Tesla’s been getting a lot more publicity recently, and that makes me smile.  A wonderful, unappreciated inventor of so many things, and inadvertantly probably the greatest force in ending the steam-centric age and ushering in electricity!  A world treasure, and just an all round facinating character – Fortean Times did an article on him only recently, though as I’m not a subscriber I cannot see much more than the first of 5 pages.  However, if you’d like something a bit more moving-picture based, there’s a half hour, 80’s documentary on Tesla over at the Internet Archive.  (There seems to be some conspiracy theory tags on it – it’s not related to that, as far as I can see.  You may ignore as you wish.) Were it not for Tesla, we’d not have so many of the linchpins of the modern world – but also of the richness of our fictional world.  Mad scientists with giant tesla coils have become such a mainstay, that we can barely imagine an over-the-top scientific genius without one.  Thanks to reader Charles to give me another excuse to post about the master of electricity.