Nikola Tesla Articles
That is how American journalists wrote about Nikola Tesla, apparently unable to explain rationally everything he had done in the field of electrical engineering in less than a decade.
Everyone was simply fighting over him. His newer and newer patents followed one another, invitations for lectures likewise, and after his famous lecture in New York on 20 May 1891 about experiments with very high-frequency currents, it was expected that all that great success would be confirmed in the European capitals as well. From there he was most kindly invited to present his latest inventions in London, Paris…
Only one man did not share that enthusiasm. Moreover, he did not hide his antipathies and the most vulgar opposition to our inventor. It was an American, also a famous inventor, whom they called the wizard of Menlo Park. His name was Thomas Alva Edison.
It seems that the secret of the intolerance was basically simple. Tesla was an intellectual, a theorist, and a cultured man — everything that was the complete opposite of Edison. That is probably why such a Tesla repelled him so much.
Speaking about the lack of cultural atmosphere in America at that time, Tesla’s biographer Margaret Cheney took as an example the two of our famous countrymen — Tesla and Pupin. Although both came from the most modest Serbian families, they were shocked when they first encountered the vulgar noisy Americans.
The attractiveness of the young Tesla was also reflected in the fact that he was European-educated, that he spoke foreign languages, visited theaters and associated with actors and writers, that he was a good connoisseur of literature, loved music, and finally that he was so broadly educated that no one could ever be bored with him. Besides that, he was a scientist, one of the greatest.
Paris at His Feet
Accepting the high invitation of the Royal Institution of Great Britain to give the first lecture on his European tour, crowned with fame and recognition, he could not help remembering how, once upon a time, he had arrived quite modestly in the port of New York, without luggage and without money, on the ship Saturnia, as a second-class passenger. He looked at the Statue of Liberty, the very one the people of France had given to America, perhaps thinking how even Paris, the “city of light,” had not understood or accepted him, and now they were inviting him there too to present his great discoveries.
He set sail across the ocean in the winter of 1892. He probably had no idea what a magnificent reception his lecture, which he gave in London on 3 February in the presence of the most eminent English scientists, would receive.
Nikola Tesla particularly impressed Sir James Dewar, who specially asked him to give another lecture in the British capital.
