Nikola Tesla Described Your Smartphone in a 1926 Magazine Interview

Key Takeaways

• •Tesla described video calling, wireless internet, and a pocket device — in 1926
• •His Wardenclyffe Tower (1901) was an attempt to build global wireless infrastructure
• •Tesla predicted not just the device, but the social transformation it would cause

Timeline

In January 1926, reporter John B. Kennedy sat down with 69-year-old Nikola Tesla for an interview in Collier's magazine. Tesla, then living in semi-poverty at the New Yorker Hotel, made a prediction so specific it sounds like time travel.

'When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole,' Tesla said. 'We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.'

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is... We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. — Nikola Tesla, 1926

Read that again. In 1926 — when radio was barely a decade old, television hadn't been demonstrated publicly, and the first electronic computer was 20 years away — Tesla described a pocket device for instant global communication with video. He described a smartphone.

But Tesla wasn't guessing. He was extrapolating from his own work. In 1893, he had demonstrated wireless radio transmission. In 1901, he began building the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island — a 187-foot structure designed to transmit information and power wirelessly across the globe. It was, conceptually, a cell tower. In 1901.

The tower was never completed — Tesla ran out of funding when his investor, J.P. Morgan, pulled support. The structure was demolished in 1917. But the vision lived in Tesla's mind for another decade.

What makes Tesla's prediction extraordinary isn't just the technology — others imagined wireless communication. It's the specificity: a device small enough for a pocket, capable of voice and video, connecting the entire planet. And it's the social insight: the idea that this connection would transform humanity into a 'huge brain.'

Eighty-one years after that interview, Steve Jobs stood on stage and announced the iPhone. Tesla's vest-pocket device had arrived. Everything he predicted — instant communication, video calling, global information access — was now real.

Except the Wardenclyffe Tower. We still don't have wireless power. Tesla's most ambitious root remains unfinished.

How did this make you feel?

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