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Tesla, Nikola
(b. July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan, Croatia--d. Jan. 7, 1943, New York
City), Serbian-American inventor and researcher who discovered the
rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current
machinery. He emigrated to the United States in 1884 and sold the patent
rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and
motors to George Westinghouse the following year. 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. A dreamer with
a poetic touch, as he matured Tesla added to these earlier qualities
those of self-discipline and a desire for precision.
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, in 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 1885, 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.
Tesla gave exhibitions in his laboratory in which he lighted lamps
without wires by allowing electricity to flow through his body, to allay
fears of alternating current. 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 United States citizenship.
Westinghouse used Tesla's system to light the World's Columbian
Exposition at Chicago in 1893. His success was a factor in winning him
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, Colo., 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 the Earth
could be used as a conductor and would be as responsive as a tuning fork
to electrical vibrations of a certain frequency. He also lighted 200
lamps without wires from a distance of 25 miles (40 kilometres) and
created man-made lightning, producing flashes measuring 135 feet (41
metres). 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 engineers for unexploited clues. In 1915 he was severely
disappointed when a report that he and Edison were to share the Nobel
Prize proved erroneous. Tesla was the recipient of the Edison Medal in
1917, the highest honour that the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers could bestow.
Tesla allowed himself only a few close friends. Among them were the
writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, and Francis Marion
Crawford. He was quite impractical in financial matters and an
eccentric, driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia. But he
had a way of intuitively sensing hidden scientific secrets and employing
his inventive talent to prove his hypotheses. Tesla was a godsend to
reporters who sought sensational copy but a problem to editors who were
uncertain how seriously his futuristic prophecies should be regarded.
Caustic criticism greeted his speculations concerning communication with
other planets, his assertions that he could split the Earth like an
apple, and his claim of having invented a death ray capable of
destroying 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles (400 kilometres).
After Tesla's death the custodian of alien property impounded his
trunks, which held his papers, his diplomas and other honours, his
letters, and his laboratory notes. These were eventually inherited by
Tesla's nephew, Sava Kosanovich, and later housed in the Nikola Tesla
Museum in Belgrade. Hundreds filed into New York City's Cathedral of St.
John the Divine for his funeral services, and a flood of messages
acknowledged the loss of a great genius. Three Nobel Prize recipients
addressed their tribute to "one of the outstanding intellects of the
world who paved the way for many of the technological developments of
modern times." (I.W.H.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Inez Hunt and Wanetta W. Draper, Lightning in His Hand: The Life
Story of Nikola Tesla (1964), is a complete, authoritative, nontechnical
biography. Nikola Tesla Museum, Nikola Tesla 1856-1943: Lectures,
Patents, Articles (1956), contains authentic reprints, diagrams,
lectures, and considerable detailed information. Nikola Tesla,
Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency
(1904), furnishes Tesla's own story of his Colorado experiments. |
Nikola Tesla