who, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, played an important role in the development of the technology that made it possible for humankind to make use of electricity.

And he didn’t get the credit he deserved.

But we’re not doing his name any favors with idiotic stuff like this.

He invented electricity?  First of all, electricity is a property of the universe that existed from its inception.  Thus it’s no more proper to say that someone invented it than to say that someone invented the North Pole.

More to the point, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, a Greek named Thales discovered that amber, when rubbed with silk, attracted feathers and other light objects.  He named this phenomenon after the word for amber: ëelectron.

More than 2000 years later, European scientists Galvani, Volta, Ampere, Ohm, and many others worked out certain of the key principles of the subject.  Note that many of the units in which we measure electricity are named for them.

In my estimation, it was England’s Michael Faraday who deserves top credit in this department for having nailed all this together in the 1830s with his discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism.  But, if you’re a purist, you can argue in favor of James Clerk Maxwell, who expressed all this in the elegance of the mathematics that Faraday couldn’t.

In any case, Tesla was a great mind (though he had little or nothing to do with X-rays and radar).  Let’s not dishonor him with our stupidity.