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Nikola Tesla

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

- Nikola Tesla

Who is Nikola Tesla?

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Tesla was from a family of Serbian origin. His father was an Orthodox priest; his mother was unschooled but highly intelligent. As he matured, he displayed remarkable imagination and creativity as well as a poetic touch.

Training for an engineering career, he attended the Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague. At Graz he first saw the Gramme dynamo, which operated as a generator and, when reversed, became an electric motor, and he conceived a way to use alternating current to advantage. Later, at Budapest, he visualized the principle of the rotating magnetic field and developed plans for an induction motor that would become his first step toward the successful utilization of alternating current. In 1882 Tesla went to work in Paris for the Continental Edison Company, and, while on assignment to Strassburg in 1883, he constructed, after work hours, his first induction motor. Tesla sailed for America in 1884, arriving in New York with four cents in his pocket, a few of his own poems, and calculations for a flying machine. He first found employment with Thomas Edison, but the two inventors were far apart in background and methods, and their separation was inevitable.

In order to allay fears of alternating currents, Tesla gave exhibitions in his laboratory in which he lit lamps by allowing electricity to flow through his body. He was often invited to lecture at home and abroad. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is widely used today in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment. That year also marked the date of Tesla’s U.S. citizenship. Westinghouse used Tesla’s alternating current system to light the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. This success was a factor in their winning the contract to install the first power machinery at Niagara Falls, which bore Tesla’s name and patent numbers. The project carried power to Buffalo by 1896. In 1898 Tesla announced his invention of a teleautomatic boat guided by remote control. When skepticism was voiced, Tesla proved his claims for it before a crowd in Madison Square Garden. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he stayed from May 1899 until early 1900, Tesla made what he regarded as his most important discovery—terrestrial stationary waves. By this discovery he proved that Earth could be used as a conductor and made to resonate at a certain electrical frequency. He also lit 200 lamps without wires from a distance of 40 km (25 miles) and created man-made lightning, producing flashes measuring 41 metres (135 feet). At one time he was certain he had received signals from another planet in his Colorado laboratory, a claim that was met with derision in some scientific journals.

Returning to New York in 1900, Tesla began construction on Long Island of a wireless world broadcasting tower, with $150,000 capital from the American financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Tesla claimed he secured the loan by assigning 51 percent of his patent rights of telephony and telegraphy to Morgan. He expected to provide worldwide communication and to furnish facilities for sending pictures, messages, weather warnings, and stock reports. The project was abandoned because of a financial panic, labour troubles, and Morgan’s withdrawal of support. It was Tesla’s greatest defeat. Tesla’s work then shifted to turbines and other projects. Because of a lack of funds, his ideas remained in his notebooks, which are still examined by enthusiasts for unexploited clues. In 1915 he was severely disappointed when a report that he and Edison were to share the Nobel Prize proved erroneous. Tesla was the recipient of the Edison Medal in 1917, the highest honour that the American Institute of Electrical Engineers could bestow. Tesla allowed himself only a few close friends.

Among them were the writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, and Francis Marion Crawford. He was quite impractical in financial matters and an eccentric, driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia. But he had a way of intuitively sensing hidden scientific secrets and employing his inventive talent to prove his hypotheses. Tesla was a godsend to reporters who sought sensational copy but a problem to editors who were uncertain how seriously his futuristic prophecies should be regarded. Caustic criticism greeted his speculations concerning communication with other planets, his assertions that he could split the Earth like an apple, and his claim of having invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 400 km (250 miles). After Tesla’s death the custodian of alien property impounded his trunks, which held his papers, his diplomas and other honours, his letters, and his laboratory notes. These were eventually inherited by Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovich, and later housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. Hundreds filed into New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine for his funeral services, and a flood of messages acknowledged the loss of a great genius. Three Nobel Prize recipients addressed their tribute to “one of the outstanding intellects of the world who paved the way for many of the technological developments of modern times.”

The Current War

One irony of history is that while Thomas Edison invented the first practical and affordable light bulb, he didn’t invent a practical and affordable system for keeping those lights on nationwide. The distinction for developing the system for transporting electricity that way goes jointly to George Westinghouse, the inventor of the railroad air brake, and to Nikola Tesla, a visionary engineer from the Austrian empire.

In the 1880s, the three went to battle over who had the superior technology for electrical transmission. The three-way rivalry between the inventors is the premise of The Current War (a movie that has its own dramatic back story), starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison, Nicholas Hoult as Tesla and Michael Shannon as Westinghouse.

Edison was promoting direct current (DC), while Westinghouse was promoting alternating current (AC). As the U.S. Department of Energy explains, direct current “runs continually in a single direction, like in a battery or a fuel cell,” while “alternating current reverses direction a certain number of times per second — 60 in the U.S. — and can be converted to different voltages relatively easily using a transformer.”

But the differences between the two went beyond their definitions.

“If we were living in Edison’s world, we’d have a large coal-operated generating plant every mile or two, because DC couldn’t travel any distance,” says Jill Jonnes, author of Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. (Jonnes was not involved in the film.) “The brilliance of AC was that you could send it long distances, bring the voltage down via another transformer station, and distribute it as needed out into the surroundings.”

Despite Edison’s efforts, the incident was not enough to keep his opponent down. After Tesla demonstrated his AC motor in 1888, Westinghouse bought up Tesla’s AC patents and hired him so he could commercialize the motor.

“Once Tesla solved the problem of creating a motor that could operate using AC, then it was clearly the superior tech,” says Jonnes.

Westinghouse’s company won the bid to electrify the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. That dazzling spectacle ended the “War of the Currents.” That same year, Westinghouse’s company signed a contract to install AC generators at Niagara Falls, and in 1895, the first hydro-electric power plant launched there.

But Edison’s career as an inventor was far from over. His moving-picture camera and Kinetoscope viewer helped establish him as one of the inventors of movies. And Edison did win out in terms of being the most remembered of the three in terms of household name recognition — at least until recently, when the introduction of Elon Musk’s Tesla electric cars gave him some competition. The cars, Jonnes adds, would be right up the real Tesla’s alley, as he loved the finer things in life. But ultimately, inventing things that are used every day proved key to Edison’s fame.

“The thing I always say about Edison, about why he is the most famous inventor,” she says, “is we all understand his inventions and we all get enormous pleasure out of them.”

Timeline of Nikola Tesla

Jul 10, 1856: Nikola Tesla Is Born
1875: Tesla Enrolls At Austrian Polytechnic
1882: Nikola Tesla begins working for Continental Edison
1882: Tesla Identifies Magnetic Induction Field Principle
Jun 6, 1884: Tesla arrives in the United States
1885: Nikola Tesla quits working for Edison
1886: Nikola Tesla forms Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company
1887: War of Currents era begins
April, 1887: Nikola Tesla begins experimenting with X-Rays
May 16, 1888: Tesla Delivers Lecture: A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers
1891: Nikola Tesla Patents the Tesla Coil
1893: Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse power the World's Columbian Exposition
1899: Tesla moves to research facility in Colorado Springs
1901: Construction begins on Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower
1913: Tesla Patents Bladeless Turbine
1915: Tesla and Edison ignored by Nobel Prize committee
Aug 4, 1915: Tesla Files Lawsuit Against Guglielmo Marconi
Jul 10, 1934: The New York Times publicizes Nikola Tesla's particle Beam research
Jan 7, 1943: Jan 7 1943 Nikola Tesla Dies
1960: 'Tesla' Defined As a Unit of Measure

List of Nikola Tesla patents

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