Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born on 9/10 July 1856 in Smiljan, then in the Austrian Empire and today in Croatia¹. His parents, Milutin and Djuka Tesla, were Serbian, and the family lived in the Lika, a mountainous Balkan region². His father was an Orthodox priest and an intellectual who pushed his son toward unusual mental discipline³, while his mother, unschooled but highly intelligent, built time-saving devices for home and farm, including a mechanical eggbeater Tesla credited for his inventive instincts¹².

An early sign of his gift was that he could perform integral calculus in his mind, which made his teachers think he was cheating². As a boy he saw a steel engraving of Niagara Falls and told an uncle that he would go to America one day and capture the cataract's energy².

By nineteen he was a star student of electrical engineering at the Imperial and Royal Technical College in Graz⁴. He dropped out in his third year in 1878, became addicted to gambling, lost all his tuition money and suffered a nervous breakdown⁴. He worked as a draftsman in Maribor, moved to Prague in 1880, and in 1881 reached Budapest, where Ferenc Puskás hired him to install an Edison telephone exchange³.

Budapest is where the idea came: walking in a park and reciting Goethe's Faust with his friend Antal Szigety, he drew a diagram in the dirt of a motor using rotating magnetic fields created by two or more alternating currents⁴. In 1882 he joined the Continental Edison Company in Paris, and on assignment to Strasbourg in 1883 he built his first induction motor after hours¹.

In June 1884 Tesla sailed for New York, arriving with four cents in his pocket, a few poems, and calculations for a flying machine¹⁴. According to Tesla, Edison offered him $50,000 to improve the direct-current plants he favored, then refused to pay, telling him he would appreciate an American joke once he became a full-fledged American⁴. In 1886 he formed Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing, and within two years he had applied for more than thirty patents on his system⁵³.

In November and December of 1887 Tesla filed seven United States patents covering a complete polyphase system: generators, transformers, transmission lines, motors and lighting⁶. So original were the ideas that they were issued without a successful challenge, and they would prove the most valuable patents since the telephone⁶.

In May 1888 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 motors¹. He purchased the patents for $60,000, including $5,000 in cash and 150 shares of Westinghouse stock, plus royalties on every horsepower of electrical capacity sold⁶. The sale precipitated a titanic power struggle between Edison's direct current and the Tesla–Westinghouse approach, which eventually won out¹; Westinghouse won it at a steep cost in litigation for both sides⁴.

Edison launched a propaganda war against alternating current: Westinghouse recalled him telling audiences that direct current was like a river flowing peacefully to the sea, while alternating current was like a torrent rushing over a precipice⁶. To allay public fears, Tesla lit lamps by passing electricity through his own body in laboratory exhibitions¹.

The Columbian Exposition opened on 1 May 1893, and when President Grover Cleveland pushed a button, a hundred thousand incandescent lamps lit the fairgrounds⁶. The City of Light was the work of Tesla, Westinghouse and twelve new thousand-horsepower alternating-current units, with the polyphase system displayed in the Great Hall of Electricity⁶. The twenty-seven million visitors saw the future plainly, and from then on more than 80 percent of all electrical devices ordered in the United States were for alternating current⁶.

The principle Tesla visualized in Budapest became the basis of most alternating-current machinery¹. His own account places the insight on a park walk, with Goethe's Faust on his lips and a stick tracing the diagram in the dirt⁴. It was the beginning of the induction motor, his first step toward the successful use of alternating current¹.

The paper that set it out — A New System of Alternate Current Motors and Transformers — was read before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York in May 1888⁷. It was written the night before the meeting, in pencil and very hastily, by an overworked and ill Tesla who had been reluctant to give it at all⁷.

The polyphase system was an architecture rather than a device: generators, transformers, transmission lines, motors and lighting, joined by three-phase transmission⁶¹. The Library of Congress dates the first usable alternating-current motor to 1888⁵. In an 1892 London lecture Tesla argued that with oil insulation and alternate-current motors, power could be transmitted safely and on an industrial basis at distances of as much as a thousand miles⁸. UNESCO calls the system the cornerstone of the modern electro-energetic system⁹.

Since childhood Tesla had dreamed of harnessing Niagara Falls, and in late 1893 the dream became real when Westinghouse was awarded the contract to create the powerhouse¹⁰. At the head of the international commission sat Lord Kelvin, as opposed to alternating current as Edison had been — until he attended the Chicago Exposition; converted, he and his commission asked Westinghouse to use alternating current at the falls¹⁰.

When the switch was thrown, the first power reached Buffalo at midnight on 16 November 1896¹⁰. The Niagara Falls Gazette reported that a switch thrown in the big powerhouse had completed a circuit which caused the Niagara River to flow uphill¹⁰. The Library of Congress records that the first Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant opened in 1896, designed to convert the falls' energy into electricity⁵.

The boy who had promised an uncle that he would capture the falls' energy had made good². Westinghouse pleaded for relief from the contract that granted Tesla generous royalties, and in a magnanimous and history-making gesture, Tesla tore up the contract¹⁰. Grateful to the one man who had believed in his invention, he accepted the cost, and recurring financial difficulties followed him for the rest of his life¹⁰.

In 1891 Tesla invented the Tesla coil, an induction coil widely used in radio technology and still found in radio and television sets¹. Before the turn of the century he had built a powerful coil generating high voltages and frequencies, leading to new forms of light such as neon and fluorescent, and to X-ray work⁴. Tuned to resonate at the same frequency, the coils could send and receive powerful radio signals, and by early 1895 Tesla was ready to transmit a signal 50 miles to West Point, New York — until a building fire consumed his laboratory and destroyed the work¹¹.

Tesla filed his basic radio patent applications in 1897, beating Guglielmo Marconi to the punch, and they were granted in 1900¹¹⁴. Marconi's first application in America, filed on 10 November 1900, was turned down, and his revisions over the next three years were repeatedly rejected because of the priority of Tesla and other inventors¹¹.

Then, on 12 December 1901, the world awoke to the news that Marconi had signalled the letter S across the Atlantic from Cornwall to Newfoundland¹². Asked whether the Italian had got the jump on him, Tesla replied that Marconi was a good fellow and should continue — he was using seventeen of Tesla's patents¹¹. In 1904 the United States Patent Office suddenly reversed its decisions and gave Marconi a patent for radio¹¹. It was not until 1943, months after Tesla's death, that the United States Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent 645,576, restoring his priority over Marconi¹¹.

In 1898, at an electrical exhibition in the recently completed Madison Square Garden, Tesla demonstrated the world's first radio-controlled vessel¹³. The crowd saw a small, odd-looking iron-hulled boat scooting across an indoor pond, carrying what Tesla called a borrowed mind¹³. When skepticism was voiced, he proved his claims before a crowd in Madison Square Garden¹.

The working model, the teleautomaton, responded to radio signals and was powered by an internal battery¹³. His United States patent number 613,809 describes the first device anywhere for wireless remote control¹³. The Library of Congress records the demonstration as the first remote control device⁵. When a New York Times writer suggested the boat could submerge and carry dynamite as a weapon, Tesla exploded with a correction: it was not a wireless torpedo but the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which would do the laborious work of the human race¹³.

With $30,000 from Colonel John Jacob Astor and help from his friend Leonard Curtis, Tesla built an experimental station on the prairie near Pikes Peak, staying from May 1899 until early 1900¹⁴¹. The laboratory was both wired and weird: a roof that rolled back to keep it from catching fire, a wooden tower soaring up eighty feet, and above it a 142-foot mast supporting a large copper ball¹⁴.

Bolts of man-made lightning more than a hundred feet long shot from the mast, and one night the experiment burned out the dynamo at the El Paso Electric Company — the entire city lost power¹⁴. Britannica records that he also lit 200 lamps without wires from 40 km (25 miles) away, and that his flashes measured 41 metres (135 feet)¹. He regarded his most important discovery there to be terrestrial stationary waves: the Earth, he believed, could be used as a conductor and made to resonate at a certain frequency¹.

Whether he actually transmitted wireless power at Pikes Peak has never been definitively answered¹⁴. He calculated that the resonant frequency of the space between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere was approximately 8 hertz, an idea taken seriously only in the 1950s, when researchers found it in that range¹⁴.

Returning to New York, Tesla wrote a sensational Century Magazine article describing a means of tapping the sun's energy with an antenna, the control of weather by electrical energy, machines that would make war impossible, and a global system of wireless communications¹². He told Morgan that when wireless was fully applied the earth would be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts¹². Morgan offered $150,000 to build a transmission tower and power plant — a realistic budget would have been nearer a million — and Tesla went to work immediately¹².

Britannica records that Tesla began construction on Long Island in 1900 with the $150,000 from Morgan, and that he claimed to have secured the loan by assigning 51 percent of his telephony and telegraphy patent rights to his backer¹. He hired the architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead and White in New York⁴. By 1901 an enormous tower was rising 187 feet, topped by a fifty-five-ton steel sphere¹². Beneath it a well-like shaft plunged 120 feet, and sixteen iron pipes were driven three hundred feet deeper to seize hold of the earth¹².

White designed Wardenclyffe Tower in 1901, but soon it became apparent that Tesla would run out of money too quickly, and an appeal to Morgan proved fruitless⁴. Then, on 12 December 1901, the world awoke to news that Marconi had signalled the letter S across the Atlantic¹². Tesla, unruffled, said the Italian had used seventeen Tesla patents — but Morgan began to doubt him¹².

In 1905, after some amazing electrical displays, Tesla's team abandoned Wardenclyffe forever, and newspapers called it Tesla's million dollar folly¹². Humiliated, he suffered a complete nervous breakdown, protesting that it was not a dream but a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, expensive only, and blaming a blind, faint-hearted, doubting world¹². He lost the lease in 1915, and the tower was razed in 1917⁵⁴.

Tesla was granted more than 100 United States patents¹. The table selects the ones that left the deepest mark, with what each is on the record for¹.

The Edison story is best told the way the record tells it: according to Tesla, Edison offered him $50,000 to improve the direct-current plants he favored, then refused to pay, calling it an American joke a full-fledged American would appreciate⁴. That version of the rift rests on Tesla's own telling⁴, and Britannica's sober line is that the two inventors were far apart in background and methods, their separation inevitable¹.

Wireless power was Tesla's stated aim in the Century Magazine article that followed Colorado Springs¹². What the experiments yielded is another matter: the Colorado results are not clear, and the central question — whether wireless power was actually transmitted at Pikes Peak — has never been definitively answered¹⁴. In 1943 the government's examiner John Trump concluded after a three-day investigation that Tesla's recent thinking was speculative, philosophical and promotional in character and offered no new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results¹⁶.

The late claims are where the legend thickened: in 1934 the New York Times reported that Tesla was working on a Death Beam capable of knocking 10,000 enemy airplanes out of the sky and making war impossible⁴. The Soviet Union funded his beam-weapon investigations in 1939 to the tune of $25,000, but the project languished⁴. Britannica records the caustic criticism that greeted his speculations about other planets, his assertion that he could split the Earth like an apple, and his death-ray claim of 10,000 airplanes destroyed at 400 km (250 miles)¹. In 1915 he was severely disappointed when a report that he and Edison would share the Nobel Prize proved erroneous¹.

Tesla's own sentences were as vivid as his apparatus, and the passages below are reproduced in the exact wording the sources record⁷. They trace the arc of the life: the flash of insight in Budapest, the wireless earth, the robots, the doubting world¹².

Tesla died in New York City on 7 January 1943, alone in a room at the New Yorker Hotel, increasingly reclusive and eccentric³. By the end he was penniless, spending his days in a park among pigeons and working out his inventions in his head, a habit that would confound scholars for years after his death⁴. After his death the custodian of alien property impounded his trunks — his papers, diplomas and other honors, his letters and his laboratory notes — and these were eventually inherited by his nephew Sava Kosanovich and housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade¹.

In 1952 the remaining papers and possessions were released to Sava Kosanovic and returned to Belgrade, where a museum was created in the inventor's honor¹⁶. The museum's greatest treasure is Tesla's personal archive — documents, manuscripts, scientific notes, calculations, diagrams, drawings and letters from 1856 to 1943 — amounting to 163,911 call numbers in 548 boxes, catalogued in seven units by subject¹⁷. UNESCO calls the collection unique and indispensable to studying the history of electrification of the globe⁹.

The name persists in units, companies and classrooms: the tesla, the SI unit of magnetic flux density, was named in his honor in 1960³. In 2003 the American entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla Inc., the manufacturer of electric automobiles, solar panels and batteries, in honor of the inventor¹. The Library of Congress calls him a genuine poet of electricity, crediting his alternating-current system, his artificial daylight and his interplanetary theories with paving the way for breakthroughs⁵. As early as 1895, Nature's reviewer called him a young man whose career had been somewhat romantic, and whose ingenuity ranked him very high among the electrical workers and discoverers of the day¹⁸.