I believe there is not much left to say about Nikola Tesla's work. The engineer and inventor completely revolutionized the development, generation, and distribution of alternating current. However, when we explore some details of his later years, we discover ideas that can only be called controversial. One of them was his support for eugenics. Tesla was convinced that by 2100 eugenics would be universally established, and that more drastic measures were needed to prevent the reproduction of undesirables.
The essential principles of eugenics can be traced back to ancient Greece without much difficulty, but this philosophy gained much traction at the beginning of the 20th century, and quickly established itself in different circles, including the political one. Charles Lindbergh, Winston Churchill, H.G. Wells, Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes... let's say eugenics did not lack sympathizers.
Obviously, each of them had their own interpretation, but the general result was a mix of positive and negative actions: positive through encouraging the reproduction of those individuals considered outstanding, and negative such as the prohibition of marriages and mandatory sterilization for the unfit.
Universal Eugenics by the Year 2100
Another very high-profile name that supported eugenics at the time was Nikola Tesla. In recent years, the need to do justice and recognize with much greater emphasis the work of this extraordinary inventor has arisen, especially when compared to Thomas Edison, who is seen as greedy and business-focused.
If we study some of his interviews, we can conclude that Tesla believed there would be a change in the sexual order with women (whom he saw as superior) in first place, adopting a matriarchal structure similar to that of bees. But at the same time, Tesla always conveyed the feeling of being disappointed with the human species, and specifically with men. For that reason, his support for eugenics in his later years does not surprise us so much.
The most important eugenic statements by Nikola Tesla were published in the February 9, 1935 issue of Liberty magazine, and rediscovered by journalist Matt Novak in November 2012. The article describes a series of predictions by Tesla for the next hundred years, including the abandonment of tea, coffee, and tobacco because they will go out of style, and a change in priorities regarding war and education spending.
However, although later in the text he suggests that progress is impossible if nations insist on the savage practice of killing each other, Tesla did not hesitate to point out that eugenics would be universally established by 2100.
He then added that a new sense of pity in man began to interfere with the relentless work of nature, and the result is the reproduction and survival of the unfit. His interpretation was that the only method compatible with our notions of civilization and race was to prevent the reproduction of the unfit by sterilization, and to mark a deliberate direction in the reproductive instinct.
Another disturbing part of the text is when he indicates that several European countries and states of the American Union sterilized criminals and the mentally ill, and that that was not enough. Marriage needed to be more difficult to achieve, and no one who was not a desirable father or mother should have the possibility of producing offspring.
Needless to say, several defenders of eugenics were able to observe a practical application of their philosophy with Nazism. Tesla died in January 1943, almost eight years after the article's publication, and perhaps he did not have a complete idea of the impact caused by concepts like racial purity and selective breeding on the disturbed minds of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen... not to mention the fact that Serbs (and Slavs in general) were considered 'Untermensch'.
To close, I will say that it is worth reading the entire article, as it serves as a very particular window into the past. Those who are right in a big way can also be wrong in a big way, and in this, Tesla was wrong.
