Laser beams, hovercrafts, and listening to aliens from Venus made Tesla the prototype for the “mad scientist.”
Born in Serbia to a priest and an inventor, Nikola Tesla showed skills in science at a young age. He studied at several universities when he was old enough. As a young adult he took a job in the United States, working with Thomas Edison, where he invented many practical items such as the Tesla Coil, which conducted “AC” energy, and prototypes of what would later become “the radio.”
However, some of his inventions are what might be called “strange.” One such invention used magnets to float a “carriage” over the Earth in what could be called a hovercraft. Steering was problematic, though, as it didn’t go where he wanted
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This device, however, shot lightning into the air, ended up causing a massive blackout, and, at another time, the oscillating parts under the floor caused Mark Twain to soil himself from the vibrations.
Perhaps his most “mad” invention, though, was the “Doomsday Device.” It was intended to project energy in a beam (similar to modern lasers) to anywhere on Earth, but a few days after testing it Tesla read in a newspaper that part of Russia had “exploded” in what is commonly called the Tunguska Event. It turns out that a meteor crashed in the area, and knocked down acres of forest, but poor Tesla was so terrified that he’d blown up a large area that he immediately dismantled his creation.
Even though Tesla made some wacky inventions it was one of his most practical that got him the “crazy” label. When testing his radio he thought he heard beeping and clicking sounds. Since no one had invented similar technology at that point in time, he thought that the sounds must have come from an extraterrestrial civilization. No one knows where the sounds were really coming from, but other scientists determined that it was not from Venus, as Tesla claimed, or any other planet for that matter. Because of his beliefs the other scientists lost much respect for