Nocola Tesla - Forgotten Genius or the future of Humanity

1. The shock of his brother’s death turned him into a mystic-at age seven.
The defining event of young Nikola’s childhood was the day he witnessed the death of his older brother Dane in a riding accident. In the years following the tragedy, Tesla (the son and grandson of Serbian Orthodox priests) began seeing visions of the air around him “filled with tongues of living flame.” As an adolescent Tesla learned to exercise his willpower to control the visions, but in later life he would spend much of his time feeding and, he claimed, mystically communicating with New York City’s pigeons.
2. Tesla was briefly reduced to digging ditches for a living.
After graduating from university, Tesla worked for Edison’s electric company in Paris, but traveled to the United States in 1884 in the hopes of working directly for Edison, the leading figure in the race to deliver electric lighting and power to consumers. Tesla quickly gained a job as an engineer at Edison’s headquarters, impressing the “Wizard of Menlo Park” with his hardworking ingenuity. After Edison casually mentioned that he would pay $50,000 for an improved direct current (DC) generator design, Tesla worked nights until he came up with a solution. Edison refused to pay up, claiming he had been joking. Soon after, Tesla quit to form his own electric company. While he searched for backers to support his research into alternating current, Tesla took a job digging ditches for $2 a day to make ends meet.
3. With help from Mark Twain, Tesla nearly discovered X-rays.
Twain and Tesla became friends in the 1890s, thanks in part to Twain’s lifelong fascination with technology and new inventions. Visiting Tesla’s lab late one night, Twain posed for one of the first photographs to be lit by incandescent light. In 1895, Tesla and photographer Edward Ringwood Hewett invited Twain back to the lab to pose for another photo, this one lit using an electrical device called a Crookes tube. When Tesla reviewed the resulting photographic negative, he found it splotchy and spotted and decided it was ruined. It was only weeks later, after German scientist Wilhelm Röntigen announced his discovery of what he called “X-radiation” produced by Crookes tubes, that Tesla realized the photograph of Twain had been ruined by the X-ray shadows of the camera’s metal screws.
4. He invented a remote controlled boat that he thought could end all warfare.
At the height of the Spanish-American War in 1898, one of Tesla’s side projects was a miniature boat that could be started, stopped and steered with rudimentary radio signals. When he filed a patent for the device, the U.S. Patent Office refused to believe that it could work, and so dispatched an agent to Tesla’s Manhattan lab for a demonstration. Tesla also showed his boat to a string of other important visitors, including J.P. Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt. He told the New York Post that his invention, which would allow battles to be fought without putting humans at risk, would render warfare itself obsolete. “Battle ships will cease to be built,” he predicted, “and the most tremendous artillery afloat will be of no more use than so much scrap iron.”
5. His claims of receiving signals from outer space were proven right-a century later.
During the summer of 1899 Tesla set up a field laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to the possibilities of using high-altitude stations to transmit information and electric power over long distances. One July day, while tracking lightning storms, Tesla’s equipment picked up a series of beeps. After ruling out solar and terrestrial causes, he concluded that the signals must be from another planet. The following Christmas, in response to the American Red Cross’s request for a prediction of the greatest scientific achievement of the coming century, Tesla wrote, “Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…” In 1996 scientists published a study replicating Tesla’s experiment and showing that the signal was in fact caused by the moon Io passing through Jupiter’s magnetic field.