• He worked for Thomas Edison and was promised a huge bonus if he redesigned his electric motors and generators. He did so, and gave Edison several patents as an employee, but Edison never paid out. Tesla quit and developed the more efficient "alternating current" that opposed Edison's "direct current" and eventually became the standard electrical current that we still use today.
• He was one of the first people to work with x-rays, and he invented an "X-Ray Gun" that you could use to fire x-ray beams at someone with, and it would develop on unexposed film hung behind the subject. A favorite target of this gun? Mark Twain.
• He thought that memories and thoughts were recorded on the brain and could be watched, like a movie, through the retina.
• He thought he could control the weather, and attempted to develop this technology. Eventually he was able to produce spectacular artificial lightning bolts.
• He developed the first radar system.
• He built his own wireless radio transmission tower in New York in conjunction with a German company named Telefunken, but the government tore it down in 1917 for fears that the Germans would use it to spy on the U.S.
• He transmitted radio waves before Marconi, but was never seen as the "father of radio," even though the Supreme Court decided to uphold his radio patent over Marconi in 1943. He died before the case was heard.
• He tried to develop anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel after becoming fascinated with idea of light as both a wave and a particle. He put a lot of theoretical work into Tesla's Flying Machine, which would have been an ion-propelled airplane.
• There is a crater on the moon named after him.
• He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future, and that they would rule over mankind like "Queen Bees."
• He was developing a way to harness energy from space, and said that one day all of man's inventions would run on this energy.
• He had plans to illuminate the world's oceans and build a massive ring around the Earth that would allow people to travel around the world in a single day.
• He developed something late in life called Nikola Tesla's Death Ray, and had a press conference to publicize it, stating it could "send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation's border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks." It later became the basis for the Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars" satellite defense system that is still being developed today.
• He died alone and in massive debt in his New York hotel room in 1943 at the age of 86. Upon his death, the FBI declared all of his papers and research to be "top secret" and seized them. Eventually, some were returned to his family. Some have never been found. Cue conspiracy theories.
• Visitors frequently request his room at The New Yorker Hotel, room 3327. Supposedly they hope for a "spark" of inspiration.
• He was portrayed by David Bowie in the film The Prestige, although he sadly never invented the machine shown in the film, which we won't spoil for you here. Although you can check out a clip here featuring Bowie as Tesla, which we hope will inspire you to rent this excellent "science meets magic" film.

They write:

The Hexagram shirt was inspired by and conceived to fit into the dystopic universe of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, a novel depicting what the world would have been like during the 1960s, had the Axis won WWII.

In the book, the U.S. west coast is a colony of Japan, whose rule and influence has permeated and dominated Californian society for years. The Book of Changes has become the mainstream method, for Japanese and Californian people alike, to take important decisions in life.

Whenever someone has a choice to make, that person takes out three little coins that are shaken and tossed on a surface several times, the resulting heads and tails data is then translated into one of the 64 hexagrams that comprise the Book of Changes.

Mitch Pileggi, who played FBI assistant director Walter Skinner in The X-Files, stars as Horace Pinker, a serial killer who has made a deal with the devil. Once he gets caught and sentence to death in the electric chair, he comes back as a pure energy source and is able to transfer his consciousness between human hosts. So, he goes on another killing spree with his newfound power.

However, his estranged son realizes that he can be controlled, like any energy source, and eventually forces him into a television transmitter, where he chases him across the television landscape. They go through Entertainment Tonight, where they encounter John Tesh, zip though some old war footage, and even pass by Leave It To Beaver. No kidding. Just like in that recent Jumper commercial. Or in Amazon Women From The Moon. Eventually the son stops him with the mightiest of all weapons, the television remote. And... scene.

Please, zap this idea before it gets out of control and we have a repeat performance.

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