Today, July 10, in the village of Smiljan in Austria-Hungary, today’s Croatia, Nikola Tesla was born – the man who, according to some, more or less “invents the twentieth century” and is the “patron saint” of modern electricity.
There is no other person in the history of science like Nikola Tesla, who has so captured the imagination of his contemporaries that to this day he is almost a mythological hero.
He is undoubtedly one of the pioneers in the history of electromagnetic technology. As an inventor, he was very prolific, with about 300 patents in at least 26 countries. He was just as remarkable as a person – eccentric, with an exceptional memory and bizarre habits.
These qualities make him a favorite of admirers of conspiracy theories and alternative scientific hypotheses. Many people are convinced that Nikola Tesla invented almost everything, and in the age of the Internet, more and more sites with fake stories fan Tesla’s mania and accumulate numerous myths.
He discovered alternating current, wireless power transmission, for the first time developed the principles of remote control, the basis of high-frequency current therapy, designed the transformer and the first electric clock and much more – there are more than three hundred patents for inventions in different countries. He invented radio before Marconi and Popov, received three-phase electricity before Dolivo-Dobrovolski. All modern electricity would be impossible without his discoveries.
No one disputes that Nikola Tesla was a great engineer. Nikola Tesla is a genius of electrical engineering, but most of all he is a genius of PR. Let it be clear that Tesla, although an influential inventor, was not a scientist. The basic laws of the physics of electricity were discovered not by him, but by Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Om and others. It’s just that Tesla manages to put these laws into practice.
