“Nikola Tesla has always been a backroom genius, a scientist’s scientist, a nerd’s nerd. But things are looking up for the Serbian inventor, who died in 1943. It started in 2006, when then up-and-coming filmmaker Christopher Nolan wrote Tesla into The Prestige, and cast David Bowie to play the perfector of radio waves, alternating current, remote control and radar. In 2012, cartoonist Matthew Inman explained “why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived” in one of his popular The Oatmeal online comics. By July, 2014, when the entrepreneur behind the Tesla electric car, Elon Musk, announced he would donate a million dollars to help save Tesla’s old lab in New Jersey, the little-known inventor was almost a houshold name, despite most people still not being clear on who the guy was.
[caption id="attachment_22686" align="alignleft" width="600"] Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade[/caption]
Musk’s money will help turn the building in Wardenclyffe, N.J., into a Nikola Tesla museum. But the Nikola Tesla Museum already exists, in Belgrade. It contains nearly everything he wrote or owned and, its curator told me, it has no intention of giving the new museum anything, even on extended loan. So if you want to know more about the man who inspired the next wave of automobiles, you’ll have to visit the Serbian capital. What I discovered on my visit, however, is that Belgrade itself is the real revelation.
Tesla did not spend much time in Belgrade – one account says the small-town boy was there for a single afternoon – but according to his nephew, it was the scientist’s last wish that his work and archives be returned there. Tesla lived most of his life in the United States, but he was always a proud Serbian.
The museum is small and cool, in a way only museums in proud but underfunded nations can be, and housed in a large 1930s neoclassical house originally built for a government minister. It holds 160,000 documents, including a number of translations into English by Tesla of Serbian authors. I saw one translation, a handwritten page of poetry by Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj, Tesla’s favourite Serbian writer, and realized that I knew practically nothing about this place.
[caption id="attachment_20343" align="alignleft" width="600"] Belgrade by night[/caption]
As on previous trips to other former Eastern Bloc countries, the lasting effects of the Cold War became apparent. It’s as if, for decades, a blanket had been thrown over the whole area. As a result (along with some American culture-jamming) these places, rich with distinctive foods and wines, literature, art and music, continue to be a blank page to most people from the West.”
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