Unsung Hero Quotes
Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
He felt that he couldn’t explain why he was awarded the medal so it would be a continuous source of embarrassment. An iconoclastic individual, Berg turned down the medal, apparently the only person to have ever done so. His exploits for which he was recognized included photographing Tokyo Harbor and determining that the Nazi’s were no far advanced in the development of the atomic bomb. He was the agent who was to assassinate Werner Heisenberg the German nuclear physicist if there was any significant progress towards a working bomb. He determined that is was not necessary by pretending to be a European scientist and actually interviewing Heisenberg and many other European scientists in Nazi occupied Europe.
