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Edited on Sun May-10-09 12:30 PM by onager
Aside from that interesting self-medication tangent...
"Tesla" is one of those names guaranteed to attract...er...enthusiastic (and often unintentionally hilarious) posts. Sort of like "Velikovsky" or "Wilhelm Reich."
I was glad some posters tried to point out the truth: while Tesla was certainly a genius who got shafted, not everything that happened to him was an Edisonian-government conspiracy.
He could be his own worst enemy, which is true of many brilliant people.
Take a recent Hollywood example, the movie "Flash of Genius" about inventor Robert Kearns. The movie shows him as a happy family guy who was always surrounded by his helpful kids in the family basement workshop.
IRL, Kearns was a bizarro religious fanatic known for unpleasantly eccentric behavior. Even before each of his kids were born, he had "jobs" assigned to them in that basement workshop. Some of his kids didn't speak to him for years after they left home. The movie hints at this a little, but has to go for the Obligatory Happy Ending.
Other great examples: William Shockley, winner of the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor. Later in life he decided to become an expert on human genetics, with absolutely no training or experience in the field. Whatever he intended, his statements on the subject came off as blatantly racist. As I remember, his "research" could be summarized by saying: dark-skinned people are dumber than light-skinned people and also, they have too many kids.
Or one of my favorites, Walter Christie, who was way ahead of his time in designing tanks and military vehicles. The US government recognized his genius and tried to hire him many times during the 1920's and 30's. But Christie was a "my-way-or-the-highway" kind of guy. He absolutely refused to compromise or take suggestions from others.
Ironically, his excellent tank suspension system ended up in the service of another guy with the same character traits--Josef Stalin. The Christie suspension was a key feature of the Russian T-34 tank, a major (and often ignored) contributor to the Allied victory in WWII.
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