Tesla

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane." ~  Nikola Tesla

I love Tesla.  He is one of the most fascinating people I've ever read about, hands down.  More and more, I believe he could do most if not all of the things he said he could do. I think he would have been so deeply and wonderfully amazing to know for his sheer eccentricity, although he would undoubtedly have been horrified by the two sets of earrings I wear in each ear, and so he probably wouldn't have talked to silly old me, anyway. Science is finally starting to catch up to him only now, almost a century later. 

This quote, however, worries me just a smidgen.  If you know anything about his life, you may wonder as I do which camp he fell in. You may also wonder which camp he believed he fell in.  Was he delivering this line straight or with some of his tongue-in-cheek irony?  Oh, how I wish I could have been there to ask.  Again, though, teasing Tesla isn't probably the sort of thing that is polite. 

We recently passed the anniversary of his death, Jan. 7.  This greatest of the inventors died penniless and alone in his hotel room.  Every time I think about it, it makes me sad.  That great man, the one who made so much of our modern life possible and who believed that those inventions should belong to everyone while Edison was hoarding and profiteering, passed away unnoticed and almost unmourned. 

There's a museum now in his native land, and the scientific community that shunned him in his life now claims him as one of its heroes.  I guess sometimes scientists are like artists and poets, not receiving their due in their lifetimes if they are too much the visionary.