Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, then part of the Austrian Empire (now Croatia), to Serbian parents. His father, Milutin, was an Orthodox priest and a poet who wanted his son to enter the priesthood, but Nikola was devoted to science. His mother, Đuka, made tools to ease her household work, including a mechanical eggbeater, and Nikola later credited her for his inventiveness. He studied at Karlovac, at the Polytechnic in Graz, Austria, and briefly in Prague. He then moved to Budapest, Hungary, where, while working at the telephone exchange, the idea for his induction motor came to him. At 28 he left for America. As a boy, Nikola had pictured a great wheel turned by Niagara Falls and told his uncle he would one day go and do it. About thirty years later, Niagara Falls powered a hydroelectric plant running on his alternating current system.¹

Many tried to discredit his alternating current (AC), the system the whole world uses today, and some called him a dreamer for predicting the radio. He used mechanical vibration therapy on himself and on friends such as Mark Twain, whose books, he said, had helped him recover from a serious illness as a young man. He had only a few close friends: the writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain and F. Marion Crawford, and the artist Walter Russell, who stood by him when he was low from doubt and attacks. Later he proposed a defensive "peace ray," which the press called a "death ray," and which he said would surround every country like an invisible Chinese wall.⁴ In 1888 George Westinghouse bought his AC patents, and in 1893 Tesla's AC system lit the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. When Westinghouse's company was facing ruin, Tesla tore up his royalty contract, giving up what could have been millions, to help save it. He patented the Tesla coil, which laid foundations for wireless technology still used in radio today.²

In 1898, at Madison Square Garden, he showed a radio-controlled boat that he said carried "a borrowed mind." When the audience asked it questions, such as the cube root of 64, the boat answered by flashing its lights, four times in that case, all controlled wirelessly. At Colorado Springs in 1899 he reportedly lit lamps without wires at a distance. In 1917 he received the Edison Medal, ironically named after his old rival, the highest honor the AIEE (American Institute of Electrical Engineers) could give.³

Earlier, Edison had promised Tesla $50,000 to improve his DC dynamos. When Tesla finished, Edison said the offer was only a joke, and Tesla left. Investors then formed the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing company around his arc-lamp designs, but they forced him out and left him with nearly worthless stock. During 1886–87 he had to dig ditches to support himself. Alfred S. Brown and Charles Peck then backed a new laboratory, where he built the AC induction motor he had first imagined in Budapest. Tesla also believed the earth and its upper atmosphere could carry signals and power. Some see in his work an early hint of the earth's natural resonances of about 8 hertz, later called Schumann resonances, which were predicted in 1952 and measured in the early 1960s. J.P. Morgan gave him $150,000 to build a wireless transmission tower at Wardenclyffe, New York, but Tesla needed far more. In December 1901 Marconi sent the letter "S" across the Atlantic from England to Newfoundland, and Tesla said Marconi had used seventeen of his patents. Morgan withdrew his support, and the Wardenclyffe project failed. In 1909 Marconi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for wireless telegraphy. Tesla had filed his own radio patents in 1897. In 1943, months after Tesla's death, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Marconi's key radio patent, which in effect recognized the earlier work of Tesla and others.

Around 1909 to 1913 he developed a bladeless turbine that ran on steam or gas. It spun so fast that the metals of the day distorted, and it needed better materials than he had. In his later years he cared for the pigeons of New York City. In 1917 he described the idea behind what we now call radar. Still impeccably dressed into old age, he worked as a consulting engineer, though some thought him impractical. He disagreed with Einstein's theories. He also wrote a poem, "Fragments of Olympian Gossip," dedicated to his friend George Sylvester Viereck. In 1928, at 71, he received his last patent, for an aircraft that could take off vertically and fly like an airplane, an early form of the tilt-rotor (VTOL) aircraft, though he never had the money to build a prototype. In the late 1930s he proposed his "peace beam," and in 1939 the Soviet Union reportedly paid $25,000 for plans. He also dreamed of lighting the night sky by making the upper atmosphere glow like a man-made aurora borealis. After his death, the U.S. Office of Alien Property, with FBI involvement, took his papers and belongings, and the Air Force is reported to have studied his beam ideas, though no results were ever published. In 1952 his remaining belongings were released to his nephew, Sava Kosanović, and they are now in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. Tesla died of coronary thrombosis on January 7, 1943, in New York City, at the age of 86.²,⁴

References
¹ teslabook.fw.hu/
² biography.com
³ britannica.com
⁴ pbs.org
⁵ Gilbert King, "Nikola Tesla and the Tower That Became His 'Million Dollar Folly'," Smithsonian Magazine, February 4, 2013 (updated April 24, 2024).