Often called eccentric in his time, Nikola Tesla was a controversial figure who died alone, penniless, and largely forgotten.
Today, Nikola Tesla is recognized as one of the fathers of modern electricity. His contributions to the science of energy rival those of his chief competitor, Thomas Edison. An energy visionary, Nikola Tesla laid the groundwork for the electricity generation and delivery systems that we know today.
Nikola Tesla once said, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” As we look at his life and work, we’ll see that he did just that.
Who Was Nikola Tesla?
Born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia (formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Serbian-American Nikola Tesla was one of history’s important inventors. His work with electricity was well ahead of his time; as a result, he was often ridiculed. However, his inventions and thinking continue to influence modern technology.
Tesla’s father was a Serbian Orthodox priest, writer, and poet. His mother, who had no formal education, was an inventor herself. Among other things, she invented a mechanical eggbeater. Tesla credited his mother’s interests in machinery as inspiration for his investigations.
Tesla was determined to become an engineer despite his father’s insistence on the priesthood. While Tesla was sick with cholera, he extracted a promise from his father — if Tesla survived his illness, he could attend the Austrian Polytechnic School at Graz, Austria, to study engineering. Upon his return to health, Tesla enrolled at the Polytechnic School, where he studied mathematics, physics, and mechanics. That was followed by two years at the University of Prague studying philosophy.
While working at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, Tesla began developing the principles of rotating magnetic fields. His work, which formed the basis of his later inventions and discoveries, is still used today in electromechanical devices, such as asynchronous induction motors.
Following his arrival in New York City in 1884, Nikola Tesla worked with Thomas Edison at Edison Electric Light Company, best known today as General Electric. The relationship between Tesla and Edison was complicated by their very different personalities, interests, and approaches to inventing.
Tesla left his partnership with Edison over a contract dispute. In 1885, Tesla opened his own lab, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company. There, he experimented with several ideas: perfecting arc lamps, early X-rays, and electrical resonance. He also continued his work with polyphase alternating current.
Throughout his life, Tesla would live and work in Manhattan. He held more than 300 patents that laid the groundwork for the way we generate and use electricity today. He died alone at the New Yorker hotel in 1943.
Did Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla Invent Electricity?
Electricity is a natural phenomenon that neither Tesla nor Edison invented. However, both made significant contributions to how we understand and use electricity. For example, Nikola Tesla‘s ideas about electricity and how it works led him to develop the polyphase alternating current system that we use in our homes today.
How Many Patents Did Nikola Tesla Hold?
Globally, Tesla held more than 300 patents. In addition to his 112 U.S. patents, Tesla’s patents totaled 192 in 26 other countries. Because of the territorial limitations of patents, many were for the same invention.
However, a review of those patents shows that Tesla had 126 basic patents. A basic patent is the first one registered for a design or invention. Those basic patents protected 125 of Tesla’s inventions.
What Was the War of the Currents?
Edison, who developed and advocated for direct current electricity, had a virtual monopoly on electricity in New York. But there was such demand for electricity that the likes of J.P. Morgan rushed to have his home wired for electricity.
However, direct current had its drawbacks. The primary problem for Edison was one of transmission; it’s challenging to transmit direct current voltage over enough distance to be effective. In addition, direct current voltage can’t be easily stepped up or down, making it impractical for electrical appliances. It was also expensive and dangerous.
Tesla’s work with alternating current virtually guaranteed that he and Edison would clash. Tesla believed alternating current was more effective for everyday use.
In 1888, Tesla delivered his groundbreaking paper, “A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers,” to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. His paper attracted the attention of George Westinghouse, an American inventor and industrialist. Westinghouse visited Tesla’s lab where Tesla had built a large model electrical generation and transmission system that powered an AC motor. Impressed by what he saw, Westinghouse bought Tesla’s work.
The pair went on to light the Chicago World Fair in 1893, also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition. President Grover Cleveland turned on the lights with a press of the button. Called the Illuminated City, the dramatic spectacle of 100,000 incandescent lamps served as an example of alternating current‘s power to change the world.
The War of the Currents ended at Niagra Falls, where Tesla and Westinghouse achieved Tesla’s long-held dream of harnessing the falls. Westinghouse won the contract to build the world’s first hydroelectric power plant using Nikola Tesla‘s water turbines and system of polyphase alternating current. In November 1896, the power plant transmitted electricity to Buffalo, New York, and, eventually, to New York City.
What Is a Tesla Coil?
Dreaming of wireless electrical transmission, Nikola Tesla developed his now-famous coil in Manhattan in 1891. The Tesla coil was the first electrical system to use wireless transmission. Telephone circuits, radio antennas, and lighting systems used the Tesla coil.
A simple idea using resonance and electromagnetic force, the Tesla coil has a primary and secondary coil, each with its own capacitor. The rings are open electrical circuits connected by a spark gap, essentially open-air space between the coils.
Essentially an air-core transformer, the Tesla coil works as a step-up transformer. So not only does it generate high-voltage electricity, but it also creates very high-frequency electricity. High-frequency AC has advantages when size or weight is considered, and HFAC has implications for parallel power generation applications.
What Did Nikola Tesla Do In Colorado Springs?
In 1899, Tesla moved to Colorado Springs to investigate his ideas about wireless transmission at high altitudes. There, on the prairie, Tesla constructed an 80-foot wooden tower, topped by a 142-foot metal mast with a copper ball on top.
Through his work at the Tesla Experimental Station, he hoped to transmit wireless power over long distances with sufficient capacity for industrial applications. The tower at Colorado Springs was a forerunner of his later building at Wardenclyffe.
In addition, it was at Colorado Springs that Tesla correctly calculated the resonant frequency between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere at 8 hertz. It’s also widely believed that he may have been the first to detect radio waves from space.
Is Nikola Tesla the True Father of Radio?
Tesla worked with radio waves and filed the United States’ first radio patent in 1897. Later, he introduced a remote control boat at a Madison Square Garden electrical exhibition, which serves as the precursor to today’s modern remote controls. Tesla continued his work with radio waves, eventually receiving more than a dozen patents related to radio wave technology.
In the meantime, Guglielmo Marconi was also working on radio. However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office turned down his patent application in 1900 because of Tesla’s prior patents. About Marconi’s first successful radio transmission on December 12, 1901, Tesla said, “Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using 17 of my patents.” The patent office reversed itself in 1904, awarding Marconi’s patents retroactively.
Despite Tesla’s apparently complacent response, he sued the Marconi Company for infringement. The decades-long lawsuit was eventually decided in 1943 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s patent. But unfortunately, the reversal came too late; Tesla had died a few months before the decision.
What Was the Wardenclyffe Tower?
Tesla proposed a prototype tower that would wirelessly transmit power, a long held dream.
Tesla’s ideas about wireless transmission caught the interest of financier J.P. Morgan, who invested $150,000 (roughly $4 million in today’s dollars). With Morgan’s financial backing, Tesla began constructing a 187-foot wooden tower and telecommunications station at Wardenclyffe near Shoreham, Long Island.
With Marconi’s successful wireless transmission, Morgan began to doubt that Tesla’s ideas were worth the expense. Morgan refused further funding. With his failure to find financial backers, together with the stock market crash and ensuing Depression, Tesla finally had to abandon the project in 1905.
Today, Wardenclyffe is the site of the Tesla Science Center, one of several Tesla museums that commemorate Tesla’s groundbreaking work in power transmission.
What Happened to Tesla’s Death Ray?
Popularly called a death ray, Nikola Tesla conceived his idea as a war-ending technology. With another world war on the horizon in 1937, Tesla sent “New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media” to the U.S. government and several of its allies, including the Soviet Union.
The highly technical paper outlined Tesla’s proposal for what is now called a charged particle beam. The most unique feature was the vacuum chamber. Tesla designed the apparatus to have one end of the device open to the atmosphere.
A high-velocity air stream directed at the device’s tip sealed the vacuum. It was all powered by a Tesla turbine.
Immediately following his death, the FBI seized the contents of his hotel room, even though Tesla’s journal and some technical reports had already disappeared. Some papers ended up at Patterson Air Force Base, where the military conducted experiments – the results of which have never been released.
In 1952, Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovic, received Tesla’s remaining papers and possessions and returned to Belgrade. As a result, a Tesla museum was established there.
While Western scientists had limited access to the papers, their Soviet counterparts had free access under Tito’s communist regime. Eight years later, in 1960, Nikita Khruschev announced a startling new (but undisclosed) weapon was in the “hatching stage.”
Despite the military interest of the American and Soviet governments, Tesla’s beam has failed to become a reality. Some could say that his dream of peace died with him. Without the inventor’s genius to guide research experiments, his vision failed to come to fruition.
Was Tesla Motors Named For Nikola Tesla?
Some reports credit Nikola Tesla with inventing the battery-less electric car in 1931. As the story goes, he converted a Pierce-Arrow in Buffalo, New York. In place of the gas-powered combustion engine was an AC electric motor. The report, for which there is no hard evidence, gains credence based on the inventor’s work with wireless electrical transmission at Wardenclyffe.
Regardless of the truth, Tesla Motors founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning (Elon Musk joined the company later as CEO) chose to honor the work of Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla by naming their electric car company Tesla Inc., after him.
How Did Nikola Tesla Change the World?
Before he died, Nikola Tesla had dozens of inventions to his credit. In a few ways, he was a man ahead of his time despite living during the Gilded Age, which was a period of incredible invention.
An electrical engineer by training and an inventor by nature, Nikola Tesla was also a philosopher. His vision of how the universe works inspired his quest to harness electricity to change the world. His work with AC power and AC systems, the Tesla coil, and AC motors gave us the electric power we know and use today. The next time you’re looking for an electricity company or using your remote control, you can remember that Tesla had something to do with it.
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