People today are fascinated by artificial intelligence and robotics. But did you know that Nikola Tesla was the first to demonstrate robotics in 1898? He enthralled onlookers with his robot boat in New York City long before Isaac Asimov made robots chic.
I wrote about this in my book, Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity:
While his Tesla coil research was proceeding, Tesla was also moving forward with his wireless radio experimentation. In “The Art of Telautomatics,” Tesla refers to a remote-controlled boat he described in The Century Magazine and demonstrated in Madison Square Garden back in 1898. In order to show how wireless technology could be used to command ships and missiles from a distance, Tesla had a large tank built in the center of the arena in which he placed “an iron-hulled boat a few feet long, shaped like an arc.” The audience, mostly attendees of the first annual Electrical Exhibition, was requested to ask questions and the automaton would answer them by signs, usually by turning left or right or reversing direction. “This was considered magic at the time,” writes Tesla, “but was extremely simple, for it was myself who gave the replies by means of the device.” He repeated the exercise with a more advanced and larger telautomatic boat in 1919. While Tesla acknowledged that these were “the first and rather crude steps in the evolution of the art of telautomatics,” it did signal the beginning of what today we might call robotics. Consider Tesla’s designs then and the remote-controlled drones used in our more recent military and terrorist control efforts and you can see how far he was ahead of his time.
Tesla’s experiments with wireless technology eventually led him to Colorado Springs, whose dramatic local lightning phenomena gave him a superb testing grounds. After about a year in Colorado he returned to New York and set up his famed Wardenclyffe laboratory and tower on Long Island. More on that at the link.
[The above is adapted from Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity]
David J. Kent is the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity (2013) and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (2016) and two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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