Still With Us Today

       For the duration of nearly his entire life, Nikola Tesla was the embodiment of innovation and creation and anything involving electricity. He was consistently pushing the envelope with his ideas and inventions to make the world a better place.  This great mind paved the way for the introduction of electricity and wireless technology into the lives of the general public, and thus creating a countless number of jobs along the way.  Although his work may not be commonly taught in schools and it would seem many of his accomplishments do not receive their deserved credit, this inventor was a giant in the field of electrical engineering and his work can still be seen in the every-day world.

       Though this man has been gone for over 50 years, he and his work are having a resurgence of popularity in recent years. His inventions are slowly becoming a form of artwork for many people who find the beauty of science much greater than that of what one might call a normal work of art. The band The White Stripes has stated before that one of their greatest inspirations for their music (Yabroff). Many individuals in the modern day are beginning to give credit to the invention of the radio to Tesla, when for many years pop-culture has told people that it was another that did so. He is now an inspiration for many different types of people all around the world such as scientists, engineers, artists and musicians alike.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Tesla2.jpg

Yabroff, Jennie. The Cult Of The Volt; Inventor Nikola Tesla didn’t get much glory when he was alive, but to hipsters now, he’s a real turn-on. Newsweek. New York: Mar 24, 2008. Vol. 151, Iss. 12.

The Young Inventor

     It was at a young age that Nikola Tesla was exposed to very inventive minds. When he was but a small child, his mother was constantly creating new tools to help with her everyday tasks around the household (Jonnes 90). One can clearly see how this aspect would help develop the mind of a young child, with him watching his mother create new objects that no one has ever seen before. In his early twenties, he lived in the vibrant city of Paris, France while he was in the employment of one of the great minds involving electricity at the time, Thomas Edison (Jonnes 88).

     This renowned inventor has achieved many accomplishments in his career, yet he never obtained much wealth or even got credit for some of his most profound inventions. Throughout his life he worked with electrical and radio frequencies, but one of his major accomplishments was his invention that we all use still in the modern era, the radio. Tesla did not receive credit for this great device though, shown in a 1895 issue of the San Francisco newspaper that stated an Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, demonstrated the first radio voice broadcast. But the fact of the matter is, Tesla had demonstrated this technology in Philadelphia, a whole two years earlier (Ikenson 254-255).


Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York, New York: Random House, 2003.

Ikenson, Ben. Patents: Ingenious Inventions- How They Work and How They Came to Be. New York, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc. 2004.