July 10th: Nikola Tesla Day
According to the Tesla Society, July 10th is officially Nikola Tesla day, and super geeks across the globe are celebrating the day by sharing Tesla’s accomplishments, most of which are completely unknown to the public, yet highly regarded by the geek community.
Tesla was born in the wrong era where the focus was on practicality, sales, and ROI, which although not too different from today, the spin machine that was media was far more controlled in Tesla’s era, thus the reason American textbooks still teach children that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.
There is no person on the globe that has, or maybe ever will, match the genius that is Tesla, and so many years later, he is finally gaining traction and becoming known, whereas in his era, he died alone in a hotel room in love with a pigeon. No joke.
Years ago, when we began discussing how we would meet the demand of having offline events connected to AGBeat (aka AgentGenius), and how to recognize and facilitate the genius that is on the ground, not what we perceive to be our own genius, and we used the title of Nikola Tesla’s book, “A Spark of Genius” as the inspiration for removing ego from the process and focusing on making business better – just as Tesla did. When we win awards for being “innovative” and “genius,” it is an honor, yet it stings a little bit, because we compare our tiny spec of work on this earth to Tesla and know that no one living could possibly touch what he himself created.
Tesla died celibate, claiming that womanizing would hurt his intellectual process, and like many eccentric intellectuals today, he was misunderstood and stolen from by those who had better sales skills, but would it have been different had he been born in a different century? Perhaps. Can you imagine the strange personality lighting up the stage at the Apple WWDC talking about using lightning to bring free energy to the world?
The best outline of Tesla’s work
Today, TheOatmeal, a comedy site drawn by Matt Inman, posted what we like to think of as a love letter to Tesla, showing people his massive accomplishments, and it is the best outline of Tesla’s work we have ever seen. Take a look below, we’re betting you didn’t know 90 percent of all facts presented in this curse-filled, brilliant illustration:
