Nikola Tesla

Serbian American inventor

• Born: July 9, 1856
• Birthplace: Smiljan, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Croatia)
• Died: January 7, 1943
• Place of death: New York, New York

With his brilliant, intuitive insight and endless creative imagination, Nikola Telsa laid the foundations for many of the technological developments of the twentieth century, and his development of alternating current continues to affect the daily lives of the entire world into the twenty-first century.

Early Life

Nikola Tesla was the son of an Orthodox priest. His mother, in spite of her lack of formal education, was a remarkably capable woman who invented numerous household devices and developed a prodigious memory for epic poetry. Tesla was later to attribute his own development as an inventor to her influence. When he was six, the family moved to the city of Gospic, and Tesla excelled at the local school, particularly in languages and mathematics. From his earliest years he showed a remarkable aptitude for solving mechanical problems and the rigid self-discipline and unshakable self-confidence that were to lead him to success. As a boy, he frequently suffered from ill health.

In 1875, Tesla entered the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz, where he studied compulsively. Even at this young age he was occupied with the problem of the feasibility of using alternating current for the distribution of electrical energy. His solution, when it came, was to revolutionize the world of electrical engineering.

Financial difficulties forced Tesla to leave the Polytechnic at the end of his second year. His mother raised the money for him to travel to Prague, where he continued his studies, although he was not officially enrolled in any university. For the most part, Tesla was self-taught.

In 1881, he traveled to Budapest and found a lowly position in the Central Telegraph Office. While in Hungary he suffered from one of the nervous disorders that were to be a regular feature of his life, but following his recovery came a significant moment. One evening he was walking toward the sunset reciting a passage from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, when the principle of the rotating magnetic field came to him in a sudden flash of realization, and he knew that he had the solution to the problem of the alternating current system. At this time, however, he had neither time nor means to build the machine he could see so clearly in his mind.

In 1882, he moved to Paris, where he secured a job with the Continental Edison Company. Two years later, in 1884, armed with a splendid recommendation from the manager of the company, a former associate of Thomas Alva Edison, Tesla sailed for the richer pastures of America, arriving in New York in June of that year. The stage was set for Tesla’s brilliant and extraordinary career.

Life’s Work

Edison was impressed by Tesla and offered him a job. The two great inventors were vastly different in method and personality, however, and were not destined to have a long working relationship. Tesla resigned over a disagreement about financial compensation for his redesign of Edison’s dynamos. Tesla’s reputation had been growing, however, and a group of financiers offered him a company under his own name, for which Tesla developed an improved and more economical arc lamp. However, he was given little control over the company, and there was no scope for his large ambitions. He soon resigned. For the next year, his life was difficult, and he was forced to take any job that came along in order to support himself.

By 1887, his luck changed, and so began a decade of high achievement and recognition. A. K. Brown, of the Western Union Telegraph Company, became interested in Tesla’s ideas concerning alternating current, and this quickly led to the formation of the Tesla Electric Company. In the same year Tesla filed his first patents for the alternating current, and in 1888 he was invited to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. He made such an impact that another inventor and industrialist, George Westinghouse, showed keen interest. Westinghouse soon negotiated a contract with Tesla for his polyphase system of alternating current dynamos, a system that would allow power to be economically distributed over large distances. This gave rise to a bitter rivalry between Westinghouse, armed with Tesla’s system, and Edison, whose company was committed to using the direct current system; it became known as the “battle of the currents.”

By the early 1890s, Tesla had developed a worldwide reputation as a brilliant inventor. He was invited to Europe, where he lectured to prestigious scientific societies, including the Royal Society in London. He made an impressive figure. Standing six and one-half feet tall, of slender build, with blue eyes and black hair, and always immaculately dressed, he was the complete showman. During his lectures he would conduct spectacular electrical demonstrations, keeping his audience enthralled with his almost unlimited vision of the possibilities of electrical power and currents.

By 1893, the battle of the currents was all but over. Tesla’s system had provided the power for the spectacular Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, the first electrical fair in history, and in the same year the Niagara Falls Commission announced that it had awarded a contract to build three generators at Niagara Falls to Westinghouse’s firm. The project proved to be one of the great engineering feats of the age.

These were highly productive years for Tesla; he worked on a variety of different projects at once and also led a lively social life in New York alongside the wealthy and famous. He built the Tesla coil, an air-core transformer designed to produce high voltages at high frequencies; he discovered the healing possibilities in high-frequency currents applied to the human body; he invented the carbon button lamp, the shadowgraph (forerunner of the X ray), and a new reciprocating dynamo, which proved to be the inspiration for the modern electric clock. In a lecture in 1893, he described the principle of radio broadcasting, a number of years before Guglielmo Marconi’s practical demonstrations; in 1898 he demonstrated the first radio-controlled robot boat. In many of his ideas, Tesla was ahead of his time. He pioneered the basic principles of radar, which were not to be developed for another thirty years. He wanted to create artificial lightning to control the world’s weather, and he developed a new science called telegeodynamics, which he said could be used to locate ore deposits.

Restlessly spinning new ideas, he then entered on a major project, the building of a laboratory at Colorado Springs, which was to develop his vision of a worldwide broadcasting system. There he built the largest Tesla coil ever, a twelve-million-volt machine capable of producing artificial lightning that soared up to 135 feet in the air. His spectacular experiments aroused a great deal of local curiosity, and his much-publicized belief that he had received signals from another planet earned for him considerable ridicule.

In 1900, Tesla closed the laboratory and returned to New York. By the following year he had obtained the backing of the financier J. P. Morgan for the construction of a transmitter for the world broadcasting system on a site Tesla named Wardenclyffe, on Long Island, New York. The combination of labor troubles and Morgan’s withdrawal of financial support, however, resulted in the failure of the project.

After the failure of Wardenclyffe, Tesla’s scientific reputation came under attack. His opponents portrayed him as an impractical dreamer, and the high point of his career was over. Despite the criticism, Tesla’s inventive spirit remained undimmed. In 1906, he turned to designing a new turbine, which he thought could drive an ocean liner across the Atlantic in three days, but he lacked funds to translate the theory into practice.

In 1915, it was rumored that he and Edison had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, but in what appears to have been a last-minute change of mind by the Nobel committee, the prize was awarded to Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg instead for the "analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays." Tesla’s disappointment was only partially allayed when in 1917 he was awarded the prestigious Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

In his last years Tesla was increasingly afflicted by phobias and neuroses and lived virtually as a recluse. He had never accumulated wealth from his inventions, and he was now saved from poverty only by an honorarium of seven thousand dollars per annum from the Tesla Institute in Belgrade, which had been founded in 1935.

At the age of eighty-six, Tesla died alone, on January 7, 1943, in his hotel room in New York. At his funeral in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, two thousand people were in attendance, and tributes from many of the world’s great scientists poured in to honor the man who had, so to speak, set the world alight.

Significance

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was the great age of invention and industrial expansion in the United States. Circumstances were highly favorable for growth. There were wide markets, and labor, raw materials, and capital were freely available. There were few political or social barriers to free enterprise, and farsighted entrepreneurs were quick to see commercial possibilities in the breakthroughs being made in science and technology. The rewards were great for those who were prepared to take the risks. Machines and mass production revolutionized home, factory, and office: electric lighting, telephones, cameras, adding machines, and typewriters all became commonplace within the ensuing decades.

Tesla’s legacy is everywhere apparent. His greatest discovery, the alternating current motor, laid the foundation for the power system used throughout the industrialized world. The Tesla coil is widely used in television and radio sets, and scientists still eagerly explore Teslian concepts. The Tesla turbine, for example, was still being investigated and developed nearly half a century after his death. The publication in 1978 of Tesla’s research notes from Colorado Springs aroused a fresh wave of interest, although because Tesla could always visualize his designs and possessed a photographic memory, his written records are usually incomplete.

In 1975, Tesla was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, a fitting honor for the man whose brilliant skill and indefatigable labor harnessed the basic forces of nature for the betterment of the human condition.

Bibliography

Cheney, Margaret. Tesla: Man Out of Time. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981. Print.

Hall, Stephen H. “Tesla: A Scientific Saint, Wizard or Carnival Sideman?” Smithsonian 17 (1986): 120–34. Print.

Hunt, Inez, and Wanetta W. Draper. Lightning in His Hand: The Life Story of Nikola Tesla. Denver: Sage, 1964. Print.

Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.

O’Neill, John J. Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla. New York: Ives Washburn, 1944. Print.

Seifer, Marc J. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla: Biography of a Genius. Secaucus: Carol, 1996. Print.

Tesla, Nikola. Nikola Tesla: Lectures, Patents, Articles. Ed. Vojin Popović, Radoslav Horvat, and Nikola Nikolić. Belgrade: Nikola Tesla Museum, 1956. Print.