No. The new electric sports car is named for him. So is a unit of magnetic flux.
Nikola Telsa (1856-1943) invented alternating current electrical systems. He is, contrary to accepted history, the inventor of the radio. Also the first robot/remote control device Also, flourescent lights. And an electron microscope in the form of a beautiful light bulb.
He was compelled to do many things in multiples of threes, insisted on staying in hotel rooms (in which he lived all of his adult life) which had a room number in a multiple of three, and demanded that he have eighteen fresh towels every day and eighteen napkins at every meal. He could not enjoy his food unless he first calculated its volume, and if he read one thing an author had written he felt compelled to then read everything else, which caused him to call Voltaire a 'monster' in a most amusing way in his little autobiography.
He was extremely revolted by the touch of human hair and skin, and wore gloves a great deal of the time. He was also revolted by most jewelry, expecially pearls, and could not bring himself to approach people who were wearing them.
He was obsessed with pigeons and would feed them every day, or hire Western Union carrier to do so. He made a hospital for them. And eventually fell in love with one, more or less.
True, about the hearing. He claimed to be able to hear the 'thud' of a fly landing on a table. He definately could hear thunder from considerably further away than others, an ability he made obvious at his research station in Colorado Springs.
He never seemed to sleep more than four hours a day and was appearantly pretty hyper and moody. At one point a doctor said he had a unique condition and dosed him with bromide (a period treatment for epilepsy, also rather often applied to people that we now believe probably had bipolar disorder) which Tesla said didn't do anything at all.
He was unlikable, standoffish and shy until he got to know you, then charmed the heck out of people, but often managed to be quite cruel on occassions when he obviously meant to be comforting. One can observe this in his letters. He was also rather tragically naive and repeatedly got conned, first by Edison and then by Westinghouse. If he hadn't been daft about the Westinghouse business he would have ended up owning the company and been the richest man in the world and Earth's first billionare, but as it was he spent most of his life trying to scrape together backers for his amazing projects. Which is why the amazing Wardenclyffe tower was never finished and instead torn down. He wanted to provide free wireless electricity to the entire world, and that tower was meant to be the beginning.
He had amazing powers of visualization. He was nearly fifty before he ever had to make adjustments to any of his designs after building them. He made the machines in his mind and then would run them in his mind and see how they'd wear, adjust for that in his mind, and then build the thing. There are a number of things he came up with that he never bothered to actually build at all, because he'd become obsessed with the next great idea.
Some people printed hilarious pamphlets claiming he was an alien from Venus sent to bring enlightenment to mankind. Tesla said he hated it when people misspelled his name.
Last edited by Electric_Kite on 24 Jan 2009, 5:28 am, edited 1 time in total.