NIKOLA TESLA (1856 - 1943) ______________________________________________________________________ "Called a madman by someone, a genius by others, and an enigma by nearly everyone, Nikola Tesla was possibly the greatest inventor the world has ever known. He was, without doubt, a trail blazer who created astonishing, sometimes world-transforming, devices that often were virtually without theoretical precedent. It was Tesla who introduced us to the fundamentals of robotry, computers, and missile science and helped pave the way for such space-age technologies as satellites, microwaves, beam weapons, and nuclear fusion. Yet, Tesla still remains one of the least recognized scientific pioneers in history. Certainly he was one of the strangest of scientists-almost supernaturally gifted, erratic, flamboyant, and neurotic nearly to the point of madness. A dandy and popular man-about-town, he was admired by man as diverse as George Westinghouse and Mark Twain and adored by scores of society beauties. Yet his bewildering of compulsions and phobias extended from such mundane subject as food and clean linen to pearls and women's ears. He was fond of creating neighborhood-threatening electrical storms in his apartment laboratory and once nearly knocked down a tall building by attaching a mysterious "black box" to its side. (He claimed he could have destroyed the entire planet with a similar device.) And because he kept so few notes, to this day we can only guess at the details of many of the fantastic scientific projects that occupied his fevered intellect." Adapted from the: "Man out of time" by Margaret Cheney ______________________________________________________________________ lpv@umiacs.umd.edu