Do we like Nikola Tesla?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A genius with a clean personal record in what we found, held back by his own words backing eugenics.
Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor whose alternating-current work made him wealthy. He then raised money for a grander dream of wireless transmission, and built a giant tower at Wardenclyffe on Long Island. He died in 1943, so this is history, not goss.
The Wardenclyffe story is a classic tale of ambition outrunning the money. When Marconi beat him to radio, Tesla pivoted to transmitting wireless energy, and his investors withdrew. One write-up argues the tower was never capable of doing that, so the dream stalled and the site fell into disrepair.
Now the harm check. In a 1935 Liberty interview looking a century ahead, Tesla said “The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established.” He also argued that “we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.” That's his own voice backing the idea of controlling who gets to have children, which is the kind of thing we'd flag today.
In fairness, the article we read notes that endorsing eugenics was a common view before World War II. That explains it but doesn't excuse it, and we found no other pattern of harmful words or harmful company. No anti-vax, climate denial or campaigning against any group turned up. That's why it's a close call, not a fail.
On war he went the other way: in a 1900 article he hoped machines would fight instead of people, so that war became a contest of machines without men and without loss of life. It was a naive hope, but a gentle one.
The good stuff is mostly legacy. In 2012 a crowdfunding drive raised a million dollars to turn his old Wardenclyffe lab into a museum, which shows how much people still love the bloke. That's honestly about the extent of what we could verify on kindness.