156 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
156 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
|
||
NIKOLA TESLA: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY
|
||
|
||
Nikola Tesla, who discovered the rotating magnetic field, which is the
|
||
basis of practically all alternating-current machinery, has been
|
||
called the genius who ushered in the power age.
|
||
|
||
______________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
Nikola Tesla was born at precisely midnight between July 9/10, 1856,
|
||
in the village of Smiljan, province of Lika (Austria-Hungary, now
|
||
Croatia). His father, the Reverend Milutin Tesla, was a
|
||
Serbian-Orthodox priest; his mother, Djuka (Mandich), was unschooled
|
||
but highly intelligent. Both families came originally from western
|
||
Serbia and for generations had sent their sons to serve Church or Army
|
||
and their daughters to marry ministers or officers. 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 of Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague (1879-1880).
|
||
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. His first employment was in a
|
||
government telegraph engineering office in Budapest, where he made his
|
||
first invention, a telephone repeater. Later, 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 Strasbourg in 1883, he constructed, in after-work hours,
|
||
his first induction motor. Tesla sailed to America in 1884, arriving
|
||
in New York City 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 in New Jersey, 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.
|
||
|
||
After a difficult period, during which Tesla invented but lost his
|
||
rights to an arc-lighting system, he established his own laboratory in
|
||
New York City in 1887, 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 for wireless
|
||
communication. That year also marked the date of Tesla's United States
|
||
citizenship.
|
||
|
||
Brilliant and eccentric, Tesla was then at the peak of his inventive
|
||
powers. He produced in rapid succession the induction motor (utilizing
|
||
his rotating magnetic field principle) and other electrical motors,
|
||
new forms of generators and tranformers, and a system of
|
||
alternating-current power transmission. Tesla also invented
|
||
fluorescent lights and a new type of steam turbine, and he became
|
||
increasingly intrigued with the wireless transmission of power.
|
||
|
||
A controversy between alternating-current and direct-current advocates
|
||
raged in 1880s and 1890s, featuring Tesla and Edison as leaders in the
|
||
rival camps. The advantages of the polyphase alternating-current
|
||
system, as developed by Tesla, soon became apparent, however,
|
||
particularly for long-distance power transmission. Westinghouse used
|
||
Tesla's system to light the World 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 pattent 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, 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 pitch. 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
|
||
U.S. 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 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. An eccentric,
|
||
driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia, Tesla had a way
|
||
of intuitively sensing hidden scientific secrets and employing his
|
||
inventive talent to prove his hypotheses. He 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 to having invented a death ray
|
||
capable of destroying 10,000 airplanes, 250 miles (400 kilometres)
|
||
distant.
|
||
|
||
Tesla demanded much of his employees but inspired their loyalty.
|
||
Though he admired intellectual and beautiful women, he had no time to
|
||
become involved.
|
||
|
||
Tesla died in New York City on January 7, 1943, the holder of more
|
||
than 700 patents. 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, Belgrade, Yugoslavia. 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.
|
||
|
||
______________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
Based on "The New Encyclopaedia Britannica", 15th edition, "The
|
||
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography", and "Tesla: Man out of
|
||
time" by Margaret Cheney
|
||
|
||
______________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
bogdan@neuronet.pitt.edu
|
||
|