Historical Note: A Century of Tesla

Dr. Carmen Santiago,
Tesla Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Excerpted from Scientific Terran, Vol. 27, Issue 9, 1995

Few have done more to make those words a reality than the man himself, whose inventions have touched nearly every aspect of modern life. I first met Dr. Tesla when I was a little girl on my first trip to the American Hegemony, and he was already a legend in his own time.

What more can you say about a man who literally set the world alight, filled the skies with birds of steel, and pioneered wireless technology? Still, an invention stands head and shoulders above the rest: Unveiled a hundred years ago this month at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, the Tesla Generator has been compared in its significance with the discovery of fire, changing fundamentally how people live life.

More than anything else, it is for his eponymous Generator that the 20^th has come to be called the Tesla Century. Immediately, nations all over the planet scrambled to harness the free, unlimited power offered by the Generators, which, paradoxically, made the doctor one of the richest private individuals in the world. This massive new wave of industrialization spurred intense new research into complementary fields, such as construction, propulsion, and telecoms to name a few, as well as a vast new quest for resources to keep the factories running. This, in turn, provided both the means and the motive for the Great Space Race. Without this impetus, it's doubtful we would have reached Mars this century, much less Neptune or Pluto.

Perhaps this is also a good time to look back with the benefit of hindsight, at the folly of old ways. For example, petroleum is a wondrous substance with important industrial, commercial, and medicinal applications, but, today, it seems ridiculous that people would simply burn it as a power source.

While things aren't everything the sci-fi writers predicted years ago (I for one am still waiting for those flying cars), people are building bigger, moving faster, and able to reach across the solar system with the flick of a button. Life has been reshaped by Dr. Tesla's dreams. With our new United Earth government, I think we can look forward to the 21^st century as a period of continued peace and prosperity for all humanity.