The Electric Magician
His Name Marks an Epoch in Electrical Science
Born on July 9/10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika (Austria-Hungary)
Died on January 7, 1943 in New York City, New
York (USA)
Born on July 9/10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika (Austria-Hungary)
Died on January 7, 1943 in New York City, New
York (USA)
* John Wagner's Website about Tesla
* Parascope's Website about Tesla
* "The Strange Life of Tesla" can be downloaded as a pdf-file by clicking here
* Nature
and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, "Let Tesla be", and all was light.
B.A. Behrend, AIEE annual meeting, New York City, May 18, 1917
* Despite
his relative obscurity, the greatest genius of all time may have
been Nikola Tesla. With over 700 patents in his name, Tesla shaped our
current technological landscape more than any other individual. How,
then, did this great man end up dying destitute and in obscurity? Did
Tesla's extraordinary mind decline into insanity... or was he simply far,
far ahead of his time.
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* In
1882 he made the discovery that changed the world--harnessing the
awesome power of Alternating Current.
In 1888 he obtained U.S. patents covering an entire system of polyphase
AC that remains unchanged in principle today.
He promptly sold all of his patents to George Westinghouse, an
acquisition that made the Westinghouse Company the giant it is today.
Westinghouse and Tesla were consummate friends, but after Westinghouse
died in 1913, the company forgot about its chief benefactor and Tesla
fell
victim to hard times.
Tesla died January 7, 1943, alone, and all but forgotten, in a New York
hotel room, paid for by a meager stipend provided by a foreign
government.
Today, industries flourish and the world surges from the power his
fertile mind created...and radios blare with news and music, their
transmission made possible by his giant intellect...all telling us
that
TESLA WAS HERE.
Tesla holds over forty U.S. patents (circa 1888) covering our entire
system of Polyphase Alternating Current (AC). These patents are so
novel that nobody could ever challenge them in the courts.
The Direct Current (DC) system Edison used in his much touted Pearl
Street generating station was invented by others before his time; he
merely copied the work of others to promote his business
enterprise...and the Smithsonian wants you to believe he was America's
'King of Electricity.' There is simply no evidence to support this
claim.
Lest you jump to the wrong conclusion, we are not criticzing Mr.
Edison, whose Menlo Park Laboratory workers were responsible for
many practical inventions; we are criticizing only the groups promoting
Mr. Edison's name in the electrical power field.
INVENTION OF RADIO
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark decision dated June 21, 1943,
Case No. 369, overturned Marconi's basic patent for the invention of
radio because Tesla's patent on the four-tuned circuit (below) predated
Marconi's patent. Marconi had simply copied Tesla's work.
To the Smithsonian or Bust: The Scientific Legacy of Nikola Tesla |
Web Links: | Books about Tesla: |
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Statue of Nikola Tesla at Niagara Falls |
Tesla in Colorado Springs Lab |
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Tesla's Wardenclyffe laboratory, where he tested his death ray |
* A
photograph taken in Colorado Springs during an experiment on December 31,
1899.
Tesla reads a book in the background, while several
million volts lightnings cascade
around the laboratory. The roar hat accompanied
such discharges could be heard ten
miles away. The photograph was obtained using
trick photography. Experiment was
repeated several times to capture the lightnings
and then the inventor would sit on a chair
to complete the picture.
* A bronze
statue of Nikola Tesla at Niagara Falls was produced some time in the mid
70's to honor
Tesla and the work he did for Westinghouse in building the turbines
which converted the power of
the Falls into electricity. The original statue is in front of the
Electrical Engineering building of the
University ofBelgrade in Belgrade, Serbia.
* Given
that Tesla's inventions generally
possessed an element of social conscience,
of doing good for humanity, it may seem
surprising that he created a number of devices
with military applications. And the notion of
the
Tesla harnessing his mind for purposes of war
may seem immensely frightening. After all, this
is the man who boasted that with his resonance
generator he could split the earth in two...
and no one was ever quite sure whether he was
joking.
*
The first Tesla invention with a proposed military use was his automaton
technology, with which the labor of human beings could be performed by
machines. Specifically, Tesla produced remote-controlled boats and
submarines. He demonstrated the wireless ship at an exposition in Madison
Square Garden in 1898. The automaton apparatus was so advanced, it used
a
form of voice recognition to respond to the verbal commands of Tesla and
volunteers from the audience.
In public, Tesla spoke only of the humanitarian virtues of the invention:
it
would lessen the toils and drudgery of mankind and keep human lives out
of
harm's way. But Tesla actually had his hopes on a contract with the U.S.
military. In a presentation before the War Department, Tesla argued that
his
unmanned torpedo craft could obliterate the Spanish Armada and end the
war
with Spain in an afternoon. The government never took Tesla up on his
offer.
Tesla then decided to pitch the automated submarine to private industry,
and
submitted it for the approval of J. P. Morgan. According to some accounts,
Morgan offered to manufacture Tesla's vessels, but only if Tesla would
agree to marry Morgan's daughter. Such a deal was of course anathema to
Tesla, and he and Morgan would not work together until Wardenclyffe, a
couple of years later.
Tesla eventually landed a successful military contract -- with the German
Marine High Command. The product here was not unmanned sea craft, but
sophisticated turbines which Admiral von Tirpitz used to great success
in his
fleet of warships. After J. P. Morgan cut off his support of Wardenclyffe,
this foreign contract was Tesla's only substantial source of income. Upon
the
outbreak of World War I, Tesla chose to forfeit his German royalties, lest
he
be charged with treason.
Nearly broke, and finding the United States on the brink of war, Tesla
dreamed up a new invention that might interest the military: the death
ray.
The mechanism behind Tesla's death ray is not well understood. It was
apparently some sort of particle accelerator. Tesla said it was an outgrowth
of
his magnifying transformer, which focused its energy output into a thin
beam
so concentrated it would not scatter, even over huge distances. He promoted
the device as a purely defensive weapon, intended to knock down incoming
attacks -- making the death ray the great-great grandfather of the Strategic
Defense Initiative.
It is not certain if Tesla ever used the death ray, or indeed if he even
succeeded in building one. But the following is the often-related story
of
what happened one night in 1908 when Tesla tested the foreboding weapon.
At the time, Robert Peary was making his second attempt to reach the North
Pole. Cryptically, Tesla had notified the expedition that he would be trying
to
contact them somehow. They were to report to him the details of anything
unusual they might witness on the open tundra. On the evening of June 30,
accompanied by his associate George Scherff atop Wardenclyffe tower,
Tesla aimed his death ray across the Atlantic towards the arctic, to a
spot
which he calculated was west of the Peary expedition.
Tesla switched on the device. At first, it was hard to tell if it was even
working. Its extremity emitted a dim light that was barely visible. Then
an
owl flew from its perch on the tower's pinnacle, soaring into the path
of the
beam. The bird disintegrated instantly.
That concluded the test. Tesla watched the newspapers and sent telegrams
to
Peary in hopes of confirming the death ray's effectiveness. Nothing turned
up. Tesla was ready to admit failure when news came of a strange event
in
Siberia.
On June 30, a massive explosion had devastated Tunguska, a remote area
in
the Siberian wilderness. Five hundred thousand square acres of land had
been instantly destroyed. Equivalent to ten to fifteen megatons of TNT,
the
Tunguska incident is the most powerful explosion to have occurred in human
history -- not even subsequent thermonuclear detonations have surpassed
it.
The explosion was audible from 620 miles away. Scientists believe it was
caused by either a meteorite or a fragment of a comet, although no obvious
impact site or mineral remnants of such an object were ever found.
Nikola Tesla had a different explanation. It was plain that his death ray
had
overshot its intended target and destroyed Tunguska. He was thankful
beyond measure that the explosion had -- miraculously -- killed no one.
Tesla
dismantled the death ray at once, deeming it too dangerous to remain in
existence.
Six years later, the onset of the First World War caused Tesla to reconsider.
He wrote to President Wilson, revealing his secret death ray test. He offered
to rebuild the weapon for the War Department, to be used purely as a
deterrent. The mere threat of such destructive force, he claimed, would
cause
the warring nations to agree at once to establish lasting peace.
The only response to Tesla's proposal was a form letter of appreciation
from
the president's secretary. The death ray was never reconstructed, and for
that
we should probably all be thankful.
Tesla made one one further attempt to aid in his country's war effort.
In
1917, he conceived of a sending station that would emit exploratory waves
of energy, enabling its operators to determine the precise location of
distant
enemy craft. The War Department rejected Tesla's "exploring ray" as a
laughing stock.
A generation later, a new invention exactly like this helped the Allies
win
World War II. It was called radar.
* Tesla's ideas seemed to grow markedly weirder in his later years.
Forever restless, and untethered by
concerns of practicality and
marketability, Tesla's mind spawned a
vast miscellany of odd inventions.
Many of these were never developed
beyond the concept stage, and the
ideas seemed to grow markedly
weirder in the final years of Tesla's life.
Invention was normally a deliberate process for Tesla, his every intention
and goal fully formed before he and his crew lifted a finger. But there
were times when he stumbled upon a new discovery by mistake. Tesla
performed his first experiments with resonance technology at his New
York laboratory by firing up a small oscillator, which caused a minor
amount of vibration. Suddenly, an alarmed squad of police officers
stormed into the lab, demanding that Tesla stop at once. Manhattan was
shaking for miles around. Tesla had not taken into account how resonance
waves grow stronger the further they travel from their source. He had
unintentionally created what became known as Tesla's earthquake
machine.
Tesla also applied his resonance engines in bizarre forms of physical
therapy. He created machines that flooded the human body with electrical
currents and strong vibrations, intended to soothe aches and promote
healing. And Tesla wasn't just the inventor of the "electrotherapeutic"
device -- he was also a client. He reportedly became somewhat addicted
to
administering the treatment to himself, insisting that a session with the
machine rejuvenated him on his long stretches of work without food or
sleep. Tesla once let his friend Samuel Clemens try out the healing
machine. The author is said to have enjoyed the experience tremendously
-- until the vibrations brought him a case of spontaneous diarrhea. Tesla
marketed this invention, and the Tesla Electrotherapeutic Company was
one of the few commercial enterprises of his old age that was marginally
successful.
Tesla gained another accidental revelation during his testing of the
magnifying transformer in Colorado Springs. One evening during the
construction of the device, the apparatus began to sound out a series of
precise clicks, similar to Morse code. Tesla was convinced that these were
signals being sent by extraterrestrial life. Tesla had expressed his belief
in
life on Mars, and now he thought he had proof. He later conceived of
transmitters for communicating with Martians, espousing his view that the
establishment of peaceful relations with our neighbors from outer space
was among the most pressing duties that lay before humanity.
In his later years, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both
a
particle and a wave -- the fundamental proposition of what would become
quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the development of his death
ray. Tesla also had the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating
electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light
would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and
engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of
science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation and time
travel.
The single weirdest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the
"thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the
mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data
of
this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The
stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic
nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen.
It's a pity Tesla never made this last invention a reality. With the dearth
of
written notes and documentation he left behind for modern science to
study, we can only conclude that Tesla's weirdest ideas were
misconceived fantasies -- maybe even symptoms of madness. Nothing
less than a comprehensive recorded catalog of his brain waves could
prove otherwise.
*
Nikola Tesla
A Formal Biography
(b. July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan, Croatia--d. Jan. 7, 1943, New York City),
Serbian-American inventor and researcher who discovered the rotating
magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He
emigrated to the United States in 1884 and sold the patent rights to
his
system
of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors to George
Westinghouse the following year. In 1891 he invented the Tesla coil,
an
induction coil widely used in radio technology.
Tesla was from a family of Serbian origin. His father was an Orthodox
priest; his mother was unschooled but highly intelligent. A dreamer
with
a poetic touch, as he matured Tesla added to these earlier qualities
those of self-discipline and a desire for precision.
Training for an engineering career, he attended the Technical University
at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague. At Graz he first saw
the
Gramme dynamo, which operated as a generator and, when reversed, became
an electric motor, and he conceived a way to use alternating
current to advantage. Later, at Budapest, he visualized the principle
of
the rotating magnetic field and developed plans for an induction motor
that would become his first step toward the successful utilization
of
alternating current. In 1882 Tesla went to work in Paris for the
Continental Edison Company, and, while on assignment to Strassburg
in 1883,
he constructed, in after-work hours, his first induction motor. Tesla
sailed
for America in 1884, arriving in New York, with four cents in his
pocket, a few of his own poems, and calculations for a flying machine.
He first found employment with Thomas Edison, but the two inventors
were
far apart in background and methods, and their separation was
inevitable.
In May 1885, 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 motors. The
transaction precipitated a titanic power struggle between Edison's
direct-current systems and the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating-current
approach, which eventually won out.
Tesla soon established his own laboratory, where his inventive mind
could be given free rein. He experimented with shadowgraphs similar
to
those that later were to be used by Wilhelm R–ntgen when he discovered
X-rays in 1895. Tesla's countless experiments included work on a
carbon button lamp, on the power of electrical resonance, and on various
types of lighting.
Tesla gave exhibitions in his laboratory in which he lighted lamps
without wires by allowing electricity to flow through his body, to
allay
fears of alternating current. He was often invited to lecture at home
and
abroad. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is widely used today
in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment. That year
also
marked the date of Tesla's United States citizenship.
Westinghouse used Tesla's system to light the World's Columbian
Exposition at Chicago in 1893. His success was a factor in winning
him
the contract to install the first power machinery at Niagara Falls,
which
bore Tesla's name and patent numbers. The project carried power to
Buffalo by 1896.
In 1898 Tesla announced his invention of a teleautomatic boat guided
by
remote control. When skepticism was voiced, Tesla proved his claims
for it before a crowd in Madison Square Garden.
In Colorado Springs, Colo., where he stayed from May 1899 until early
1900, Tesla made what he regarded as his most important discovery--
terrestrial stationary waves. By this discovery he proved that the
Earth
could be used as a conductor and would be as responsive as a tuning
fork
to electrical vibrations of a certain frequency. He also lighted 200
lamps without wires from a distance of 25 miles (40 kilometres) and
created man-made lightning, producing flashes measuring 135 feet (41
metres).
At one time he was certain he had received signals from another planet
in his Colorado laboratory, a claim that was met with derision in some
scientific journals.
Returning to New York in 1900, Tesla began construction on Long Island
of a wireless world broadcasting tower, with $150,000 capital from
the American financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Tesla claimed he secured
the
loan by assigning 51 percent of his patent rights of telephony and
telegraphy to Morgan. He expected to provide worldwide communication
and
to furnish facilities for sending pictures, messages, weather
warnings, and stock reports. The project was abandoned because of a
financial panic, labour troubles, and Morgan's withdrawal of support.
It
was Tesla's greatest defeat.
Tesla's work then shifted to turbines and other projects. Because of
a
lack of funds, his ideas remained in his notebooks, which are still
examined by engineers for unexploited clues. In 1915 he was severely
disappointed when a report that he and Edison were to share the Nobel
Prize proved erroneous. Tesla was the recipient of the Edison Medal
in
1917, the highest honour that the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers could bestow.
Tesla allowed himself only a few close friends. Among them were the
writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, and Francis Marion
Crawford. He was quite impractical in financial matters and an
eccentric, driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia. But
he
had a way of intuitively sensing hidden scientific secrets and employing
his
inventive talent to prove his hypotheses. Tesla was a godsend to
reporters who sought sensational copy but a problem to editors who
were
uncertain how seriously his futuristic prophecies should be regarded.
Caustic
criticism greeted his speculations concerning communication with other
planets, his assertions that he could split the Earth like an apple,
and
his claim of having invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000
airplanes at a distance of 250 miles (400 kilometres).
After Tesla's death the custodian of alien property impounded his
trunks, which held his papers, his diplomas and other honours, his
letters, and his laboratory notes. These were eventually inherited
by Tesla's
nephew, Sava Kosanovich, and later housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum
in
Belgrade. Hundreds filed into New York City's Cathedral of St. John
the
Divine for his funeral services, and a flood of messages acknowledged
the loss of a great genius. Three Nobel Prize recipients addressed
their
tribute to "one of the outstanding intellects of the world who paved
the
way for many of the technological developments of modern times."
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