It's novel because unlike us, Tesla was a product of a time when telegraph, telephone, radio and distributed electricity were still new. It's easy - even obvious - to note in retrospect how a disruptive technology or cluster of technologies plays out, in part because we are ourselves a product of the environment in which we grew up and formed our ideas about how things work.

By contrast, it's visionary to be able to understand the full implications of a new technology that disrupts the environment in which we formed our ideas. In Tesla's case, not only did he understand the implications of that technology, but he actually invented much of the technology himself.

It would be no less remarkable if Gutenberg invented the printing press and then used it to print tracts explaining how his press was going to undermine the Catholic Church's monopoly gatekeeper status and launch an explosion in the rate and density of accumulated human knowledge.

Probably because this was written at the dawn of wireless communications--shortly after the invention of radio.

Sure, his idea is definitely interesting considering the time, but the article is not. Like I say, he didn't just predict mobile phones, he predicted mobile communication which has been possible much longer than the phone version.

It feels just a little more novel when you consider just how late into last century sci-fi stories were getting written with little or no notion of universal mobile communication.

(Some excuses may be made on the grounds of story flow and building a comprehensible universe, but that's weak sci-fi).