Nikola Tesla
born midnight 7/9-10/1856 died 1/7/1943.
( age: 86 )
Tesla invented not just one but many things which revolutionized the
world, not the least of his inventions is the ac electric motor which has
changed the world. He also invented radio (not Marconi) and radar. His
Tesla Coil is used in every TV set. He instituted lead shielding to keep
people safe around x-ray machines. He gave us the knowledge needed to
produce the Electron-Microscope.
There are things he invented which we, today, do not know how he did it.
Including a wireless source of alternating current, electricity, from
space, enough to power a car, a large ship, a train, it was limitless.
This, and other things he did and spoke of, have given others the
incentive to experiment and discover/invent things that no one would have
thought of otherwise.
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Tesla was fluent or conversant in many languages including Serbian-Croatian,
English, Czech, Hungarian, French, German, Latin, and Italian.
Primary Education -
Elementary school: Gospic'
Secondary school: Karlovac
Degrees -
Baccalaureate of Physics: Austrian Polytechnic Institute (Graz)
Baccalaureate of Mathematics: Austrian Polytechnic Institute (Graz)
Baccalaureate of Mechanical Engineering: Austrian Polytechnic Institute (Graz)
Baccalaureate of Electrical Engineering: Austrian Polytechnic Institute (Graz)
Graduate studies -
Physics at Charles University in Prague
Docteur Honoris Causa -
For his work Tesla received numerous honorary doctoral degrees from a number of
universities to include: Columbia University, Graz Polytechnic Institute,University of
Zagreb, Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, University of Belgrade, University of
Brno, University of Grenoble, University of Paris, University de Poitiers, Charles
University in Prague, University of Sofia, Vienna Polytechnic Institute, and Yale
University
Photos: childhood home and family (Tesla Society, NY)
Tesla's Autobigraphy
In Feb of 1882, Tesla took a walk in the city of Budapest with a former classmate.
While a glorious sunset overspread the sky, Tesla engaged in one of his favorite
hobbies-reciting poetry. The setting sun reminded Tesla of some of Goethe's
beautiful lines:
Suddenly, Tesla snapped into a rigid pose as if he had fallen into a trance. "Watch
me!" he said, "Watch me reverse it!"
Tesla's friend said, "I see nothing, are you ill?"
"You do not understand," said Tesla, "It is my alternating-current motor I am
talking about. Can't you see it right here in front of me, running almost silently?
It is the rotating magnetic field that does it. See how the magnetic field rotates
and drags the armature around with it? Isn't it beautiful? I have solved the
problem."
from Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla by John Jacob
The First Practical Phosphorescent Lamp
Credit for the first practical phosphorescent lamp belongs to Tesla.
Phosphorescent substances are slower to emit light than fluorescent
ones, and they continue to glow for some time after the power is turned off.
Tesla's earliest lighting inventions had operated as conventional filament
or arc devices, but with high-frequency currents supplying power. As he
quickly discovered, such currents could be made to bring diffuse gases to
incandescence, or cause light emission in various solid materials. His
innovations in this field, though influential and disclosed in a series of
celebrated lectures, were seldom patented.
Inasmuch as Tesla created for himself more powerful apparatus, to operate
at higher frequency and voltage than was available to anyone else, he was
capable by 1890 of generating fields that would light up, without any wires,
phosphorescent tubes across his laboratory. (His assistants recall these
lamps strewn casually around the lab and working by their eerie green glow.)
The energy is just long wavelength radio, from Tesla's high-frequency
generators — though in this case the signal is very strong, strong enough
to be useful as power, rather than as a means of communication.
His first demonstrations of wireless power—presented always with superb
showmanship—left the electrical profession agog. And the general public,
exposed to these mysteries at Tesla's lighting exhibit in the Columbian
Exposition of 1893, came away with the impression that an age of
scientific miracles was dawning.
"Court of Honor" at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893.
The age of light that Tesla did so much to bring about was
exemplified in this scene. At nightfall, "stopper" (or Sawyer-Man)
lamps by Westinghouse provided the most spectacular lighting
display the world had ever seen.
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from pbs.org
Tesla invented the radio
In U.S. Patent 0454622, System of Electric Lighting (1891 June 23),
Tesla described this early disruptive coil. It was devised for the purpose of
converting and supplying electrical energy in a form suited for the production
of certain novel electrical phenomena, which require currents of higher
frequency and potential. It also specified an energy storage capacitor and
discharger mechanism on the primary side of a radio-frequency transformer.
This is the first-ever disclosure of a practical RF power supply capable of
exciting an antenna to emit powerful electromagnetic radiation.
With his newly created Tesla coils, the inventor soon discovered that he could
transmit and receive powerful radio signals when they were tuned to resonate at the
same frequency. When a coil is tuned to a signal of a particular frequency, it
literally magnifies the incoming electrical energy through resonant action. By early
1895, Tesla was ready to transmit a signal 50 miles to West Point, New York... But
in that same year, disaster struck. A building fire consumed Tesla's lab, destroying
his work.
The timing could not have been worse. In England, a young Italian experimenter named
Guglielmo Marconi had been hard at work building a device for wireless telegraphy.
The young Marconi had taken out the first wireless telegraphy patent in England in
1896. His device had only a two-circuit system, which some said could not transmit
"across a pond." Later, in 1901, Marconi set up long-distance demonstrations, using
a Tesla oscillator to transmit the signals across the English Channel.
Tesla filed his own basic radio patent applications in Sept. 1897. They were granted
in 1900. Marconi's first patent application in America, filed on November 10, 1900,
was turned down. Marconi's revised applications over the next three years were
repeatedly rejected because of the priority of Tesla and other inventors.
The Patent Office made the following comment in 1903:
"Many of the claims are not patentable over Tesla patent numbers
645,576 and 649,621, of record, the amendment to overcome said
references as well as Marconi's pretended ignorance of the nature
of a "Tesla oscillator" being little short of absurd... the term
"Tesla oscillator" (a.k.a. Tesla Coil) has become
a household word on both continents [Europe and North America]."
[in other words, Marconi lied.]
But no patent is truly safe, as Tesla's career demonstrates. In 1900, the Marconi
Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd. began thriving in the stock markets-due primarily
to Marconi's family connections with English aristocracy. British Marconi stock
soared from $3 to $22 per share and the glamorous young Italian nobleman was
internationally acclaimed. Both Edison and Andrew Carnegie invested in Marconi and
Edison became a consulting engineer of American Marconi. Then, on December 12, 1901,
Marconi for the first time transmitted and received signals across the Atlantic
Ocean.
Otis Pond, an engineer then working for Tesla, said, "Looks as if Marconi got the
jump on you." Tesla replied, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is
using seventeen of my patents."
But Tesla's calm confidence was shattered in 1904, when the U.S. Patent Office
suddenly and surprisingly reversed its previous decisions and gave Marconi a patent
for the invention of radio. The reasons for this have never been fully explained,
but the powerful financial backing for Marconi in the United States suggests one
possible explanation.
Tesla was embroiled in other problems at the time, but when Marconi won the Nobel
Prize in 1911, Tesla was furious. He sued the Marconi Company for infringement in
1915, but was in no financial condition to litigate a case against a major
corporation. It wasn't until 1943-a few months after Tesla's death- that the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld Tesla's radio patent number 645,576. The Court had a selfish
reason for doing so. The Marconi Company was suing the United States Government for
use of its patents in World War I. The Court simply avoided the action by restoring
the priority of Tesla's patent over Marconi.
from
luminet.net:
Among his business investors he would eventually number the likes of J. P. Morgan
and John Jacob Astor, but the most important for his aspirations was an early
association with George Westinghouse. Westinghouse purchased Tesla's basic AC
patents in 1888 for cash and shares amounting to $60,000 and a royalty on electrical
horsepower sold. ($1 / hp) (By agreement the two principals
canceled the mostly unpaid royalty in 1897; the lump sum Westinghouse negotiated has
never been firmly determined, though a check record for $216,000 does exist.) More
importantly Tesla acquired a resourceful and tenacious champion in the Westinghouse
Corporation.
A fierce, often underhanded competition raged for years between the General Electric
Co. (a creature of J.P. Morgan) and Westinghouse. GE's strategy, when mere engineering
would not avail, was to invent ghastly tales of AC hazards and misadventures. In
1890 the company went so far as to license, through an agent, the Westinghouse
system in order to power a death contraption which they called an "electric chair."
Sing Sing Prison, in upstate New York, was persuaded to use it, with the gratifying
results for GE that the press for a while played headlines in which prisoners were
"Westinghoused."
When the publicity battles were over, and the superiority of AC systems apparent,
Westinghouse was kept constantly in the courts, defending the patents-which the
company did with ferocity.
J. P. Morgan sinks Tesla
Tesla's ambitious World System came to an end when its principal financier,
J. P. Morgan pulled the plug on funding. Morgan, the financial giant behind
the formation of many monopolies in railroads, shipping, steel, banking,
etc., was a major conduit of European capital into U. S. industrial
development in the Robber Baron era. He looms large in Tesla's life. Morgan
money was in the Niagara Falls project. He backed Edison, too. It was
Morgan's pressure on Westinghouse, whom he also financed, that caused the
cancellation of Tesla's dollar-a-horsepower contract and the loss of
millions in royalties to Tesla for his ac motors and system. When Tesla's lab burned
down (arson was suspected), one of Morgan's men promptly arrived offering aid,
in the form of a contract with Morgan interests. Acceptance
would have put Tesla firmly under Morgan's control. Tesla refused. And Tesla
succeeded in preserving his autonomy until he became possessed with
overwhelming ardor to fulfill the dream of his World system. Tesla was ready
to sell his soul to finance Wardencliff, and J. P. Morgan was right there to
buy it. In 1901 Tesla signed over to Morgan controlling interest in the
patents he still owned, as well as all future ones, in lighting and radio.
Morgan then put about $150,000 start-up funding into Wardencliff. Later he
invested more, just enough to bring the project within sight of completion.
Morgan then became elusive. Tesla tried desperately to communicate with the
investor, but to no avail. When word was out on Wall Street that Morgan had
withdrawn support, no one would touch the project. This finished Tesla as a
functioning inventor.
Work on the Wardencliff tower came to a halt. Left to dereliction, the tower
remained only as a curiosity to passersby. During World War I, the tower was
unceremoniously dynamited to the ground.
"Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has, as its ultimate goal the
betterment of humanity. ... What we want is closer contact and better understanding
between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of
egoism and pride... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal
enlightenment." Nikola Tesla, 1919
Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I
change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without
ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and
when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the
actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test
it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In
thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the
vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been
developed in exactly this way. -- Nikola Tesla, Autobiography
TESLA: Man Out of Time
biography
by Margaret Cheney
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"Falmboyant, eccentric, almost supernaturally gifted ...
perhaps the greatest inventor the world has ever known
...He was a trailblazer who created astonishing,
world-transforming devices, often without theoretical
precedent." -- outside back cover
"there had been no truly successful AC motor until Tesla invented his - an
induction motor that was the heart of a new system and a quantum jump
ahead of the times" pg. 23
He did not just invent one simple AC motor. He "conceived of such
practical alternating-current motors as polyphase induction,
split-phase induction, and polyphase synchronous, as well as the
whole polyphase and single-phase motor system ... indeed,
"practically all electricity in the world, in time, would be
generated, transmitted, distributed, and turned into mechanical power
by means of the Tesla Polyphase System."
pg. 24
In November and December of 1887, Tesla filed for seven U.S. patents
in the field of polyphase AC motors and power transmission. These
comprised a complete system of generators, transformers, transmission
lines, motors and lighting. So original were the ideas that they were
issued without a successful challenge, and would turn out to be the
most valuable patents since the telephone.
pbs.org
"Because his motors required 60 cycle AC, that became the standard in the
U.S. pg.41
He demonstrated "a motor that ran on only one wire, the return circuit
occurring wirelessly through space. ... he spoke of the possibility of
running motors without any wires at all." pg. 54
Tesla's Letterhead, Stationary
The "carbon-button lamp with which Tesla dazzled his audience at Columbia
College on May 20, 1891, also embodied the concept of the point electron
microscope. ... Tesla's description of the effect achieved with his
carbon-button lamp ... stands with hardly a change in wording for a
description of the million-magnification point
electron microscope." ...
developed by Vladimir R. Zworykin in 1939. pg. 57
"The Tesla Coil...which is today used, in one form or another, in every
radio and television set was, in a very short time, to become part of
the research equipment of every university science laboratory". pg. 61
"In the Electrical Experimenter of August 1917 he described the main
features of modern military radar ... pulsed radar that
would finally be practically developed in a crash program only months
prior to the beginning of World War II." pg. 208
"in 1934, a French team under Dr. Emil Girardeau built and installed radar
on both ships and land stations, using 'precisely apparatuses conceived
according to the principles stated by Tesla,' says the Frenchman." pg. 213
By 1937 it was clear that war would soon break out in Europe. Frustrated in his
attempts to generate interest and financing for his "peace beam," he sent an
elaborate technical paper, including diagrams, to a number of Allied nations
including the United States, Canada, England, France, the Soviet Union, and
Yugoslavia. Titled "New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through
Natural Media," the paper provided the first technical description of what is today
called a charged particle beam weapon.
Of all the countries to receive Tesla's proposal, the greatest interest came from
the Soviet Union. In 1937 Tesla presented a plan to the Amtorg Trading Corporation,
an alleged Soviet arms front in New York City. Two years later, in 1939, one stage
of the plan was tested in the USSR and Tesla received a check for $25,000.
Today ... his death beam bears an uncanny resemblance to the charged-particle beam
weapon developed by both the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war.
Tesla "lectured to the New York Academy of Science on April 6, 1897,
on the practical construction and safe operation of X-ray
equipment" ... "He had already experimented with various metal
protective devices, and soon thereafter lead shields came into
general use." pg. 105
"Inventors of modern computer technology in the last half of
the twentieth century repeatedly have been surprised, when seeking
patents, to encounter Tesla's basic ones, already on file." pg.130
He built "high powered switches and spark gap switches" of
kinds that even today "the knowledge has been lost; we don't know how
he did it." pg. 282
"Ideas chased each other through his mind faster than he could nail
them down. Once he understood exactly how an invention worked, in
his mind, he tended to lose interest" pg. 13
"He worked not just in private, but...in secret. Thus any inventions
which he did not patent or give freely to the world were more or less
shrouded in mystery." pg. 268
To a Westinghouse manager, Tesla wrote "You should not be at
all surprised, if some day you see me fly from New York to
Colorado Springs in a contrivance which will resemble a gas
stove and weigh as much." ... and could, if necessary enter and
depart through a window. pg. 198
According to museum officials at The Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade, "he
left sketches of interplanetary ships. This information, however, has not
been made available to western scholars."
pg. 203
Tesla produced artificial fireballs (plasma) from a
secondary coil in a transformer and "modern plasma physicists with
the best equipped laboratories, have failed to produce plasmoids
with anything near the stability of the true ball-lightning spheres
that he created." pg. 281-2
Tesla, Einstein, and Steiglitz
"Tesla was nearly as famous as Albert Einstein in his prime.
Einstein personally sent Tesla a telegram for his birthday."
His "COLORADO SPRINGS NOTES when they appeared in English in 1978
... were eagerly awaited by many scientists. But, even this work left
important questions unanswered. ... The bulk of his papers having
vanished ... Only by piecing together fragmentary information could the
magnitude of his experiments be comprehended." pg. 269
"Around 1928...six boxes placed in storage by Nikola Tesla would be sold by
the storage warehouse...for unpaid bills." But when a friend (John O'Neill)
offered to try to buy them for Tesla, "Tesla hit the ceiling," ..."He forbid
me to buy them or do anything in any way about them." ... "Shortly after
the inventor died, O'Neill ... was never able to get a positive statement
...about the boxes..." and got "evasive assurances that there was no reason
to worry." pg. 269-270
"A young American engineer * engaged in war work consulted Tesla on a
ballistics engineering problem because he could not get time on an overworked
computer, and Tesla's mind was known to offer the nearest thing to it.
Soon he became fascinated with Tesla's scientific papers and was allowed to
take batches of them home to his hotel room where he and another American
engineer pored over them each night. They were returned the next day, a
procedure which continued for about two weeks prior to the inventor's
death." pg. 270
(* They must have been in college as 2 years later Bloyce D.
Fitzgerald was only a private in the Army. If he had gotten his
degree he would be an officer.)
"Tesla had received offers to work for Germany and Russia. After the
inventor died, both engineers became concerned that critical scientific
information might fall into foreign hands and alerted United States security
agencies and high government officials." pg. 270
"The relevant records I have obtained from federal agencies under the
Freedom of Information Act reveal strange twisting and inconsistencies in
the handling of the inventor's estate. Tesla left tons of papers, barrels
and boxes full of them." pg. 270
Agent Foxworth of the Field Division of the New York Bureau of the FBI:
"Bloyce D. Fitzgerald, an electrical engineer who had been quite close to
Tesla during his lifetime," [the last few weeks] continued agent Foxworth,
"advised the New York office ...Within the last month, Tesla told Fitzgerald
that his experiments in connection with wireless transmission of electrical
power had been completed and perfected ... that Tesla had conceived and
designed a revolutionary type of torpedo ... the basic theories of these
things are in the personal effects of Tesla ... Bureau is requested to
advise immediately what, if any, action should be taken concerning the
matter by the New York Field Division." pg. 272
"Curiously, the FBI released his estate to the Office of Alien Property,
which promptly sealed the contents. ... a number of times Mr. K mentioned
the fact that the custodian at the storage warehouse told him that some
government guys were in to microfilm some of the papers.... Hoover denied
categorically that the FBI had gone into the papers...." pg. 271
"On August 21, 1945, the Air Technical Service Command requested
permission from the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Force in
Washington, D.C. for Private Bloyce D. Fitzgerald to go to Washington
for a period of seven days ... asking for photostatic copies of the
exhibits ... from the estate of Tesla." pg. 277
Also, "at least one set of Tesla's papers had reached Wright Field,
Dayton, Ohio, because on November 25, 1947 ... 'These reports are now
in the possession of the Electronic Subdivision and are being evaluated.'"
pg. 278
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Why I Wrote About Tesla - Margret Cheney
In school I never heard of Tesla at all. And when I did hear about him, I was
intrigued by the mystery about him. There are several reasons why Tesla is not well
known. One was that he was a man who never married and had children. He never worked
for universities or for corporations. He was very independent. And he was so far
ahead of his time, so much a visionary, that his contemporary scientists really
didn't understand what he was doing. The Smithsonian Institution has never adequately
credited Tesla for his invention of radio. They have tended to call Marconi the
"father of radio," and they have tended to give Edison credit for Tesla's work in
alternating current, although Edison didn't work in that area at all. So, there are
many reasons why we have not learned as much as we should about Tesla.
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