Fun Facts You Probably Didn't Know About Nikola Tesla

Tesla was an eccentric genius who helped a staggering array of important electrical and electronic technologies, like fluorescent lighting and utility-scale AC power. If you haven't clicked through this gallery yet, it's well worth it.

Jim Lucy

Oct. 3, 2014

We recently discovered an idea Tesla had for wireless communications in this post at www.pbs.org. In a PBS interview W. Bernard Carlson, author of “Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age,” said, "Tesla may have had a brilliant mind, but he was not as good at reducing his ideas to practice. In the race to develop transatlantic radio, Tesla described to his funder and business partner, J.P. Morgan, a new means of instant communication that involved gathering stock quotes and telegram messages, funneling them to his laboratory, where he would encode them and assign them each a new frequency. That frequency would be broadcast to a device that would fit in your hand, he explained. In other words, Tesla had envisioned the smart phone and wireless internet."

Photo credits: Getty Images, Tesla Universe (A great online resource for anything to do with Tesla), Wikimedia Commons and www.teslasciencecenter.org.

About the Author

Jim Lucy

Editor-in-Chief of Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing

Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 40 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter, and as a contributing writer for EC&M magazine During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement.

Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted with his wife and three sons in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 30 years.