Madison Square Garden, the electrical exhibition of 1898. A man steps onto the stage. He’s a tall man, fastidious and mustachioed, and he speaks with an Eastern European accent when he tells the assembled crowd that he has invented a device to send signals through the very air and control devices remotely. The Crowd is skeptical. That sounds like magic. This is a time where electricity had only recently become part of the life of major cities. This was before the first widely recognized demonstration of radio transmission.
But they also knew Tesla was a man of nearly wizard-like powers. If he said that someday people would be able to send signals over long distances, even control machines through signals in the air, then maybe, just maybe, it was true.
Tesla was not a man to leave the crowd long in dispense. He unveiled a tank of water. A small boat, about four feet long, floated inside it. Tesla told the crowd that he would control the boat without ever going near it. It was plain to see that there were no wires attached. Tesla told the crowd that didn’t matter, that he would control the boat using electromagnetic waves which, while invisible to the eye, passed through the air.
He operated an electronic control device of his own design and, to the astonishment of everyone present the boat started to move. Tesla steered the boat around the little tub, telling the crowd he could turn it left or right, make it accelerate or stop, and following up each claim with immediate proof—controlling the little boat expertly.
Nikola Tesla had done it again. Like a man out of time he’d shown the world the future. While remote controlled vehicles wouldn’t be anything more than a novelty for 100 years, he was right when he told the stunned crowd that someday mankind would harness the power of machines controlled through invisible signals through the air. He’d given the people of the 19th century a glimpse of the 21st.
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For more, listen to the Podcast episode and check out my book, History Stories for Everyone, where I dive deeper into this and some of history’s other most fascinating and relatable human stories:
