The Truth About Nikola Tesla

For a brief period in his own time Nikola Tesla was one of the most famous scientists and inventors in the world. Then everyone figured out he was mostly a fraud with antiquated ideas about science that he refused to move on from and he was mostly disgraced and forgotten. Then Reddit and others on the interwebs began believing Tesla's lies and hype again and now everyone (including us before we really researched into the man) thinks he was amazing again. Let's set the record straight, shall we? In the mid-19th century, the Austrian Empire, which stretched for over a thousand miles (1600 km) from Italy to Ukraine, was a place of contradictions. The ruling patriarch, Minister of the Interior Baron Alexander von Bach, was on the one hand something of a despot, abolishing public trials, reducing the freedom of the press and imprisoning political opponents. Conversely, his rule also saw the relaxing of economic laws, the demise of internal custom duties and peasants freed from their feudal obligations. It was during this time, in the small village of Smiljan, situated within the Empire’s military frontier (now modern-day Croatia) that Nikola Tesla was born on July 9th or 10th (with the confusion owing to the time at around midnight), 1856, the fourth of five children. Tesla’s father, Milutin, was a priest, and the family soon moved to nearby Gospić, where his parish was located. From the beginning, Tesla was seemingly a rather brilliant child, though Tesla claims his father discouraged scientific academic pursuit, hoping Tesla would become a priest himself someday and doggedly stuck to this point. Even, according to Tesla, restricting his study, with Tesla partially attributing this to the death of his apparently brilliant older brother Dane, back when Tesla was 5 years old. Tesla writes of his brother and this event, ”In the first place I had a brother who was gifted to an extraordinary degree — one of those rare phenomena of mentality which biological investigation has failed to explain. His premature death left my parents disconsolate. We owned a horse which had been presented to us by a dear friend. It was a magnificent animal of Arabian breed, possessed of almost human intelligence, and was cared for and petted by the whole family, having on one occasion saved my father’s life under remarkable circumstances… This horse was responsible for my brother’s injuries from which he died. I witnest the tragic scene and altho fifty-six years have elapsed since, my visual impression of it has lost none of its force. The recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison… Anything I did that was creditable merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself. But I was far from being considered a stupid boy, if I am to judge from an incident of which I have still a strong remembrance. One day the Aldermen were passing thru a street where I was at play with other boys. The oldest of these venerable gentlemen — a wealthy citizen — paused to give a silver piece to each of us. Coming to me he suddenly stopt and commanded, “Look in my eyes.” I met his gaze, my hand outstretched to receive the much valued coin, when, to my dismay, he said, ‘No, not much, you can get nothing from me, you are too smart.’” It was also as a youth that Tesla first became interested in electricity, noting while petting his cat on a dry, winter night, “As I stroked Macak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.” His father then told him, “Well, this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.” Tesla’s reply was allegedly, “Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God.” Another core facet of Tesla’s personality deriving from his youth that is important to point out was his obsession with working hard and efficiency and a complete disregard for sleep as far as humanly possible. This work ethic he attributed to his mother, noting o... This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout