September the 11th, 2023 – Elon Musk is a controversial character, but few can deny that he is one of the greatest minds of our times when it comes to innovation and invention. In a world in which Thomas Edison is still given all the credit for just about anything to do with electricity, Musk gave Croatia-born inventor Nikola Tesla the well-deserved limelight back in the form of the astonishing Tesla Motors.
Nikola Tesla’s humble beginnings
Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, in the mountainous Lika-Senj County which didn’t provide easy living for its inhabitants. It arguably still doesn’t. He suffered from an array of strange health conditions and was a genius Croatia and Serbia still squabble endlessly over to this very day.
Born in what is now Croatian territory and what was then the Austrian Empire, Tesla famously said that he was both proud of his “Serb origin and his Croatian homeland”. The fact of the matter is that Tesla never held Serbian citizenship, and spent a total of 31 hours in that country in his entire life. Despite his own words, some claim that he’s America’s pride given the fact that he spent decades living in Manhattan, and Serbia sees fit to name Belgrade’s airport after him. Croatia immortalised him on the euro coins introduced this year. It’s all well and good fighting over him and who he “belongs to” now, but the sad truth is that Tesla’s life was far from easy, and his inventions weren’t given the attention they deserved during his lifetime.
Tesla suffered from quite severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). His life was dogged with health complaints of various kinds and it was nearly snuffed out before he could go on to fulfil any of his potential after he contracted cholera. Owing to that, he spent the best part of a year bedridden in his hometown of Smiljan, nearly dying multiple times. Dropping out of educational facilities, dealing with health conditions and struggling with the limitations his OCD placed on him, he didn’t have the best start in life despite his incredible brain and the fact that he was decades before his time.
Thomas Edison takes Tesla’s spotlight
Edison wronged the Smiljan-born futurist and engineer, and it all began not long after Tesla arrived in America with some loose change in his pocket, a seemingly rather outlandish idea for a flying machine and an introduction letter from one of Edison’s associates based in Europe. The DC mechanism that Edison had already perfected was flawed in quite a significant way, and that was that regardless of it having been invented successfully, most of the population was still operating by candle light. Edison’s DC electrical works couldn’t replace candles and become the household norm without the means to carry that electricity into the houses.
Edison did have ideas about generators, but setting up sub-stations in many locations wasn’t ideal and the generator he used was infamous for breaking down very frequently. When those breakdowns became weekly, Edison deemed it far too costly to keep repairing it and so his plans had reached an impasse.
Tesla to the rescue?
Edison offered Nikola Tesla 50,000 USD to come up with a way to perfect his generator system and ensure far less frequent breakdowns. Tesla agreed, worked on the project and when he finished it several months later, he asked for his fee. Edison, apparently never having had any intention of giving Tesla the sum he had previously promised, simply told Tesla that when he “becomes a proper American, he’ll appreciate American jokes”. Nikola Tesla, shocked and appalled, resigned and turned his attention to his praised alternating current system, which appeared to be of little interest to Edison. Despite that AC system not being attractive to the obviously more backwards Edison, he wasn’t a fan of Tesla’s new found voice and deemed his public batting to be a threat to his authority. He then set about soiling Tesla’s good name in as many ways as possible.
Tesla the dreamer and Edison the killer
There appeared to be no mountain too high for Edison if it meant trampling all over Nikola Tesla’s reputation. Edison decided to offer children living close to him money to bring him dogs and cats, so that he could display them and electrocute them using Tesla’s invention in an attempt to show how unsafe it was. As horrific as this was, Tesla’s name wasn’t destroyed, and he powered the world’s very first electrically lit fair in 1893. The vile Edison, on the other hand, went on to invent the Electric Chair. What the former and the latter went on to do, with one creating joy and the other ending life, doesn’t come as a surprise.
The fatal flaw in Tesla was that he actually wanted what he invented to be made free for use, and he wasn’t a businessman by any stretch of the imagination – unlike Thomas Edison. Wanting what his brain could think up to become a gift to humankind and progression, Tesla’s pure intentions and real face were no match for Edison’s underhand actions and mask. It might have been Edison who won by lobbying and knowing the right people, but it’s Nikola Tesla’s inventions which lit up the world, and continue to do so in every household across the planet.
Elon Musk returns electrical progression to Tesla’s name
Musk is, as stated previously, a wildly controversial character. For as much as he has done in the name as innovation, he’s often in the press for all the wrong reasons. That said, him naming the now globally famous Tesla Motors after Nikola Tesla was karmic justice for the inventor from Smiljan, Croatia. The story behind how Tesla Motors actually got its name, however, is a bit of a weird one. Musk had to go to some rather bizarre lengths to get the rights to the name Tesla.
“We didn’t come up with it” revealed Musk, before going into the strange story of him wanting to purchase the rights to it for $75,000 from a man in Sacramento, who didn’t want to sell it. Elon Musk then decided on a different approach, which is just as controversial as the man himself, and you can read about how Musk finally got his hands on the Tesla name by clicking here.
Speaking of karmic justice, it seems fitting that Tesla Motors, which has a market cap of $803 billion in September 2023 and is a respected name across the planet, bears the name of the man who once said that he wasn’t sorry that his ideas were stolen, just that those who stole them had none of their own.
