Engineer, physicist, and futurist Nikola Tesla (July 10, 1856–January 7, 1943) is among the most radical rule-breakers of science and is regarded by many as the greatest inventor in human history. His groundbreaking work paved the way for wireless communication and imprinted every electrical device we use today. Without Tesla, I wouldn’t be writing these words on this keyboard and you wouldn’t be reading them on this screen. But like all true geniuses, Tesla envisioned not only the practical applications of his inventions but the profound cultural shifts that any successful technology precipitates.
One of the most surprising, most obscure, yet most incisive of Tesla’s predictions peers into the future of society’s changing gender roles and considers how the advent of wireless technology would empower women, liberating us to develop our full intellectual potential repressed by the patriarchy for centuries.
In January of 1926, a reporter named John B. Kennedy interviewed Tesla about these very ideas. The piece was published in Colliers magazine under the title “When Woman Is Boss” and is discussed in Margaret Cheney’s excellent Tesla: Man Out of Time (public library), which remains the most insightful and dimensional perspective on the great inventor’s mind and spirit.
After reflecting on the future uses of wireless technology and practically predicting the iPhone, Tesla points to the empowerment of women as one of the most significant effects of technology on the world of tomorrow:
Tesla goes on to predict “the acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women” and “their gradual usurpation of leadership” as the inevitable result of that previously repressed potential, newly uncorked by the interconnectivity and educational empowerment that wireless technology would make possible:
