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TESLA'S FANTASTIC VISION OF THE FUTURE. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Tesla's most detailed presentation of his worldview and his fantastic vision of the future. His prescient thoughts on renewable energy, solar power, food sustainability, and the use of stationary electromagnetic waves to "determine the relative position or course of a moving object" - an idea remarkably similar to modern RADAR - are just a few of the topics that Tesla explores in this work. "He was an inventor, an engineer, a scientist and an oddball . more than any one man, Nikola Tesla is responsible for the twentieth century" (Hunt, introduction to Nikola Tesla: My Inventions and Other Writings, 2011). In his speech presenting Tesla with the Edison medal in 1917, B. A. Behrend, Vice President of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, stated: "Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the result of Mr. Tesla's work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark and our mills would be idle and dead. His name marks an epoch in the advance of electrical science." "In the early part of 1900, Tesla . concentrated most of his efforts on working on an article for the Century. Robert [Underwood Johnson, associate editor of Century] had requested that Tesla write an educational piece about telautomatics and wireless communication. The plan was to decorate the essay with photographs of the remote-controlled boat and the inventor's fantastic experiments in Colorado, but Tesla had other ideas . the inventor decided to compose a once-in-a-lifetime apocalyptic treatise on the human condition and technology's role in shaping world history. Robert pleaded with him 'not to write a metaphysical article, but rather an informative one,' but Tesla would not listen. Instead, he sent back a twelve-thousand-word discourse which covered such topics as the evolution of the race, artificial intelligence, the possibility of future beings surviving without the necessity of eating food, the role of nitrogen as a fertilizer, telautomatics, alternative energy sources (e.g., terrestrial heat, wind, and the sun), a description of how wireless communication can be achieved, hydrolysis, problems in mining, and the concept of the plurality of worlds. Robert was now in a bind. Neither he nor [Century editor Richard Watson] Gilder wanted to publish a lengthy, controversial, abstract philosophical essay which might damage the magazine. However, they could not simply cross out sections they were unhappy with, for they were dealing with a man who was born a genius and a friend who had contributed two previous gems that added greatly to the prestige of their publication . [Tesla] had decided, once and for all, to put down a significant percentage of the knowledge he had amassed into one treatise, and there was no way he was going to change it. Most likely Robert conferred with Gilder. Clearly, the essay was brilliant and original, and the more they read it, the more they realized its many layers of wisdom. The best tack to take at this point, they reasoned, was to work to clarify the piece by using subheadings, by including all of the startling electrical photos from Colorado, and the telautomaton, and by having Tesla more carefully explain the details of his inventions, and then hope for the best . When the article appeared in the June issue of the Century, it created a sensation ." (Seifer, pp. 239-241). "Overlengthy though Tesla's writing may have been, it succeeded in interesting many readers-most notably the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas Edison's early backer. Morgan told Tesla that he might sponsor the inventor's plans for worldwide message transmission ." (Yount, p. 72). No copies in auction records. We are aware of only one other copy in wrappers having appeared on the market. "Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Lika [now Croatia] in 1856 as the fourth child of Miluti. Seller Inventory # 6254
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