Amazed, people should be genuinely amazed by Tesla’s mind. Not only did he predict some of the inventions of the 21st century, but he was so detailed in their description. It seems like Nikola Tesla time-traveled to be in this moment with us. He described modern smartphones as wireless devices that “a man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket” used for video and telephone calls. He was also able to describe self-driving cars, drones, and autonomous robots. Everything that we find normal in our time, Tesla imagined a hundred years ago. A mind of a scientist, and accurate futurist, trapped in different times with a lack of resources.
That Tesla lived before his time proved his ideas in 1901. He gained $150 000 from financier J.P. Morgan to build a mushroom-shaped tower for transmitting messages, telephony, and images to ships across the Atlantic. He was convinced then, more than a hundred years ago, that he could carry millions of volts of electricity through the air, based on his experiments with radio and microwaves. Work had begun on the structure later known as Wardenclyffe Tower in 1906, but Morgan cut off funds before it was completed. Some say that the investor Morgan realized that this invention would cripple his other energy-sector holdings.
Tesla's early predictions
The eccentric predicted almost a century ago: “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain.” Tesla may have been eccentric in everyday life and social occasions, but how do you cope with the fact that you lived a hundred years before your time? Think about the things he was dreaming about but had to live with the things he had. It is not strange that people think that Tesla time traveled when they see what he predicted at the beginning of the 20th century. Tesla's prediction came true through the invention of the internet in the 1980s and Wi-Fi in the 1990s, along with the internet of things (IoT). His description of live streaming said that in the future, people would be able to view events, such as a World Series game, remotely as if they were there in person.
If not a time traveler, Nikola Tesla for sure was a visionary. A great visionary whose ideas are accepted and celebrated today more than ever. At the beginning of the 20th century, he was aware of many things that modern people value nowadays. Things such as a healthier diet, using robotics, the value of clean water…
Look at what he said about natural resources:
“Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.”
He made a mistake by saying that 100 years from now, coffee, tea, and tobacco will no longer be in vogue, but it is probably the only mistake he made in his predictions. Tesla was very extreme in his food choice at an advanced age. But when you think about it, was he not always extreme? He based his diet on milk and honey, especially abstaining from meat, but using alcohol as "a veritable elixir of life". Today it is recommendable to eat less meat because enormous slaughterhouses are known as great polluters, but also it is healthier for your diet to abstain from meat daily.
Here are some other Tesla's predictions to George Sylvester Viereck 100 years ago:
“Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States, who holds office in the year 2035. than the Secretary of War. The pollution of our beaches such as exists today around New York City, will seem as unthinkable to our children and grandchildren as life without plumbing seems to us. Our water supply will be far more carefully supervised, and only a lunatic will drink unsterilized water.”
Nikola Tesla was a visionary
The idea that Tesla time-traveled should have occurred to you when you are familiar with the things that this great scientist said 100 years ago. How else would he know all those things? When you think about it, Tesla's idea was that the numbers three, six, and nine create another dimension. The fourth dimension in physics is referred to as time. It seems like so much coincidence, but who are we to tell? One thing that stopped him from realizing all his ideas and plans was the thing that makes the world go round – money. Imagine what our visionary Nikola Tesla would do if he only had the money.