Fun Facts You Probably Didn't Know About Nikola Tesla

Oct. 3, 2014
Tesla was an eccentric genius who helped a staggering array of important electrical and electronic technologies, like fluorescent lighting and utility-scale AC power. If you haven't clicked through this gallery yet, it's well worth it.

We recently discovered an idea Tesla had for wireless communications in this post at www.pbs.org. In a PBS interview  W. Bernard Carlson, author of “Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age,” said, "Tesla may have had a brilliant mind, but he was not as good at reducing his ideas to practice. In the race to develop transatlantic radio, Tesla described to his funder and business partner, J.P. Morgan, a new means of instant communication that involved gathering stock quotes and telegram messages, funneling them to his laboratory, where he would encode them and assign them each a new frequency. That frequency would be broadcast to a device that would fit in your hand, he explained. In other words, Tesla had envisioned the smart phone and wireless internet."

Photo credits: Getty Images, Tesla Universe (A great online resource for anything to do with Tesla), Wikimedia Commons and www.teslasciencecenter.org.

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