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 first studied engineering and physics, but he did not receive a degree. In the early 1880s, he gained practical experience working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884, he moved to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before starting on his own. With the help of partners who helped pay for and sell his ideas, he set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop 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 large amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system, which Westinghouse sold.

Tesla carried out many experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging, among other things, as he tried to create inventions he could patent and sell. He built a wirelessly controlled boat, one of the first wirelessly controlled vehicles ever made. Tesla became well known as an inventor and showed his achievements to famous people and wealthy supporters at his lab. He was also noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, he pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power in his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made statements about the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. He tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but he ran out of funding before he could finish it.

After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s, with mixed success. Having 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 fell into relative obscurity after his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the International System of Units (SI) measurement of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. 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 into a family of ethnic Serbs in Smiljan, a village then part of Military Frontier, Austrian Empire, and now part of Croatia. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church. His mother, Georgina "Đuka" Mandić, had a talent for making home tools and could memorize Serbian epic poems. Tesla credited his eidetic memory and creative abilities to his mother. 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. He became interested in electricity through his physics professor's demonstrations, and he was able to perform integral calculus in his head. He graduated in 1873. After that, he contracted cholera and was bedridden for nine months. While recovering, he read the earlier works of Mark Twain.

In 1875 Tesla avoided conscription into the Austro-Hungarian Army by running away to Tomingaj, a village near Gračac. He then enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz, where he was fascinated by the lectures of professor Jakob Pöschl. However, he was failing by his third year and left Graz in December 1878 without graduating. Later, Tesla worked as a draftsman in Maribor and was reported to have been earning 60 florins per month. His father died in April 1879. In 1880 Tesla went to Prague to study, but he arrived too late to enroll at Charles-Ferdinand University, had never studied Greek, and could not read Czech. In 1881 he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás at a telegraph company. Within a few months, he became chief electrician, and he later 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 in a brand new industry, large-scale electric power utility work. At the Société Electrique Edison, a division in the Ivry-sur-Seine suburb of Paris, he gained a great deal of practical experience. His bosses noticed his skill and soon had him designing and building improved dynamos and motors.

In 1884, Edison manager Charles Batchelor returned to the United States to manage the Edison Machine Works in New York City, and asked that Tesla come too. Tesla arrived in June 1884 and began working at the Machine Works on Manhattan's Lower East Side. There he troubleshot installations and improved generators, and he was given a street lighting project based on arc lamps, which was never put into production. He may have met company founder Thomas Edison only a couple of times. Tesla left after about six months, and the reason is unclear. It may have involved 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 cash 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, for help submitting the patents. Serrell introduced Tesla to two businessmen, Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail, who agreed to finance an arc lighting company in Tesla's name, the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company. Tesla spent the rest of the year obtaining patents, including an improved DC generator and his first US patents, and building and installing the system in Rahway, New Jersey.

The investors showed little interest in Tesla's ideas for new types of alternating current motors and electrical transmission equipment. After the utility was running in 1886, they decided that manufacturing was too competitive and chose to run only an electric utility. They formed a new company, leaving Tesla's company behind and leaving the inventor with no money. Tesla even lost control of the patents he had given the company in exchange for stock. He had to take various electrical repair jobs and work as a ditch digger for $2 per day. Later, Tesla described 1886 as a hard time, writing that his "high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery".

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 back Tesla's ideas and handle his patents. In 1887, Tesla developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current (AC), a power system that 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. It was patented in May 1888 and did not need a commutator, so it avoided sparking and frequent repairs. On 16 May 1888, Tesla demonstrated 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 for the AC system his company was already selling.

In July 1888, Westinghouse agreed to license Tesla's motor and transformer designs for $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, where Tesla helped plan an AC system for the city's streetcars. The companies were fighting hard for business at that time, and the "war of currents" was underway. In 1890, the financial panic of 1890, which followed the near collapse of Barings Bank, 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 for a lump sum payment of $216,000 as part of an agreement with General Electric.

New York laboratories

Main article: Tesla coil

The money Tesla made from licensing his AC patents made him independently wealthy and gave him the time and money to pursue his own interests. In 1889 he left the Liberty Street shop and spent the next dozen years working 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 traveled to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and learned of Heinrich Hertz's experiments that proved the existence of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves. When Tesla tried to repeat and expand these experiments, he found that high-frequency current overheated the iron core and melted insulation in a Ruhmkorff coil powered by a fast alternator. To fix this, he created an "oscillating transformer" with an air gap. Later called the Tesla coil, it produced high-voltage, low-current, high frequency alternating-current electricity, and he later used this resonant transformer circuit in his wireless power work. After 1890, he experimented with sending power through inductive and capacitive coupling and tried to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field coupling. In public demonstrations he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent bulbs from across a stage. He spent most of the decade on this idea with various investors, but none of the ventures made a commercial product. In 1893 he told onlookers in St. Louis, Missouri, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and at the National Electric Light Association that such a system could someday send "intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires" by conducting it through the Earth. On 30 July 1891, aged 35, Tesla became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and that same year he patented his Tesla coil. From 1892 to 1894 he served as a vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), along with the Institute of Radio Engineers.

Main article: Tesla's oscillator

By the beginning of 1893, Westinghouse engineers Charles F. Scott and then Benjamin G. Lamme had made progress on an efficient version of Tesla's induction motor. Lamme made the polyphase system compatible with older AC and DC systems by developing a rotary converter, and Westinghouse Electric began branding its polyphase AC system as the "Tesla Polyphase System," believing Tesla's patents gave it patent priority. Westinghouse Electric invited Tesla to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and won the bid to light the fair with alternating current, showing the public that an AC system could be safe, reliable, and efficient. At the fair, a special exhibit showed Tesla's induction motor, and a demonstration called the Egg of Columbus used a two-phase coil to make a copper egg spin and stand on end. Tesla attended the International Electrical Congress and gave demonstrations of his wireless lighting, including high-voltage, high-frequency current lighting wireless gas-discharge lamps. During that congress he introduced his steam-powered reciprocating electricity generator, which he patented that year. Steam pushed a piston attached to an armature, and the vibrating magnetic field induced a current in nearby coils. The device did away with the complicated parts of a steam engine, but it never became a practical way to generate electricity. In 1893, Edward Dean Adams, who headed the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company, asked Tesla which system would be best for transmitting power from the falls. Tesla advised a two-phase system, and the company gave the generating contract to Westinghouse Electric, while General Electric built the distribution system. In 1895, Adams helped found the Nikola Tesla Company to develop and sell Tesla's patents. That March, a fire destroyed Tesla's South Fifth Avenue lab, along with early notes, models, and exhibits, and Tesla told The New York Times, "I am in too much grief to talk. What can I say?" Starting in 1894, Tesla also investigated "invisible" radiant energy, later known as X-rays ("Roentgen rays" or "X-rays"), after noticing damaged film in his lab. He worked with Crookes tubes, a cold cathode discharge tube, and in March 1896 he developed a high-energy vacuum tube that produced bremsstrahlung, or braking radiation. He noted hazards in this work and believed early on that skin damage came from ozone and, to a lesser extent, nitrous acid, not from the rays themselves. Tesla also incorrectly believed X-rays were longitudinal waves, like those in waves in plasmas that can occur in force-free magnetic fields. In 1898 he demonstrated a boat controlled by radio control using a coherer, which he called "telautomaton," at Madison Square Garden. 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 while traveling to Colorado Springs.

Wireless power

Further information: Wireless power transfer § Nikola Tesla

From the 1890s through 1906, Tesla spent a great deal of time and money trying to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires. At the time, there was no feasible way to send signals or large amounts of power over long distances without wires. Tesla studied radio waves and concluded that part of Hertz's earlier study was incorrect. He thought electricity might travel long distances through the Earth or the air, so he began experiments, including a large magnifying transmitter in his East Houston Street lab.

Colorado Springs

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

In 1899, Tesla set up an experimental station at high altitude in Colorado Springs to study how electricity moves through thin air. There he could safely run much larger coils, and he convinced John Jacob Astor IV to invest $100,000 to become the majority shareholder in the Nikola Tesla Company. He hoped to send signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla also reported hearing unusual signals that he guessed might come from another planet, and reporters quickly suggested Mars. Later, in 1905, the Wardenclyffe project came to a halt after investors turned away and some newspapers called it a hoax. In March 1901, Tesla had obtained $150,000 from J. P. Morgan to begin 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 try to get more money for the project. In 1906 he opened offices at 165 Broadway in Manhattan to raise money by developing and marketing his patents. He later had offices at the Metropolitan Life Tower from 1910 to 1914, rented space for a few months at the Woolworth Building before moving out because he could not afford the rent, and then used office space at 8 West 40th Street from 1915 to 1925. By then he was effectively bankrupt. Most of his patents had expired, and he was having trouble with the new inventions he was trying to develop.

Main article: Tesla turbine

On his 50th birthday, in 1906, Tesla demonstrated a 200 horsepower (150 kilowatts) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910–1911, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100–5,000 hp 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 precision instrument company, and it was used in luxury car speedometers and other instruments.

When World War I broke out, the British cut the transatlantic telegraph cable linking the U.S. to Germany. They also tried to shut off German wireless communication by having the U.S. Marconi Company sue the German radio company Telefunken for patent infringement. Telefunken brought in the physicists 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 became moot when the U.S. entered 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 market several devices based on the production of ozone. He also theorized that applying electricity to the brain enhanced intelligence. In 1912, he proposed wiring a schoolroom so that its students would become brighter, and New York City schools superintendent William H. Maxwell provisionally approved the plan. In 1917, Tesla wrote in the magazine The Electrical Experimenter that electricity could be used to find submarines. This idea has been noted to resemble modern radar in a superficial way, though Tesla was wrong that high-frequency radio waves would penetrate water. Émile Girardeau, who helped develop 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 capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), which was impractical.

Tesla lived at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City from 1900 and ran up a large bill. He moved to the St. Regis Hotel in 1922 and then kept moving to a different hotel every few years, leaving unpaid bills behind. He was forced to leave the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930, and the Hotel Governor Clinton in 1934. At one point he stayed at the Hotel Marguery, and 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, and several sources claim the company was concerned about bad publicity over his poor living conditions. The payment was described as a "consulting fee" so that Tesla would not feel he was accepting charity.

Birthday press conferences

In 1931, a young journalist whom Tesla befriended, Kenneth M. Swezey, organized a celebration for the inventor's 75th birthday. Tesla received congratulations from scientists and engineers such as Albert Einstein, and he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, with the caption "All the world's his power house," which noted his contribution to electrical power generation. The party became an annual event, where Tesla served food and drink, including dishes of his own creation, and 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 form of energy, and he described work on metallurgy and on photographing the retina to record thought. At the 1934 event, he said he had designed a superweapon that would end all war. Papers called it a "death ray" or death ray, and Tesla used the name Teleforce in 1940 but never explained how it worked. The U.S. suspected he planned to sell it to the League of Nations, and 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 at the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade described a device that used electrostatic repulsion to direct charged particles in streams.

In 1935, at his 79th birthday party, Tesla claimed he had discovered the cosmic ray in 1896 and had invented a way to produce 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, and he claimed it could destroy the Empire State Building. In 1937, he received the Order of the White Lion from the Czechoslovak ambassador, and 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 awards included the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sava from Yugoslavia in 1926, and the John Scott Medal from the Franklin Institute and Philadelphia City Council in 1934. 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. His back was badly wrenched and three of his ribs were broken. He refused to see a doctor, as he had for most of his life, and never fully recovered. On the night of 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, Tesla died alone in his hotel room. The cause of death was ruled to be coronary thrombosis.

During World War II, some U.S. government officials worried that Tesla's belongings, including plans for a supposed beam weapon, might go to his nephew Sava Kosanović, an exiled Yugoslav politician who was not a U.S. citizen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation asked the Office of Alien Property Custodian to seize the belongings two days after his death. John G. Trump, an electrical engineering professor at MIT who was helping the National Defense Research Committee, examined the items and concluded 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 scientific work, though later he sometimes felt that not marrying was a great sacrifice to 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 much time together. Twain called Tesla's induction motor "the most valuable patent since the telephone." At a party in 1896, Tesla met Swami Vivekananda, who hoped Tesla's work could give a scientific base to Vedantic ideas about the universe. This meeting sparked Tesla's interest in Eastern science, and he studied Vedic philosophy for several years. He later wrote an article, "Man's Greatest Achievement," that 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, living mostly on milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.

Views and beliefs

Tesla is widely considered by his biographers to have been a humanist in how he saw the world. He believed that human "pity" had come to get in the way of the natural "ruthless workings of nature." Although his ideas did not rely on a "master race" or on one person being better than another, he supported eugenics. In 1926, he commented on the problems of women being kept in a lower position in society and on the struggle of women for gender equality. He said that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees" and believed women would become the dominant sex in the future. In an article titled "Science and Discovery are the great Forces which will lead to the Consummation of the War" (20 December 1914), he made predictions about the world after World War I.

Tesla was raised in the faith of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Later in life, he did not think of himself as a "believer in the orthodox sense." He said he opposed religious fanaticism and 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," and that "what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body."

Literary works

Tesla wrote a number of books and articles for magazines and journals. One of his books is My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Ben Johnston compiled and edited it in 1983 from a series of 1919 magazine articles by Tesla, which had been republished in 1977. He also wrote The Tesla Papers.

Many of his writings are freely available online. These include "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," published in The Century Magazine in 1900, and "Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency," which was published in his book Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla.

Legacy

In 1952, after pressure from Sava Kosanović, Tesla's whole estate was shipped to Belgrade in 80 trunks marked "N.T.". In 1957, Kosanović's secretary Charlotte Muzar took Tesla's ashes from the United States to Belgrade. They are displayed in a gold-plated sphere on a marble pedestal in the Nikola Tesla Museum. His archive has over 160,000 documents and is part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme.

Tesla received around 300 patents around the world for his inventions. Some of his patents cannot be accounted for, and some 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, while many others were approved in countries all over the globe.