In the wake of an eyelash in time: Nikola Tesla, his brokers, audiences, and ghost

In this paper, I describe three memory brokers of Nikola Tesla and their audiences: Hugo Gernsback and ‘boy experimenters’ of early twentieth century, the esotericist New Age writer Margaret Storm and ufologists of the mid-twentieth century, and the Croatian electrical engineer Tomo Bosanac and the Yugoslavs in the late twentieth century. Through comparative analysis of three cases and a detailed reconstruction of the respective broker’s strategies and audience’s reception, I suggest the hauntological idea of a ghost as the proper analytical concept for understanding the propagation and accumulation of pasts’ imagined futures for historians of technology. In the past, people have imagined unrealized futures. If we reconstruct such futures in their original historical contexts, we can perceive previously inaccessible or incoherent temporal sequences. As a historical process, the fame of an individual inventor involved many audiences and their respective brokers. Brokers reimagined collective pasts, presents, and futures around audiences’ experiences of the life story of an inventor. In the process, memory brokers opened powerful new opportunities for inventors for future re-imaginings by new publics and hence the production of further fame. In the process, however, brokers’ activities turned the inventors they touched into ghosts.