Hussain M Elius

I remember when I first discovered Command and Conquer back in the early 2000s. Even today that DOS game is hands down one of the best games that I ever played. It was there that I first encountered the word Tesla, with the Russian side in the game featuring Tesla tanks that shoots lightning bolts and Tesla coils that vaporized any enemy troops in range. I brushed it off as a “game thing”… until I came across Tesla again years later.

Tesla was brilliant. And not just Professor X-like brilliant, but “holy crap my head just exploded” brilliant. This Serbian dude from Croatia spoke eight languages, almost single handedly developed technology that harnessed the power of electricity for household use and invented things like electrical generators, FM Radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights and a giant machine that shot million volts lighting bolts over hundreds of feet. At least video games got something factually correct. He had a photographic memory and an insane ability to visualize even the most complex pieces of machinery before building it the guy did calculus and advanced physics in his head, and some of his prototypes can’t still, a hundred years later, be replicated because he did not leave blue prints behind. For instance in 2007 a group of lesser geniuses from MIT threw a party because they could wirelessly transmit electricity at a distance of seven feet, when in comparison Tesla lit up 200 light bulbs from a power source 26 miles away he built at 1899 in the middle of a god-forsaken desert!

Like many other giga-geniuses and diabolical masterminds, Tesla was also completely insane. He suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes and was adamant about staying in a room number divisible by three. He was physically revolted by jewellery, but loved pigeons and the pet cat he had as a child – The Magnificent Macak. He pathologically feared contact with dirt and germs, and even though there were many women vying for his attention, some madly in love, Tesla remained unmarried and celibate. Basically he was the ultimate mad scientist.

During his 86 years of life, he held over 600 patents while many of his inventions were not even held under patent protection. After he moved to the US, he worked with Thomas Edison who promised him $50,000 (which is approximately $1.2 million today) if he could improve Edison’s inefficient motors and generators. In 1885 when Tesla inquired about payment for his work, Edison replied, “Tesla, you don’t understand American humour.” They had been adversaries since, and neither received the Nobel Prize because they refused to share the honour. Later, Tesla came out victorious in The War of the Currents where he advocated the use of AC as opposed to DC (promoted by Edison), which ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Tesla once generated resonance in several buildings (except his own) surrounding his lab, causing complaints to police. Just as the police arrived, he was forced to apply a sledgehammer to terminate the experiment. It is rumoured that he later claimed he could cause an earthquake, and with enough power, split the Earth in two. No one dared question him. If this was mythology, Tesla could and would have single handedly taken down Thor and Zeus… blindfolded.

Oh, and he also claimed to have invented death rays, which, and I quote, “send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.” Fortunately (?), he died with all the schematics in his head before his ideas ever became reality, but the FBI confiscated away all his personal belongings… just to be safe.

Nikola Tesla walked the thin line between “sheer genius” and “utter madness”. His groundbreaking discoveries in the field of physics, robotics, steam turbine engineering, magnetism, and melting his assistants hand by overloading it with X-Ray, which although is not scientific, but still pretty cool, shaped the world. And honestly, if there was any man who could claim that he could destroy the entire world and get away with it, it was Tesla. That alone should qualify him as a righteous badass.

Published in Rising Star, The Daily Star, 13 May 2010