HighVoltageChick wrote ...

16) Tesla invented the X-Ray tube, did lots of work on radiation, invented the fluorescent light bulb, and most importantly of all, Alternating Current (with George Westinghouse).

pauleddy wrote ...

true, but he did improve the x-ray tube, he notice the x-rays dering his experments with vacume tubes years before the Röntgen published his findings but never thought much of it. then the Röntgen radiation was the hat new thing in science he work on them and made vast inprovements that are what today are mondern x-ray tubes.

Proud Mary wrote ...


Yes, these are very fair points, Turkey.

As for "Fact No 4" in the Top Ten List above, which says that "Tesla was a supporter of the "theory" of eugenics, although it is unclear if this was later in life or not" - it is perfectly clear that he supported eugenics in later life, and was closely associated with Nazi sympathisers in the USA.

As a person, as a human being, Tesla seems to have lost his moral compass somewhere along the way, and openly advocated and praised Nazi theories of 'racial hygiene' that would see millions murdered in Europe:

"The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal."

Source: Tesla N, Vierek GS,* A Machine to End War, Liberty, February 1937

This may well be irrelevant to his work on AC power, but it is just as well he never achieved more influence than he did.

* Tesla's close friend George Sylvester Vierek (1884 - 1962) was imprisoned in the US as a Nazi agent from 1942 till 1947. Vierek thought that the persecution of Jews and other minorities was an inevitable and minor injustice in an "imperfect world." (New York Times, May 18, 1934)