Nikola Tesla was a visionary. A mind of at least a century, so as to be able to foresee inventions that would be accomplished many years after his death. Suffice it to think that in 1926 he had been able to predict the invention of smartphones.
A genius - there are over 700 patents bearing its name - never recognized until today, so that its name does not appear in history books. Yet much of the technology of our times is to him. On all wireless radio and x-ray communications.
John B. Kennedy, an American reporter, was fortunate enough to interview Tesla, "a tall, slender man, an ascetic figure dressed in sober clothes, and observing his interlocutor with a firm, deep look," the journalist writes in his article . An almost monastic life that of the engineer-philosopher-inventor: he does not drink, does not smoke, follows a feral diet. Totally focused on his mission: discover and create.
After a couple of questions, Tesla spies his interviewer with a sentence: "There is a clear difference between progress and technology. Progress provides benefits to humanity, technology not necessarily." So he begins to talk, explaining to Kennedy his vision of a future world: "When wireless telephony is perfectly applied, the whole Earth will turn into a huge brain, as it is, and all things will be part of a We will be able to communicate with each other instantly, regardless of the distance. Not only that, but through television and telephony, we will be able to see and feel exactly as if we were face to face. if you are away thousands of miles, and the tools that will allow us to do this will be incredibly simple, compared to the phone we are using now. A man will be able to keep them in the jacket pocket. "
With these few words, the inventor has anticipated for almost a century all the technology that today seems so trivial to possess: smartphone, internet, wireless network, face time and the other hundreds of apps we use every day. And he did it in 1926. But his name does not appear on the history books.