Maybe the Most Important Futurist to Ever Live

Nikola Tesla  (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, and futurist.

 Best known for developing the modern alternating current (AC) electrical supply system, Tesla was a man ahead of his time. In Fact, many of his ideas are just becoming reality.

 

Tesla's inventions and developments (over 800) include the AC motor, the bifilar coil, various devices that use rotating magnetic fields, the alternating current polyphase power distribution system, the fundamental devices of systems of wireless communication (legal priority for the invention of radio), radio frequency oscillators, devices for voltage magnification by standing waves, robotics, logic gates for secure radio frequency communications, devices for x-rays, apparatus for ozone generation, devices for ionized gases, devices for high field emission, devices for charged particle beams, methods for providing extremely low level of resistance to the passage of electrical current, means for increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations, voltage multiplication circuitry, devices for high voltage discharges, devices for lightning protection, the bladeless turbine, and VTOL

Tesla's predictions of the future include

-talking to planets in an interview in 1901

- smartphones in another interview in 1909

-portable televisions in 1926

-he also predicted things like Wireless communication 

(WI-FI, bluetooth ect)

"NEW YORK, Jan 25 - (AP) - Application of radio principles will enable people by carrying a small instrument in their pockets to see distant events like the sorceress of the magic crystal fairy tales and legends, Nikola Tesla, electrical inventor, predicted today. Mr. Tesla, who on several occasion has tried to communicate with the planet Mars, made his predictions in an interview published in the current issue of Collier's Weekly.
"We shall be able to witness the inauguration of a president, the playing of a world's series baseball game, the havoc of an earthquake, or a battle just as though we were present," Mr. Tesla said."

"Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics.

This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel.

The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a view-screen. 

Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer."

-from http://www.crystalinks.com/tesla.html 

In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance". He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel".

In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences.

Tesla died penniless at age 86 on January 7, 1943. In his lifetime, he received over 800 different patents. Scientists continue to scour through his notes.
The "Tesla bladeless disk turbine engine" that he designed, when made with modern materials, is proving to be among the most efficient motors ever made. Experiments he performed with cryogenic liquids and electricity provide the foundation for modern superconductors. He also talked about experiments that suggested particles with fractional charges of an electron. In 1977 they were "discovered" as quarks!

Crystalinks  continue to describe events after his death...

Tesla died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number U.S. Patent 645,576 in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio.

Soon after his death Tesla's safe was opened by his nephew Sava Kosanovic. Shortly thereafter Tesla's papers and other property were impounded by the United States' Alien Property Custodian office in Tesla's compound at the Manhattan Warehouse, even though he was a naturalized citizen.

Dr. John G. Trump was the main government official who went over Tesla's secret papers after his death in 1943. At the time, Trump was a well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research & Development, Technical Aids, Div. 14, NTRC (predecessor agency to the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence).

Trump was also a professor at M.I.T., and had his feelings hurt by Tesla's 1938 review and critique of M.I.T.'s huge Van de Graaff generator with its two thirty-foot towers and two 15-foot-diameter (4.6 m) balls, mounted on railroad tracks - which Tesla showed could be out-performed in both voltage and current by one of his tiny coils about two feet tall.

Trump was asked to participate in the examination of Tesla's papers at the Manhattan Warehouse & Storage Co. Trump reported afterwards that no examination had been made of the vast amount of Tesla's property, that had been in the basement of the New Yorker Hotel, ten years prior to Tesla's death, or of any of his papers, except those in his immediate possession at the time of his death. Trump concluded in his report, that there was nothing that would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands.

At the time of his death, Tesla had been working on the Teleforce weapon, or 'death ray,' that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that Teleforce was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma, and was conceived as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe.

After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The personal effects were sequestered on the advice of presidential advisers; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents.

One document stated that "he is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments". Altogether, in Tesla's effects, there were the contents of his safe, two truckloads of papers and apparati from his hotel, another 75 packing crates and trunks in a storage facility, and another 80 large storage trunks in another storage facility. The Navy and several "federal officials" spent two days microfilming some of the stuff at the Office of Alien Properties storage facility in 1943, and that was it, until Oct., 1945.

Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death because of the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually Mr. Kosanovic won possession of the materials, which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum.

Nikola Tesla has been referred to as "the man who invented the 20th century." His use of alternating electrical currents and invention of the AC engine brought revolutionary changes in electrical power generation and transmission that remain the global standard today. Tesla recited entire books from memory, and designed his machines in his head, rather than on paper. He was also frequently ridiculed for proposing "impossible" inventions … which he then went and invented anyway.

“Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine."

-Nikola Tesla