short essay about nikola tesla

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Nikola Tesla

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• Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Biography of Nikola Tesla
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Where was Nikola Tesla born?

Nikola Tesla was born to Serbian parents in Smiljan, in what was then the Austrian Empire (now in Croatia).

When did Nikola Tesla die?

Nikola Tesla died on January 7, 1943, in New York City.

Where did Nikola Tesla attend school?

Nikola Tesla studied engineering at the Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague .

How did Nikola Tesla change the world?

Tesla developed the alternating-current power system that provides electricity for homes and buildings. He also pioneered the field of radio communication and was granted more than 100 U.S. patents.

What was Nikola Tesla’s childhood like?

As a boy, Tesla was often sick, but he was a bright student with a photographic memory. In addition to his interest in engineering, he possessed a wild imagination as well as a love of poetry.

Nikola Tesla (born July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan, Austrian Empire [now in Croatia]—died January 7, 1943, New York , New York, U.S.) was a Serbian American inventor and engineer who discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field , the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He also developed the three-phase system of electric power transmission. He immigrated to the United States in 1884 and sold the patent rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers , and motors to George Westinghouse . In 1891 he invented the Tesla coil, an induction coil widely used in radio technology .

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 May 1888 George Westinghouse , head of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh , bought the patent rights to Tesla’s polyphase system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors. The transaction precipitated a titanic power struggle between Edison’s direct-current systems and the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating-current approach, which eventually won out.

Tesla soon established his own laboratory, where his inventive mind could be given free rein. He experimented with shadowgraphs similar to those that later were to be used by Wilhelm Röntgen when he discovered X-rays in 1895. Tesla’s countless experiments included work on a carbon button lamp, on the power of electrical resonance , and on various types of lighting.

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 honor 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 honors, 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.”

In 2003 American entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla Inc. , the manufacturer of electric automobiles, solar panels, and batteries, in honor of the inventor. Tesla Inc. quickly became one of the most recognizable car brands in the world.

Nikola Tesla

Serbian American scientist Nikola Tesla invented the Tesla coil and alternating-current (AC) electricity, in addition to discovering the rotating magnetic field.

Who Was Nikola Tesla?

Quick facts, when was nikola tesla born, nikola tesla and thomas edison, solo venture, how did nikola tesla die, legacy: movies, electric car, and wardenclyffe tower renovation.

Engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla designed the alternating-current (AC) electric system, which is the predominant electrical system used across the world today. He also created the “Tesla coil” that is still used in radio technology. Born in modern-day Croatia, Tesla immigrated to the United States in 1884 and briefly worked with Thomas Edison before the two parted ways. The Serbian American sold several patent rights, including those to his AC machinery, to George Westinghouse . Tesla died at age 86 in January 1943, but his legacy lives on through his inventions and the electric car company Tesla that’s named in his honor.

FULL NAME: Nikola Tesla BORN: July 10, 1856 DIED: January 7, 1943 BIRTHPLACE: Smiljan, Croatia ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer

Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the Austrian Empire town of Smiljan that is now part of Croatia.

He was one of five children, including siblings Dane, Angelina, Milka, and Marica. Nikola’s interest in electrical invention was spurred by his mother, Djuka Mandic, who invented small household appliances in her spare time while her son was growing up.

Tesla’s father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian orthodox priest and a writer, and he pushed for his son to join the priesthood. But Nikola’s interests lay squarely in the sciences.

Tesla received quite a bit of education. He studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt (later renamed the Johann-Rudolph-Glauber Realschule Karlstadt) in Germany; the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria; and the University of Prague during the 1870s.

After university, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, where for a time he worked at the Central Telephone Exchange. It was while in Budapest that the idea for the induction motor first came to Tesla, but after several years of trying to gain interest in his invention, at age 28, Tesla decided to leave Europe for America.

In 1884, Tesla arrived in the United States with little more than the clothes on his back and a letter of introduction to famed inventor and business mogul Thomas Edison , whose DC-based electrical works were fast becoming the standard in the country. Edison hired Tesla, and the two men were soon working tirelessly alongside each other, making improvements to Edison’s inventions.

Several months later, the two parted ways due to a conflicting business-scientific relationship , attributed by historians to their incredibly different personalities. While Edison was a power figure who focused on marketing and financial success, Tesla was commercially out-of-touch and somewhat vulnerable. Their feud would continue to affect Tesla’s career.

In 1885, Tesla received funding for the Tesla Electric Light Company and was tasked by his investors to develop improved arc lighting. After successfully doing so, however, Tesla was forced out of the venture and, for a time, had to work as a manual laborer in order to survive. His luck changed two years later when he received funding for his new Tesla Electric Company.

Throughout his career, Tesla discovered, designed, and developed ideas for a number of important inventions—most of which were officially patented by other inventors—including dynamos (electrical generators similar to batteries) and the induction motor.

He was also a pioneer in the discovery of radar technology, X-ray technology, remote control, and the rotating magnetic field—the basis of most AC machinery. Tesla is most well-known for his contributions in AC electricity and for the Tesla coil.

AC Electrical System

Tesla designed the alternating-current (AC) electrical system, which quickly became the preeminent power system of the 20 th century and has remained the worldwide standard ever since. In 1887, Tesla found funding for his new Tesla Electric Company, and by the end of the year, he had successfully filed several patents for AC-based inventions.

Tesla’s AC system soon caught the attention of American engineer and businessman George Westinghouse , who was seeking a solution to supplying the nation with long-distance power. Convinced that Tesla’s inventions would help him achieve this, in 1888, he purchased his patents for $60,000 in cash and stock in the Westinghouse Corporation.

As interest in an AC system grew, Tesla and Westinghouse were put in direct competition with Thomas Edison , who was intent on selling his direct-current (DC) system to the nation. A negative press campaign was soon waged by Edison, in an attempt to undermine interest in AC power.

Unfortunately for Edison, the Westinghouse Corporation was chosen to supply the lighting at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Tesla conducted demonstrations of his AC system there.

Hydroelectric Power Plant

In 1895, Tesla designed what was among the first AC hydroelectric power plants in the United States, at Niagara Falls. The following year, it was used to power the city of Buffalo, New York—a feat that was highly publicized throughout the world and helped further AC electricity’s path to becoming the world’s power system.

In the late 19 th century, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, which laid the foundation for wireless technologies and is still used in radio technology today. The heart of an electrical circuit, the Tesla coil is an inductor used in many early radio transmission antennas.

The coil works with a capacitor to resonate current and voltage from a power source across the circuit. Tesla used his coil to study fluorescence, x-rays, radio, wireless power, and electromagnetism in the earth and its atmosphere.

Wireless Power and Wardenclyffe Tower

Having become obsessed with the wireless transmission of energy, around 1900, Tesla set to work on his boldest project yet: to build a global, wireless communication system transmitted through a large electrical tower that would enable information sharing and provide free energy throughout the world.

With funding from a group of investors that included financial giant J. P. Morgan , Tesla began work on the free energy project in earnest in 1901. He designed and built a lab with a power plant and a massive transmission tower on a site on Long Island, New York, that became known as Wardenclyffe.

However, doubts arose among his investors about the plausibility of Tesla’s system. As his rival, Guglielmo Marconi —with the financial support of Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison —continued to make great advances with his own radio technologies, Tesla had no choice but to abandon the project.

The Wardenclyffe staff was laid off in 1906, and by 1915, the site had fallen into foreclosure. Two years later, Tesla declared bankruptcy, and the tower was dismantled and sold for scrap to help pay the debts he had accrued.

After suffering a nervous breakdown following the closure of his wireless power project, Tesla eventually returned to work, primarily as a consultant. But as time went on, his ideas became progressively more outlandish and impractical. He grew increasingly eccentric, devoting much of his time to the care of wild pigeons in the parks of New York City . Tesla even drew the attention of the FBI with his talk of building a powerful “death ray,” which had received some interest from the Soviet Union during World War II.

Poor and reclusive, Tesla died of coronary thrombosis on January 7, 1943, at the age of 86 in New York City, where he had lived for nearly 60 years.

The legacy of Tesla’s work lives on to this day. In 1994, a street sign identifying “Nikola Tesla Corner” was installed near the site of his former New York City laboratory, at the intersection of 40 th Street and 6 th Avenue.

Several movies have highlighted Tesla’s life and famous works, most notably:

• The Secret of Nikola Tesla , a 1980 biographical film starring Orson Welles as J. P. Morgan .
• Nikola Tesla, The Genius Who Lit the World , a 1994 documentary produced by the Tesla Memorial Society and the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.
• The Prestige , a 2006 fictional film about two magicians directed by Christopher Nolan , with rock star David Bowie portraying Tesla.

In 2003, a group of engineers founded Tesla Motors, a car company named after Tesla dedicated to building the first fully electric-powered car. Entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk contributed over $30 million to Tesla in 2004 and serves as the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Tesla Motors unveiled its first electric car, the Roadster, in 2008. A high-performance sports vehicle, the Roadster helped changed the perception of what electric cars could be. In 2014, Tesla launched the Model S, a lower-priced model that, in 2017, set the MotorTrend world record for 0 to 60 miles per hour acceleration at 2.28 seconds. The company’s designs showed that an electric car could have the same performance as gasoline-powered sports car brands like Porsche and Lamborghini.

Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe

Since Tesla’s original forfeiture of his free energy project, ownership of the Wardenclyffe property has passed through numerous hands. Several attempts have been made to preserve it, but efforts to declare it a national historic site failed in 1967, 1976, and 1994.

Then, in 2008, a group called the Tesla Science Center (TSC) was formed with the intention of purchasing the property and turning it into a museum dedicated to the inventor’s work. In 2009, the Wardenclyffe site went on the market for nearly $1.6 million, and for the next several years, the TSC worked diligently to raise funds for its purchase. In 2012, public interest in the project peaked when Matthew Inman of TheOatmeal.com collaborated with the TSC in an Internet fundraising effort, ultimately receiving enough contributions to acquire the site in May 2013.

Wardenclyffe Tower finally joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. Work on its restoration is still in progress. A $20 million redevelopment broke ground in April 2023, but those efforts were complicated by large fire that November. The site is closed to the public “for the foreseeable future” for reasons of safety and preservation, according to the Tesla Science Center.

• Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
• I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.
• The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

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Nikola Tesla

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 13, 2020 | Original: November 9, 2009

Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power. He invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology. Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.

Nikola Tesla’s Early Years

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother managed the family’s farm. In 1863 Tesla’s brother Daniel was killed in a riding accident. The shock of the loss unsettled the 7-year-old Tesla, who reported seeing visions—the first signs of his lifelong mental illnesses.

Did you know? During the 1890s Mark Twain struck up a friendship with inventor Nikola Tesla. Twain often visited him in his lab, where in 1894 Tesla photographed the great American writer in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light.

Tesla studied math and physics at the Technical University of Graz and philosophy at the University of Prague. In 1882, while on a walk, he came up with the idea for a brushless AC motor, making the first sketches of its rotating electromagnets in the sand of the path. Later that year he moved to Paris and got a job repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison Company. Two years later he immigrated to the United States.

Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison

Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 and was hired as an engineer at Thomas Edison’s Manhattan headquarters. He worked there for a year, impressing Edison with his diligence and ingenuity. At one point Edison told Tesla he would pay $50,000 for an improved design for his DC dynamos. After months of experimentation, Tesla presented a solution and asked for the money. Edison demurred, saying, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.” Tesla quit soon after.

Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse

After an unsuccessful attempt to start his own Tesla Electric Light Company and a stint digging ditches for $2 a day, Tesla found backers to support his research into alternating current. In 1887 and 1888 he was granted more than 30 patents for his inventions and invited to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on his work. His lecture caught the attention of George Westinghouse, the inventor who had launched the first AC power system near Boston and was Edison’s major competitor in the “Battle of the Currents.”

Westinghouse hired Tesla, licensed the patents for his AC motor and gave him his own lab. In 1890 Edison arranged for a convicted New York murderer to be put to death in an AC-powered electric chair—a stunt designed to show how dangerous the Westinghouse standard could be.

Buoyed by Westinghouse’s royalties, Tesla struck out on his own again. But Westinghouse was soon forced by his backers to renegotiate their contract, with Tesla relinquishing his royalty rights.

In the 1890s Tesla invented electric oscillators, meters, improved lights and the high-voltage transformer known as the Tesla coil. He also experimented with X-rays, gave short-range demonstrations of radio communication two years before Guglielmo Marconi and piloted a radio-controlled boat around a pool in Madison Square Garden. Together, Tesla and Westinghouse lit the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and partnered with General Electric to install AC generators at Niagara Falls , creating the first modern power station.

Nikola Tesla’s Failures, Death and Legacy

In 1895 Tesla’s New York lab burned, destroying years’ worth of notes and equipment. Tesla relocated to Colorado Springs for two years, returning to New York in 1900. He secured backing from financier J.P. Morgan and began building a global communications network centered on a giant tower at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. But funds ran out and Morgan balked at Tesla’s grandiose schemes.

Tesla lived his last decades in a New York hotel, working on new inventions even as his energy and mental health faded. His obsession with the number three and fastidious washing were dismissed as the eccentricities of genius. He spent his final years feeding—and, he claimed, communicating with—the city’s pigeons.

Tesla died in his room on January 7, 1943. Later that year the U.S. Supreme Court voided four of Marconi’s key patents, belatedly acknowledging Tesla’s innovations in radio. The AC system he championed and improved remains the global standard for power transmission.

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Nikola Tesla

Amongst many inventors throughout the history of science, one of the most prominent inventors was Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla was an inventor, an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. Nikola Tesla was also a Serbian-American Engineer who was highly regarded for his achievements in energy for the advancement and growth of Alternating Current (AC) in electrical systems. He also provided his extraordinary contributions to electromagnetism and wireless radio communications.

Table of Contents

Introduction of nikola tesla, nikola tesla’s education, awards and achievements, contribution in alternating currents (ac).

• Tesla Turbine

Nikola Tesla was a mastermind inventor who shaped some ground-breaking inventions. He was an engineer who was awarded about 300 patents for his innovations in history. He also collaborated with many prominent names and companies in history.

Nikola Tesla was born on 10th July in 1856 to a priest father in the Croatian town of Smiljan (Austrian Empire).

Tesla’s inventions constitute significant technological breakthroughs throughout his lifetime. He invented the widely used Tesla coil and induction coil in radio technology. This math and physics genius made a substantial impact on our daily lives through his important innovations.

Tesla studied at several places in Europe, which also included Germany, Austria, and Prague. At the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, he pursued electrical engineering, and later, joined the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.

He had the opportunity to go to Budapest in the late 1870s, where he worked at the Telephone Exchange. He made enhancements to some inventions and came up with an idea for the induction motor, which produced an alternating current system, and used electromagnetic induction from the magnetic field instead of electrical connections to the rotor.

At age 28, in 1884, he decided to move to the U.S., in search of more opportunities. Tesla met Thomas Edison in the U.S. Tesla worked alongside him for a couple of months. When Edison declined to pay Tesla for his work, Tesla decided to quit and pursue his journey as an inventor.

Tesla’s legacy holds nine decorations with certificates of honours with which the scientist was decorated between 1892 and 1939.

Nikola Tesla’s best-known invention was Alternating Current . AC power permits electricity to be sent over extended distances much more efficiently.

Tesla’s AC patents were accepted by Westinghouse and used for the lighting of the Chicago World’s Fair. Tesla’s apparent essential skill for invention and profound imagination made him one of the most prolific inventors of our times. Clearly, his genius was unmatched in his time and perhaps ours.

Perhaps the most well-known symbol of Tesla’s work is the Tesla coil. It is a transformer that produces high-voltage, low-current, high-frequency alternating-current electricity.

A Tesla coil comprises a primary coil and secondary coil, each coil with its own capacitor to store electrical energy. A spark gap links both the coils and capacitors. The system is powered by a high-voltage source. As the current flows out of the capacitor down the primary coil, a magnetic field is created.

This field breaks down quickly and produces an electric current in the secondary coil. The subsequent high-frequency voltage can lighten fluorescent bulbs several feet away with no wire connection.

Watch Video :Charging By Induction

Tesla revealed that he could use his coils to transmit and receive powerful radio signals before his lab burned down. Tuning those radio signals to resonate at the same frequency radio signals could be sent and received. He was ready to convey a signal 50 miles from his lab to West Point, New York, by early 1895. But the fire in Tesla’s lab demolished his work.

Guglielmo Marconi (inventor of the wireless telegraph system) established long-distance demonstrations in the future, and he used a Tesla oscillator to spread the signals across the English Channel.

Tesla Turbine and Induction Motor

As a way to make a change in the world, Tesla saw the growth of piston engines in the automobile industry. Therefore, Tesla developed his own turbine engine that used the combustion process to rotate the disks.

With 90% of fuel efficiency, this engine was a significant achievement.

Also, Nikola Tesla and Galileo Ferraris independently invented the first AC commutator-free three-phase induction motor in 1885, and it was Tesla who filed for a patent first. This type of motor is generally used in vacuums, blow dryers, and power tools, even today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Define alternating current..

Alternating current is an electric current that periodically reverses direction, in contrast to DC which flows in only one direction.

Where is Nikola Tesla Tower located?

Shoreham, Long Island, Newyork

Nikola Tesla was most famous for which inventions?

Tesla Coil, Alternating Current (AC) and discovery of rotating magnetic field.

What is a Tesla Coil?

A form of Induction coil used for producing high-frequency alternating currents.

Which principle is responsible for the working of induction motor?

Electromagnetic Induction.

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Biography of Nikola Tesla, Serbian-American Inventor

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Nikola Tesla (July 10, 1856–January 7, 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, and futurist. As the holder of nearly 300 patents, Tesla is best known for his role in developing the modern three-phase alternating current (AC) electric power supply system and for his invention of the Tesla coil, an early advancement in the field of radio transmission.

During the 1880s, Tesla and Thomas Edison , inventor and champion of direct electrical current (DC), would become embattled in the “War of the Currents” over whether Tesla’s AC or Edison’s DC would become the standard current used in long-distance transmission of electrical power.

Fast Facts: Nikola Tesla

• Known For: Development of alternating current (AC) electrical power
• Born: July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia)
• Parents: Milutin Tesla and Đuka Tesla
• Died: January 7, 1943 in New York City, New York
• Education: Austrian Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria (1875)
• Patents: US381968A —Electro-magnetic motor, US512,340A —coil for electro-magnets
• Awards and Honors : Edison Medal (1917), Inventor’s Hall of Fame (1975)
• Notable Quote : “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

Early Life and Education

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan in the Austrian Empire (now Croatia) to his Serbian father Milutin Tesla, an Eastern Orthodox priest, and his mother Đuka Tesla, who invented small household appliances and had the ability to memorize lengthy Serbian epic poems. Tesla credited his mother for his own interest in inventing and photographic memory. He had four siblings, a brother Dane, and sisters Angelina, Milka, and Marica. 

In 1870, Tesla started high school at the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac, Austria. He recalled that his physics teacher’s demonstrations of electricity made him want “to know more of this wonderful force.” Able to do integral calculus in his head, Tesla completed high school in just three years, graduating in 1873.

Determined to pursue a career in engineering, Tesla enrolled at the Austrian Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, in 1875. It was here that Tesla studied a Gramme dynamo, an electrical generator that produces direct current. Observing that the dynamo functioned like an electric motor when the direction of its current was reversed, Tesla began thinking of ways this alternating current could be used in industrial applications. Though he never graduated—as was not uncommon then—Tesla posted excellent grades and was even given a letter from the dean of the technical faculty addressed to his father stating, “Your son is a star of first rank.”

Feeling that chastity would help him focus on his career, Tesla never married or had any known romantic relationships. In her 2001 book, “ Tesla: Man Out of Time ,” biographer Margaret Cheney writes that Tesla felt himself to be unworthy of women, considering them to be superior to him in every way. Later in life, however, he publicly expressed strong dislike what he called the “new woman,” women he felt were abandoning their femininity in an attempt to dominate men.

The Path to Alternating Current

In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he gained practical experience as the chief electrician at the Central Telephone Exchange. In 1882, Tesla was hired by the Continental Edison Company in Paris where he worked in the emerging industry of installing the direct current-powered indoor incandescent lighting system patented by Thomas Edison in 1879. Impressed by Tesla’s mastery of engineering and physics, the company’s management soon had him designing improved versions of generating dynamos and motors and fixing problems at other Edison facilities throughout France and Germany.

When the manager of the Continental Edison facility in Paris was transferred back to the United States in 1884, he asked that Tesla be brought to the U.S. as well. In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States and went to work at the Edison Machine Works in New York City, where Edison’s DC-based electrical lighting system was fast becoming the standard. Just six months later, Tesla quit Edison after a heated dispute over unpaid wages and bonuses. In his diary, Notebook from the Edison Machine Works: 1884-1885 , Tesla marked the end of the amicable relationship between the two great inventors. Across two pages, Tesla wrote in large letters, “Good By to the Edison Machine Works.”

By March 1885, Tesla, with the financial backing of businessmen Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail, started his own lighting utility company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. Instead of Edison’s incandescent lamp bulbs, Tesla’s company installed a DC-powered arc lighting system he had designed while working at Edison Machine Works. While Tesla’s arc light system was praised for its advanced features, his investors, Lane and Vail, had little interest in his ideas for perfecting and harnessing alternating current. In 1886, they abandoned Tesla’s company to start their own company. The move left Tesla penniless, forcing him to survive by taking electrical repair jobs and digging ditches for $2.00 per day. Of this period of hardship, Tesla would later recall, “My high education in various branches of science, mechanics, and literature seemed to me like a mockery.”

During his time of near destitution, Tesla’s resolve to prove the superiority of alternating current over Edison’s direct current grew even stronger.

Alternating Current and the Induction Motor

In April 1887, Tesla, along with his investors, Western Union telegraph superintendent Alfred S. Brown and attorney Charles F. Peck, founded the Tesla Electric Company in New York City for the purpose of developing new types of electric motors and generators.

Tesla soon developed a new type of electromagnetic induction motor that ran on alternating current. Patented in May 1888, Tesla’s motor proved to be simple, dependable, and not subject to the constant need for repairs that plagued direct current-driven motors at the time.

In July 1888, Tesla sold his patent for AC-powered motors to Westinghouse Electric Corporation, owned by electrical industry pioneer George Westinghouse. In the deal, which proved financially lucrative for Tesla, Westinghouse Electric got the rights to market Tesla’s AC motor and agreed to hire Tesla as a consultant.

With Westinghouse now backing AC and Edison backing DC, the stage was set for what would become known as “The War of the Currents.”

The War of the Currents: Tesla vs. Edison

Recognizing the economic and technical superiority of alternating current to his direct current for long-distance power distribution, Edison undertook an unprecedently aggressive public relations campaign to discredit AC as posing a deadly threat to the public—a force should never allow in their homes. Edison and his associates toured the U.S. presenting grizzly public demonstrations of animals being electrocuted with AC electricity. When New York State sought a faster, “more humane” alternative to hanging for executing condemned prisoners, Edison, though once a vocal opponent of capital punishment, recommended using AC-powered electrocution. In 1890, murderer William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in a Westinghouse AC generator-powered electric chair that had been secretly designed by one of Edison’s salesmen.

Despite his best efforts, Edison failed to discredit alternating current. In 1892, Westinghouse and Edison’s new company General Electric, competed head-to-head for the contract to supply electricity to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. When Westinghouse ultimately won the contract, the fair served as a dazzling public display of Tesla’s AC system.

On the tails of their success at the World’s Fair, Tesla and Westinghouse won a historic contract to build the generators for a new hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls. In 1896, the power plant began delivering AC electricity to Buffalo, New York, 26 miles away. In his speech at the opening ceremony of the power plant, Tesla said of the accomplishment, “It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.”

The success of the Niagara Falls power plant firmly established Tesla’s AC as the standard for the electric power industry, effectively ending the War of the Currents.

The Tesla Coil

In 1891, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, an electrical transformer circuit capable of producing high-voltage, low-current AC electricity. Though best-known today for its use in spectacular, lightening-spitting demonstrations of electricity, the Tesla coil was fundamental to the development of wireless communications. Still used in modern radio technology, the Tesla coil inductor was an essential part of many early radio transmission antennas.

Tesla would go on to use his Tesla coil in experiments with radio remote control, fluorescent lighting , x-rays , electromagnetism , and universal wireless power transmission. 

On July 30, 1891, the same year he patented his coil, the 35-year-old Tesla was sworn in as a naturalized United States citizen.

Radio Remote Control

At the 1898 Electrical Exposition in Boston’s Madison Square Gardens, Tesla demonstrated an invention he called a “telautomaton,” a three-foot-long, radio-controlled boat propelled by a small battery-powered motor and rudder. Members of the amazed crowd accused Tesla of using telepathy, a trained monkey, or pure magic to steer the boat.

Finding little consumer interest in radio-controlled devices, Tesla tried unsuccessfully to sell his “Teleautomatics” idea to the US Navy as a type of radio-controlled torpedo. However, during and after World War I (1914-1918), the militaries of many countries, including the United States incorporated it.

Wireless Power Transmission

From 1901 through 1906, Tesla spent most of his time and savings working on arguably his most ambitious, if a far-fetched, project—an electrical transmission system he believed could provide free energy and communications throughout the world without the need for wires. 

In 1901, with the backing of investors headed by financial giant J. P. Morgan, Tesla began building a power plant and massive power transmission tower at his

Wardenclyffe laboratory on Long Island, New York. Seizing on the then commonly-held belief that the Earth’s atmosphere conducted electricity, Tesla envisioned a globe-spanning network of power transmitting and receiving antennas suspended by balloons 30,000 feet (9,100 m) in the air. 

However, as Tesla’s project drug on, its sheer enormity caused his investors to doubt its plausibility and withdraw their support. With his rival, Guglielmo Marconi—enjoying the substantial financial support of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison—was making great advances in his own radio transmission developments, Tesla was forced to abandon his wireless power project in 1906.

Later Life and Death

In 1922, Tesla, deeply in debt from his failed wireless power project, was forced to leave the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City where he had been living since 1900, and move into the more-affordable St. Regis Hotel. While living at the St. Regis, Tesla took to feeding pigeons on the windowsill of his room, often bringing weak or injured birds into his room to nurse them back to health.

Of his love for one particular injured pigeon, Tesla would write, “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”

By late 1923, the St. Regis evicted Tesla because of unpaid bills and complaints about the smell from keeping pigeons in his room. For the next decade, he would live in a series of hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills at each. Finally, in 1934, his former employer, Westinghouse Electric Company, began paying Tesla $125 per month as a “consulting fee,” as well as paying his rent at the Hotel New Yorker.

In 1937, at age 81, Tesla was knocked to the ground by a taxicab while crossing a street a few blocks from the New Yorker. Though he suffered a severely wrenched back and broken ribs, Tesla characteristically refused extended medical attention. While he survived the incident, the full extent of his injuries, from which he never fully recovered, was never known.

On January 7, 1943, Tesla died alone in his room at the New Yorker Hotel at the age of 86. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as coronary thrombosis, a heart attack.

On January 10, 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivered a eulogy to Tesla broadcast live over WNYC radio. On January 12, over 2,000 people attended Tesla’s funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Following the funeral, Tesla’s body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York.

With the United States then fully engaged in World War II ., fears that the Austrian-born inventor might have been in possession of devices or designs helpful to Nazi Germany , drove the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seize Tesla’s possessions after his death. However, the FBI reported finding nothing of interest, concluding that since about 1928, Tesla’s work had been “primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

In his 1944 book, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla , journalist, and historian John Joseph O’Neill wrote that Tesla claimed to have never slept more than two hours per night, “dozing” during the day instead to “recharge his batteries.” He was reported to have once spent 84 straight hours without sleep working in his laboratory.

It is believed that Tesla was granted around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions during his lifetime. While several of his patents remain unaccounted for or archived, he holds at least 278 known patents in 26 countries, mostly in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Tesla never attempted to patent many of his other inventions and ideas.

Today, Tesla’s legacy can be seen in multiple forms of popular culture, including movies, TV, video games and several genres of science fiction. For example, in the 2006 movie The Prestige, David Bowie portrays Tesla developing an amazing electro-replicating device for a magician. In Disney’s 2015 film Tomorrowland: A World Beyond, Tesla helps Thomas Edison, Gustave Eiffel , and Jules Verne discover a better future in an alternate dimension. And in the 2019 film The Current War, Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult, squares off with Thomas Edison, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, in a history-based depiction of the war of the currents.

In 1917, Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal, the most coveted electrical prize in the United States, and in 1975, Tesla was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. In 1983, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Tesla. Most recently, in 2003, a group of investors headed by engineer and futurist Elon Musk founded Tesla Motors, a company dedicated to producing the first car fittingly powered totally by Tesla’s obsession—electricity.

• Carlson, W. Bernard. “Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age.” Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Cheney, Margaret. “Tesla: Man Out of Time.” Simon & Schuster, 2001.
• O'Neill, John J. (1944). “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla.” Cosimo Classics, 2006.
• Gunderman, Richard. “The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla.” Smithsonian.com , January 5, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/extraordinary-life-nikola-tesla-180967758/ .
• Tesla, Nikola. “Notebook from the Edison Machine Works: 1884-1885.” Tesla Universe, https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/books/nikola-tesla-notebook-edison-machine-works-1884-1885 .
• “The War of the Currents: AC vs. DC Power.” U.S. Department of Energy , https://www.energy.gov/articles/war-currents-ac-vs-dc-power .
• Cheney, Margaret. “Tesla: Master of Lightning.” MetroBooks, 2001.
• Dickerson, Kelly.“Wireless Electricity? How the Tesla Coil Works.” LiveScience , July 10, 2014, https://www.livescience.com/46745-how-tesla-coil-works.html .
• “About Nikola Tesla.” Tesla Society , https://web.archive.org/web/20120525133151/http:/www.teslasociety.org/about.html .
• O’Neill, John J. “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla.” Cosimo Classics, 2006.
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The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

The eccentric inventor and modern Prometheus died 75 years ago, after a rags-to-riches to rags life

Richard Gunderman, The Conversation

Match the following figures – Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, Alfred Nobel and Nikola Tesla – with these biographical facts:

• Spoke eight languages
• Produced the first motor that ran on AC current
• Developed the underlying technology for wireless communication over long distances
• Held approximately 300 patents
• Claimed to have developed a “superweapon” that would end all war

The match for each, of course, is Tesla. Surprised? Most people have heard his name, but few know much about his place in modern science and technology .

The 75th anniversary of Tesla’s death on Jan. 7 provides a timely opportunity to review the life of a man who came from nowhere yet became world famous; claimed to be devoted solely to discovery but relished the role of a showman; attracted the attention of many women but never married; and generated ideas that transformed daily life and created multiple fortunes but died nearly penniless.

Early years

Tesla was born in Croatia on a summer night in 1856, during what he claimed was a lightning storm – which led the midwife to say, “He will be a child of the storm,” and his mother to counter prophetically, “No, of the light.”* As a student, Tesla displayed such remarkable abilities to calculate mathematical problems that teachers accused him of cheating. During his teen years, he fell seriously ill, recovering once his father abandoned his demand that Nikola become a priest and agreed he could attend engineering school instead.

Although an outstanding student, Tesla eventually withdrew from polytechnic school and ended up working for the  Continental Edison Company , where he focused on electrical lighting and motors. Wishing to meet Edison himself, Tesla immigrated to the U.S. in 1884, and he later claimed he was offered the sum of US$50,000 if he could solve a series of engineering problems Edison’s company faced. Having achieved the feat, Tesla said he was then told that the offer had just been a joke, and he left the company after six months.

Tesla then developed a relationship with two businessmen that led to the founding of  Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing . He filed a number of electrical patents, which he assigned to the company. When his partners decided that they wanted to focus strictly on supplying electricity, they took the company’s intellectual property and founded another firm, leaving Tesla with nothing.

Tesla reported that he then  worked as a ditch digger  for $2 a day, tortured by the sense that his great talent and education were going to waste.

Success as an inventor

In 1887, Tesla met two investors who agreed to back the formation of the Tesla Electric Company. He set up a laboratory in Manhattan, where he developed the  alternating current induction motor , which solved a number of technical problems that had bedeviled other designs. When Tesla demonstrated his device at an engineering meeting, the Westinghouse Company made arrangements to license the technology, providing an upfront payment and royalties on each horsepower generated.

The so-called “ War of the Currents ” was raging in the late 1880s. Thomas Edison promoted direct current, asserting that it was safer than AC. George Westinghouse backed AC, since it could transmit power over long distances. Because the two were undercutting each other’s prices, Westinghouse lacked capital. He explained the difficulty and asked Tesla to sell his patents to him for a single lump sum, to which Tesla agreed, forgoing what would have been a vast fortune had he held on to them.

With the  World’s Columbian Exposition  of 1893 looming in Chicago, Westinghouse asked Tesla to help supply power; they’d have a huge platform for demonstrating the merits of AC. Tesla helped the fair illuminate more light bulbs than could be found in the entire city of Chicago, and wowed audiences with a variety of wonders, including an electric light that required no wires. Later Tesla also helped Westinghouse win a contract to generate electrical power at  Niagara Falls , helping to build the first large-scale AC power plant in the world.

Challenges along the way

Tesla encountered many obstacles. In 1895, his Manhattan laboratory was devastated by a fire, which destroyed his notes and prototypes. At Madison Square Garden in 1898, he demonstrated  wireless control  of a boat, a stunt that many branded a hoax. Soon after he turned his attention to the wireless transmission of electric power. He believed that his system could not only distribute electricity around the globe but also provide for worldwide wireless communication.

Seeking to test his ideas, Tesla built a laboratory in  Colorado Springs . There he once drew so much power that he caused a regional power outage. He also detected signals that he claimed emanated from an extraterrestrial source. In 1901 Tesla persuaded J.P. Morgan to invest in the construction of a  tower on Long Island  that he believed would vindicate his plan to electrify the world. Yet Tesla’s dream did not materialize, and Morgan soon withdrew funding.

In 1909,  Marconi received the Nobel Prize  for the development of radio. In 1915, Tesla unsuccessfully sued Marconi, claiming infringement on his patents. That same year,  it was rumored  that Edison and Tesla would share the Nobel Prize, but it didn’t happen. Unsubstantiated speculation suggested their mutual animosity was the cause. However, Tesla did receive numerous honors and awards over his life, including, ironically, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers  Edison Medal .

A singular man

Tesla was a  remarkable person . He said that he had a photographic memory, which helped him memorize whole books and speak eight languages. He also claimed that many of his best ideas came to him in a flash, and that he saw detailed pictures of many of his inventions in his mind before he ever set about constructing prototypes. As a result, he didn’t initially prepare drawings and plans for many of his devices.

The 6-foot-2-inch Tesla cut a dashing figure and was popular with women, though he never married, claiming that his  celibacy played an important role in his creativity . Perhaps because of his nearly fatal illness as a teenager, he feared germs and practiced very strict hygiene, likely a barrier to the development of interpersonal relationships. He also exhibited unusual phobias, such as an aversion to pearls, which led him to refuse to speak to any woman wearing them.

Tesla held that his greatest ideas came to him in solitude. Yet he was no hermit, socializing with many of the most  famous people of his day  at elegant dinner parties he hosted. Mark Twain frequented his laboratory and promoted some of his inventions. Tesla enjoyed a reputation as not only a great engineer and inventor but also a philosopher, poet and connoisseur. On his 75th birthday he received a congratulatory letter from Einstein and was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Tesla’s last years

In the popular imagination, Tesla played the part of a mad scientist . He claimed that he had developed a motor that ran on cosmic rays; that he was working on a new non-Einsteinian physics that would supply a new form of energy; that he had discovered a new technique for photographing thoughts; and that he had developed a new ray, alternately labeled the death ray and the peace ray, with vastly greater military potential than Nobel’s munitions.

His money long gone, Tesla spent his later years moving from place to place, leaving behind unpaid bills. Eventually, he settled in at a New York hotel, where his rent was paid by Westinghouse. Always living alone, he frequented the local park, where he was regularly seen feeding and tending to the pigeons , with which he claimed to share a special affinity. On the morning of Jan. 7, 1943, he was found dead in his room by a hotel maid at age 86.

Today the name Tesla is still very much in circulation. The airport in Belgrade bears his name, as does the world’s best-known electric car, and the magnetic field strength of MRI scanners is measured in Teslas. Tesla was a real-life Prometheus: the mythical Greek titan who raided heaven to bring fire to mankind, yet in punishment was chained to a rock where each day an eagle ate his liver. Tesla scaled great heights to bring lightning down to earth, yet his rare cast of mind and uncommon habits eventually led to his downfall, leaving him nearly penniless and alone.

*Editor's Note, August 29, 2019: This article has been updated to correct Tesla's birthplace. Though he was of Serbian ethnicity, he was born in present day Croatia.

Richard Gunderman, Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University

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Nikola Tesla: Biography, Inventions & Quotes

Nikola Tesla is often called one of history’s most important inventors, one whose discoveries in the field of electricity were way ahead of his time and continue to influence technology today. Despite his accomplishments, however, Tesla died penniless and without the accolades that would he would ultimately earn over a century later.

The “genius who lit the world” is now commemorated with an electrical unit called the Tesla, has a place in the inventor’s hall of fame, streets, statues, and a prestigious engineer’s award in his name, but in life he wasn’t always so successful.

Brilliant scientist, terrible businessman

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in a town called Smiljan, today part of Croatia but then located within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest and his mother, despite not having any formal education, tinkered in machinery and was known for having a spectacular memory.

Tesla’s career as an inventor began early; while working at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, at the age of just 26, he is reported to have first sketched out the principles for a rotating magnetic field — an important idea still used in many electromechanical devices. This major achievement laid the groundwork for many of his future inventions, including the alternating current motor and ultimately led him to New York City in 1884, lured by Thomas Edison and his groundbreaking engineering factory, Edison Machine Works.

It is often said that as brilliant a scientist as Tesla was, he was an equally terrible businessman, unable (or possibly unwilling) to see the commercial value behind his ideas. Thomas Edison was both an inventor and a business mogul focused on the bottom line, and he often clashed with Tesla over methods and ideology. It was also unlikely, perhaps, that two minds so brilliant could coexist in peace for very long and, indeed, Tesla quit Edison Machine Works only a year later.

Tesla’s creativity was given free rein at the new laboratory he established, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing, where he experimented with early X-ray technology, electrical resonance, arc lamps and other ideas. Moves to Colorado and then back to New York coincided with other great scientific feats, including advances in turbine science, the installation of the first hydroelectric power station at Niagara Falls and, most importantly, the perfection of his alternating current system.

Through it all, the compulsive, eccentric and often sensational Tesla provided terrific sound bites for reporters, speaking frequently to the press about new, futuristic ideas up to a few years before his death, when he became a recluse. Tesla died in 1943, broke and alone in a New York City hotel room.

Tesla’s legacy has experienced a resurgence of sorts in recent years, thanks to a handful of supporters who have popularized his work in the media, in the hopes of having a Nikola Tesla science museum built on the grounds of a former laboratory on Long Island, New York.

Innumerable patents

The exact number of patents held by Tesla is disputed, as some likely remain undiscovered, historians believe. He is thought to be responsible for at least 300 inventions (many related to each other), in addition to countless unpatented ideas that he developed over the course of his career.

Alternating current

Perhaps Tesla’s most famous and important idea, alternating current (AC), was an answer to his old boss Edison’s inefficient — as Tesla put it — use of direct current (DC) in the new electric age. While DC power stations sent electricity flowing in one direction in a straight line, alternating currents change direction quickly, and could do so at a much higher voltage.

Indeed, Edison’s power lines that crisscrossed the Atlantic seaboard were short and weak due to DC, while AC was able to send electricity much farther afield. Though Thomas Edison had more resources and an established reputation, Tesla’s AC power grids eventually became the norm. Several dozen of Tesla’s patents were related to alternating current science.

The Tesla Coil

Since named for its inventor, this impressive machine transforms energy into extremely high voltage charges, creating powerful electrical fields capable of producing spectacular electrical arcs. Besides the lightning-bolt shows they can put on, Tesla Coils had very practical applications in wireless radio technology and some medical devices. Tesla experimented with his coils in the last years of the 19th century.

The true father of radio

Tesla tinkered with radio waves as early as 1892, debuting a radio wave-controlled boat in 1898 with great fanfare at an electrical exhibition at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Expanding on the technology, he patented more than a dozen ideas related to radio communication, before Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi leapt ahead of a financially unstable Tesla and completed the first transatlantic radio transmission (a bit of Morse code, sent from England to Newfoundland) on the back of Tesla’s science. Marconi and Tesla’s battle for intellectual recognition waged for decades before the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately revoked some of Marconi’s patents in 1943, restoring Tesla as the father of radio, at least legally.

Tesla quotes

“Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.” — "A Visit to Nikola Tesla" by Dragislav L. Petković in Politika (April 1927)

“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.” — “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” — “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

Further reading:

• Tesla Memorial Society

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The Life and Achievements of Nikola Tesla a Scientist and Inventor

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Nikola Tesla

Introduction.

Nikola Tesla was born on July 9 or 10, 1856, in Smiljan, Austria-Hungary (now Croatia). His parents were Serbian. Nikola was an excellent student who easily memorized books and solved math problems. He studied electricity in college.

In 1880 Tesla graduated from the University of Prague. In 1882 Tesla discovered a type of current, or flow of electricity. It was different from the type being used in the world’s first two electric power stations, which opened that year. Both stations used direct current (DC), which could not change direction. However, Tesla’s alternating current (AC) could. Tesla built his first AC motor in 1883.

In 1884 Tesla moved to the United States. He worked for the renowned inventor Thomas Edison . Unlike Tesla, Edison preferred DC to AC. After two years Tesla left Edison’s laboratory.

In 1887 Tesla opened a laboratory in New York City. The next year he sold his AC idea to George Westinghouse, head of Westinghouse Electric Company. By 1891 he had invented the Tesla coil, which was widely used for many years in radios, television sets, and other electronic equipment. Tesla became a U.S. citizen in 1891.

In 1893 AC power was used to light the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. People started to agree that AC worked better than DC over distances. By 1896 Tesla and Westinghouse had constructed an AC power station that was driven by the energy of Niagara Falls.

Tesla died in New York City on January 7, 1943. The Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, was founded in his honor.

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Case Files: Nikola Tesla

Introduction

Born in a rural village in Croatia, Nikola Tesla would bring his brilliant scientific mind to America in 1884 to work with Thomas Edison. It was George Westinghouse, however, who fully recognized Tesla's brilliance and initiated a partnership with him. During that temporary partnership with Westinghouse and for many years that followed, Tesla generated amazing new advances in electrical engineering and earned patents by the dozen.

Who was Nikola Tesla? What were his contributions to research in high frequency phenomena?

Brilliant Imaginings

Nikola Tesla was born on July 9, 1856, in Smiljan, a village in rural Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest who was a notable preacher, and a clever and inventive, though uneducated, mother. Tesla was the second son in a family of two boys and three girls. His brilliant 12-year-old brother, Dane, died from an accident when Nikola was five years old.

Tesla grew up a keenly imaginative child, becoming fluent in six languages and developing a fascination for mechanical contraptions. A science prodigy, he was destined for the family occupations of priesthood or the military, but he was able, during a childhood illness, to get permission to pursue his dreams in science. He described his adventurous imaginings to be much more than dreams; instead, they were highly detailed visualizations with a dash of intuition added.

Between the age of 10 and 14, Tesla attended school in the town of Gospic, graduating as a brilliant student who had taught himself as much outside the classroom as he had learned inside. During the next three years at college in Carlstadt, Tesla discovered his lifetime passion: the science of electricity. His announcement of this choice was resisted by his parents, but decisions delayed when Tesla succumbed to the cholera epidemic in his hometown. He was dangerously ill and restricted for a year, and when he recovered, his father permitted his son's engineering ambitions to go forward.

Planting Seeds

In 1875, Tesla began studying electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria. Again, with obsessive effort that permitted only study, he excelled. In Graz, Tesla was able to observe the new Gramme machine, which generated direct current electricity using electromagnets and could also be reversed to operate as an electricity-driven motor. The demonstration planted an intuitive seed in Tesla's brain. Why was it necessary to go to such lengths to convert the alternating current (AC) produced by the dynamo to direct current (DC)? Why not leave the current AC and run the motor that way?

The electrical standard at that time was DC, the same mode produced by a battery, the mode that everyone was used to and accepted. To even imagine usable alternating current was visionary. Tesla's strong instincts told him this was possible, but at that time, in spite of his visualization efforts and the mental gymnastics of picturing many operating dynamo models, he failed to find the solution to this nagging problem.

Breakdown and Revelation

Tesla moved on to study electricity at the University of Prague and, short of funds, left after a year for a minor position with the newly-established Hungarian Telegraph Office in Budapest. Recognition of his ability came quickly and, in 1881, he was made manager of the telephone company and, with his characteristic enthusiasm, worked, invented, and began his avalanche of discoveries. However, his fixation with the alternating motor idea remained and eventually manifested in a critical mental and physical breakdown with highly mysterious symptoms. A hypersensitivity to sounds, light, and vibration brought shivers, twitches, and wildly erratic pulse rates. The illness continued for some months and defied medical diagnosis. Physical improvement came, the extreme sensitivity subsided, and Tesla returned to work still maintaining his captivation with the AC motor puzzle.

The puzzle's solution came to him in dramatic fashion in February, 1882. While walking with a friend at sunset, reciting poetry by Goethe, a spasm of revelation struck Tesla. He stood transfixed, explaining how an AC motor would work. The vision he outlined in minute detail had surfaced spontaneously in response to the questions he had asked himself back in 1875. Tesla later described his visualization powers with the example that he would envisage a design in meticulous detail, then return to the retained image days or weeks later and be able to examine it for wear as if it had been running during the intervening period.

In the midst of this excitement, Tesla's employer sold the telephone company but encouraged this unusual genius to move to Paris for work and expanded opportunities. Tesla moved to Paris in April of 1882.

Interested in learning more about Nikola Tesla? Learn More About His Cresson Award

Dreams to Reality

In Paris, Tesla was referred to a junior engineer position with the Compagnie Continental Edison, the branch of the American company set up to expand Edison’s DC generators and lighting systems. Advancing quickly, Tesla became one of the traveling repairmen sent to work on installations throughout Europe. He continued to be a strange, phobic character and talk enthusiastically about his AC system. He received little attention from colleagues who were too busy expanding the DC system. The company had stunned the public by illuminating the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition and was setting up generators to light-restricted areas such as factories. However, the one-mile transmission range for practical DC transmission limited sales to larger installations such as towns and cities.

The German city of Strasburg did purchase an Edison system, but the dedication ceremony for the railroad station lighting was disastrous. Throwing the switch caused an immediate explosion which blew out a wall of the train shed. The German-speaking Tesla was dispatched to deal with the problem. He spent a year doing the repairs and waiting for various levels of bureaucracy to approve the work.

During the slow time of waiting, Tesla was able to convert his dreams to reality. In a rented machine shop, he built the solid version of the dynamo he had preserved in his mind's eye during the previous year. The model worked beautifully. On returning to Paris, Tesla's plan was to collect his Strasburg bonus for start-up funds and find French financial backers as he built his new AC generators and motors.

The bonus did not materialize, either through lack of funds on the Edison company's part or misplaced expectations on Tesla's part. Edison managers advised Tesla to take his dreams and plans and try them out in America. The 28-year-old who had studied, worked, and traveled through much of central Europe set out for the United States.

Coming to America

Nikola Tesla arrived in New York on June 6, 1884, and set out to look for the friend he would live with. He stopped to do an engine repair job he happened to find along the way, and met with Thomas Edison, a meeting he described as "a memorable event in my life."

Working for Edison, Tesla again advanced quickly and his many patentable designs improved efficiency and controls. Tesla again became convinced that Edison had not lived up to a promise of bonuses and he resigned from the company within a year.

By this time, Tesla's engineering reputation was known and he found financial backing to develop his cherished AC generators and motors. The Tesla Light and Manufacturing Company was established and began to produce AC-driven arc lighting. Following completion of the project that illuminated the city of Rahway, New Jersey, Tesla expected to go on to manufacture his generators but his naivety brought failure. In the fall of 1886, the backers disagreed with Tesla, tricked him out of his money and patents, and left him penniless.

In the next step of his eventful life, Tesla spent the winter of 1886 working as a ditch digger and no doubt telling everyone he met of his AC electricity systems. A foreman recognized his promising labor and introduced Tesla to superiors who also appreciated his possibilities.

Recognized Genius

In April of 1887, the Tesla Electric Company was born in southern Manhattan and Tesla finally had the opportunity to build—in reality—the entire electrical systems, from generators through transformers to motors, that had been in his visual memory since that day in Budapest.

When he applied for the patent on his invention, he was directed by the patent office to rework and resubmit it broken into seven separate sections to reflect the inventive scope of the work. U.S. patents numbered 381,968 through 381,970 and 382,279 through 382,282 were issued on May 1, 1888.

The engineering fraternity began to notice Tesla and he was persuaded to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on May 16, 1888. Tesla's description of the theory and realization of his inventions was greeted as a masterwork; his genius was recognized.

Partnerships

Tesla had very little interest in the commercial development of his inventions, preferring to continue his "dreaming" and trust that somehow funding would materialize. Opportunity came in the form of George Westinghouse, an inventor and businessman from Pittsburgh who had made his fortune manufacturing air brakes for the burgeoning railroad industry. Westinghouse saw Tesla's potential and Tesla accepted his offer of one million dollars for his patents plus a royalty of one dollar per horsepower on all motors produced. Tesla now had enormous riches to match his reputation and his genius.

The arrangement required that Tesla spend time at the Pittsburgh plant as production of his motors started up. He did not enjoy the inevitable conflicts that arose in converting theoretical and pilot plant design to full scale production and gladly returned to New York at the end of the year. Manufacture of the motors began soon afterwards and Tesla happily went back to his laboratory. During the next four years, he received 45 U.S. patents.

At this time, the major application for electricity was in lighting from the DC incandescent lamps developed by Thomas Edison and the AC arc lights supplied by Westinghouse and the Thomson-Houston Company. The United States financial climate in this era of industrial expansion was dominated by the demand for capital and consolidations were common. Thomson-Houston merged with Edison and others to become the General Electric Company and Westinghouse needed partners to ensure its solvency.

These potential partners demanded that Westinghouse cancel his royalty arrangement with Tesla, a step this fellow inventor was reluctant to take. With no other choice, Westinghouse approached Tesla to cancel their contract with its multimillion-dollar value while stressing his commitment to AC power and Tesla's efforts. Citing his friend's confidence and support, Tesla simply tore up the contract. This hugely generous gesture meant that the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company flourished. By definition, Tesla had also shrunk the funding for his own further research and inventions by at least ten million dollars.

Electrical Endeavors

Now 33 years old, a rich man who had rejected marriage in favor of his devotion to science and nature, Tesla applied his genius to wider, greater endeavors. He set out to investigate the limits of electromagnetic radiation. He created an electric current operating at up to 10,000 cycles per second (the U.S. standard is 60) in an effort to duplicate a light beam. He noted the advantage of high frequency current in the transformer used for electricity transmission and went on to invent the Tesla coil transformers in insulating oil baths still in use today. Tesla's experiments reached a frequency of 20,000 cycles per second at extremely high voltages. At an address to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in May, 1891, he caused a sensation by demonstrating 100,000 volt spark discharges five inches long, plus the brightest of electric lamps, from transformed alternating current.

Tesla was now a public hero, celebrated everywhere, yet still obsessed with his appetite for knowledge of all things electrical. He returned the favor of many invitations with elaborate meals for his guests followed by a laboratory show of all kinds of spellbinding, glowing, sparking, and spinning objects driven by electricity. The highlight was a demonstration in which he passed electric current through his body from head to toe, having first determined the optimum frequency and power, then producing these conditions using his high-frequency dynamos and coil transformers.

Eventually accepting European invitations, Tesla took his enlightening lecture and show of amazing electrical experiments on the road. In just eight years since leaving Paris for the United States, Tesla had gone from penniless immigrant to engineer to destitute ditch digger to international celebrity—all by the age of 36. Among the innovative, and later widely adopted, inventions he demonstrated were neon and phosphorescent lamps, electronic tubes for wireless signal reception, and coil tuning principles used in radios.

While in Paris, Tesla learned of his mother's serious illness and left for Gospic; he was able to be with her during her final weeks of life. He was treated as a national hero while in his homeland. A severe illness he suffered while in Serbia prompted Tesla to self-examination and a resolution to avoid all further distractions and concentrate on his experimentation. He returned to New York, resumed his solitary lifestyle, and restarted his investigations of electricity's promise.

In May, 1893, The Columbian Exhibition opened in Chicago with illumination inside and out supplied by the Westinghouse Company using Tesla technologies. The Westinghouse installation was "outshining" Edison's lighting efforts and Tesla supplied a spectacular personal rebuttal to Edison's claim that AC current was by nature too dangerous for everyday use.

Since Tesla's first introduction of AC electricity, the "War of Electric Currents" had been waged, with Edison insisting on the safety of DC current over AC current. The safeness in fact came from the minimal strength of the direct current.

Now Tesla disproved that claim by letting a charge of one million volts be passed through his body without harm. Alternating current had won the "War."

Westinghouse also used the Tesla polyphase system in harnessing the power of Niagara Falls to produce 37,300 kilowatts electrical output from ten generators and transmit it to Buffalo, which was 22 miles away. The system went online in August, 1895.

Front Page News

To advance his experiments with high frequency, Tesla built a reciprocating engine, operable by air or steam, which led to an altercation with the Police Department. From watching the machine's vibrations, he was side-tracked into investigating the mechanical vibrations it caused. He came to believe that mechanical vibrational resonance was similar to the resonances of electric current. The "high-vibrations" machine he built worked too well. It operated strongly enough to raise neighborhood fears of an earthquake and caused the police shutdown of his experiments.

In September, 1898, Tesla was again front page news with his demonstration of a remotely-controlled robotic boat. The model boat was wirelessly controlled by the signals from Tesla's transmitter to its antenna and receiver and then to a servomechanism which translated the signal to a variety of maneuvers: starting, stopping, turning, etc. This was a remarkable combination of wireless telegraphy and robotics.

Tesla, an American citizen since 1889, offered this invention to the U.S. government but it was ridiculed and rejected. A patent was granted in November, 1898, but only after the Chief Examiner had visited New York to confirm the machine was really operable.

Next, Tesla returned to his experiments with power sources but having built an oscillator that produced 4 million volts, he had reached his laboratory's safety limitations and was short of money yet again.

An offer of much space and operating funds sent Tesla to Colorado Springs in May, 1899. The Tesla coil transformers in Colorado were huge, 75 feet in diameter and produced correspondingly large voltages and frequencies—artificial lightning bolts 135 feet long and accompanying thunder heard 15 miles away. Tesla had charged the earth to a level that would only have been achievable by hundreds of natural lightning bolts. Enough power was used to overload and cause short circuits at the powerhouse of the Colorado Springs Electric Company. Again Tesla's experiments were curtailed and he returned to New York to report on his findings. Further details of the Colorado experiments remained locked in Tesla's imagination until he died.

Advancing Humanity

Out of money again, Tesla returned to New York in the fall of 1899, satisfied that he had advanced his overriding and glorious goal of improving the condition of humanity by extending scientific knowledge. Through a friend, he published an article entitled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" which outlined his personal philosophy and his Colorado discoveries. Tesla believed that the type of energy available had been and would continue to be the controlling factor in the progress of the human condition, reducing such developments to a mechanical process. Thus, by discovering and improving electrical energy, he was playing his part in advancing humanity: a grandiose assertion.

J. Pierpont Morgan was Tesla's next benefactor. He had underwritten the Niagara Falls power system and was aware of Tesla's genius and now supported his ideas on transmitting electric power through the earth and on worldwide wireless broadcasting. Morgan could imagine the commercial potential, which never occurred to Tesla, and the importance of controlling the release of the ideas' conclusions. Tesla now had a willing supporter and spoke of Morgan's "noble generosity."

Again, in 1900, Tesla set out to build a new plant in Long Island, New York, intended as a source of a universal power supply and world-wide broadcasting. The enormous scope of his project never troubled Tesla; with Morgan's first donation, he confidently went forward. Stanford White agreed to design the centerpiece building of this new industrial city, a 154-foot-high tower to be the origin of the electrical power. Inevitably, delays crept into the project and bills went unpaid. The project ceased in 1905 and Tesla returned to New York City.

Pure vs. Applied Science

Tesla refused further lucrative offers which did not meet his idealistic purposes and took the consequences. He returned to the design of turbines and by 1910 had models available. However, his entry competed with machinery which had been developed in the interval since Niagara when Tesla was occupied with his Colorado and Long Island enterprises. Tesla's secretive nature and stubbornness caused problems and he met an audience which was not inclined to cooperate. The Tesla turbine, a machine of great ingenuity and promise, did not succeed.

In 1912, the Nobel Committee announced that Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were the recipients of the Physics Prize; instead, the prize went to Gustav Dalen. Details of the reversal are unclear but it is known that Tesla refused the prize (and the $20,000 that came with it). Tesla differentiated between inspirational discoverers such as himself and methodical improvers such as Edison; he gave greater value to the former. Tesla was a pure scientist and Edison an applied scientist, and they should not be in combination. Tesla was persuaded to accept the 1917 Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers but made his disinterest noticeable.

Continued Progress

Tesla continued his work on power generation, making occasional announcements of progress which reached the press. He mentioned many discoveries but supplied no experimental details. He had enough money to live and always remained optimistic. There was talk of Tesla having invented a "death ray beam"; he spoke of sending a beam from Earth to the dark side of the moon. The discovery of atomic physics sent Tesla's mind racing to cosmic possibilities as he celebrated what he saw as the reach of man nearing that of “the Creator”. He described himself as "merely an automaton endowed with power of movement, responding to the stimuli of the sense organs and thinking and acting accordingly”.

His admiration for the human mind stood in contrast to his definition of the human body as "a meat machine which responds to external forces”.

Tesla died of heart failure, a forgotten man, on January 7, 1943, the Orthodox Christmas Day of that year. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately removed the papers from Tesla's safe, citing wartime security concerns. His funeral was conducted in New York, and his body was cremated.

Introduction (Science)

Michael Faraday first demonstrated the connection between magnetism and electricity by moving a magnet inside a coil of wire. So long as the magnet moved in relation to the coil, an electric current was induced in the wire; when the magnet was stationary, the current ceased. Faraday further suggested that the electromagnetic forces which occurred spread into the area around the wire. The first electricity generator, known as a dynamo, applied these principles with a cranked permanent magnet spinning inside a wire coil. Each time the magnet turned, a current in alternating directions was produced, depending on which pole of the magnet was passing the wire. All electric currents available at the time of this discovery were the direct currents from the batteries invented by Alessandro Volta, so this alternating current was altered to direct by adding a commutator (switch) to the dynamo design.

The Gramme dynamo, which so intrigued Tesla, improved on previous versions. It was made up of a series of thirty coils, connected in series with a commutator at each connection, placed inside a rotating, magnetized iron ring. It created an almost uninterrupted direct current with the drawback that Tesla noticed—sparking at the commutator brushes due to the tiny power disruptions. The dynamo was reversible; a supply of electricity to the coils induced rotation of the magnet, which could be connected to the spindle of a motor. Electrical force could be converted to mechanical force and vice versa.

Two-Phase Induction Motor

In the two-phase motor, two sets of coils are set perpendicular to each other surrounding the core. When alternating current is sent to the coils, they become electromagnets where polarity rapidly changes with each reversal of current flow. As the first coils are supplied with current, they create a magnetic field which starts the core turning. When the first coil’s current supply reverses, the second coil set is at its maximum supply point and creates its own magnetic field; the core spins on. In effect, the "magnetization" amount never varies and a rotating magnetic field is created. The result is a smooth-running, commutator-free motor with the rotor as its only moving part.

The Tesla Transformer

Tesla described his coil as "a simpler device for the production of electric oscillations" for use in the design of high frequency machines.

In this device, a primary transformer coil with a few turns of wire is connected to a selected condenser (or capacitor) through a spark gap. When the condenser is supplied with electric current, it continuously charges up to reach the point where it achieves the selected breakdown voltage of the gap, and a spark results. At the moment of sparking, the condenser and primary coil are connected and form an oscillating circuit.

As the charge-to-spark process is rapidly repeated, the high energy pulsation in the primary coil induces voltage in the secondary transformer coil, which has many turns of smaller wire. Settings and adjustments of each circuit control the oscillation frequencies of each circuit and optimum operation is achieved when the oscillating frequencies match, i.e. resonate. Then, the oscillation in the second coil is multiplied, the coil produces high voltage, and strong sparks are emitted by the secondary terminal. With this output voltage reaching many millions of volts, some exceptional lightning-like discharges can be created.

The Nikola Tesla presentation was made possible by support from The Barra Foundation and Unisys.

Read the Committee on Science and the Arts Report on “Nikola Tesla’s Researches in High Frequency Phenomena."

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Nikola Tesla essay

Nikola Tesla remains one of the most mystical and dramatic figures of engineering. His discoveries to a large extent shaped the power of technology which changed the world in the 20th century. Tesla’s thoughts and ideas laid the background of industrial revolution and it would not be an exaggeration to state that Tesla was the superman of engineering in the previous century. What is more impressive, Tesla’s papers and records contained more discoveries, some of them are not fully understood or utilized yet.

The life story of Nikola Tesla is very dramatic and full of controversies and struggle. Many of Tesla’s discoveries and achievements were only recognized after his death. During his 86 years of life, Tesla made important contributions to such fields as radio technology, electric power and devices, electricity transmission, etc (Bergstresser 6). Some of his discoveries and statements were intensively criticized by the scientists; however, Tesla managed to prove the value of his ideas by creating working prototypes and implementing the newly discovered principles in new technologies.

Overall, Tesla applied for more than 700 patents worldwide (Bergstresser 43). Many of his discoveries were not patented, because he believed that knowledge should be universal and should be shared between all people. The goal of this paper is to research the life and discoveries of Nikola Tesla, outline his key discoveries, discuss disputed discoveries and patents assigned to other people, and to consider the theories and papers which were not yet adopted by the scientific community.

• Biography of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Yugoslavia (now – Croatia), in the family of an Orthodox priest and a talented mother who was the inventor of household appliances (Martin 17). Tesla received fundamental technical education in polytechnic school of Graz, and then received a degree in Prague University (Martin 19). First job of Tesla was the position of an electrical engineer in a telephone company, located in Budapest; later on, he moved to Paris to work for a branch of Edison company. In these years, Tesla made his first discovery – induction motor powered by alternating current, and was actually trying to attract investors. However, the investors in Europe were reluctant to support his idea, and in 1884 Tesla made a decision to move to America (Martin 44).

He started working for Edison, and shared his ideas with him; however, Edison found his ideas terrible. However, Edison appreciated Tesla’s outstanding engineering talent, and suggested him to improve Edison’s DC motors for $50,000 (Cheney 254). Tesla desperately wanted to earn money to construct a working prototype of his discovery, but after he managed to task, Edison turned his promises into a joke. Since that time, they have become opponents, and these tensions continued throughout all their lives. Edison tried to disprove Tesla’s ideas, but alternating current became the standard already in a decade.

When Tesla found a sagacious investor, George Westinghouse, he developed a system allowing to generate alternating current and to transmit it to long distances. A very significant contribution of Tesla into the modern technology was the creation of a hydroelectric generation station at Niagara waterfall. The system transmitted the generated power using alternating current to Buffalo. Tesla’s systems were showed to the public at a World Exposition in 1893, and since that time his fame has become worldwide (Cheney 289).

During the course of his life, Tesla received numerous awards and honors: honor degrees of Yale University and Columbia University, Edison medal and other awards. He never received the Nobel prize, although he was nominated to it, along with Edison (Cheney 350). Since both of them did not agree to receive the prize together, and both were trying to diminish the competitor’s achievements, the prize was not awarded to any of them.

The peak of Tesla’s career was in the 1900-1905 period, when he convinced J.P. Morgan to support his research (Burgan 97). A large tower intended for power and signal transmission was built on Long Island, but its construction was never completed: Morgan withdrew his funds, and the tower was demolished. Although Tesla continued working and preparing the background for the idea of wireless transmission of power, his financial position deteriorated and the rest of his life was spent in poverty. Nikola Tesla died in 1943 in New Yorker hotel (Burgan 15). After his death, all his papers, research and laboratory were confiscated by FBI, and many of his discoveries might remain unknown. Some of his papers and research are nowadays located in the Tesla Museum, located in Belgrad (Cheney 22).

• Tesla’s key discoveries

Tesla’s first major discovery was the rotating magnetic field. This field allowed to use the alternating current instead of the direct current, which was widely used in the end of 1880s (Colladay 58). During two years Tesla was working on the refutation of his professor’s statement that it was not possible to create a motor powered not by direct, but by alternating current. The scientists of that time believed it was impossible; however, in 1882 Tesla discovered that rotating magnetic field would allow to run an engine using the alternating current (and without converting it to direct current) (Colladay 63).

Second great discovery is related to the first one: motor powered by alternating current (AC). Tesla had designed the model of the motor in his mind, and implemented this solution in 1883 (Colladay 65). In this motor, the rotating magnetic field was used to move an armature around. Alternating current created self-reversing magnetic poles, which needed no mechanical support for this movement, compared to motors powered by direct current. This discovery opened path for much more efficient and functional motors which are widely used nowadays.

Third famous Tesla’s discovery, which was shown to the public in New York laboratory and had great success, is Tesla’s coil (Cheney 117). This discovery was based on the important principle also discovered by Tesla – polyphase alternating currents. Polyphase system denotes a method of electrical power distribution where at least three conductors with alternating currents are used to transmit the power (Cheney 124). The advantage of polyphase system is that it is more efficient with regard to the wire requirements, costs and effectiveness of power transmission. Currently the transmission of electricity to long distances and effective electric motors exist due to Tesla’s discovery of polyphase alternating currents. Using this idea, Tesla in 1890 created a high-voltage transformer, which significantly impressed both scientists and the general public (Cheney 138).

Finally, Tesla invented radio transmission (tuned radio circuits) and virtually all elements of current radio technologies are also either his discoveries or are based on his ideas. Tesla’s first radio transmission took place in 1897, and reached across the distance of 40 kilometers (Colladay 91). In fact, Tesla invented al main elements of radio transmission technology, but the patent for radio transmission was granted to Guglielmo Marconi (Colladay 91). After Tesla’s death, his patent application was reconsidered as primary, but the fame already belonged to Marconi.

The invention of wireless (radio) transmission is only one example of how Tesla was receiving less credit than he deserved. Another vivid example is the invention of X-rays: in 1856 Tesla published an article about X-rays, and almost at the same time, Roentgen patented X-rays, while Tesla never attempted to claim his rights for this discovery (Martin 230). It is also supposed that Tesla invented the first solar, although this discovery is also not associated with his name.

Among other Tesla’s achievements, there are findings in electrotherapeutics and in high frequency heating. Radio-guided ships and torpedoes were invented by this prominent engineer in 1898, and Tesla also managed to forecast the invention of radar in 1917 (Martin 307). Such inventions as wireless boat with remote control, wireless bulbs powered by the energy of the Earth, neon and fluorescent lights also belong to Tesla. His patents and findings related to such spheres as radiant energy, turbines, wireless lighting, telegeodynamics, dynamic gravity theory, magnifying transmitters, etc (Martin 415). His patents cover such areas as dynamo electric machines, alternate current motors, electromagnetic motors, AC/Dc conversion, electric generators, transformers, lighting systems, production of ozone, production of high-frequency currents, circuit controllers, utilization of radiant energy, transmission of electric energy through natural mediums, aerial transportation, etc (Martin 416).

This famous scientist also made some very significant military inventions: electromagnetic shells, beam projector for projecting concentrated energy on natural media, teleforce weapon (Tesla was working on it, but different sources diverge in conclusions regarding its existence), machine for generating earthquakes and even a device for recording extraterrestrial signals. However, many of these discoveries are controversial, and their existence is doubted by a number of sources (Martin 424).

Tesla’s life story is one of the most vivid examples of a great genius and a true passion for science. Despite all obstacles, Tesla made a huge contribution into modern science and technology, laid the foundation of modern industrial revolution by discovering rotating magnetic field and applying alternating electric current for powering motors and power transmission. Construction of hydroelectric power stations, creation of power electric transformers, discovery of radio transmission, exploration of terrestrial stationary waves… Nikola Tesla, without doubt, was a genius whose discoveries revolutionized the science of the 20th century, and, perhaps, his papers and research have enough potential to make a similar revolution in the 21st century, if his legacy would be properly used.

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Nikola Tesla - List of Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Nikola Tesla was a visionary inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist known for his pioneering work in alternating current (AC) electricity supply system, wireless communication, and numerous inventive contributions in the field of electrical engineering. Essays on Tesla might explore his early life and education, delve into his key inventions and innovations, or discuss his rivalry with Thomas Edison known as the “War of Currents.” Discussions could also cover Tesla’s vision for wireless energy transmission, his unrealized projects, and his impact on modern electrical engineering and communication technologies. Analyzing Tesla’s legacy, exploring his eccentric personality, or discussing the portrayal of Tesla in popular culture and literature could also provide a nuanced understanding of this enigmatic figure. We’ve gathered an extensive assortment of free essay samples on the topic of Nikola Tesla you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Nikola Tesla – the Inventor Behind it all

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Thomas Edison Vs Nikola Tesla

From business partnership to bitter rivalry, the dynamic between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla is largely absent from history books. Yet the relationship between the two inventors is pivotal to the origins of electric power. Edison was primarily a businessman and tycoon, mass marketing low current DC power to the public. Tesla's early efforts to expand Edison's technology were met with resistance, necessitating the need for Tesla to break from Edison. Of the two men, Nikola Tesla was indisputably the […]

Nikola Tesla: an Electrifying Current of Innovated Leadership

Abstract Nikola Tesla created some of the worlds most amazing projects. Bathed in defeat, victory, and competition he managed to create the alternating current (AC) electrical system and the Tesla Coil. The AC provided electrical power to homes, offices, factories, etc. While the tesla coil was a high frequency transformer, creating high voltage at a low current. Despite his many inventions, these two provided the world with the most benefit. A normal man with a dream to light the world […]

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Nikola Tesla’s Change to the World

Abstract Stephen began his research on Thomas Edison and how he changed the world. Stephen began researching currents and soon found sources comparing direct and alternating current. He changed his focus from Edison to Nikola Tesla because of the significant difference that Tesla influenced through his current. Stephen will write a research paper on the importance of Nikola Tesla and Tesla's production of alternating current. Stephen will use various sources on Tesla's journey through struggles and eventually to fame, as […]

Biography of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla"" is the name most of us know just as a great scientist's name, but the fact is we know his works and his discoveries that shaped the power of technology which changed the world in the 20th century only to a small extent. He had many other names like ""Father of Alternating Current"", ""Electrochemical Wizard"", ""The Futurist"", Edison's rival"" etc. He is one of the most mystical and dramatic figures of engineering and most controversial scientist in the […]

Nikola Tesla: Electrical Engineering

An individual that made important contributions to the field of electrical engineering was Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla was a man of many traits, he was a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist who discovered, designed, and developed many important inventions, the majority of which were officially patented by other inventors, like the induction motor and dynamos. In the discovery of radar technology, X-ray technology, remote control and the rotating magnetic field Nikola Tesla was initial. Tesla's […]

The Remarkable Nikola Tesla

Scientists are everywhere, but are all of them as talented as Tesla? Let's find out. Nikola Tesla was a scientist who lived from the 1850s to the 1940s. He worked with electricity, and he made a bunch of amazing discoveries and inventions along the way. He was one of the most talented inventors in my opinion. Nikola was very involved with electricity during his lifetime. He never stopped thinking of new ideas that he could create. He would go on […]

How did Nikola Tesla Change the World

“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked for, is mine.” (Nikola Tesla) Nikola Tesla meant that the scientists changed today, but Nikola works really hard to change the future. Tesla was a remarkably brilliant man, and he invented lots of things like the Tesla coil. Tesla helped alter the future with the vast number of inventions. Nikola Tesla was born on June 9th or 10th in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia. He had four other siblings who […]

The Development of Electricity a Look into Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla

It would be hard to refute that one of the most important developments of the 20th Century was the development of the electrical grid. It radically changed our society; allowing simultaneously larger windows of working hours and giving us far more leisure time than was possible without it; in fact, it has been suggested that electricity was the catalyst for the expansion of the middle class. It was also an instrumental catalyst for the second industrial revolution, which propelled the […]

Who was Nikola Tesla?

Nikola Tesla was a scientist who lived nearly a century ago, born in Serbia in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm on July 10, 1856. Tesla's interest in electricity was inspired by his mother, who created a small electrical appliance while he was growing up. Tesla was a genius who had a photographic memory and was able to imagine and tweak inventions in his head that were three-dimensional. Tesla also knew eight languages (Anderson, 2017). Tesla moved to […]

Nikola Tesla: a Legacy of Revolutionary Inventions

Nikola Tesla, an individual closely associated with groundbreaking ideas and the advent of the electrical era, was a forward-thinking inventor whose contributions established the fundamental principles for several technologies that have significantly influenced our contemporary society. Nikola Tesla, who was born in 1856 in present-day Croatia, made groundbreaking contributions to the domains of electricity and magnetism throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This article examines many of Tesla's notable inventions, analyzing their influence on technological progress and assessing […]

Nikola Tesla Biography

Not everyone can speak eight languages, hold approximately 300 patents, or develop the technology for long distance communication, but there was one man that achieved all of that and more. Thanks to a man named Nikola Tesla, we have the framework for many inventions that have shaped our world of today. Without him and his many failures, we may not have developed the wireless remote control, AC (alternating current) motor, or radio. Despite his mental state and rough background, he […]

Tesla: a Visionary Entrepreneur who Revolutionized Industries

In the annals of history, few names shine as brightly as that of Nikola Tesla. His legacy is as multifaceted as it is profound, spanning the realms of science, engineering, and entrepreneurship. Born in 1856 in the Serbian village of Smiljan, Tesla's journey began amidst the pastoral landscapes of Eastern Europe. Little did the world know that this unassuming boy would grow up to become one of the most influential figures of the modern age. Tesla's early years were marked […]

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Home / Essay Samples / Science / Nikola Tesla / Life And Legacy Of Nikola Tesla

Life And Legacy Of Nikola Tesla

• Category: Science
• Topic: Nikola Tesla

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