Nikola Tesla's 7 Best Inventions
A short inventory of the things one man built that you are almost certainly using, standing near, or being irradiated by right now. Ranked loosely by how casually he treated each one.
Why it was classified
Mostly it wasn't. The exception came after his death in January 1943, when the Office of Alien Property took custody of his papers and effects; an MIT electrical engineer, John G. Trump, reviewed them and reported nothing of immediate military value. The papers were eventually released and most now sit in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, which has not stopped anyone from insisting the good ones are still in a warehouse somewhere.
Why it matters
The list, briefly. One: the alternating-current induction motor, which turns the electricity in your walls into rotating machinery, and which he worked out while walking through a park reciting poetry. Two: the polyphase AC system that won the current wars and lit the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, settling a public argument in which the other side had been electrocuting animals to make a point. Three: the Tesla coil of 1891, a resonant transformer that remains the standard way to produce lightning indoors on purpose. Four: radio — his 1893 demonstrations and the priority his patents were granted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943, several months after he had stopped caring. Five: remote control, demonstrated in 1898 by piloting a small boat around a Madison Square Garden pond while spectators looked for the hidden trained monkey. Six: the bladeless turbine of 1913, elegant, efficient in theory, and still waiting for the right century. Seven: wireless power transmission, attempted at Wardenclyffe on Long Island until the money ran out, which is the most Tesla ending available. Six of the seven are load-bearing infrastructure. The seventh is a tower he never got to finish, and somehow that is the one everyone remembers.