Nikola Tesla

For other uses, see Nikola Tesla (disambiguation).

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American engineer, futurist, and inventor. He is known for helping to design the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

Tesla was born and raised in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the 1870s, he studied engineering and physics, but he did not earn a degree. In the early 1880s, he gained practical experience working in telephony and at Continental Edison. This was the new electric power industry. In 1884, he moved to the United States and later became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City. Then he started on his own. With the help of partners who paid for and sold his ideas, he set up labs and companies in New York. There he developed many electrical and mechanical devices. His AC induction motor and related polyphase AC patents were licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888. These patents earned him a lot of money. They also became the foundation of the polyphase system, which Westinghouse sold.

Tesla did many experiments as he tried to create inventions he could patent and sell. He worked with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging, among other things. He built a boat that could be controlled without wires. It was one of the first wirelessly controlled vehicles ever made. Tesla became well known as an inventor. He showed his achievements to famous people and wealthy supporters at his lab. He was also known for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, he worked on his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power. He did this in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he spoke about the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. He tried to put these ideas to practical use in his Wardenclyffe Tower project. It was meant to send communication and power across continents. However, he ran out of funding before he could finish it.

After Wardenclyffe, Tesla tried a series of new inventions in the 1910s and 1920s. Some worked well and some did not. He had spent most of his money. He lived in a series of New York hotels and left behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943. Tesla's work was not widely remembered for a time after his death. Then, in 1960, the General Conference on Weights and Measures named a unit in his honor. It is the tesla, the International System of Units (SI) measure of magnetic flux density. Interest in Tesla has grown again among the public since the 1990s. In 2013, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most significant figures of all time.

Early years

Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, a village in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire. Today the village is part of Croatia. His family was of Serbs, an ethnic group. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church. His mother, Georgina "Đuka" Mandić, was good at making tools for the home. She could also memorize Serbian epic poems. Tesla believed his eidetic memory and his creative skills came from her. In 1862 the family moved to Gospić, where his father worked as a parish priest. Later, in his patent applications, Tesla described himself as "of Smiljan, Lika, border country of Austria-Hungary."

In 1870 he moved to Karlovac to attend high school at the Higher Real Gymnasium. His physics teacher showed experiments with electricity, and this got Tesla interested in the subject. He could also do integral calculus in his head. He finished school in 1873. After that, he became ill with cholera and stayed in bed for nine months. While he was getting better, he read the older books of Mark Twain.

In 1875 Tesla avoided conscription into the Austro-Hungarian Army by running away to Tomingaj, a village near Gračac. Then he enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz. He enjoyed the lectures of professor Jakob Pöschl. However, he was struggling by his third year, and he left Graz in December 1878 without finishing his studies. Later, Tesla worked as a draftsman in Maribor. He was reported to have earned 60 florins a month. His father died in April 1879. In 1880 Tesla went to Prague to study. He arrived too late to join Charles-Ferdinand University. He had never studied Greek, and he could not read Czech. In 1881 he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work for Tivadar Puskás at a telegraph company. Within a few months, he became the chief electrician. Later, he made improvements to the equipment, including a repeater or amplifier.

Working at Edison

In 1882, Tivadar Puskás helped Tesla get another job in Paris with the Continental Edison Company. Tesla worked on installing indoor lighting, which was a brand new kind of work in the growing electric power utility industry. At the Société Electrique Edison, a division in the Ivry-sur-Seine suburb of Paris, he gained a lot of hands-on experience. His bosses noticed his skill and soon had him designing and building better dynamos and motors.

In 1884, Edison manager Charles Batchelor went back to the United States to run the Edison Machine Works in New York City. He asked Tesla to come too. Tesla arrived in June 1884 and started working at the Machine Works on Manhattan's Lower East Side. There he fixed installations and improved generators. He was also given a street lighting project using arc lamps, but it was never built. He may have met company founder Thomas Edison only a couple of times. Tesla left after about six months. The reason is not clear. It may have had to do with a bonus he did not receive. In his autobiography, he said he had been promised a bonus of $50,000, but that it "turned out to be a practical joke." Historians have noted that the company did not have that much money on hand.

Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing

Soon after leaving the Edison company, Tesla worked on patenting an arc lighting system, possibly the same one he had developed at Edison. In March 1885, he met with patent attorney Lemuel W. Serrell, the same attorney Edison had used, to get help with the patents. Serrell introduced Tesla to two businessmen, Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail. They agreed to pay for an arc lighting company in Tesla's name, the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company. Tesla spent the rest of the year getting patents, including an improved DC generator and his first US patents. He also built and installed the system in Rahway, New Jersey.

The investors did not care much about Tesla's ideas for new kinds of alternating current motors and electrical equipment. After the electric service started running in 1886, they decided that making products was too competitive. They chose to run only the electric service. They formed a new company and left Tesla's company behind. Tesla was left with no money. He even lost control of the patents he had given the company in exchange for stock. He took different electrical repair jobs and worked as a ditch digger for $2 a day. Later, Tesla said that 1886 was a hard time for him.

AC and the induction motor

In late 1886, Tesla met Alfred S. Brown, a Western Union superintendent, and New York attorney Charles Fletcher Peck. The two men agreed to support Tesla's ideas and manage his patents. In 1887, Tesla created an induction motor that ran on alternating current (AC). AC power was spreading quickly because it worked well over long distances with high-voltage transmission. The motor used polyphase current to create a rotating magnetic field that turned it. Tesla patented the motor in May 1888. It did not need a commutator, so it avoided sparks and frequent repairs. On 16 May 1888, Tesla showed the motor at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Engineers at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company told George Westinghouse that Tesla's motor could work with the AC system his company already sold.

In July 1888, Westinghouse agreed to license Tesla's motor and transformer designs. He paid $60,000 in cash and stock, plus a royalty for each horsepower the motors produced. He also hired Tesla for a year as a consultant at the company's Pittsburgh labs. There, Tesla helped plan an AC system for the city's streetcars. The companies were competing hard for business, and the "war of currents" was underway. In 1890, the financial panic of 1890 followed the near collapse of Barings Bank. This left Westinghouse Electric short of cash. In early 1891, Westinghouse asked Tesla to release the company from the royalty payments, and Tesla agreed. Six years later, Westinghouse bought Tesla's patent in a lump sum payment of $216,000. This was part of an agreement with General Electric.

New York laboratories

Main article: Tesla coil

Tesla earned a lot of money from his AC patents. This made him independently wealthy, so he could pay for his own projects. In 1889 he left the Liberty Street shop. For about the next twelve years, he worked in several workshop-laboratories in Manhattan. These included a lab at 175 Grand Street, the fourth floor of 33–35 South Fifth Avenue, and the sixth and seventh floors of 46 & 48 East Houston Street. In the summer of 1889, Tesla went to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. There he learned about Heinrich Hertz's experiments, which showed that electromagnetic radiation exists, including radio waves. When Tesla tried to repeat these experiments, he had a problem. High-frequency current overheated the iron core and melted the insulation in a Ruhmkorff coil powered by a fast alternator. To fix this, he made an "oscillating transformer" with an air gap. It was later called the Tesla coil. It made high-voltage, low-current, high frequency alternating-current electricity. He later used this resonant transformer circuit in his wireless power work. After 1890, he tried sending power through inductive and capacitive coupling. He also tried to build a wireless lighting system based on near-field coupling. In public demonstrations, he lit Geissler tubes and even regular light bulbs from across a stage. He spent most of the decade on this idea with different investors, but none of the projects made a product that companies sold. In 1893 he told audiences in St. Louis, Missouri, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and at the National Electric Light Association that such a system might one day send "intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires" through the Earth. On 30 July 1891, at age 35, Tesla became a naturalized citizen of the United States. That same year, he patented his Tesla coil. From 1892 to 1894, he was a vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This group came before the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He also worked with the Institute of Radio Engineers.

Main article: Tesla's oscillator

By the start of 1893, Westinghouse engineers Charles F. Scott and then Benjamin G. Lamme had improved Tesla's induction motor. Lamme made the polyphase system work with older AC and DC systems by creating a rotary converter. Westinghouse Electric began calling its polyphase AC system the "Tesla Polyphase System." The company believed Tesla's patents gave it patent priority. Westinghouse Electric invited Tesla to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The company also won the bid to light the fair with alternating current. This showed the public that AC could be safe, reliable, and efficient. At the fair, a special exhibit showed Tesla's induction motor. A demonstration called the Egg of Columbus used a two-phase coil to make a copper egg spin and stand on end. Tesla went to the International Electrical Congress and showed his wireless lighting. This included high-voltage, high-frequency current lighting wireless gas-discharge lamps. At that congress, he introduced his steam-powered reciprocating electricity generator, which he patented that year. Steam pushed a piston attached to an armature. The vibrating magnetic field induced a current in nearby coils. The device removed the complicated parts of a steam engine, but it never became a practical way to make electricity. In 1893, Edward Dean Adams led the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company. He asked Tesla which system would work best for sending power from the falls. Tesla suggested a two-phase system. The company gave the generating contract to Westinghouse Electric, and General Electric built the distribution system. In 1895, Adams helped start the Nikola Tesla Company to develop and sell Tesla's patents. That March, a fire destroyed Tesla's South Fifth Avenue lab. Early notes, models, and exhibits were lost too. Tesla told The New York Times, "I am in too much grief to talk. What can I say?" Starting in 1894, Tesla also studied "invisible" radiant energy. This later became known as X-rays ("Roentgen rays" or "X-rays"). He noticed damaged film in his lab, which led him to this work. He worked with Crookes tubes, a cold cathode discharge tube. In March 1896, he developed a high-energy vacuum tube that produced bremsstrahlung, or braking radiation. He noted that this work could be dangerous. Early on, he believed that skin damage came from ozone and, to a smaller degree, nitrous acid, not from the rays themselves. Tesla also wrongly believed X-rays were longitudinal waves. He compared them to waves in plasmas that can occur in force-free magnetic fields. In 1898, he showed a boat controlled by radio control at Madison Square Garden. He used a coherer and called it "telautomaton." He tried to sell the idea to the U.S. military as a radio-controlled torpedo, but they showed little interest. On 13 May 1899, he presented his "Teleautomatics" to the Commercial Club in Chicago. He was traveling to Colorado Springs at the time.

Wireless power

Further information: Wireless power transfer § Nikola Tesla

From the 1890s to 1906, Tesla spent a lot of time and money trying to develop sending electrical power without wires. At that time, there was no practical way to send signals or large amounts of power over long distances without wires. Tesla studied radio waves and decided that part of Hertz's earlier work was wrong. He thought electricity might travel long distances through the Earth or the air. So he began experiments, including a large magnifying transmitter in his lab on East Houston Street.

Colorado Springs

Further information: Tesla Experimental Station; Magnifying transmitter; and Colorado Springs Notes, 1899–1900

In 1899, Tesla set up an experimental station high in the mountains of Colorado Springs. There he studied how electricity moves through thin air, and he could safely run much bigger coils. He convinced John Jacob Astor IV to invest $100,000 and become the largest owner of the Nikola Tesla Company. Tesla hoped to send signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. He also said he heard strange signals that he thought might come from another planet. Reporters quickly guessed they came from Mars. In 1905, the Wardenclyffe project stopped after investors backed away, and some newspapers said it was a hoax. In March 1901, Tesla got $150,000 from J. P. Morgan to start building the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York.

Wardenclyffe

Main article: Wardenclyffe Tower

Later years

After Wardenclyffe closed, Tesla kept writing to Morgan. After Morgan died, Tesla wrote to Morgan's son Jack to ask for more money for the project. In 1906 he opened offices at 165 Broadway in Manhattan. He hoped to earn money by developing and selling his patents. Later he had offices at the Metropolitan Life Tower from 1910 to 1914. He rented space at the Woolworth Building for a few months, but he could not afford the rent and had to leave. From 1915 to 1925 he used office space at 8 West 40th Street. By then he had very little money. Most of his patents had expired, and the new inventions he was working on were not going well.

Main article: Tesla turbine

On his 50th birthday, in 1906, Tesla showed a bladeless turbine. It produced 200 horsepower (150 kilowatts) and spun at 16,000 rpm. From 1910 to 1911, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at the Waterside Power Station in New York. From 1919 to 1922, he worked with several companies, including Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee. He licensed the idea to a company that made precision instruments. The design was later used in some luxury car speedometers and other instruments.

When World War I began, the British cut the telegraph cable that linked the U.S. to Germany. They also tried to stop German wireless communication. The U.S. Marconi Company sued the German radio company Telefunken for patent infringement. Telefunken brought in the scientists Jonathan Zenneck and Karl Ferdinand Braun to defend it, and hired Tesla as a witness for two years at $1,000 a month. The case stalled and then ended when the U.S. joined the war against Germany in 1917. In 1915, Tesla tried to sue the Marconi Company over his wireless tuning patents, but that case went nowhere. In a related case, a Supreme Court of the United States decision in 1943 restored the earlier patents of Oliver Lodge, John Stone, and Tesla.

Other ideas

Tesla tried to sell several devices that made ozone. He also believed that electricity applied to the brain could improve intelligence. In 1912, he proposed wiring a schoolroom so that its students would become smarter. New York City schools superintendent William H. Maxwell gave the plan a temporary approval. In 1917, Tesla wrote in the magazine The Electrical Experimenter that electricity could be used to find submarines. This idea is somewhat like modern radar, though Tesla was wrong that high-frequency radio waves could pass through water. Émile Girardeau, who helped build France's first radar system, later said Tesla was "prophesying or dreaming" but "dreaming correctly". In 1928, Tesla received a patent for a biplane design that could take off and land straight up and down, known as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL). The design was not practical.

Tesla lived at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City from 1900. He ran up a large bill there. In 1922 he moved to the St. Regis Hotel. After that, he moved to a new hotel every few years and often left unpaid bills behind. He had to leave the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930, and the Hotel Governor Clinton in 1934. For a time he stayed at the Hotel Marguery. In 1934 he moved to the Hotel New Yorker. That year, the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company began paying him $125 a month, plus his rent. He had once been their star inventor. Some sources say the company worried about bad publicity over his living conditions. The payment was called a "consulting fee" so that Tesla would not feel he was accepting charity.

Birthday press conferences

In 1931, a young journalist who had become Tesla's friend, Kenneth M. Swezey, organized a party for the inventor's 75th birthday. Tesla received congratulations from scientists and engineers, including Albert Einstein. He also appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The cover caption read "All the world's his power house," which pointed to his work on electrical power generation. The party became a yearly event. Tesla served food and drinks, including dishes he had made himself. He invited reporters to see his inventions and hear his stories and claims.

At the 1932 party, Tesla claimed he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays. In 1933, he told reporters he was close to proving a new kind of energy. He also described work on metallurgy and on photographing the retina to record thoughts. At the 1934 event, he said he had designed a superweapon that would end all war. Newspapers called it a "death ray" or death ray. Tesla used the name Teleforce in 1940, but he never explained how it worked. The U.S. suspected he planned to sell it to the League of Nations. As war threats grew, he sent diagrams to the U.S. War Department and to governments in the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. In 1984, plans found in the archive of the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade described a device that used electrostatic repulsion to push charged particles into streams.

In 1935, at his 79th birthday party, Tesla claimed he had discovered the cosmic ray in 1896. He also said he had found a way to make direct current by induction. He described a mechanical oscillator that he said had caused an earthquake in his lab and nearby streets in Lower Manhattan in 1898. He claimed it could destroy the Empire State Building. In 1937, he received the Order of the White Lion from the Czechoslovak ambassador. When asked about the death ray, he said, "But it is not an experiment ... I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world."

Awards

Tesla won many medals and awards. In 1894 he received the Elliott Cresson Medal from the Franklin Institute. In 1895 he was made a Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Danilo I from Montenegro. In 1896 he became a member of the American Philosophical Society in the United States. In 1916 he received the AIEE Edison Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in the United States.

Later, in 1926, he received the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sava from Yugoslavia. In 1934 he was given the John Scott Medal by the Franklin Institute and Philadelphia City Council. In 1936 he received the Order of the White Eagle from Yugoslavia. In 1937 he was made a Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion from Czechoslovakia.

Death

In the fall of 1937, when he was 81, Tesla was hit by a taxicab while crossing a street near his hotel late one night. He was on his way to feed the pigeons at St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Public Library. He was badly hurt and never fully recovered. He would not see a doctor, as he had done for most of his life. On the night of 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, Tesla died in his hotel room. The cause of death was found to be coronary thrombosis.

During World War II, some U.S. government officials were worried that Tesla's belongings might go to his nephew Sava Kosanović. Kosanović was an exiled Yugoslav politician who was not a U.S. citizen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation asked the Office of Alien Property Custodian to take the belongings two days after his death. John G. Trump, an electrical engineering professor at MIT, was helping the National Defense Research Committee. He looked through the items and decided there was nothing that would "constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands." In a box said to hold part of his "death ray," Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box. On 10 January 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a eulogy at Tesla's funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Personal life and character

Tesla never married. He believed that staying single helped his work as a scientist. Later, he sometimes felt that not marrying was a big sacrifice for his work. He was good friends with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, and others. In middle age, he became close to Mark Twain, and the two spent a lot of time together. Twain called Tesla's induction motor "the most valuable patent since the telephone."

At a party in 1896, Tesla met Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda hoped Tesla's work could support Vedantic ideas about the universe with science. This meeting got Tesla interested in Eastern science, and he studied Vedic philosophy for several years. Later, he wrote an article called "Man's Greatest Achievement." In it, he used the Sanskrit words akasha and prana to describe matter and energy.

Tesla could be harsh at times and was quick to criticize people's clothing. In the late 1920s, he became friends with George Sylvester Viereck, a poet and writer who later became a Nazi propagandist. When Thomas Edison died in 1931, Tesla gave the only negative opinion about him in The New York Times. In his later years, Tesla became a vegetarian. He mostly ate milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.

Views and beliefs

Tesla is widely seen by his biographers as a humanist. He believed that human "pity" had come to get in the way of the natural "ruthless workings of nature." His ideas did not depend on a "master race" or on one person being better than another. However, he supported eugenics. In 1926, he spoke about women being kept in a lower place in society and about the fight for gender equality. He said that humanity's future would be guided by "Queen Bees" and believed women would become the stronger sex in the future. In an article from 20 December 1914, he shared his ideas about the world after World War I.

Tesla was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Later in life, he did not think of himself as a "believer in the orthodox sense." He opposed religious fanaticism. He said that "Buddhism and Christianity are the greatest religions both in number of disciples and in importance." He also said, "To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end."

Literary works

Tesla wrote many books and magazine articles. One of his books is My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Ben Johnston put it together and edited it in 1983. It was based on a series of magazine articles Tesla wrote in 1919. Those articles had been published again in 1977. He also wrote The Tesla Papers.

Many of his writings can be read for free online. These include "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," which was published in The Century Magazine in 1900. They also include "Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency," which appeared in his book Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla.

Legacy

In 1952, after pressure from Sava Kosanović, Tesla's belongings were sent to Belgrade in 80 trunks. In 1957, Kosanović's secretary Charlotte Muzar brought Tesla's ashes from the United States to Belgrade. They are on display in a gold-plated sphere on a marble stand in the Nikola Tesla Museum. His archive has over 160,000 documents. It is part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme.

Tesla received about 300 patents around the world for his inventions. Some of these patents cannot be found today. Others that had been hidden in patent archives were found again. At least 278 patents issued to Tesla are known, in 26 countries. Many were in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Many others were approved in countries all over the world.