Men, please don't get caught up in such

Last Tuesday at a media launch on a range of technology products on the invitation of my friend Noni Mbugguss, my mind went back to a documentary I'd coincidentally watched that morning on Viasat History about the man called Nikola Tesla.

Born in Serbia in 1856, Tesla was a prodigy who in his first year of university elected to take all nine of the courses available in his engineering college, instead of the five required. This is the equivalent of a KCSE student choosing to take nine subjects instead of the required five, and asking to be examined on all of them.

Being one of those rare four-hour-a-night sleepers, Tesla would wake up at 3am and work till 11 pm. At the end of his first year, he had the highest grades in every subject and returned home in triumph. But everything changed in the second year when he began challenging his professors academically.

Insecure about this problem genius, they crushed his grades, and by his third year in university, Tesla seemed to have lost interest in engineering and spent his time gambling in the streets of Graz, dropping out before he could get his degree.

Tesla left Europe for America with just a letter of recommendation, book of poetry and five cents in his pocket. In the USA, he soon became one of the most valued engineers for the inventor, Thomas Edison. They fell out after Edison gave Tesla a raise instead of 50,000 dollars for a workplace invention.

Tesla left in a huff, spent a year digging ditches in 1886/1887, before the electric mogul George Westinghouse employed him, and after Tesla invented the ‘alternating current’ system we still use today, gave him a large royalty on his invention.

Amazingly, a few years later, Tesla allowed himself to be persuaded to sell future royalties back to Westinghouse in exchange for a lump sum of USD216,000 (Sh22 million). This was because Tesla, never very much money minded, preferred the quick cash so he could set up a laboratory to experiment on his latest interest – X rays.

 As it turned out, a chap called Roentgen beat Tesla to the discovery of X-rays by a matter of days, after Tesla’s USD50,000 lab had been destroyed in a fire.

Tesla soon moved on into experimenting with radio, only for Italian physicist Gugliemo Marconi to use 17 Tesla patents to ‘invent’ radio in 1901. Tesla took Marconi to court in 1904, but with the international nature of the case in a pre-global era, the USA/ Italy jurisdictional divide and two world wars in-between, it wasn’t until 1943, almost 40 years later, that the case was concluded in favour of Tesla.

By then, the 86-year old genius was on his deathbed in a hotel in New York, broke after having invested all his monies across the years in scientific ventures that did not quite work out.

 Yet he would have been worth about USD300 million (Sh30 billion) at the time of his death, had he not given back those patent royalties to George Westinghouse many decades before.

As I cocktail mingled with fellow journalists Kenna, Eudiah Kamonjo and great photographer Michael Khatelli after the launch, I wondered how differently it might have turned out for Tesla if he had had a hard wife, and children to feed. (He died without ever marrying or having kids, being obsessed with work).

Would he have given up his a/c royalties just to chase after elusive X-rays in his lab? But that is alternate history. And reality, really, is pretty much all direct current.