Well it looks like the Rats delivered an electrical performance at Let's Rock Southampton last Saturday - I'm really, really, looking forward to Let's Rock Shrewsbury, this weekend.
Talking about electrical performances ..... you probably know the name ‘Tesla’ from the US electric vehicle business of the same name – but who was Nikola Tesla?
Tesla was a Serbian-born inventor, who late in the nineteenth century, began a series of really bold and often very pioneering experiments with electricity. Born in 1856, he learned to speak eight languages and some say, he had a photographic memory.
Although he began a degree in engineering and physics, he gave up his studies in 1884 to emigrate to the US. He started work with Edison in New York but gave this up too, bravely deciding he’d go it alone. Initially, the gamble paid off and he was hugely successful, securing several patents and making quite a lot of money. With the freedom to do what he wanted, he worked on things as diverse as early X-ray machines, a wirelessly controlled boat and advanced ideas such as wireless lighting. He was also an early pioneer of wireless communications – what we now know as radio. But he ran out of money and others such as Marconi, beat him to it.
Some of his most startling and ambitious experiments were with wireless power distribution. For these he needed huge equipment and so in 1899, he moved from New York to the wide-open spaces of Colorado Springs. These experiments were arguably his most startling - producing artificial lightning bolts over 40m long - and led him to the belief that he could use the surface of the Earth to conduct electrical energy. It’s a shame that he got this bit wrong, because if he’d succeeded, Tesla planned to give everyone on the planet, free and abundant energy.
By the 1920s he’d spent most of his money but was still experimenting widely. At this stage, he was living in hotels, often leaving without paying the bills and leaving the rooms in a real mess. Through all of this though however, people stuck by him. The industrial magnate George Westinghouse gave him funds to continue his experiments until the end of his life. Couldn’t we all do with friends like that!!
On his 75th birthday, a party was held in Tesla’s honour and this led to a series of annual birthday press conferences in which he announced his latest findings. Some of these ideas were really out there, such as a motor that would run on cosmic rays and would produce a new form of cheap and boundless energy – that would be useful right now!! In 1943 he announced a superweapon – some form of death-ray that he claimed would end all war.
Soon after his death-ray announcement however, Tesla died alone in his New York hotel room. To honour his many achievements, in 1960, his name was added to the official SI system of measurements and is now used for the units of magnetic flux density. And of course, his name lives on with Tesla Inc.
Interesting stuff. Name lives on through OMD as well.