No, the One in this Picture is not Nikola Tesla

It happens from time to time as I review articles about Nikola Tesla. Many of them include a famous photograph of which, insistently, it is said that among the people portrayed is Nikola Tesla. This is the photograph.

The image was taken in April 1921 at the RCA radio facility in Brunswick, New Jersey. In the picture, Albert Einstein is shown with several engineers and scientists of the above mentioned communication company and members of other companies, such as General Electric. Let’s enlarge a little the central part of the photograph. Let’s look at the three characters on the left in the zoom.

There is Albert Einstein on the left, below, the man of small stature, is the brilliant mathematician and electrical engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz and, in the background, with a moustache… Nikola Tesla? That’s what many people think, but in reality the man with the moustache looks nothing like Tesla, in fact, he is not Tesla! I have come across this error a lot of times in various articles in which the famous image appears. No, the one in the picture is not Tesla. It’s about a radio pioneer, engineer John Renshaw Carson, inventor of the Single Sideband Modulation.