A few days ago after seeing an article on Yahoo! about the anniversary of the Tunguska event (June 30th, 1908), I decided to read up on Nikola Tesla. Many people believe this explosion was caused by his 'death ray', but it was most likely from an air burst of a meteor or comet fragment up in the atmosphere. Of course I had heard of Tesla before in school and in the movie 'The Prestige' (an excellent movie, where he was played by none other than David Bowie), but I didn't know too much. I've never been interested in physics or anything like that, but some of the stuff he came up with is just fascinating. He is known as 'the man who invented the twentieth century' and 'the father of phsyics', and he's the official inventor of the radio, which he did in the 1890's, but he was not given credit until 1943 by the US Supreme Court. I'm not really familiar with most of his work but it is obvious that the man was a genius. He was and still is very famous, but most thought of him as a 'mad scientist' because apparently he was quite eccentric. He was fluent in eight languages and had an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He hated jewelry, was a germophob, was obsessed with pigeons, and he did not like overweight people. He also disliked Thomas Edison because Edison kind of did him wrong when Tesla first came to the States, but he was very good friends with Mark Twain. This led me to read a bit about Mark Twain aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who I am a bit more familiar with. Of course I've read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as well as watched the movies and 'Wishbone' episodes about each story. The most interesting thing I learned about Mark Twain was that he was born two weeks after the closest approach to earth of Halley's Comet, in November of 1835. In 1909, he said, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'" His prediction was accurate - he died of a heart attack on April 21st, 1910, one day after the comet's closest approach to earth. Now that is pretty dang amazing. (Below are my two favorite pictures, Tesla studying in front of his high frequency transformer and Twain in Tesla's lab)
3 comments:
I am glad you jumped on the blog bandwagon! Your post about Tesla was fascinating. I had only heard about him from "The Prestige" (which I liked but I LOVED "The Illusionist"). And that fact about Mark Twain was really cool. I look forward to reading more about your Wikipedia discoveries!
I really enjoyed learning about Tesla and Twain. (So do you think I would like this movie about him?) Thanks for sharing your information. I hope you will share more fascinating facts with us. That would be a much better use of your time than spider solitaire! (How does that work? Do you have a spider crawl across the cards? Or is he your opponent and you try to beat him?)
well the movie isn't about him, he just kind of helps out the main character, who's a magician. it's a very good movie but it's kind of dark....i know dad would like it, and you might, too. and there aren't any spiders involved in spider solitaire, it's just a different way to play the game. i find it to be more challenging than the original.
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