The Man Who Invented the 20th Century

It would be unthinkable to spend the summer in Serbia without visiting a museum dedicated to its most famous citizen, so Onur and I took the chance to visit the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. In all honesty, it’s difficult to avoid Tesla here. He’s on the 100 dinar note and the main airport is named after him, along with seemingly every second street. It’s fascinating and refreshing to see a country to display such pride in its scientific heritage, something which I feel some places tend to neglect.

For anyone not familiar with his work: Tesla was a physicist who lived between 1856 and 1943. He was responsible for many advances in the fields of electricity and magnetism, most notably in his design of AC power supply. He was a prolific and pioneering inventor, holding around 300 patents and is widely regarded as one of the most important scientific minds of all time, due to the long-lasting impacts his discoveries have had.

The entrance to the museum

The museum is situated near the centre of Belgrade (although not so central that we didn’t get lost while trying to find it). The building is smaller than you might expect, containing just seven rooms, but they are all packed full of documents, photos, inventions and other exhibits. When we arrived we were shown a 20 minute film documenting Tesla’s life and work, documenting his childhood in Serbia and all the way through his career in America. We were then given a tour of the museum, which included a demonstration of some of Tesla’s inventions.It was pretty incredible to see what he was able to do over 100 years ago. It was a unique experience to see an ancient-looking machine used to do things that seem futuristic even to this day. Two of my favourites were the Egg of Columbus and the Tesla Coil. The Egg of Columbus uses a rotating magnetic field to make a copper egg rotate on its tip. It looks a bit like a magic trick even when you know how it works because it just feels counterintuitive. You can see a video of an Egg of Columbus in action here.

The Tesla Coil was an invention which Tesla used in his experiments, in particular those involving wireless transmission of electricity. He first demonstrated this in the late 19th century, which becomes all the more impressive when you consider that wireless energy is not commonly available even now. We were given a (very loud) demonstration of his machine that involved lighting a number of fluorescent tubes from across the room. I had a great video of this happening, but unfortunately the museum has a rule against sharing videos of their exhibitions, so just use your imagination.

A large Tesla Coil

There were many other exhibits, some of which I have included as pictures below. Unfortunately Tesla achieved rather a lot in his lifetime, so it’s difficult to find space to talk about them all. I will briefly mention a few other highlights though:

• The first ever radio-controlled boat, which people believed was powered either by magic or a trained monkey.
• A model of Tesla’s design for a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, something that wasn’t achieved until decades later.
• A model of Wardenclyff Tower. This was intended to be a wireless power transmitter, but was unfortunately never completed.

It was a great experience to visit the museum and I would definitely recommend a visit to anyone. Nikola Tesla was certainly a fascinating character who I could never hope to do justice to in under 600 words, but I hope this has given you some sense of his achievements and abilities.

Portrait of Nikola Tesla in the museum

Model of Wardenclyffe Tower

Definition of the Tesla: the unit of magnetic flux density

Model of the VTOL aircraft

The urn containing Tesla’s ashes

The title of this post was taken from Robert Lomas’ biography of Tesla with the same name.