Tesla's cat

The man you see in the image looking at the world with the fascination of a dreamer, is Nikola Tesla, a brilliant scientist who dedicated his life to solving the mysteries of electricity and devising ways to make this phenomenon easier for people's daily lives. And his dream began while petting his cat... Tesla's cat.

“Science must have as its ultimate goal to improve the life of humanity”

This reflection summarizes the vision of Tesla, a man with an enigmatic figure and a controversial and uncommitted visionary who was many years ahead of his time.

It is often said that Tesla's amazement with electricity began when he was 3 years old, one autumn night when, in front of the crackling firewood of the fireplace, he stroked his cat's back Mácka. Perhaps our story today began that distant afternoon in the middle of the 19th century. He himself would tell it in his autobiography:”As I caressed my pet, a bright curtain of sparkle suddenly came off, like a shower of lights that surprised me”. His father, a learned man, had read B. Franklin's studies on static electricity almost a century earlier, so he was able to explain the phenomenon to him: “it's like lightning during a storm”, and at that moment, at only three years old, the little genius answered him: —“Dad, then, if nature were a giant cat, God must live on its back.” Tesla's cat.

This is how Tesla grew up, stimulated in the incomparable setting of rural Serbia, an environment surrounded by wildlife and natural phenomena. One event would change his life. At the age of 16, he was convalescing for 9 months due to cholera, devouring dozens of books on engineering during those long weeks.

He completed his studies at the Polytechnic University of Graz (Austria), later traveling to Paris and, finally, in 1884, he would make the leap to Mecca of science of its time, the imposing New York of the late 19th century.

Oddly enough, Tesla arrived in New York almost at the same time as the Stature of Freedom, an allegory that leaves no one indifferent: his dream was to create a fairer world where people had access to electrical energy, an asset that at that time was an unattainable luxury, would mark his life as a researcher. It would be in the city that He never sleeps where, for better or worse, he would start working under Thomas Alba Edison, a man who changed his life. Tesla came to his company's offices with a letter of recommendation from his last boss in Europe, in which he read:

—”Mr. Edison, in my life as an engineer I have met only two geniuses; you are one of them. The other is the young man in front of him”— Edison hired him right away, and Tesla would change everything forever. In a world where the direct current championed by Edison was an amazing milestone, Tesla was convinced that “its alternating current” would be more comfortable, efficient and cheaper. Edison would defend direct current to the extreme and Tesla enlightened the world to the alternative one, which today, half a century later, we continue to use in our homes and allows the operation of all our appliances and electronic devices. It was what at that time was known as the war of the currents.

But Tesla wouldn't stop there. In addition to the alternator, his creative ingenuity would know no bounds and his hands and brain would illuminate the transistor, the bulb for the light bulbs, the X-rays, the wireless waves, the electric motor or the neon lamps (we recommend this other Post on light and solar energy)

That productive exuberance could not be assumed by Edison, who not only fired him, but also launched an aggressive advertising campaign of harassment and discrediting against Tesla in which, publicly, cats and dogs were electrocuted to show people the dangers of alternating current. This would make Tesla, shy and withdrawn, withdraw from public life, without making a sound, as every time he gave humanity a prodigious new invention. Without the spotlights he always shied away from in favor of others. This is how the last romantic in science went, dying of a heart attack in 1943, in almost absolute destitution.

About to say goodbye to the year 2021, we cannot ignore the 165th anniversary of the birth of this genius, considered part of the call Holy Trinity of Physics: Newton-Einstein and Tesla himself. The world of the 21st century recognizes the Bosnian Serb genius as the greatest inventor of all time, one of those strangely privileged minds, out of whose imagination most of the technologies we use today (although some others have been listed as their “inventors”), and some of the technologies that inexplicably, and only in a reticent way, the world is beginning to recognize as the solution to many of its problems.

Reading Tesla, describing in his own words how he had everything ready for a wireless system that would connect the world, similar to the Internet in an almost creepy way; or how he had designed a system for “drones that could capture images anywhere in the world”, today's drones; or an electrical system that could provide electricity wirelessly and free of charge to everyone... is a transformative experience.

But even more so is knowing the man behind those inventions, his particular history, his childhood, his struggles, the many times he trusted others and was disappointed... Tesla offered us almost a century ago, in 1919, the opportunity to take an intimate look at his life. The world of Physics gave its name to the unit of the magnetic field in the international system of weights and measures: the Tesla. Today we leave you this post about the genius who ate at the same table as Newton and Einstein, the last romantic in science, in the year that marks the 165th anniversary of his birth.

Five recommended readings to learn more about Tesla:

• Nikola Tesla. My life, my research. Nikola Tesla (1919)
  
• Tesla wireless . Nikola Tesla (1920)
• Me and energy. Marcelino De Dueños Fontan (2007)
• My inventions and other writings. Nikola Tesla (1925)
• Nikola Tesla. Autobiography. Nikola Tesla (1920)