NIKOLA TESLA AND
THE ONE HUNDREDTH
ANNIVERSARY OF RADIO TRANSMISSION
by
Michael McAdams
March 1996
On November 4, 1995 there were a
number of celebrations around the world marking the one
hundredth anniversary of the first radio voice broadcast
by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895. It was indeed an important
milestone and an exhibit at San Francisco's Palace of
Fine Arts Theater a fitting commemoration. Many
journalists wrote that Marconi "invented" radio
a century ago. However, while Marconi was the first to
broadcast the human voice, he did not invent radio. That
honor and patent belong to the electrical genius Nikola
Tesla who gave us, among other things, alternating
current.
While it might seem that Serbs and
Croatians can agree on little or nothing for the past
five years, Tesla is a hero to both nations and is
presently pictured on Serbian currency. Tesla was an
Orthodox Serb from Lika, Croatia who moved to the United
States in 1884 to work with the likes of Bell, Edison,
and Westinghouse. Tesla's radio was invented in Europe in
1893 and a U.S. patent for the electronic transmission of
signals and data was filed on September 2, 1897. The
patent was allowed on March 20, 1900 (Patent No. 645,576) and
became Tesla's second radio patent, the first being
granted in 1898. Marconi's patent for voice transmission
alone, was filed on November 10, 1900 and was rejected as
a duplicate of Tesla's.
In later years the Marconi Company
attempted to strip Tesla of his patent. After years of
litigation and thousands of pages of testimony from the
world's great scientists, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
Tesla's to be the sole valid patent in June 1943, only
months after Tesla's death. The case was much more than
academic. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company made
millions and wanted sole ownership of radio. Like most of
his inventions, Tesla was willing to give the technology
to the world for free. In 1904 Tesla envisioned, to the
disbelief of most of the world, "A cheap and simple
device, which might be carried in one's pocket may then
be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the
world's news or such special messages as may be intended
for it. Thus the earth will be converted into a huge
brain...the system will have a virtually infinite working
capacity and immensely facilitate and cheapen the
transmission of intelligence."
In
life, Tesla was an eccentric and brilliant man, called
the "prodigal genius." In death his legacy
lives on as even today his theories continue to be
explored and con-firmed. It is nearly impossible to enter
a modern room or vehicle, whether an automobile or space
shuttle and not see some device, whether a computer
screen or a telephone, that can be traced back to his
genius. But his greatest legacy may be in being one of
the few shared heroes of Croatia and Serbia.
Back to Contents Page
|