Nikola Tesla died in January
Nikola Tesla from The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla
Tesla was born on 10 July 1856, in a small town called Smiljan in the Austria –Hungary border province of modern day Croatian republic. Tesla was born into a poor family whose father was a priest and his mother an illiterate housewife but very talented and to whom he was emotionally very close. Tesla had one elder brother and three sisters. According to Tesla’s biography (Cheney ,1999) the elder brother Dane was brilliant and died at the age of 12 and Tesla came under tremendous pressure from his parents to perform as well as his brother. This was a major motivating force in his early life.Tesla studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz.
Throughout his working life there was great animosity between Tesla, Marconi and Edison, the latter two managing to get early industry recognition for their work. This animosity was particularly evident in the “War of the Currents” which nearly broke both the Edison and Westinghouse Company’s. However Tesla did manage to be awarded the Edison Medal in 1917 and had the unit for measuring magnetic flux named after him. In 1943 the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla’s patent on radio and formally recognising him as the inventor of radio. Tesla died in New York in 1943, alone and destitute and in debt.
Tesla began his formal career in 1881 when he moved to Budapest, to work as the chief electrician for a telegraph company, the American Telephone Company. It was here that he quickly had his first invention which was an amplifier or loudspeaker. In 1884, he emigrated to the US and went to work for Edison in the ‘Edison Machine Works’. He was offered in present value terms 1M$ if he completed design improvements to the direct current (DC) motor and generator initiatives that Edison was doing at the time. After one year of hard work where he produced some very profitable products and patents, Edison reneged on the deal and when finally Tesla was refused a 25$/week raise he resigned. This is a good example of naivety in business which Tesla would exhibit many times in his life. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, ‘Tesla Electric -Light & Manufacturing’ and started work on developing an alternating current (AC) motor. He disagreed with his financial investors on his plan for an (AC) motor and he was forced to leave the company. However during this time he worked with a patent attorney who helped Tesla to start work on his AC motor and financed him in setting up his laboratory. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1888.
Some Achievements
Nikola Tesla contributed more to the field of electricity, radio, and television than any other person. He invented alternating current, generators and motors to run on it, high voltage Tesla coils, radio, X-rays, highly efficient bladeless steam turbines, radio controlled boats and robots, fluorescent lights and was hugely influential in his industry. Tesla was a metaphysical genius who had a tremendous ability to visualise his inventions and the complete working model of his invention including the minutest details so that when it was manufactured for the first time it worked just as he visualized it.
In April of 1887, Tesla began his early investigative work in the area of X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes and where he discovered the phenomenon of braking radiation. This was much before Roentgen’s discovery who was a pioneer in this area also. In 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35.When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted.
From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC in excess of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil (Fig 2) and his most impressive experiment with this coil was in Colorado Springs where he produced artificial lightning discharges which were up to 135 foot long and managed unwittin gly to blow up the electricity generators for the Colorado Springs area. He investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep and cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, effectively building the first radio transmitter. His first radio patents were filed in 1896 but it was not until after his death that he was formally recognised as the inventor of radio.
At the 1893 World’s Fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Tesla and Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to light the exhibition facility. In 1896 the world’s first large-scale power plant producing AC power was set up at Niagara Falls. Both these systems clearly demonstrated the superiority of AC power over Edison’s DC power.
In 1894, he was given an honorary doctoral degree by Columbia and Yale Universities and the Elliot Cresson Medal by the Franklin Institute. In 1897, when Tesla was 42 he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat to the US military. In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. In the same year, Tesla invented an “electric igniter” or spark plug for internal combustion gasoline engines which is related to the Tesla coil in its principle of working.
In 1917 Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal, the most coveted prize of IEEE.
In 1934, the city of Philadelphia awarded him the John Scott Medal for his polyphase power system.
In his latter years Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon which he called “death ray”. This got articulated as “Star Wars” during the Reagan administration. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled “The Art of Projecting Concentrated Nondispersive Energy through the Natural Media” concerning charged particle beams. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the developments and a contract was entered into to build a de vice. Tesla died of heart failure in the New Yorker Hotel in 1943, at the age of 86.
An interesting thought is what impact Tesla would gave today on our overstressed world where we seek the technological wave that will mitigate the risks of global warming and the depletion of fossil fuels.
