Answer: yes and here’s how
Explanation: Of the exhibits in Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Museum, perhaps the most telling contains Mr. Tesla’s brown suit, which hangs in a glass case in the front room. With its natty, old-fashioned styling punctuated by the dapper brown trilby hovering over the space where his head ought to be, the disembodied ensemble recalls an illustration for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It’s a slightly unsettling but apt metaphor for the brilliant Serbian inventor and futurist who arguably did more to shape and foretell the 20th century than anyone, yet who remains a largely forgotten historical footnote.
Nikola Tesla did not always labor in obscurity. For a fleeting decade or so around the turn of the century, he was the toast of America, the country to which he’d emigrated in 1884. Feted by the press and showered with gold medals and awards from learned institutions and universities, he threw dinner parties at Delmonico’s in New York, entertained crowds with showy electricity demonstrations, and counted J.P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor, and Mark Twain among his many famous acquaintances.
For it was Tesla’s genius that solved the problem of how to distribute electricity safely and efficiently to homes, shops, and factories—something that had defeated Thomas Edison. With that innovation, he helped usher in a whole new industrial age. He additionally gave the world its first, functional electric motor: Whenever a vacuum cleaner clatters to life, a laptop powers up, or an overhead light is turned on, the technology used can be traced back to Tesla.
In one golden decade beginning in 1893, he pioneered radio technology some two years ahead of Guglielmo Marconi, created the world’s first x-ray images, and conceived the idea of radar. While the late 19th-century world became enthralled with the wondrous new age of hydroelectric dams, power lines, and electric lighting available at the flick of a switch, Tesla continued to leapfrog ahead. He invented the bladeless turbines used in modern jet engines and imagined a wireless future in which information, music, pictures, and limitless renewable energy could be beamed around the globe instantly, free, and available for all.
