Nikola Tesla was a great inventor who lived during the 19th and 20th centuries. Tesla was born at exactly Midnight between July 9 and 10, 1856, in Smiljan, Croatia. Croatia is today a part of Yugoslavia. Nikola Tesla was the fourth in a family of five children. His father, Milutin, was a minister, and he had intended Nikola to be one also. The eldest child in the family was Daniel, who died at the age of 12 in an accident. The accident occurred when the horse he was riding threw him, and he died of the injuries. Nikola claimed to have witnessed the accident when his brother died, and it was recorded in his autobiography. This horse may have been the kind easily spooked, because the previous winter, it had thrown Milutin Tesla "in the middle of the forest after an encounter with wolves."(Seifer P10) The horse ran home, and then brought the search party back to where Milutin had fallen unconscious. There are different, conflicting accounts of how Daniel died, but this is what Nikola said happened.
After Daniel's death, to his parents everything that Nikola did never seemed to be as good as what Daniel had done. In Nikola's own words: "The recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison. Anything I did that was creditable merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself." Nikola's father still intended him to join the ministry, as was the custom in his family. However, Nikola wanted to be an engineer.
Nikola Tesla was close to death many times. He claimed that it was his willpower that always overcame whatever disease he was facing. He moved in with his aunt Stanka, the sister of Nikola's father, and her husband, to go to a school closer to their home than his parents. There, during his last year of school, he had caught a fever which he claimed was Malaria, after he explored near a marsh. Not too long after, when he graduated, he was planning to visit his parents and tell his father that he wanted to be an engineer, instead of entering the ministry. His father sent a letter telling him not to come home, but to go on a hunting trip instead. His father didn't tell him that there was an epidemic of Cholera in the town, and Tesla went there anyway. He quickly caught the disease, still being weak from the last illness, and almost died. "In one of the sinking spells which was thought to be the last, my father rushed into the room.... �Perhaps,' I said, �I may get well if you will let me study engineering.' �You will go to the best technical institution in the world,' he solemnly replied, and I knew that he meant it.". He recovered, and they selected the Polytechnic School in Austria. However, having graduated from what would be high school here, he was required to enter the military for 3 years. A war was starting, so his father told him to go on a trip to the mountains for a year, instead. Fortunately, he was not captured, and returned to the town in 1875, and later entered the Polytechnic School.
While at the school, one of his teachers brought in a DC (Direct Current) dynamo. The dynamo had a commutator attached to it, as all DC dynamos do. The commutator served the purpose of changing the electricity generated to travel in one direction only (thus direct current). Tesla intuitively realized that the commutator attached to the dynamo wasn't necessary, because electricity is naturally alternating, not direct. He would puzzle over this solution for many years, and eventually would leave the Polytechnic School, disappointed because he couldn't find the solution. He eventually entered another school, however, and he later would suddenly realize the answer while watching a sunrise. After he knew how to build it, he moved to Paris, France and got a job with the Continental Edison Company. He tried to sell his AC system, or get the company to use it, but they didn't want it. Eventually he moved to America, to find better opportunities.
When Tesla arrived in America, he got a job with Thomas Edison. Edison didn't want Tesla's AC system either, Edison being firmly opposed to AC because his motors worked with DC only. Edison reportedly told Tesla that there was $50,000 for him if he could redesign the current DC machinery, to work more efficiently. Tesla immediately started working - even on holidays and weekends - to complete this task. When he finished, and requested his payment, Edison said something to the effect of "You don't yet understand our American humor," and Tesla quit, disgusted.
Tesla went on to patent his AC system, and then he sold the patents to Westinghouse Corp. There were a few different competing AC systems in existence then, but all of them still used a commutator, excepting Tesla's. George Westinghouse recognized that Tesla's AC system would revolutionize the electrical industry, and that's why he bought the patents. Tesla started working on his own after selling his AC patents, though he bought most of his equipment from Westinghouse from then on. After the AC system, Tesla invented the Tesla Coil, a type of transformer which can also generate lightning or sparks. It is also used in television sets, computer monitors (CRTs), radios, and other devices, as well as just for the lightning effects. Tesla also invented many other things, such as the basic principle behind the radio, which he and most other people at that time called the �Wireless', short for wireless communications or wireless telegraph. Other people began working on radio communications, including Guglielmo Marconi, who essentially copied Tesla's patents for his own devices, without changing them at all. While Tesla was running his radio receiver, he received a signal which he believed was probably from outer space. Tesla could prove that it didn't come from anything natural, and as far as he knew, nobody else was using his transmitters. Marconi was using a radio transmitter he had built exactly as Tesla's patents are, and because of this, the two were running on the same frequency, which explains how Tesla picked up Marconi's transmissions.
Tesla also developed a wireless power transmission device, placed in one or more large towers. His tower would transmit power over the Earth's crust, and it could be used by anyone with a compatible device. For instance, one could take their watch and attach it to a metal rod, and stick the rod in the ground, to recharge the watch batteries. Or one could attach their electric pencil sharpener to the ground, and it would work. Of course, the device must transform the power going through the earth into usable power, so one couldn't just plug something into the ground and hope it worked. This scheme would have worked perfectly back when Tesla was alive (until the 1930s or 1940s), however now it would require restructuring even current systems that won't use the power systems. This is because many devices use the ground as a place to put excess power. What happens is that the ground prong on any 3-prong plug attaches directly to the ground. The ground, in this case, is used as a power "sinkhole". Any power that goes into the ground plug goes to the ground, away from the device and the user. So far, no problem, right? Wrong. Tesla's power system would send the power through the ground. The problem is that the power would go right up the ground plug and fry any delicate devices - such as computers. Anyone who knows anything about computers knows that if you leave your computer plugged in during a lightning storm, and lightning hits nearby, your computer is fried. Lightning is nothing more than electricity with thousands of Volts (wall current is 120 Volts). When lightning hits the ground, the electricity spreads out, and if enough power is left when it reaches your house, the electricity may travel up the ground plug and into the computer, or other delicate device, damaging it, or in the case of a computer, destroying it. Unfortunately, Tesla's wireless power transmitter might have the same effect as a lightning storm. In Tesla's time, there were no devices at all like this - except the power company's dynamos. Tesla, while testing his device, happened to destroy the power company's dynamo, by accident, cutting off power for all the residents of Colorado Springs, at least until they got the backup working. They refused to power Tesla's experiments with it however, and they put his lab on a separate dynamo so that their main customers wouldn't be affected if he did it again. It should be noted that the device only affected Colorado Springs and the opposite point on the world (the antipode), so it may still be feasible.
This was a great plan for power transmission, at the time, although there was one problem - money. Tesla didn't have enough money to build the tower necessary. He managed to convince J. Piermont Morgan to give him some money to work on it, although he told him only that it would be a radio transmitter. When he eventually revealed that it would be a power generator as well, Morgan cut off funds, and Tesla couldn't build it. He also invented remote-control devices, worked in robotics, and much more. After Morgan cut support, Tesla only got support from the Yugoslavian government, where he was a national hero. Tesla soon started working on other devices, such as a death ray he claimed to have invented. This could never be verified, although he claimed to have sold a copy to the Soviet Union, and offered it to numerous other nations. After Tesla died, the government confiscated his papers and belongings and looked through them. Eventually they handed them over to Tesla's nephew, the ambassador to the USA from Yugoslavia, after removing a few items and papers. Much of Tesla's papers became classified, and stayed so until the end of the Cold War. Much has very recently been discovered about his inventions, and it seems that the more time passes, the more is discovered about his life and inventions.
I admire Nikola Tesla because he was a great inventor and scientist. He worked for the betterment of humanity, although the money was nice as well. He often told his friends not to dislike the millionaires too much, because he someday wanted to be one. He also told his father "It is not humans that I love, but humanity" (Seifer P 13). He invented numerous devices, including our current system of power, the transformer used in radios and CRTs, wireless communications, wireless power, the precursor to the laser beam, lights without a filament (Tesla's florescent lights, without a filament and using AC, last for years. Edison's light bulbs, the type in common use, which have filaments and use DC, stop working in months.), the bladeless turbine, a flying machine which is remarkably similar to today's VTOL craft - without all the electronic equipment, maybe even a death ray, and he had many other ideas that he didn't have enough time to work on. Tesla was a great inventor, who revolutionized technology, and created the basis for most of our modern technology.
Seifer, Marc J. Wizard. The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla - Biography of a Genius. Carol Publishing Group. Secaucus, NJ. 1996
Cheney, Margaret. Tesla: Man out of Time. Dell Publishing. New York, NY. 1981.
Articles at: http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/electrical/tesla/?0+1 were used in this report. This site has a number of articles on Tesla, most of them relating to building Tesla Coils. A few had historically relevent information.
http://www.nashville.com/~phil.hamilton/teslaref.htm is a good reference to numerous other Tesla sites on the internet, and addresses and phone #s of organizations to write to or call for more info on Tesla.
http://www.brotherhoodoflife.com/ProGen%20TOC.html contained an online biography, but it was long and very old, and extremely hard to read. For instance, they replaced the letters like ff, fi, fg, etc. with X, Y, Z, or W (not necesscarily in that order, and I left out one - see the site to see what they did). This made it hard to read at first, but I got used to it after a few minutes ( a few meaning < 10 minutes, but I�d bet there�s some poor soul out there who�ll never get used to it, and give up after a few pages).
The two books (not the web sites, they�re underlined) above used a number of Tesla references, but I think that Seifer�s was more accurate, so I used mostly information from that one. That book is larger, also, than Cheney�s and contains much more information.
I created a
Nikola Tesla Icon
for Windows.
If you want it, right click on it, and select Save As.
Feel free to give it to who ever you like, and use it as much as you want. But don't you put it on another web page. You can of course, put a link to THIS page and say it includes an icon, but don't just stick the icon on your web page. Thanks. (: