Thursday 2 April 2015

April Fools!



Well, only a little bit. That photograph yesterday of Nikola Tesla apparently calmly sitting and reading a book while a spectacular artificial lightning display zapped about him was in fact a double exposure. But I have seen some genuine photographs of him standing with one hand on the top of one of his large ‘Tesla Coils’ (a sort of high-frequency transformer) and allowing absurdly long arcs, sparks, ionized electrical discharges, whatever you want to call them to pass over, under, and even through him with no apparent ill effect.

Tesla had an endearing taste for the spectacular and showy, and an imagination guaranteed to cause the people he talked to, especially Patent Office officials and potential business partners, to think ‘We’ve got a right one ’ere’ but this could be misleading: he had a knowledge and understanding of complex electrical matters such as the behaviour of multi-phase alternating currents in inductive and capacitive circuitry that would put the most advanced physicists to shame, and many of his ingenious inventions became essential to modern technology.

No picture today; I drank too much a couple of evenings ago before I was well enough to do so and am very tired.

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