Most people would trace the beginning of automation to 1947, when Ford Motor Co. and Del Harder, vice president of production, applied the concept to machine processes in automobile manufacture. Del Harder coined the term, but it was used only internally at Ford to describe automatic processes. The term came into broader use in 1953 in John Diebold's seminal book, Automation, which used it in reference to information as well as mechanics processing.

But automation actually started with Nikola Tesla, who coined the word "teleautomaton," or remotely controlled automatic figure or object. In 1893, he demonstrated that he could transmit electrical energy without wires by remotely controlling a model boat's passage in a shallow water tank in Saint Louis and again a few years later in New York's Madison Square Garden.

Tesla was more than 60 years ahead of his time. After all, George Devol didn't patent his industrial robot until 1957, and the first fully successful fax machine using radio technology was not operational until 1955.

Tesla managed a remote radio device that let him send messages that moved the rudder and thus the boat in ways no one had ever seen before. Some audience members thought Tesla used mind control; others thought it was a trick; still others thought the boat had a mind under its own control. It was not a trick; the boat model still exists in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, Tesla's original homeland.

This incredible invention went almost unnoticed in an age of amazing inventions. Tesla's alternating current (AC) motor and generator and a transmission from Niagara Falls eclipsed his remote-controlled robot. Thomas Edison overshadowed Tesla and tried to undermine Tesla's AC system, showing, through a skewed experiment, that AC was dangerous. Yet, in his last days, Edison saw the value of AC for transmission. Only in the last decade or so have Tesla's amazing accomplishments been acknowledged fully. They are in X-ray, radio, the origins of MRI technology, the AC transmission system, motors and generators, robotics, wireless communication, and energy transmission.

Ironically, Tesla, who did so much to advance communications, died alone and nearly penniless in his room on the thirty-third floor of the New Yorker Hotel in 1943 at age 86. The FBI seized his papers and other possessions because J. Edgar Hoover thought Tesla had stored in one of his trunks a weapon of mass destruction, then referred to as a powerful "death ray." Hoover may have had some basis for suspicion, as Tesla had designed on paper a wireless "ray" of powerful and possibly destructive force. In addition, he once nearly demolished his New York laboratory and neighboring buildings with a machine that vibrated too strongly by means of mechanical resonance.

Tesla's real resonance is in automation, communications, and energy distribution. He didn't need to bring the neighborhood down as he raised the world up into light. Tesla is one of the few people who truly changed the world, and he has been granted posthumously the title of father of radio, supplanting Marconi. Hail to you, Tesla, father of automation.