Nicola Tesla; (below) the 80s rock band named after the scientist

In an earlier installment of Only Connect, I had written about ‘Edisonades’, a sub-sub-genre of early American SF featuring the inventor Thomas Alva Edison as hero. I had then promised to write about the other great inventor of the time, the Serbian Nicola Tesla, who has also been appearing in novels, movies and comic books for over a century now. But despite his many appearances in popular culture, Tesla (1856-1943) never received adequate recognition as a scientist in his lifetime.

Some posthumous justice may be on its way though. The world’s first personal supercomputer called Tesla was recently unveiled. It is billed to be 250 times faster than the ordinary PC, and at £4,000, is about 10 times as expensive. Obviously, someone at NVIDIA — the US firm which has designed the machine — is an avid reader of steampunk and alternative technology SF.

The most important technology with which the real-life Tesla was associated was AC or alternating current electric power, “including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor”, according to Wikipedia. The SI unit for magnetic induction was also named Tesla in his honour.

But in his lifetime, Tesla was far more famous for the controversies he became embroiled in. After his demonstration of wireless communication in 1894, he filed for a radio patent in 1897. This was initially granted him but in 1904, the US patents office revised its decision and awarded the patent to Guglielmo Marconi, a decision which Tesla bitterly contested all his life. In between Tesla’s and Marconi’s demonstrations was the one by Jagadish Chandra Bose at Presidency College in 1894, in which Bose ignited gunpowder and rang a bell at a distance using millimetre range wavelength microwaves.

Other than Marconi, Tesla also clashed repeatedly with Edison (who was a proponent of DC or direct current network), leading to the so-called ‘War of Currents’ between the two scientists and George Westinghouse. Apparently, this caused both scientists to be passed over for the physics Nobel Prize in 1915, which instead went to Marconi. Undeterred, Tesla went on to make a series of important contributions to science throughout his life. This columnist does not have sufficient physics to understand them, but he can report enthusiastically that Tesla’s first fictional appearance was in To Mars With Tesla (1901) by J. Weldon Cobb in which the scientist is aided by a nephew of Thomas Edison.

The Tesla craze really began in earnest from the 1980s and he has so far appeared in the works of such worthies as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster and Howard Chaykin. He has been a character in a Spielberg cartoon, in a Christopher Nolan film and even has a rock band named after him. But I suspect what would have pleased him most is the PC-supercomputer, a machine which will make his name synonymous with computing in the future.

The author teaches English at Jadavpur University