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Electric Mind

Nikola Tesla, who turned on the world with his AC technology, talks about robots, cell phones, and the sacred fire of invention.

In 1885, armed with an unproven new device, the alternating-current polyphase generator, Nikola Tesla set out to fight a crucial battle. His foe: Thomas Edison, the inventor/entrepreneur/public hero whose direct-current technology was distributing electricity to hundreds of US cities. But DC was flawed - because its current waned with distance, homes and factories had to be situated within a few thousand feet of generators. Using Tesla's AC system, however, electricity could be transmitted for hundreds of miles.

Still, Edison's stature gave DC the inside track. But Tesla had an influential backer, George Westinghouse, who in 1893 underbid Edison for the contract to light the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Alternating current performed so well at the fair that the technological tide turned. Today, the world's power grids are based on Tesla's AC polyphase system.

As for Tesla, a Croatian-born Serb who came to America as a young man, he had just begun to innovate. His inquiries anticipated hundreds of familiar devices and technologies, including lasers, cell phones, artificial intelligence and robots, and remote-control devices. Born in 1856 of a family with extraordinary longevity, Tesla once predicted he would live past age 140. Now, 142 years after he was born, he still has a lot to say.

WIRED: Your alternating-current technology revolutionized electric power almost overnight, but the world is only now catching up with your other ideas. What's the role of invention in today's tech-driven society?

TESLA: It is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

What advice would you give to someone following in your footsteps?

To concentrate all his energies on one single great effort. Let him perceive a single truth, even though he'll be consumed by the sacred fire, and millions of less gifted men can easily follow him. Let him toil day and night with a small chance of achieving and yet be unflinching. It is not as much quantity as quality of work which determines the magnitude of the progress.

And we've seen plenty of progress toward things you predicted, from cosmic rays to subatomic forces. Any sense we're reaching our limits?

Even in the fields most successfully exploited, the ground has only been broken. What has been so far done by electricity is nothing as compared to what the future has in store. It is paradoxical yet true to say that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.

And that evolution leads where? What are the barriers to getting there?