World has so many problems and it welcomes he who comes first with the solution. The people want products that give instant solution, while the market wants marketable products and the bankers fund profitable ideas. Intellectual thievery is a crime that largely goes unnoticed because those who commit it are not common crooks but are affiliated with established & powerful people.
Many have been victims of intellectual theft- like Mark Zuckerberg VWinklevoss Brothers; Bill Gates and Steve Jobs stealing the idea of GUI from XEROX or the famous backstabbing of a genius named Nikola Tesla by a clever (cunning) businessman named by Thomas Edison.
Tesla was born in Croatia on July 10, 1856. Interested in Physics, Mathematics and inventions, he mastered them at ease. To Tesla, Physics was like reading the nature of how things work and he understood and formulated how science could be used to serve human needs.
Tesla ventured to America into which he immigrated and started to work for Edison. He solved many of Edison’s problems with his inventions. Impressed with his intelligence, Edison used him to better his problematic inventions till a day the employee left his employer due to differences and mainly due to unpaid salaries.
Tesla found supporters in America who backed his concept of inventing Alternating current powered projects. He was recognized as a genius and he was supported by George Westinghouse with whose financial backings he built polyphase induction motors for The Niagara Falls Power Company which started using his Alternating Current.
Tesla pioneered wireless current supply. He even demonstrated it to the public by lighting Geissler tubes equivalent of today’s neon tubes.
Tesla was such a bright star who was spotted for his brilliance very late. Edison on the other hand wanted his DC (Direct Current) to triumph over Tesla’s AC (Alternating Current) but Tesla’s invention prevailed as the best. A fire that broke out in his lab burned his findings and key details of his projects. He later set up a lab at Colorado Springs, USA but his later inventions didn’t get him good recognition from the public because of his time-consuming experimentations. Since some of his inventions seemed too expensive he lacked support from patrons.
He spent his life living in a hotel and had little money in his hand and he used it for his researches. He died on January 7, 1943 due to Coronary Thrombosis. Many inventors used his patents to better their inventions. One of them is Marconi, the man who the world thought of as the inventor of radio. Tesla has been linked with many of the inventions like Radar, X-Ray, wireless communication and much more.
If Tesla was financially successful scientist, he is not highly so. But ask anyone was Tesla a great genius, visionary, innovator and thinker; he surely is. Perhaps Science is not always about inventions, solutions and money but inspiration and imagination. A philosopher once said “The last time the world utters your name is the day you die”. In that regard, despite people of that time giving up on him; there are millions of aspiring innovators and lovers of physics who will always remember the greatness of Tesla and what he stood for – “harnessing the forces of nature to human needs”.