Ericsson Business Review no. 3 2012

Energy is at the heart of most of the things we do – so the radical process of change that our energy systems are undergoing concerns us all in one way or another. It is a change that goes far beyond solar panels and smart meters. Completely new market models are being created –and things are starting to move really fast. This issue’s theme takes a closer look at the challenges that utility companies face as they press ahead with smart-grid initiatives, adding sophisticated communications networks to the transmission and distribution power grid. And as yet another industry reinvents itself through ICT, this is by no means just a technological challenge. It involves the ability to connect really closely to consumers’ needs and behaviors – as well as to socioeconomic and environmental goals.

An eternal source of power

On March 27, 1904, The New York Times carried the poetic headline Cloudborn Electric Wavelets To Encircle the Globe. The newspaper went on to report on the latest dream of the Serbian-American inventor and visionary Nikola Tesla: to gather in the latent electricity in the clouds, and with the globe itself as a medium of transmission, to convey telegraphic messages, power for commercial purposes, or even the sound of the human voice to the utmost confines of the earth.

Tesla is remembered for developing alternating current in a way that made possible the widespread industrial-scale use of electricity. But his own vision was much broader and more radical than that. His demonstration of the wireless transmission of energy continues to intrigue modern-day scientists who are still trying to understand how he made it work.

By no means a mad scientist, he was rather the contrary: a man of great integrity who gave much thought to the meaning and ethical aspects of science and technological development.

The handwritten text at the bottom of the picture says "To Prof. A. Slaby with expressions of esteem from Nikola Tesla." Adolf Slaby was a German wireless pioneer and became the first professor of electro-technology at the Technical University of Berlin in 1886. In a dispute with Marconi who claimed that others stole his work, Slaby held the view that in fact it was Tesla who had first published the basic concepts of wireless communications, in 1894, before Marconi had started his research.