[Loch-Ruadh] Which Historical Lunatic Are You?

Alric and Fiona sidhe01 at swbell.net
Fri May 13 04:21:41 PDT 2005


now who would have believed this of me.   Alric

You are Nicola Tesla, inventor of the Tesla Coil!

A minister's son from Simljan in Austria-Hungary, you were precocious from
an early age. At three you could multiply three-digit numbers in your head
and calculate how many seconds visitors to your home had lived. In awe of
your older brother Dane, you shot a pea-shooter at his horse, causing it to
throw him and inflict injuries from which he later died. This tragedy
haunted you ever after. You frequently suffered bouts of illness with
hallucinations throughout your life. During one affliction of cholera, you
encountered the writing of Mark Twain, with whom you were later to be close
friends. Later, another, this time mystery, illness inexplicably heightened
your senses to a painful extent, only relenting when you hit upon the idea
of the alternating current motor.

You developed an aversion to human contact, particularly involving hair, and
a fear of pearls; when one would-be lover kissed you, you ran away in agony.
Later, you insisted that any repeated actions in your day-to-day life had to
be divisible by three, or, better yet, twenty-seven. You would, for example,
continue walking until you had executed the required number of footsteps.
You refused to eat anything until you had calculated its exact volume.
Saltine crackers were a favourite for their uniformity in this respect. In
the midst of important work, you forgot trivial details such as eating,
sleeping or, on one memorable occasion, who you were.

Your inventions, always eccentric, began on a suitably bizarre note. The
first was a frog-catching device that was so successful, and hence so
emulated by your fellow children, that local frogs were almost eradicated.
You also created a turbine powered by gluing sixteen May bugs to a tiny
windmill. The insects panicked and flapped their wings furiously, powering
the contraption for hours on end. This worked admirably until a small child
came along and ate all the creatures alive, after which you never again
touched another insect.

Prompted by dreams of attaining the then-ridiculed goal of achieving an
alternating-current motor, you went to America in the hope of teaming up
with Thomas Edison. Edison snubbed you, but promised fifty thousand dollars
if you could improve his own direct-current motor by 20% efficiency. You
succeeded. Edison did not pay up. It was not long until you created an AC
motor by yourself.

Now successful, you set up a small laboratory, with a few assistants and
almost no written records whatsoever. Despite it being destroyed by fire,
you invented the Tesla Coil, impressing even the least astute observer with
man-made lightning and lights lit seemingly by magic. Moving to Colorado
Springs, you created a machine capable of sending ten million volts into the
Earth's surface, which even while being started up caused lightning to shoot
from fire hydrants and sparks to singe feet through shoes all over the town.
When calibrated to be in tune with the planet's resonance, it created what
is still the largest man-made electrical surge ever, an arc over 130 feet
long. Unfortunately, it set the local power plant aflame.

You returned to New York, incidentally toying with the nascent idea of
something eerily like today's internet. Although the wealthiest man in
America withdrew funding for a larger, more powerful resonator in short
order, it did not stop you announcing the ability to split the world in two.
You grew ever more diverse in your inventions: remote-controlled boats and
submarines, bladeless turbines, and, finally, a death ray.

While whether the ray ever existed is still doubtful, it is said that you
notified the Peary polar expedition to report anything strange in the
tundra, and turned on the ray. First, nothing happened; then it
disintegrated an owl; finally, reports reached you of the mysterious
Tunguska explosion, upon which news you dismantled the apparatus
immediately. An offer during WWII to recreate it was, thankfully, never
acted upon by then-President Wilson. Turning to other matters, you
investigated the forerunner of radar, to widespread derision.

Your inventions grew stranger. One oscillator caused earthquakes in
Manhattan. You adapted this for medical purposes, claiming various health
benefits for your devices. You found they let you work for days without
sleep; Mark Twain enjoyed the experience until the sudden onset of
diarrhoea. You claimed to receive signals in quasi-Morse Code from Mars,
explored the initial stages of quantum physics; proposed a "wall of light",
using carefully-calibrated electromagnetic radiation, that would allegedly
enable teleportation, anti-gravity airships and time travel; and proposed a
basic design for a machine for photographing thoughts. You died aged 87 in
New York, sharing an apartment with the flock of pigeons who were by then
your only friends.

Ridiculed throughout your life (Superman fought the evil Dr. Tesla in 1940s
comics), you were posthumously declared the father of the fluorescent bulb,
the vacuum tube amplifier and the X-ray machine, and the Supreme Court named
you as the legal inventor of the radio in place of Marconi. Wardenclyffe,
the tower once housing your death ray, was dynamited several times to stop
it falling into the hands of spies. It was strangely hard to topple, and
even then could not be broken up.


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