The story of the last photo of Nikola Tesla before his death

The most unfairly relegated scientific mind of public recognition was undoubtedly owned by Nikola Tesla. History is built through the dominant accounts and a fact can be counted as many times as necessary to make it a reality. In the case of Tesla, the practical applications of technological developments such as alternating current or X-rays were discriminated against in the scientific community thanks to the stigma that arose over their revolutionary ideas, in part driven by the campaign begun by Thomas Alva Edison, Ideas of dangerous.

Thanks to the discrepancy granted by the scientific lobby, Tesla's ideas were no longer taken seriously and the vision of the general public about his work was that of a mad scientist. More than 150 years after its birth, the passage of time served to appreciate in its just magnitude the legacy that the audacity and usefulness of the Austrian scientist left today. Tesla's thought innovation is present in the technology we use every day: from computing, telecommunications, automobiles and even GPS to cell phones, all were fields that received some significant input from Nikola Tesla.

The personality of the scientist was confused, for a moment introverted and at the same time, explosive. Unlike his American counterpart, Thomas Alva Edison, Tesla lacked a business mindset and thought of money as a way of funding more scientific studies and experiments. This reason, coupled with an exhausting trial of the invention of the radio that maintained against Marconi, caused that Tesla spent his last years in solitude and barely with the sufficient income to subsist.

Tesla continued thinking about the possibilities of electromagnetism and studying a system of wireless transmission of electricity, while his age wreaked havoc with his physical strength. The inventor of the alternating current lived in low-budget hotels in New York, until he moved to room 3327 of the New Yorker hotel. His personal convictions led him to start a vegetarian diet, which included mainly bread, honey and vegetable juices.

Old Tesla went out during his last autumn to tour the parks of New York. He sat on a bench and waited for the pigeons, one of his favorite animals, to approach his body to feed them for hours. On January 7, 1943, after 86 years of life, Nikola Tesla was found dead in her room, after a maid noticed the stillness of the room during the previous two days.

The last picture of Tesla in life, is an older adult who - although tired - maintains the same curious and strange face that led him to discover some of the principles that govern the world today. Immediately after his death, the United States government intervened in his room and personal offices, subtracting all sorts of notes, light machines and construction plans. The professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John G. Trump, examined for three days each one of the objects of the scientist and when realizing the lack of planes, he affirmed that these were speculative and philosophical innovations.

Tesla hated to write plans and instructions, even to assemble the machines that came from his head. Instead, he used to capture the final appearance of his designs on paper, without any details of the performance. Hence most of his ideas are preserved, but they are indecipherable today. Three days after his death, about two thousand people gathered in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and then followed the body to its final destination, Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsely, New York, being the first of a multitude of recognitions, all Post-mortem for the scientist.

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