Ten things you didn't know about the genius Nikola Tesla

Today I'm going to share 10 things you didn't know about our Nikola Tesla, our genius

Nikola Tesla is known for numerous inventions without which the modern world would not be as it is. Ask yourself - do you know everything about him? For a start, he was born on this day in 1856 ...

Nikola Tesla is an icon of the scientific world that comes from our region, and until recently he had the most fans in the former Yugoslavia. We bring you ten facts about one of the greatest inventors ever, born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan.

1. A man of thunder

Thanks to the popularization of environmentally conscious technologies and the advent of a new era of electricity, this visionary has once again reached the place it deserved. After all, what about a man who was born during a storm and invented alternating current? No, we're not kidding. Nikola Tesla was born around midnight between July 9 and 10, 1856. According to a story told by his family, the midwife reached into the air and said in panic, 'This child will be a child of darkness, to which Tesla's mother replied:' No, he will be a child of light'.

2. The Nikola Tesla Museum in the USA is funded by comics

Tesla's tower, ie Wardenclyffe, was restored thanks to the intervention of the biggest fans of his life and work. In May this year, the building was purchased by the Tesla Science Center for about $ 1.3 million. The funds were donated by the popular public funding site IndieGoGo. The organizer and main initiator of the campaign is Matthew Inman, an illustrator known for the online comic Oatmeal.

3. Tesla was a keen ecologist

According to contemporaries, Nikola Tesla was 'very concerned about the fact that people are consuming the resources of our planet too quickly, which prompted him to deal with renewable energy sources'. Tesla therefore decided to study ways of extracting natural energy from the earth and air. In his laboratory, he created artificial lightning and recorded the potential difference between the Earth and objects high in the air.

4. Tesla conceived the technology of smartphones back in 1901.

Tesla had really great ideas, but he rarely managed to put them into practice. In the race to develop transatlantic radio, writes author and professor W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla’s business partner J.P. He introduced Morgan to new ways of instant communication - sending stock exchanges and short telegrams. He would receive each message via a tube to the lab, where he would then encode them and associate them with the selected frequency. He would transmit that frequency to a device that fits in his hand. In other words, Tesla indirectly designed the smartphone and wireless internet. Impressive, isn't it?

5. Tesla managed to scare Mark Twain

There is a well-known legend that Tesla had a functional earthquake machine in a laboratory in Manhattan that could shake his building and reportedly nearly demolished an entire neighborhood during one experiment. Tesla's device was allegedly not an earthquake machine, but a frequency oscillator. The piston located below the platform in the lab created a huge noise and vibration during the experimentation.

The neighborhood reportedly failed to crash, but what he managed to do was ‘scare Mark Twain’. Namely, Twain was widely known for his digestive problems. One day Tesla, who met Twain at a gentlemen's club, decided to invite the author to his lab. He told Twain to step on the platform and turn the switch. After a minute and a half, Twain jumped off the platform and quickly ran to a nearby toilet.

6. Tesla would go crazy every time he saw - pearls

The pearls seemed to be Tesla's kryptonite. Every time he saw them, they would create so much disgust in him that he could not talk to the woman who would wear them. Whenever his secretary came to work with pearls around his neck, he would send her home. No one knows why he had such an aversion to that jewelry, but we do know that he had a very specific taste for style and aesthetics.

Tesla, claims professor and author of the book 'Tesla: The Inventor of the Electric Age' by W. Bernard Carlson, had a very strange taste. So much so, moreover, that he wore white gloves every dinner and considered himself a ‘very finely dressed man’. Each of his photos was, as expected, taken to capture his ‘good side’.

7. Tesla panicked and was afraid of microbes, and he used photographic memory

Tesla was known for his photographic memory. He knew how to memorize pictures in books and use them as a basis for his inventions. He was also reportedly able to visualize in three dimensions thus suppressing the nightmares that haunted him from a young age. Because of this, he became practically a mythological figure in popular culture. He also, Carlson claims, nurtured a great fear of bacteria. The reason for this was cholera, from which he almost suffered as a child.

8. He made a tower that draws electricity from the air

His invention is a 56-foot-tall tower on Long Island, and his plan was to draw electricity from the air and send it to a recipient through the ground. Unfortunately for all of us, the project has not been completed. In 1917, the tower was demolished, the culprits were investors who wanted to steal as many of Tesla's inventions as possible after the accident.

9. Some of Tesla's inventions became state secrets

After he died in 1943, the Aliens Property Office took all his belongings. Most of them ended up in the hands of Tesla's family, many of whom were transferred to the Tesla Museum in Belgrade. Some documents, however, are still hidden and buried in the archives of the American government.

10. Tesla literally planned to illuminate the entire planet

The eccentric scientist was convinced that he could illuminate the Earth's atmosphere, dispelling the darkness and creating a new era of eternal light. Tesla developed the theory that the upper atmosphere contains gases that can conduct high-frequency electricity that, if everything went as it should, would create a 'night light for the entire planet'.

I hope you learned a little more about Nikola Tesla, I'm sure you didn't know these 10 facts and I learned them from a professor at the faculty and I studied a lot about our genius Nikola Tesla.