But I haven’t given up. And you cannot give up.

Why Getting Into Trouble is Necessary to Make Change

I’ve seen unbelievable changes during the past 50 or 60 years. When people say, “Nothing has changed,” I feel like saying, “Come and walk in my shoes.” I truly believe that if there is faith and hope and determination, we can continue to lay progress and create an American community at peace with ourselves. The next generation will help us get there.

When I was growing up as a child in Alabama, I saw signs all around me–I saw crosses that the Klan had put up, an announcement about a Klan meeting. I saw signs that said White, colored, white men, colored men, white women, colored women. There were places where we couldn’t go. But we brought those signs down. The only place you will see those signs today will be in a book, in a museum or on a video. When I was growing up, the great majority of African Americans could not participate in a democratic process in the South. They could not register to vote. But we changed that. When I first came to Washington to go on the freedom rides in 1961, black people and white people couldn’t be seated together on a Greyhound bus leaving this city. They travel to the South without being beaten, arrested and jailed.

Now all across the South and all across America there are elected officials who are people of color. In the recent elections in Virginia and some other places around the country, you saw more people of color and more women getting elected to positions of power. They are African American, they’re Latino, Asian American, Native American. Our country is a much better place–a much different place–in spite of all the setbacks and interruptions of progress.

I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say on many occasions, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I still believe we will get there. We will redeem the soul of America, and in doing so we will inspire people around the world to stand up and speak out. I believe that it’s true today, and it was true when Dr. King said it years ago. I tell friends and family, colleagues and especially young people that when you see something that’s not right or fair, you have to do something, you have to speak up, you have to get in the way. When I was growing up, my mother and father and grandparents would tell me, “Don’t get in trouble. This is the way it is.” But then I heard Dr. King speak when I was 15. To hear him preach, to be in a discussion with him sitting on the floor, or in a car, or at a meeting in a restaurant or a church, or just walking together … He instilled something within us. I never in my years around him saw him down. Never saw him hostile or mean to a single person.

Dr. King and others inspired me to get in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. And I think we’re going to have generations for years to come that will be prepared to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble. And lead us to higher heights. It’s a struggle that doesn’t last one day, one week, one month, one year. It is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe many lifetimes.

The next generation will help make this society less conscious of race. There will be less racism, there will be more tolerance. Dr. King said we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters. There was a man by the name of A. Philip Randolph, from Jacksonville, Fla., who moved to New York City and became a champion of civil rights, human rights and labor rights. At the March on Washington in 1963 he said, “Remember our mothers and our fore-fathers all came to this great land in different ships. But we’re all in the same boat now.” That is true today.

You have to be hopeful. You have to be optimistic. If not, you will get lost in despair. When I travel around the country, I say, “Don’t get down–you cannot get down.” I’m not down. I got arrested, beaten, left bloody and unconscious. But I haven’t given up. And you cannot give up.

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Edison’s forgotten apprentice

In 1884 a Serbo-Croatian immigrant landed in New York City with just four cents in his pocket, some poetry he had written on the voyage and a few scribbled calculations for some incredible “flying machine” he had imagined

Humble beginnings, but over the next few decades this youngster would give us marvelous inventions such as the induction motor, a variety of new types of generators and transformers, the fluorescent light, improved steam turbine, and alternating electrical current. He would lay the foundations for our ability to transmit electricity over long distances, and he very nearly gave us the ability to transmit electricity without the need for wiring.

This was one bright lad, and with reference letters from Charles Batchelor, Nikola Tesla gained employment in the New Jersey laboratories of Thomas Edison, but that didn’t last long. The two great inventors, it seems, had conflicting styles. Or perhaps Edison was unwilling to share the spotlight with this 28-year-old kid and his alternating current, correctly seeing this as a threat to his investment in direct current power generation.

So Tesla departed Continental Edison Companies in 1885 and sold the patent rights to his alternating current systems to George Westinghouse, founder of the Westinghouse Electric Company. Tesla had demonstrated the advantages of alternating current over Edison's system of direct current when Westinghouse used Tesla's system to light the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Due to this success, Tesla fulfilled a childhood dream by winning the contract to install the world’s first hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls.

Tesla continued to dream of providing electrical energy wirelessly over large areas, and it is to this dream we can attribute his greatest invention. The Tesla coil remains widely used today in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment, and in 1898 it was this invention, utilized in a Colorado Springs demonstration that created spectacular 30-foot lightning bolts and lighted, without the benefit of wires, 200 bulbs spread over 25 miles.

Tesla next met financier J.P. Morgan, and with a $150,000 loan began construction of a wireless broadcasting tower on Long Island. The loan, secured with 51 percent of Tesla’s patent rights, was a worthwhile investment as Tesla expected the tower to be the start of a communications system, transmitting pictures, messages, weather warnings, and stock reports worldwide. The project was abandoned because of Morgan's withdrawal of support in 1905. Morgan wanted to meter the power output for profit, while Tesla wished it to remain free.

Over the decades more than 700 patents were issued, and the world benefitted greatly from the genius that was Nikola Tesla; the fluorescent light, lasers, wireless communication technology, remote electrical control, robotics, improved turbine engines and even vertical take off aircraft have direct roots in Tesla patents. He even invented the flashbulb for photography, if you’re old enough to remember those.

Although the accolades and even a Nobel Prize went to Marconi, Tesla is the father of radio. His published schematics appeared in 1896, several years before Marconi introduced his transmitter to the world.

Tesla gave us our modern electrical transmissions systems, and his dreams, depicted in crude drawings, included energy from the sun and the sea. He predicted interplanetary communications, satellites and space travel long before the science fiction writers scribed their amazing stories.

But the dream of abundant, free energy transmitted around the world sans wiring died with Tesla. Tesla’s tower was demolished in 1917 for wartime security reasons. The tower site remains, and the 100 foot deep foundation is still intact. Tesla's laboratory is maintained in good condition, and now sports a bicentennial plaque. Young engineers still pour over Tesla’s papers seeking unexploited ideas.

Matthew Behrend, Vice President of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (now the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), in a 1915 speech while presenting Tesla with the Edison medal, announced, "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 1931, on Tesla’s 75th birthday, the inventor appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. He received congratulatory letters from more than 70 pioneers in science and engineering, including Albert Einstein, and upon his death was eulogized by the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Mark Twain and Ayn Rand.

As we approach this coming Thursday, the 67th anniversary of Tesla’s January 7,1943 death, please take a look around you and rediscover the genius of this man. How much of your lifestyle do you owe to this poor, Serbian immigrant? Is your home heated by electricity? Do you enjoy your television and radio?

If you appreciate these comforts of your life, pause a moment to be thankful for giants who came before


CITATIONS:

[1] Rajvanshi, A., 2007. Nikola Tesla — The creator of the electric age. J. Resonance Volume 12, Number 3 / March, 2007.

[2] Seifer, M., 2001. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla : Biography of a Genius (Citadel Press)

[3] The Tesla Memorial Society of New York.

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