A contemporary, sometime employee, and frequent competitor with Edison, Tesla gets very little time in the history books today.
Considering his wide-ranging inventions (and, equally importantly, large-scale development) in induction motors, power transformation and trasmission, flourescent bulbs, and his numerous theories and attempts in the field of electricity, this is somewhat surprising to me.
Modern society runs on Tesla's inventions far more than Edison's. Flourescent lighting has largely replaced incandescent bulbs in industrial use, and is rapidly taking over the residential market. AC power transmission is the world-wide standard. Induction motors are all but universal. We're even beginning to re-examine some of Tesla's theoretical studies and claimed inventions and find that he was ahead of his time.
Perhaps most importantly to me, Tesla wasn't content to invent things and patent them, he spent a lot of effort nursing them to maturity. Many of his ideas never made it that far, and some sound freakish enough that they may never, but isn't that the mark of genius? To push the limits, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing?
That he was somewhat less than fully sane seems also well documented; certainly he had more quirks than most people do. His sanity seems to have been generally functional however, and one can only wonder how much more he might have accomplished had he not been limited by it.
A few weeks ago I ran across a steampunk-esque sci-fi/fantasy book that's coming out soon that is set in Tesla's era, and where some of his more controversial inventions are mature technology. Last night I saw a program on the History Channel about him.
Perhaps the father of the modern electrical world is finally coming out of the shadows - and who knows where that will lead?
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