The misunderstood Serbian genius

When you read these lines, I will be attending the RAD 2014, a congress about radiation and dosimetry that takes place in the city of Niš, in Serbia. Given that I am here right now, I thought that it might be interesting to write about two people related with this country, but they will not be the ones that started the First World War, but other people that did or could have had a great impact in society. Next Friday's person is intimately related to this city (he was born here, in fact), while today I will speak about one of those geniuses that were not understood or praised as they should have been until much later than that. I am talking about Nikola Tesla.

Nikola Tesla when he was 34 years old

Although of Serbian origin, actually Nikola Tesla was born on July 10^th 1856 in Smiljan, then part of the Austrian Empire and nowadays part of Croatia. Gifted with eidetic memory and great capacity for mathematical calculus, he studied in the Austrian Polytechnic (nowadays Graz University of Technology or TU Graz) thanks to a scholarship, but he never graduated because he did not sit in an exam he was not prepared for. He would later work in several cities, such as Maribor or Budapest, before being hired by Thomas Alva Edison to work in New York, where he redesigned Edison's direct current electric motors. Allegedly, Edison had promised to pay him $50,000, but in the end he only gave him $18 dollars. Tesla then started to work on his own, inventing, among other things, the induction motor, that would be later bought by George Westinghouse (Edison's main adversary) to, among other things, illuminate the Chicago Universal Exposition of 1893. Tesla also experimented with X-rays before Wilhelm Röntgen officially announced his discovery of the new radiation, as well as working in ideas such as radio (he actually designed a ship that could be controlled through radio waves), wireless transmission of electricity, radar or VTOL planes (VTOL stands for Vertical Take-Off and Landing), tnad there are rumours that he could have even developed an Unified Field Theory that could explain all fundamental forces in terms of just one field. Sadly, Tesla died, alone and poor, on January 7^th 1943.

There are many situations in which Tesla could have greatly changed history thanks to his inventions. For example, what would have happened if his wireless electricity transmission system had actually worked? Unfortunately, consequences, at least at the beginning, would have not been good at all: the possibility of an economic collapse because of the great changes this would cause would be great, but later things might improve, as this new system would allow for the transmission of electricity to places that are hard to reach in real life with wires. A sure thing would be that Chile would be a much poorer nation, as it is one of the main producers and exporters of the copper used in high voltage wiring.

It might also be possible that, after working for some time in the United States, he could have gone back to Europe and live there (not much of a chance that this might happen, particularly after 1891, when Tesla became a citizen of the United States). Depending on where he established his new home, it is possible that he may have been involved in the First World War, whether it is on the Entente's or the Central Powers' side, maybe developing new ideas for weaponry or the defence of trenches. These events may have changed the end of the war, making it last more or less, or even giving victory to the Central Powers.

It may be even possible that his efforts to develop alternate current ended up in failure, which might have given Edison the chance to market energy production using direct current motors, a fact that would have meant every city would have needed many power plants (probably even installing one for each block), as the power loss produced when transmitting direct current is much greater than the one caused with the use of alternate current (this is the reason why direct current is mainly used in small devices powered by batteries or using an AC-DC current conversor that is plugged in). Not only that, but also the production of electricity through eco-friendly means (hydroelectricity or wind power) would have been nearly impossible if it were about producing direct current (yes, OK, it could be done with solar panels, but who knows if it would be possible to make them work with an acceptable efficiency...). As a small extra, Edison's attempts to make alternate current look bad as an electricity production and transmission method directly led to the development of the electric chair as an execution method.

Nikola Tesla is not only a man to whom many things could have happened to, but he is also a peron of great influence in alternative history. Leaving apart the film The Prestige, there are many situations in which Tesla's life is the point of divergence, or Tesla himself is a main character.

In the tabletop role-playing game GURPS Infinite Worlds, one of the most important worlds is Gernsback, in which the point of divergence is Tesla marrying his friend Anne Morgan, daughter of the industrialist and millionaire J. P. Morgan, which helps him to stabilize his economical and emotional situation. He manages to carry out his plans for global radio transmission from his tower in Wardenclyffe, Long Island, and from there he concentrates in wireless electricity transmission, which he manages to make work shortly after the Great War. His inventions bring prosperity to the world (after a depression caused by the aforementioned problems), strengthening the United States and Germany (which never falls to Nazism), as well as the League of Nations, which unifies the world after a set of crisis, among them a war against the Soviet Union between 1951 and 1953 to stop the Soviet Union's development of the atomic bomb. However, in spite of the apparent utopia that has developed in this world, the discriminatory attitudes (such as racism and sexism) that, in our world, began to disappear after World War Two (and, which, sadly, have yet to fully do so) are still accepted, and colonialism remains an important issue.

Another, better known example, is the game series Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Although, actually, Tesla is not seen anywhere, undoubtedly he is a person with great influence in the story, as Tesla is kidnapped by the KGB and forced to wok for the Soviets, developing powerful weaponry like the Tesla Coil (an improved version of his coil), which can shoot artificial lightning bolts at any hostile attackers that approach it, or the Iron Curtain, which can make an unit completely invulnerable to any attacks for a short period of time. The Soviets in Red Alert 2 have soldiers armed with portable versions of the Tesla Coil, and a group of them manages to turn the Eiffel Tower into one gigantic Tesla Coil that devastates Paris and kills a high number of Allied troops.

Finally (although this is not, by any means, the only option of seeing Tesla change the world) there is the comic series Atomic Robo, written by Brian Clevinger (author of the hilarious webcomic 8-Bit Theater) and drawn by Scott Wegener. The main character, Robo, is a self-aware robot built by, yes, Nikola Tesla, in 1923, and which forms part of a team of soldiers and scientists that answers to any paranormal or supernatural emergencies. His first enemies are Nazis and mad scientists that are trying to take over the world, but later the threats become very different, such as an intelligent dinosaur that claims to have traveled in time from the dinosaurs' age (although Robo suspects it is just a genetic experiment gone wrong) or Thomas Edison's spirit.

If you are interested to learn more about Tesla, you can always try to go to his Wikipedia article, but I recommend you to go read what Matthew Inman, author of the comic webpage The Oatmeal, has written about him, as well as marveling about Inman's and many other people's efforts to save Tesla's laboratory in Wardenclyffe and build a Tesla museum in there.

See you later, and I hope that, before next Friday, someone might have guessed the second person's identity!