When we ask the average 20-year-old what they associate with Tesla, their answer will be about the icon of the modern automotive industry, the American electric car available for – a trifling – quarter million Polish zlotys [~$57,000, ed.]. Tesla Motors, which in 2010 proclaimed one of the greatest inventors of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as their namesake, paying only $75,000 for the rights to the name, got a great deal. In the era dominated by electronics, electric cars and renewable energy, the name of the precursor of these technologies is universally applicable.

Would the world really be different today without Nikola Tesla? Undoubtedly! The genius hailing from the area of today’s Croatia was a goldmine of ideas, often two epochs ahead of the state of knowledge of the contemporary world. At the end of his life, during World War II, FBI agents were said to follow his every step and collected napkins that carelessly fell out of his pocket. Because it was on these napkins that he wrote down his concepts of future technologies, including a defensive electromagnetic shield, a laser capable of remotely disabling aircraft, or communication along the lines of today’s Wi-Fi.

His unquestionable achievement was the electrification of American cities at the end of the 19th century. He made a huge contribution to the creation of the right technology, and above all, the idea to use alternating current (AC), without which this process wouldn’t have succeeded and on which today’s technology is based. It was Tesla who also developed the turbines of the largest hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls, patented the first alternator and prototyped wireless communication.

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  No one remains indifferent to his vision, although the world of technology enthusiasts is divided into two camps. The first are the followers of Nikola Tesla as the greatest genius in the history of mankind. According to them, he was a visionary who, like Prometheus, wanted to provide people with free electricity and groundbreaking inventions, and was wronged by American business. He could have been a billionaire, but he left no fortune. The other camp considers him an able designer who, yes, obtained several significant patents, but essentially drew on the achievements of 19th-century science. And as a paranoid weirdo, he couldn’t find his bearings in the predatory economic reality of America, at his own choosing. Both opinions about this visionary may be true, but in recent years so many myths have been created about him that it is worth dispelling at least a few of them.

Serb, Croat or Yugoslav American?

This surname greatly divides the Balkan peoples. It is a bone of contention between the Croats and the Serbs, but the Slovenes and Montenegrins also threw in their three paras (these are the old Yugoslav pennies, the dinar was divided into 100 paras). These two relatively small nations also compete for Tesla’s heritage – the first claiming that all outstanding people from this part of Europe come from Slovenia, and the second, that the Tesla family comes from Nikšić, Montenegro.

When Yugoslavia was falling apart, during the war in 1995, a special unit of the Croatian army was tasked with razing to the ground the house where Nikola was born in 1856 and lived as a child. This brutal act of historical policy was supposed to erase... Serbian traces from Croatian soil. After a few years, however, the Croats repaired their vandalism and arranged a modern museum there, additionally announcing July 10 as Tesla Day. In response, the Serbs named the Belgrade airport after the inventor. So the Slavs fight, and the Americans benefit, because Tesla was a citizen of the United States starting in 1891 and all of his patents later undergirded its economic development and power.

However, returning to the ethnicity of the inventor, despite various claims, it is indisputable in lieu of the fact that religion is the determinant of nationality in the Balkans. Tesla was the son of a Serbian priest, his first alphabet was Cyrillic, and during his lifetime he visited his compatriots in Belgrade many times, so he must undoubtedly be considered an Serbian-American.

Truth in the ether. Who invented the radio?

This is a question that can be a stumbling block for not only game show contenstants, but even worse, their organizers preparing questions or physics teachers asking students questions. The first answer that comes to us aligns with the official version from the encyclopedia: Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian-Irish aristocrat (great-grandson of John Jameson, of “those” Jamesons of whiskey fame). Meanwhile, despite Marconi’s Nobel Prize in 1909, international recognition, and the attention he received from Italian fascists, the story was all different.

After Tesla’s death in 1943, the US Supreme Court unequivocally validated claims he had made against Marconi ever since 1914. It concerned two patents filed in 1897 (645,576 and 649,621) on the transmission of radio waves over a distance. It turned out that Marconi not only used Tesla devices during his attempts to transmit the signal, but also did it later than his American rival. The Italian was strongly supported by the multi-millionaires Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, who counted on the invention of the radio increasing the stock market valuations of their companies. They also co-organized the first broadcast of a radio signal across the Atlantic in 1901.

In turn, taking into account the timeline of the first radio experiments in history, the Russian, Alexander Popov, the tsarist radio technician from Kronstadt, should be considered the precursor of the invention. It’s just that this man, who was to have been the first to establish long-distance communication, himself admitted that Tesla had already done it in 1893.

Could X-rays be called “Tesla waves”?

X-rays revolutionized medicine, but the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen, who in December 1895 x-rayed his wife’s hand in his home laboratory, had little interest in such applications. He was simply the first to discover that the vacuum cathode ray tube, the so-called Crookes tube, emits radiation that is stopped by bone tissue or metal. He did everything to get it recorded in a low-circulation Bavarian scientific periodical as soon as possible, and thanks to this he went down in history as the discoverer of radiation.

Soon, however, he received a mysterious letter from New York, which contained a strange photo. Nikola Tesla sent a letter of congratulations to the German and an X-ray of... his leg. He was probably working on a similar invention at the same time, but a fire in his laboratory in March 1895 destroyed the equipment and documentation. Besides, also at that time, a similar application of the Crookes tube was discovered by the Ukrainian physicist from Podolia, Ivan Puluj.

As early as 1896, Tesla published a series of articles on X-rays and their biological dangers. And in 1897, he gave a lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences, where he confirmed to some extent his primacy in the study of X-rays in North America. He publicly announced that he had been conducting independent research on the subject since 1894.

Resurrected inventions and conflict with Edison

Today’s memory of Nikola Tesla and promoting him as “the man who invented the 21st century” results not only from the innovator’s achievements during his work in the US. They are also rooted in the self-invention of the American Serb. His appearances in a white tailcoat at the 1893 Chicago Exposition marked the beginning of this. Then there was the annual press lecture series, the cover of Time on his 75th birthday, and the whole Tesla mythology. To this day, the lanky visionary from the Balkans has his imitators, the biggest of whom is the owner of the Tesla brand – Elon Musk.

In times of so-called infotainment (information combined with entertainment, sometimes at the expense of providing facts), Tesla has become an icon, the symbol of a technological celebrity, someone who was supposed to save the world, but was not understood by big business. Attributing countless inventions to the electrical engineer born in the 19th century has become a mania. He was supposed not only to have used, but to have invented alternating current, although it was done by Hippolyte Pixii in 1832. He was supposed to have developed a three-phase generator of such electricity, although it was done by a Pole, Michał Doliwo-Dobrowolski. Tesla is also credited with the invention of the induction coil, although it was developed 20 years before his birth, in 1836, by Nicholas Callan.

It is also a misunderstanding to juxtapose two names: Tesla and Edison, as rivals involved in a conflict called the war for electricity. In fact, Tesla left Thomas A. Edison’s company when he was cheated by him by not being paid a promised bonus. However, their subsequent rivalry is largely a business legend, straight out of middle-management textbooks. The brutal fight, supported by fake news spread by Edison’s team about the alleged dangers of using alternating current (AC; the Edison-supporters promoted direct current – DC) was aimed not at Tesla, but at his employer, George Westinghouse.

Super Weapons and the Tunguska Catastrophe

The aforementioned ambiguities regarding Tesla’s inventions can be verified by referring to the history of science at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which is quite well documented in press articles and patents. However, there are also conspiracy theories and bold hypotheses of his followers today in what can even be called “The Church of Tesla”. Their mythology goes so far as to turn the innovator from the Balkans into a god.

Of course, Tesla was a visionary and in his notes he predicted the development of technology in the 21st century. Before people comprehended the invention of the radio, he was already talking about devices like our smartphones and smartwatches today, or about transmitting electricity wirelessly:

Admirers of Tesla’s genius stubbornly repeat the myth associated with the events of 1908, when Siberia was rocked by an explosion larger than the subsequent atomic bombs dropped on Japan. In Ice by Jacek Dukaj, the Tunguska catastrophe was supposed to be an event that would change the fate of the world. According to Tesla’s followers, it was supposed to have the New York inventor’s experiment, a test of a powerful electric charge fired through the ionosphere. However, this is where science fiction begins, because in the first decade of the twentieth century, of course, there was no potential to carry out such an experiment.

This doesn’t change the fact that so-called Teleforce, Tesla’s own real idea, was described in the press in the 1930s. Electromagnetic weapons were to be the ultimate answer to the threat of global war, as they were to destroy the attacking enemy forces by means of an electromagnetic pulse. A defensive “missile shield” was something the inventor was supposed to have been talking about before anyone even launched the first rocket (the Germans in fact did it in 1942). The US Department of Defense had no interest in the concept, but just hours after Tesla's death in 1943, all of his belongings and records from his hotel suite were secured by federal agents. The public never saw them. That’s why Tesla’s story never ends.

– Cezary Korycki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

–Translated by Nicholas Siekierski