Teleautomaton
"Tesla's hardware seems perhaps less impressive today. However, his sweeping vision of the future is not. In many ways it anticipates Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics which linked biological and mechanical systems in greater detail. Tesla was also the first to see a direct analogy between machines and man in their mechanics, senses, and controls. In this he is first to think of robots, not as dedicated devices, but as complex integrated systems. This is an insight that has been wasted on many modern researchers. As with Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the future will bring forth some yet unknown work that will further establish Tesla's role as a pioneer of robotics."-Miomir Vukobratović, Serbian Journal of Engineers (2006)
Radio, Remote Control, and Robots
Tesla is viewed as the father of modern robotics. His invention of the teleautomaton, a small wireless controlled boat, has influenced countless military signaling devices. It incorporated one of the earliest uses of radio waves. The teleautomaton introduced a new age of technology, one of radio signaling and robotic machines.
“An automaton endowed with power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli beating upon my sense organs, and thinks and acts and moves accordingly.”- Nikola Tesla (about the human body)
"The place was New York, Madison Square Garden, 1898, during an electrical exhibition. For the first time in history Nikola Tesla applied the radio waves to direct movement of a Robot-boat in a pool of water. Radio waves were unknown in 1898. |
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"By the 19-teens, ham radio operators were everywhere...were sending homework and football scores and news in Morse code, and then they went to World War I and found out about vacuum tubes.”-Susan J. Douglas, Discover Magazine (2007)
Logic Gate
"It was 109 years ago, in the early spring of 1903, that Nikola Tesla, one of the world’s most renowned inventors, filed specifications for two patents claiming the invention of logic gates, a system for transmitting intelligible messages that would become the building blocks of all modern computers, save England from the Nazis, and will, perhaps, in just a few short years transform the world as we know it."-Elise Ackerman (2012)
Tesla patented the logic gate system shortly after his teleautomaton. It has allowed for the creation of all modern computers.
"In the twenty-first century the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not come to pass in less than a century, freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations."-Nikola Tesla, Liberty Magazine (1935)