Duke has joined a short list of prestigious universities charged by retired elementary school teacher John Wagner with preserving the memory of Nikola Tesla, a man he calls the "underdog of electrical history." To help kick off that endeavor, Wagner presented the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) department with a $6,000 bronze bust of Tesla, which now sits in the Pratt School's Vesic Library for Engineering, Mathematics and Physics.
"Tesla had over 100 patents in his name," said master of ceremonies Adam Durity, president of the IEEE Student Branch, in his welcome to Wagner at the donation ceremony Nov. 4. "He was a great inventor whose fruits are used daily, but his name is often put behind others, or dropped entirely."
The bust is the 17th Wagner has awarded to help reverse that trend. The busts are purchased with the help of funds raised through t-shirt sales and letters written by third graders at DickenElementary School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an effort that offers purpose for what would otherwise be a rote task: learning to write in cursive, Wagner said.
April Brown, chair of ECE, accepted the donation on behalf of the department. The prize has previously gone to Harvard, Yale, MIT and Cal Tech.
Tesla was born in 1856, the same year as James B. Duke, Wagner noted.
"It was a good year for giving," he said. "Duke gave you the university, but Tesla gave the power to run it."
While the movies the 75-year-old Wagner grew up watching in the 1940s, not to mention the Smithsonian Institution, all seem to attribute the breakthroughs that first made electricity possible on a broad scale to Thomas Edison, Wagner reminds people that it was, in fact, Tesla who invented the system of polyphase alternating current (AC) power generation and transmission that drives the world today.
"It just had to be Tesla who 'invented tomorrow,'" writes Wagner on a website dedicated to his cause. The vast capacity of electric generating stations in the U.S. demonstrates Tesla's broad influence, he said.
"This is an outstanding event," said Gary Ybarra, ECE professor of the practice and director of undergraduate studies. "Mr. Wagner's dedication to ensuring an accurate historical account of electrical science and invention is highly commendable."
At the dedication ceremony, Wagner also noted that visiting professor Philip Trickey, who was active in the ECE department until his death in 1991, won the IEEE's Nikola Tesla award in 1980 for advancing Tesla's theories through precise designs of small induction machines.
"You should be pleased to have had one in your midst honored by Tesla," Wagner said.
For those interested in boosting Wagner's cause, sweaters and polo shirts embroidered with Tesla's formula for the unit of magnetic flux density are available here.