Assumption @ 0: Nikola Tesla

David Lutze

I thought I was going to be an inventor and would always think of crazy insane things that would be really fun to make. I would sometimes spend hours on end thinking of how I would create these inventions and how they would work. I even had an invention journal where I would write in a code and detail my “inventions”. I would go as far as pricing these inventions for when I would eventually sell them. Some of my inventions included things like force fields, homing missiles, and being able to make a field around an area that would make that area invisible to the outside. The one that I thought about the most was making a hoverboard. By far, my biggest goal when I was young was to make this, and I would 90spend hours daydreaming about it. Unfortunately, I never really figured out how it would work, mainly because I was really young, and didn't really understand the type of technology that I would need to create a hoverboard, or any of my other ideas for that matter.     

During this time, I held Leonardo Da Vinci and Thomas Edison as my inspiration, as idols. Da Vinci because he was inventing things that were way ahead of his time, and the fact that most of the inventions in his notebook were written in code. I’m not sure why the fact that he was inventing helicopters so long ago fascinated me, but that drew me to him. I was amazed by Edison for most of the same reasons. The fact that Edison had the innovation to actually create and improve the light bulb is just astounding to me. Then I learned about Nikola Tesla, and his invention of the Tesla Coil. This was something that blew my mind, and although I never really pursued my interest in him, I held him to be my new “idol”. I guess I was content with simply holding him in reverence, beyond anything that I could hope to understand. Again, I was very young and naive. Then I happened to watch a segment on the History Channel about Tesla, and I was absolutely astounded by all of the crazy stuff that he did in his life that I really had no idea about and it was also pretty interesting how he kinda lost it in his later years.

For a long time the thing that I found most interesting about Tesla was his invention of the Tesla Coil which could produce huge electrical currents. In modern days these are used to recreate lightning. The fact that Tesla created something that could recreate lightning over a century ago absolutely astounded me. Something else that Tesla did that I thought was awesome, was his very last patent that he filed was essentially for a biplane that could take off vertically. He filed this in the very early 20th century, so this was about a century ahead of his time. This plays back into why I was very interested in Leonardo Da Vinci, they were both very ahead of their time. In his later years, he began to create a giant Tesla Coil to broadcast radio waves across the Atlantic ocean. He thought that if he could do this, then he could take it a step further and pretty much broadcast energy to the whole world through the air. But unfortunately he ran out of all funding on this project, and it was never finished. Another thing that drew me to him, was the fact that he really didn’t get credit for a lot of the things that he did, and that he went up against Thomas Edison who at the time was one of the biggest inventors alive, and someone I used to hold as my idol.

I think the biggest reason that I chose Tesla is that we both, to a certain degree, had outlandish ideas that at the time seemed insane. The difference between me and him is that he actually built stuff, and I just sat there thinking about it. And I think that’s why I was drawn to him, because he actually went out and made all, or at least most of those crazy things that he thought of. He was a sort of symbol for me that said you really can do whatever you set your mind to.