Nikola Tesla. Ideas like lightning

We cannot envision progress in the XXI century without the work of Nikola Tesla, who enlightened us with a different take on science and its resources. This exhibit, created by Fundacion Telefónica, has been planned with great scientific endeavor, but at the same time designed to reach a wider public through multimedia, images and installations dedicated to his inventions.

Nikola Tesla (Smiljan, Serbia, 1856-New York, USA, 1943) is “the genius from whom they stole the light”, having been eclipsed by other scientists, such as Edison and Marconi. Not only did he conceive alternating current and fundamental patents for the invention of the radio, but he was also a pioneer of visionary technologies for his time, such as robotics, vertical take-off aircraft, remotely guided weapons, low-energy light bulbs, alternative energies and wireless electricity. After many years in incomprehensible oblivion, the science and art worlds recently reached an agreement to see him consecrated as the true founder of modern technology.

Today, Nikola Tesla has even become an icon of popular culture, appearing in video games, comics, literature, films, songs, TV series and on websites, at a crossroads of reference points which blur the lines between reality and fiction.

Using multimedia and interactive elements the exhibition embarks on a journey through space and time inhabited by Nikola Tesla: from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the early skyscrapers of New York, hotel rooms to laboratories, fame to ruin, genius to madness, and from solitude to the latest trending topic.

Tesla: His is the future

Nikola Tesla may seem to us a prophet or a visionary. But his genius was founded always on the strict application of scientific principles. By dint of his exceptional intellect, his uncommon intuition and his almost limitless ability to work hard, Tesla opened up new lines of research and created artifacts and concepts which, time has shown, lie at the source of modern technology.

Tesla laid the foundations of what was to become mobile telephony, Wi-Fi, and wireless electricity - or 'witricity'. He also thought about issues that were very much ahead of his time, such as gender equality, sustainability, and globalization. For these reasons, perhaps, Tesla has emerged as a contemporary icon, a fount of inspiration that, strangely enough, science shares with popular culture.

Or present resembles the future that he imagined. What he saw is indeed what came to pass- and the future still belongs to Nikole Tesla.