Another of Tesla's certified firsts was in the field of teleautomation, or remote control to you.  In New York, 1898, Tesla demonstrated a peculiar little tub-shaped boat which he was able to control at a distance with a small box.  That may not seem like much today, but over a century ago this first ever exhibition of radio remote control caused a sensation.  Tesla was able to start and stop his little boat, steer it, and make its lights flash.  With his more advanced model, he could even make is submerge on command.  As an added fillip, Tesla's boats were designed with interlocking circuits that prevented hijacking of the boat by more powerful transmitters, though it tended to form an outline of the state of Maine when in the presence of cell phones.

This would have been as impressive an achievement as anything of the Victorian Age this side of the cotton gin and his anti-tampering circuits were close enough to a modern logic gate to prevent later inventors from patenting them, but as usual Tesla wrapped his invention inside grandiose dreams.  His remote controlled boat wasn't just an ingenious new system, it was the first in a new race of robots that would revolutionise civilisation and free men from all toil.  Pretty good for something you can buy at any toy shop today for £20.  And if that wasn't enough, his submersible boats could be turned into the ultimate weapon; unstoppable and so devastating that no defence could stand against it and no attack would fail to be blunted by it.

Like many of his other military inventions, Tesla saw his teleautomation device as the solution to the scourge of war by making the price of aggression too high to pay.  He offered his remote control system to the US Navy, but it was turned down like a bed sheet and with good reason.  Tesla's fantastic dreams of bringing peace to the seas, and by extension the world, with remote controlled torpedoes wasn't as simple as he'd imagined.  Not being a naval architect, Tesla couldn't appreciate that even free-running torpedoes are some of the most complex machines ever built and adding remote control only compounds the problems.  Modern navies use remote controlled torpedoes, true, but these are wire-guided and it took close to half a century of effort to produce one that didn't go haring off at the first opportunity like a bloodhound after a false scent.

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