Nikola Tesla

Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer (1856–1943), pioneer of alternating-current power and a prophet of wireless energy transmission.

Tesla's inventions — the AC induction motor, polyphase power distribution, high-frequency and wireless experiments — made him an emblem of the visionary inventor whose ambitions ran ahead of his era's ability to fund or accept them.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: forebear. Tesla is an admired inventor-predecessor to R. Buckminster Fuller within the corpus's technology-abundance milieu, where he recurs in the dome-and-energy circles (the Integratron and related mid-century inventor lore). Both men worked from the conviction that technology, rightly directed, could deliver energy and abundance to everyone — Tesla through wireless power, Fuller through ephemeralization and the global energy grid. Tesla represents the earlier generation of world-scale inventor whose optimism Fuller carried forward.

See Also

• Isaac Newton (Isaac Newton) — fellow predecessor-scientist in Fuller's account of the physical world

Sources

• The Integratron (source reference) — situates Tesla in the corpus's inventor-and-energy lore