I have read nearly every written work by or about Nikola Tesla. It’s not easy, he’s pretty fucking smart and oft-times comes off as super heady.
People fail to see the true pattern in his work. Yes, he is a true champion of electrical engineering. But the pattern wasn’t inventing, nor electricity. It was humanity.
He invented the radio (w Marconi) and immediately started listening to and broadcasting into space. Curious. Smart enough to create radio, mad enough to listen to a supposed void?
He invented AC power & the Gyro, the beginning of feasible electric power for us to live with. He harnessed Niagara Falls. Next, he immediately started working on FREE energy. Curious, genius enough to harness electricity and light our cities, mad enough to not make a fortune on it?
He invented the beginnings of RADAR, SONAR, and LASER and with LASER he was particularly interested in something he lovingly called the DEATH RAY.
Misunderstood by all, TESLA was considered a MAD scientist who had finally fallen off the deep end. It was proposed he would be the DEATH RAY of us all, had he been allowed to continue. Curious. Smart enough to create point-to-point DEATH globally, MAD enough to use it?
The democratization of ANYTHING is the beginning of it’s death. It’s power and influence wanes and it goes away. Once everyone can have or do something it can’t be used for control or envy.
DEATH RAY was the democratization of war, and we failed to see a beautiful humanitarian in Tesla. Rather we sided with a brutal inventor who had electrocuted animals to death in the streets, to protest Tesla's threats on his patents.
Thanks, Edison. I'm sure YOUR death ray would have made a fortune, had you ever been smart enough to invent one. I’m glad you were not.