We must all have some ideal which will govern our behaviour and satisfy us, but it is not material. It can be religion, art, science, whatever, it is only important that it acts as a non-material force.
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Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer whose alternating-current designs powered the modern electrical grid; died poor and largely forgotten. Closely associated with George Westinghouse (his AC-power business partner) and Mihajlo Pupin (fellow Serbian-American physicist at Columbia). For an intellectual contrast, see Thomas Edison, American inventor and direct-current advocate — Edison's direct-current power-distribution scheme was displaced by Tesla-Westinghouse AC in the 1890s 'War of Currents'. Edison ran a public-relations campaign electrocuting animals to discredit AC — the most famous engineering-ethics rivalry in American history. Tesla's AC won and powers nearly every electrical grid on Earth.
Philosophical statement on the importance of non-material ideals in life.
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PhilosophicalFound in 1 providers: gemini
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Every person needs a guiding ideal beyond money or physical comfort — something that gives life direction and meaning. That ideal could be faith, beauty, discovery, or any devotion that isn't reducible to wealth or possessions. What matters is that it operates as an invisible but real force shaping decisions, priorities, and character from the inside out.
Tesla lived this principle literally. He died nearly penniless despite holding hundreds of patents worth fortunes. He consistently rejected lucrative deals — famously tearing up his royalty contract with Westinghouse to save the company — because his driving ideal was advancing human civilization through science, not accumulating wealth. His obsession with wireless energy transmission consumed his later decades with zero commercial payoff.
Tesla spoke during the Gilded Age and early Industrial Revolution, when robber barons defined success purely through material accumulation. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan built empires measured in dollars. Against this backdrop, Tesla's insistence on non-material ideals as civilization's true engine was a direct philosophical counter-argument to the era's dominant worship of wealth and industrial power.
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