The impact of Nikola Tesla's patents to development of modern mobile and Internet services

Abstract

Nikola Tesla has been known as a Serbian scientist and inventor who has made a great impact by designing modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply systems. However, it is less known that his patents in the field of communications represent a basis of present-day ICT systems. In this paper, we present Tesla's most important patents and results regarding mobile and wireless communications and Internet services: patents concerning transmission lines, radio technologies, logic gates and digital modulations. We analyze the patents related to frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS), orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), and wireless cryptography in details. In addition, we present Tesla's vision of communication services that have become possible to implement almost a hundred years later.