Nikola Tesla, famed for his work on alternating current, was one hell of an inventor, mechanical engineer and physicist. His inventions have been found to work better than expected even 100 years after he noted them down. However, nobody can be right 100 percent of the time, and Nikola Tesla had his fair share of being wrong – often massively so.

Tesla was not a fan of relativity, describing it as “a beggar wrapped in purple whom ignorant people take for a king”.

Of course, he was wrong, and observably so.

Tesla thought he had measured faster than light travel

He didn’t believe in electrons

He thought the atom could not be split

He was in love with a pigeon
Ok, this isn’t exactly him being “wrong” in the “correct or not” sense, but it seems worth a mention. Tesla had a fairly strange final few years, including falling for a pigeon that used to visit him regularly.

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”

– Nikola Tesla

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Summary

Nikola Tesla was a brilliant, but troubled, genius. His creation of the Tesla coil was a moment of brilliance, leading to a device that’s used even today in many designs, mostly in a modified, improved architecture.

Tesla coils, however, create massive EMI disturbances in neighboring electronics. Designers must use these devices cautiously so that they will perform as desired in an electronic design and not intrude on any electronic devices within range.

Nikola Tesla, famed for his work on alternating current, was one hell of an inventor, mechanical engineer and physicist. His inventions have been found to work better than expected even 100 years after he noted them down. However, nobody can be right 100 percent of the time, and Nikola Tesla had his fair share of being wrong – often massively so.

Tesla disagreed with Einstein
Tesla was not a fan of relativity, describing it as “a beggar wrapped in purple whom ignorant people take for a king”.

Tesla thought he had measured faster than light travel

He was in love with a pigeon
Ok, this isn’t exactly him being “wrong” in the “correct or not” sense, but it seems worth a mention. Tesla had a fairly strange final few years, including falling for a pigeon that used to visit him regularly. “I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman,” he reportedly said of the bird, “and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”

He didn’t believe in electrons
This is a weird one given his work on electricity (which is the flow of electrons through a conductor), but Tesla did not believe in electrons, thinking atoms were the smallest building blocks of the universe, arguing that if they existed they would only do so in a perfect vacuum. He believed in the 19th century view that the “ether” or “aether” transmitted electrical currents.

He thought the atom could not be split
Of course, not believing in electrons led him to the belief that atoms could not be split.
“The idea of atomic energy is illusionary, but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds that, although I have preached against it for 25 years, there still are some who believe it to be realizable,” he said of the topic.

The atom was first split in 1932.