Nicholas Tesla
Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла; Smiljan, Austrian Empire, present-day Croatia; 10 May July 1856 – New York, January 7, 1943) was a Serbian-American mechanical and electrical engineer, inventor, noted for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply.
Tesla, who was born and raised in the Austrian Empire, studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without earning a degree, though he gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephones for the Continental Edison Company, which by then he was leading the new electric power industry. In 1884 he emigrated to the United States, where he acquired dual citizenship. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York before striking out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and commercialize his ideas, Tesla founded laboratories and companies in New York to develop electrical and mechanical devices. His alternating current (AC) asynchronous motor and related polyphase system patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, brought him large sums of money and also became the cornerstone of the polyphase system eventually commercialized by this company.
In his attempts to develop inventions that he could patent and commercialize, Tesla experimented with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and the first X-ray images. He also built one of the first wirelessly remote-controlled boats. He gained fame as an inventor, displaying his achievements in his laboratory to numerous personalities and wealthy patrons, as well as excelling for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla continued to investigate wireless lighting and the wireless distribution of electrical power throughout the world through his experiments with high-voltage, high-frequency power in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893 he announced the possibility of establishing wireless communication with his devices and tried to put it into practice in his unfinished project of the Wardenclyffe Tower, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funds before it could be completed.
Tesla then experimented with other inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying success. After spending most of his money, he lived in various New York hotels, where he left unpaid bills. He died in that city in January 1943. Tesla's work fell into relative oblivion after his death, but in 1960 the unit of electromagnetic induction in the International System of Units was named tesla in his honor. 1990 there is a clear resurgence of the recognition of his contributions to science.
General profile
Nikola Tesla, of Serbian ethnicity, was born in the town of Smiljan (currently in Croatia), in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later became an American citizen.
Following his demonstration of wireless communication by means of radio waves in 1894 and after his victory in the war of currents, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest electrical engineers in the United States. During Tesla's fame during this period rivaled that of any inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, but due to his eccentric personality and his incredible—sometimes totally implausible, and sometimes false—claims about the possible development of scientific and technological innovations, Tesla ended up ostracized and considered a mad scientist. He never paid much attention to his finances and is said to have died impoverished at the age of 86.
In addition to his work in electromagnetism and electromechanical engineering, Tesla's work later served to varying degrees in the development of robotics, remote control, radar, computer science, ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. He carried out studies that would allow the development of radio, but he never developed this concept because he did not fully understand the physics inherent in this phenomenon. Later, when Guillermo Marconi claimed the rights to use the radio in the middle of World War II, the Supreme Court of the United States rejected the request, including in its decision the restoration of certain patents prior to Marconi's, including some of Tesla's..
The unit of measurement of the magnetic field (B) of the International System of Units (also called magnetic flux density or magnetic induction), the tesla (T), was named in his honor at the General Conference on Weights and Measures from Paris in 1960.
His personality, his eccentric character and the story of his experiment on wireless transmission, are used by fans of conspiracy theories to justify various pseudosciences, attributing inventions, facts and/or investigations that do not correspond to reality.
Early Years
 Milutin Tesla, Orthodox priest, father of Nikola Tesla. |  Nikola Tesla in 1879, at the age of 23 years. |
Nikola Tesla was the son of Serbian parents. He was born in the town of Smiljan, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, near the city of Gospić, which belongs to the territory of present-day Croatia. His baptismal certificate states that he was born on June 28, 1856 of the Julian calendar, corresponding to July 10 of the Gregorian calendar in use today. His father was Milutin Tesla, a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the jurisdiction of Sremski Karlovci, and her mother, Đuka Mandić, a housewife of Serb descent, who spent part of her time as a self-taught scientist developing small home appliances.
His paternal origin is believed to be from one of the Serb clans of the Tara River Valley, or from the Herzegovinian nobleman Pavle Orlović. His mother, Đuka, came from an Orthodox family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deep origins in Kosovo. He was proficient at making homemade craft tools and had memorized numerous Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read.
The family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla attended the gymnasium in Karlovac, where he completed the four-year curriculum in three.
He later began studies in electrical engineering at the University of Graz, in the city of the same name, in 1875. While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources claim that he graduated from the University of Graz, although the university claims that he received no degree and that he did not continue beyond the second semester of the third year, during which he stopped attending classes.
Regarding his time in Graz, Tesla claimed that he "worked from 3 a.m. to 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., including Sundays and holidays". After his father's death in 1879, Tesla found a packet of letters from his teachers to his father, warning him that unless removed from school, his son would die from overwork. At the end of his sophomore year he lost his scholarship and became addicted to gambling, during his junior year he lost his allowance and tuition money, though he later recovered from his initial losses and returned the balance to his family. He claimed that "he was able to master [his] passion for him at the time," but later in the US he was again known for playing billiards.
In December 1878, he left Graz and stopped associating with his relatives. His friends thought that he had drowned in the Mura River. He headed for Maribor (now Slovenia), where he got his first job as an engineering assistant, a job he held for a year. During this period he suffered a nervous breakdown. Later he was persuaded by his father to continue his studies at Charles University in Prague, which he attended during the summer of 1880. There he was influenced by Ernst Mach. However, after his father passed away, he dropped out of the University, completing only one course.
Tesla spent his time reading many works and memorizing entire books, since he supposedly possessed a photographic memory. In his autobiography he recounted that on certain occasions he experienced certain moments of inspiration. During his childhood he suffered several episodes of a very peculiar disease, which caused blinding beams of light to appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Normally the visions were associated with a word or idea that was going through his head. Other times, they gave him the solution to problems that had been raised. Simply by hearing the name of an object he was able to visualize it in a very realistic way. Synesthesia currently presents similar symptoms. Tesla could visualize an invention in his brain with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before beginning the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as visual thinking. He didn't use to draw schematics; instead he conceived all ideas with his mind alone. He also sometimes had reminiscences of events that had happened to him previously in his life, a phenomenon that began during his childhood.
In 1880 he moved to Budapest to work under Tivadar Puskás at a telegraph company, the national telephone company. There he met Nebojša Petrović, a young Serbian inventor living in Austria. Although their meeting was brief, they worked together on a project using twin turbines to generate continuous power. By the time the telephone exchange opened in 1881 in Budapest, Tesla had become the company's chief electrician, and was later an engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device which, according to some sources, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but which, according to others, may have been the first loudspeaker.
Edison Company Worker
In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company (one of Thomas Alva Edison's companies), designing improvements to electrical equipment brought across the ocean thanks to Edison's ideas. According to his biography, in the same year he conceived the induction motor and initiated the development of various devices using the rotating magnetic field, for which he received patents in 1888.
Shortly thereafter, Tesla awoke from a dream in which his mother had died, "and I knew that that had happened". After this he fell ill. He stayed two or three weeks recuperating in Gospić and in the town of Tomingaj, near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother.
In June 1884, he first came to the United States, in New York City, with little more than a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, a former employer. In his letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Batchelor wrote: “I know two great men, you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work at his Edison Machine Works . He started working for Edison as a simple electrical engineer, solving some of the company's problems.
Edison's company had installed several dynamos on the SS Oregon, at the time one of the fastest ocean liners and the first ship to have onboard electricity, used for lighting the deck. ship. In 1884 the dynamos were damaged, delaying the ship's departure from New York. Tesla volunteered to carry out the repairs, and worked through the night to get the dynamos working again, thanks to which he which received Edison's congratulations the next morning.
Tesla's career progressed rapidly. He was even offered the task of completely redesigning Edison's company's DC generators. Tesla claimed he was offered $50,000 (~$1.1 million in 2007, adjusted for inflation) for redesigning the inefficient motors and generators of Edison, improving both his service and his economy. In 1885, when Tesla inquired about his remuneration, Edison replied, "Tesla, you do not understand our American humor," thus breaking his word. a salary of only USD 18 a week, he would have had to work 53 years to raise the money that was promised to him; the offer was equal to the initial capital of the company. He quit his job immediately when he was denied to raise his salary to $25 a week.
So, soon after, in need of work, he found himself digging trenches for Edison's company for a short period of time, which he used to concentrate on his polyphase AC system.
Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing
In 1886, Tesla founded his own company, Tesla Electric Light & manufacturing. Early investors disagreed with his plans for the development of an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his position at the company. He worked as a laborer in New York from 1886 to 1887 to support himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887 he built a brushless induction motor, powered by alternating current, which he presented at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) in 1888. However, Galileo Ferraris had independently developed the same design several months earlier. In the same year he developed the principle of his Tesla coil, and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's in Pittsburgh Laboratories. Westinghouse heard his ideas about polyphase systems, which could allow long-distance transmission of alternating current.
Commercial conflict
Tesla's demonstration of his induction motor and Westinghouse's subsequent grant of the patent, both in 1888, came at a time of extreme competition between the electric companies. The Big Three, Westinghouse, Edison, and Thompson-Houston, were trying to grow in a business-intensive capitalist economy while financially undermining each other. There was even a propaganda campaign, dubbed the 'war of currents', with Edison Electric trying to claim that its DC system was better and safer than Westinghouse's system. Competing in this market meant that Westinghouse would not immediately have the cash or engineering resources to develop Tesla's motor and related polyphase system.
Two years after signing the Tesla contract, Westinghouse Electric was in trouble. The near collapse of Baring Brothers in London triggered the financial panic of 1890, prompting investors to borrow from Westinghouse. The sudden cash shortage forced the company to refinance its debts. The new lenders demanded that Westinghouse cut what appeared to be excessive spending on the acquisition of other companies, research, and patents, including the agreed rights to Tesla's motor. At that point, Tesla's induction motor had not been successful. and its development was stalled. Westinghouse was paying a guaranteed royalty of $15,000 per year, although operational examples of the motor were not yet common, as were the polyphase power systems required to power them.
In early 1891, George Westinghouse explained his financial difficulties to Tesla in blunt terms, telling him that if he did not meet the demands of his lenders he would no longer have control of Westinghouse Electric and Tesla would have to "deal with the bankers" to try to collect his future royalties. The advantages of Westinghouse continuing to defend his engine probably seemed obvious to Tesla and he agreed to release the company from the royalty clause of the contract. Six years later, Westinghouse would purchase Tesla's patent for a payment of $216,000 as part of a patent exchange agreement signed with General Electric (a company created from the merger of Edison and Thompson-Houston in 1892).
New York Laboratories
The money Tesla earned from licensing his alternating-current patents made him financially independent and gave him the time and funds to pursue his own interests. In 1889, Tesla moved out of the Liberty Street store he Peck and Brown had leased and for the next twelve years worked in a series of workshops/laboratories in Manhattan, including a laboratory at 175 Grand Street (1889-1892), the fourth floor of 33-35 South Fifth Avenue (1892-1895), and the sixth and seventh floors of 46-48 East Houston Street (1895-1902). Tesla and his contract staff would do some of their most important work in these workshops.
US Citizen
On July 30, 1891, Tesla became a United States citizen at the age of 35. He set up his laboratory at 35 South Fifth Avenue, in New York City, that same year. He subsequently moved it to 46 East Houston Street. In this place, while carrying out experiments on mechanical resonance with electromechanical oscillators, he generated resonance in some neighboring buildings and, although due to the frequencies used it did not affect his own, it did generate complaints to the police: as the speed of the resonator grew, and being aware out of danger, he was forced to end the experiment using a hammer, just as the agents arrived.
He also operated electric lamps at two locations in New York, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission.
Some of her closest friends were artists. He became friends with Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, who adapted some Serbian poems by Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also at this time, Tesla was influenced by Vedic philosophy (that is, Hindu doctrine) according to the precepts of Swami Vivekananda; to such an extent that after his exposure to these teachings, he began to use Sanskrit words to name some of his fundamental concepts concerning matter and energy.
At the age of 36, he was granted the first patents related to polyphase power supply and he continued his research on the principles of the rotating magnetic field. From 1892 to 1894 he served as vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner, along with the Institute of Radio Engineers, of today's IEEE. From 1893 to 1895 he investigated high-frequency alternating current, generating a million volt alternating current using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed LC circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, wireless discharge lamps, and transmission of electromagnetic energy, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, he gave a demonstration on radio communication in 1893.
At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, there was for the first time a building dedicated to electrical exhibitions. At this event Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to the alternating current power supply that was used to illuminate the exhibition. In addition, Tesla's single-node fluorescent lamps and light bulbs were on display.
He also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and the induction motor, demonstrating how to hold a copper egg upright using his device known as the "Tesla's Egg of Columbus".
He developed the so-called Tesla generator in 1895, in conjunction with his inventions on the liquefaction of air. He knew from Kelvin's discoveries that air in a state of liquefaction absorbed more heat than was theoretically required, when it returned to its gaseous state and was used to move some device. Just before finishing his work and patenting any application, a fire broke out in his laboratory, which destroyed all his equipment, models and inventions. Soon after, Carl von Linde, in Germany, filed a patent for the application of this same process.
Tesla Coil
In the summer of 1889, Tesla traveled to the World's Fair in Paris, where he learned of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's experiments (performed 1886-1888) which demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves. He found this new discovery "refreshing" and decided to explore it further. Repeating, and then expanding, these experiments, he attempted to power a Ruhmkorff coil with a high-speed alternator, which he had been developing as part of an improved arc lamp system, but found that the high-frequency current overheated the core of the coil. iron and melted the insulation between the main and secondary windings in the coil. To get around this problem, he came up with his Tesla coil with an air gap instead of insulating material between the primary and secondary windings, and an iron core that could be moved to different positions inside or outside the coil.
Wireless lighting
After 1890, Tesla experimented with power transmission by inductive and capacitive coupling, using high AC voltages generated from his Tesla coil. He attempted to develop a wireless lighting system based on inductive and capacitive coupling, and made a series of public demonstrations where he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent bulbs on stage. He spent the better part of a decade working on variations of this new form of lighting with the help of various investors, but none of the companies managed to come up with a product. commercialization of his findings.
In 1893, in St. Louis, Missouri, before the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and before the National Electric Light Association, Tesla told onlookers that he was certain that a system like his could eventually conduct &# 34;intelligible signals or even electrical power at any distance without the use of cables" by driving them across the Earth. He thought it was only a matter of time before man could adapt machines to the gears of nature, declaring: "Before many generations have passed, our machines will be driven by energy obtained at any point of the universe".
Steam Oscillator Generator
Trying to find a better way to generate alternating current, Tesla developed a steam-powered alternator. He patented it in 1893 and presented it at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago that year. Steam was forced into the oscillator and would rush through a series of valves, pushing a piston attached to an armature up and down. The magnetic armor vibrated up and down at high speed, producing an alternating magnetic field. This field in turn induced an alternating electric current in adjacent coils of wire. It eliminated the complicated parts of a steam engine/generator, but was never envisioned as a feasible engineering solution for generating electricity.
Polyphase System and the Chicago Exposition
By early 1893, Westinghouse engineer Benjamin G. Lamme had made great progress in developing an efficient version of Tesla's induction motor, and Westinghouse Electric began branding their complete two-phase system as the "Tesla Polyphase System" 3. 4;. They believed that Tesla's patents gave them priority over other alternating current systems.
Westinghouse Electric asked Tesla to participate in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the company had a large space in a building dedicated to electrical exhibits. Westinghouse Electric won the bid to light the Exposition with alternating current and was a key event in the history of this form of electricity, as the company demonstrated to the American public the safety, reliability and efficiency of a fully integrated alternating current system. Tesla demonstrated a number of electrical effects related to alternating current, as well as his wireless lighting system, using a demonstration he had previously conducted throughout the Americas and Europe; including the use of high voltage, high frequency alternating current to light a discharge lamp wirelessly.
An observer noted:
Inside the room two hard rubber plates were suspended covered with aluminum foil. They were about fifteen feet away, and served as terminals of the cables that came out of the transformers. When the current was lit, the lamps or tubes, which had no wires connected to them, were on a table between the suspended plates, or which could be held in the hand in almost any part of the room, were illuminated. These were the same experiments and the same apparatus shown by Tesla in London about two years earlier, "where they produced so much wonder and wonder."
Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field in an induction motor by demonstrating how to make a copper egg stand on end, using a device he built known as the Egg of Columbus, and introduced his new alternating current generator with a steam-powered oscillator.
Consulting in Niagara
In 1893, Edward Dean Adams, who headed the company that would develop the hydroelectric waterfall adjacent to Niagara Falls, sought Tesla's opinion on which system would best transmit the power generated at the falls. For several years, there were a number of open proposals and contests on the best way to use the energy generated by the falls. Among the systems proposed by various companies in the US and Europe were two-phase and three-phase alternating currents, high-voltage direct currents, and compressed air systems. Adams turned to Tesla for information on the current status of all competitive systems, and Tesla advised him that a two-phase system would be the most reliable, and that there was a Westinghouse system for lighting incandescent light bulbs using AC current from Two phases. The company awarded Westinghouse Electric a contract to build a two-phase AC generating system in Niagara Falls, based on advice from Tesla and Westinghouse's demonstration at the Columbian Exposition that they could build an AC system. complete. At the same time, an additional contract was awarded to General Electric to build the distribution system for the generated current.
Some people falsely believe that the first hydroelectric power station was built in Niagara Falls thanks to Tesla's developments in 1893, managing to transmit electricity to the city of Buffalo (New York) in 1896. The first hydroelectric power stations were first developed in Europe in 1878-1885. After 1885 Westinghouse hired, among others, William Stanley, Oliver B. Shallenberger, and Benjamin Lamme, to build AC power systems throughout the United States. Tesla did not join Westinghouse until 1888.
The Nikola Tesla Company
In 1895, Edward Dean Adams, impressed with what he saw when he toured Tesla's laboratory, agreed to help found the Nikola Tesla company, created to finance, develop, and commercialize a variety of Tesla's earlier patents and inventions, as well as new ones. Alfred Brown signed, bringing patents developed under Peck and Brown. The company's board was completed by William Birch Rankine and Charles F. Coaney. They found few investors, as the mid-1890s were financially difficult, and wireless patents for lighting and oscillators that were established in the market never materialized. The company would handle Tesla's patents for decades to come.
Laboratory fire
In the early morning of March 13, 1895, the building on Fifth Avenue South that housed Tesla's laboratory caught fire. The fire started in the basement of the building and was so intense that Tesla's laboratory located on the fourth floor burned down and collapsed on the second floor. The fire not only delayed Tesla's ongoing projects, but also destroyed a collection of early notes and research material, models, and demonstration pieces, including many that had been exhibited at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Tesla told the The New York Times: "I am too sorry to speak. What can I say?' After the fire, Tesla moved to 46-48 East Houston Street and rebuilt his lab on the 6th and 7th floors.
X-ray experiments
In 1894, Tesla began to investigate what were later called X-rays. In the fire of his laboratory in 1895, all his work was lost, according to Tesla himself. Meanwhile, in November of that same year, the German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen was concluding his extensive and systematic investigation of X-rays, publishing his conclusions in 1895. Tesla's first publication on "Rontgen's rays" 3. 4; it dates from 1895.
According to Tesla himself, he used his own vacuum tube (similar to his patent USPTO Patent No. 514170: "#514,170"). This device differed from other X-ray tubes in that it did not have a receiving electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this artifact is Bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation).
In his early research, Tesla designed some experiments to produce X-rays. He stated that with these circuits, "the instrument will be able to generate Roentgen rays of greater power than that obtained with ordinary apparatus."
He also mentioned the dangers of working with his circuitry and with the X-rays produced by his single-node devices. From many of his notes on preliminary investigations of this phenomenon, it appears that he attributed the skin damage to various causes. He initially believed that the damage could not be caused by Roentgen rays, but by ozone generated on contact with the skin and partly also by nitrous acid. He thought they were longitudinal waves, like those produced by waves in plasmas.
Radio remote control
In 1898, Tesla publicly demonstrated a ship he controlled using a coherer-based radio control - which he called a "telautomaton" - during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. he made outrageous claims about the operation of the ship, such as magic, telepathy, or that it was being piloted by a trained monkey hidden inside. Tesla tried to sell his idea to the US military as a type of radio-controlled torpedo, but the navy showed little interest. Radio remote control remained a novelty until World War II, when several countries used it in their military programs. Tesla took the opportunity to further demonstrate "Teleautomatics"; in a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Commercial Club of Chicago, while traveling to Colorado Springs, on May 13, 1899.
Wireless power transmission
From the 1890s to 1906, Tesla invested much of his time and fortune in a series of projects to develop the wireless transmission of power. It was an expansion of his idea of using coils to transmit power that he had been demonstrating in wireless lighting. He saw this procedure not only as a way to transmit large amounts of energy across the Earth, but also, as he had pointed out in his previous lectures, a way to transmit communications around the world.
At the time Tesla was formulating his ideas, there was no feasible way to wirelessly transmit communication signals over long distances, let alone large amounts of power. He had studied radio waves early on and came to the conclusion that some of the existing study of them by Hertz was incorrect. Furthermore, this new form of radiation was widely regarded at the time as a phenomenon of short distance that seemed to die out in less than a mile. Tesla noted that, even if the theories about radio waves were true, they were of no value for their intended purposes, since this form of "invisible light" it would diminish at a distance like any other radiation and would make it travel in a straight line into space, "getting lost forever".
In the mid-1890s, Tesla was working on the idea that he could conduct electricity long-distances through the Earth or the atmosphere, and he began performing experiments to test this idea, including setting up a large resonance transformer based on a Tesla coil located in his laboratory on East Houston Street. He appears to have borrowed the common idea at the time that the Earth's atmosphere was conductive, and proposed a system composed of globes suspended, transmitters and receivers, electrodes in the air above 9,000 m altitude, where he thought the lower pressure would allow him to send high voltages (millions of volts) over long distances.
His "worldwide system for wireless power transmission" based on the electrical conductivity of the Earth, would work by transmitting power by various natural means and subsequently using the current transmitted between the two points to power devices electrical.
Tesla claimed to have demonstrated wireless power transmission in early 1891. However, he was never able to put it into practice efficiently.
Colorado Springs
In 1899, Tesla moved to a laboratory in Colorado Springs, USA, to begin his experiments with high voltage and electric field measurements. The objectives set by Tesla in this laboratory were: to develop a high-power transmitter, to perfect the means to individualize and isolate the transmitted power, and to determine the laws of propagation of the currents on the Earth and its atmosphere. During the eight months that he was In Colorado Springs, Tesla wrote notes detailing his day-to-day investigations. There he spent half his time measuring and testing his huge Tesla coil and half his time developing small-signal receivers and measuring the capacitance of a vertical antenna. He also made observations on fireballs, which he claimed to have produced. One day, he noticed unusual behavior from a storm-recording instrument, a rotary coherer. It was an instrument that made records when a storm approached and moved away from his laboratory. He concluded that it was about the existence of standing waves, which could be created by his oscillator. With sensitive equipment he was able to make measurements of lightning striking a great distance from his laboratory, observing that the waves of the discharges grew to a peak and then decreased before repeating the full cycle. Tesla suggested that this was due to the fact that the Earth and the atmosphere possessed electricity, which made the planet behave like a conductor of unlimited dimensions, in which it was possible to carry out wireless telegraphic message transmission, and even more; transmit electrical power at any terrestrial distance, almost without loss, by means of its resonance knowledge. Tesla had discovered that he could produce a ring around the Earth like a bell, discharged every two hours, and also that he could make it resonate electrically. He found that the resonance of the planet was of the order of 10 Hz, a really accurate value for his time, since today it is known to be 8 Hz. After he discovered how to create permanent electrical waves to transmit electrical power around the In the world, the German scientist W. O. Schumann postulated that the conductive Earth and the ionosphere form a spherical waveguide, through which electromagnetic waves of very low frequency (known as ELF) can propagate, generated by the lightning activity on a global scale, with values close to 8 Hz, a phenomenon known as the Schumann resonance. Tesla did far more advanced work than the other pioneers of wireless transmission, Hertz and Marconi, who used high frequencies that did not resonate with the Earth, as opposed to the high-wavelength radio waves used by Tesla, which had the advantage of being received in remote places on Earth, or in the depths of the sea, to maintain communication between surface ships and submarines.
In his Colorado Springs laboratory, he observed unusual signals that he later believed might be evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. He noted that they were repetitive signals, but different in nature from those seen in thunderstorms and noise. land. Tesla mentioned that his inventions could be used to talk to other planets. And he claimed that he invented the & # 34; Teslascope & # 34; For that purpose. There is currently debate about the type of signals that Tesla could receive, which could be the result of natural extraterrestrial radiation, although in any case, it has remained for the history of science as the precursor of radio astronomy.
On January 7, 1900, Tesla left Colorado Springs, but not before moving for certain periods of time to the nearby town of Cripple Creek, where he carried out experiments by placing light bulbs on the ground and, astonished neighbors commented, these were they turned on by themselves The laboratory was demolished and its contents sold to pay the debts. The set of experiments there prepared by Tesla for the establishment of transatlantic wireless telecommunications transmission was known as Wardenclyffe.
It is said that Nikola Tesla did not make blueprints, he memorized everything. A good part of the final stage of his life was spent absorbed by the judicial process that he filed regarding the invention of the radio, which was disputed with Marconi, since Tesla had invented a similar device at least 15 years before him. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the patent relating to the radio was rightfully owned by Tesla, legally recognizing him as the inventor of the radio, although this did not transcend public opinion, which still considers Tesla Marconi as its inventor.
Some of his studies no one could decipher due to his enormous inductive power. For most of his projects he devised the head documents, it was enough for him to have the image of said object without knowing how it worked, he simply elaborated it without knowing that it could mean a great advance for humanity. He was a meticulous reader of physical theory by Ruđer Bošković.
It is speculated that he devised a wireless electricity transmission system, in such a way that energy could be carried from one place to another by non-Hertzian waves. This system would be based on the ability of the ionosphere to conduct electricity, the power would be transmitted at a frequency of 6 Hz with a huge tower called Wardenclyffe Tower, to use the Schumann resonance as a means of transport.
Today it is known that this frequency is 7.83 Hz and not 6 Hz, although it actually varies from 7.83 Hz to 12 Hz, depending on solar activity and the state of the ionosphere. Although it has been believed that the failure of the project was due to financial problems, other versions claim that in reality Tesla's ideas for the tower (he planned to use the Earth as a conductor of electricity to the entire globe) did not work and that he returned to ask Morgan for money, but Morgan, disappointed with the results, refused. Some modern-day experts have tried to study how Wardenclyffe Tower was supposed to work, but usually end up with more questions than answers.[citation needed] It's not entirely clear what method intended to use Tesla to transmit electricity and many believe that perhaps he did not even have it defined himself.
Wardenclyffe
Tesla toured New York trying to find investors for what he thought would be a viable wireless transmission system, inviting them to dinner at the Palm Garden of the Waldorf Astoria (the hotel where he lived at the time), The Players Club, and the restaurant Delmonico. In March 1901, he obtained $150,000 (equivalent to about $4.4 million in 2018 dollars) from J. P. Morgan in exchange for a 51% interest in any wireless patents generated, and began planning the installation of the Tower Wardenclyffe to be built in Shoreham, New York, about 100 miles east of the city, on the north shore of Long Island.
In July 1901, he had expanded his plans to build a more powerful transmitter to bypass Marconi's radio system, which Tesla thought was a copy of his own system. He approached Morgan for more money. and being able to build the larger system, but Morgan refused to provide further funding.
In December 1901, Marconi successfully transmitted the letter S from England to Newfoundland, beating Tesla in the race to be the first to complete the transmission. Within a month of Marconi's success, Tesla attempted to get Morgan to endorse an even larger plan to transmit messages and energy by controlling "vibrations throughout the world." Over the next five years, Tesla wrote more than 50 letters to Morgan, imploring and demanding additional funds to complete the construction of Wardenclyffe. He continued the project for another nine months in 1902. The tower was erected in its entirety, reaching 57m in height.In June 1902, he moved his operations from the Houston Street laboratory to Wardenclyffe.
Investors on Wall Street were putting their money into Marconi's system, and some media outlets began to turn against Tesla's project, claiming it was a hoax. The project was halted in 1905, and in 1906, financial problems and other events may have led Tesla to have a nervous breakdown. He had to mortgage the Wardenclyffe estate to cover his debts on the Waldorf Astoria, which eventually totaled $20,000 (approximately half a million 2018 dollars). He lost ownership to foreclosure in 1915, and in 1917, the Tower was demolished by the new owner to make the land a more viable real estate asset.
Later Years
After Wardenclyffe closed, Tesla continued to write to Morgan. Following the death of "the great man," he wrote to Morgan's son Jack, trying to get more funding for the project. In 1906, he opened offices at 165 Broadway in Manhattan, trying to raise more funds by developing and marketing his patents. Later he went on to have offices in the Metropolitan Life Tower from 1910 to 1914; to be rented for a few months in the Woolworth Building (where he had to move out because he couldn't pay the rent); and finally to the offices at 8 West 40th Street, where he stayed from 1915 to 1925. When he moved into this last office, he was bankrupt: most of his patents had run out and he was having trouble with the new inventions he was trying to find. develop.
Valeless Turbine
On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated a 200 horsepower bladeless turbine capable of spinning at 16,000 rpm. Between 1910 and 1911 several of his vaneless turbine engines (ranging from 100 to 5,000 hp) were tested at the Waterside Power Station in New York. He collaborated on this development with various companies, including the period 1919-1922 working with Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee. He spent most of his time trying to perfect the Tesla turbine with Hans Dahlstrand, the company's chief engineer, but engineering difficulties meant that he never became a a practical device. Tesla licensed the idea to a precision instrument company and it found use in the form of accurate speedometers and other instruments.
Complaints about wireless systems
When World War I broke out, the British intercepted the transatlantic telegraph cable linking the US to Germany to control the flow of information between the two countries. They also tried to cut German wireless communication to and from the United States, causing the American company Marconi to sue the German radio company Telefunken for patent infringement. Telefunken summoned physicists Jonathan Zenneck and Carl Ferdinand Braun for their defense, and hired Tesla as a witness for two years for $1,000 a month. The case stalled and then dropped when the US went to war against Germany in 1917.
In 1915, Tesla tried to sue the Marconi Company for infringing his wireless tuning patents. Marconi's initial radio patent had been awarded in the US in 1897, but his 1900 patent application, covering improvements to radio transmission, had been rejected several times before its final approval in 1904, with on the basis that it infringed other existing patents, including Tesla's two wireless adjustment patents from 1897. Tesla's 1915 case came to nothing, but in a related case, where the Marconi company tried to sue the US government. In the US for patent infringements during World War I, a 1943 United States Supreme Court decision restored the earlier patents of Oliver Joseph Lodge, John Stone, and Tesla. The court stated that its decision had no bearing on the Marconi's claim as the first to achieve radio transmission, only since Marconi's claim on certain patented enhancements was questionable, the company could not claim infringement on those same patents.
Nobel Prize Rumors
On November 6, 1915, a report by the London Reuters news agency awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla; however, on November 15, a Reuters dispatch from Stockholm stated that that year's prize was being awarded to Sir William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by by means of X-rays". There were unfounded rumors at the time that both Tesla and Edison had refused the award. The Nobel Foundation noted that: "Any rumor that a person has not received a Nobel Prize because he has made known his intention to refuse the reward is ridiculous"; a recipient could decline a Nobel Prize only after being announced as the winner.
There have been subsequent claims by Tesla biographers that Edison and Tesla were the original recipients and that neither received the award due to their animosity towards each other; that each tried to minimize the achievements and the right to win the prize of the other; that both refused to accept the award if the other received it first; that both rejected any possibility of sharing it; and even that a wealthy Edison refused to allow Tesla to receive the $20,000 prize money.
In the years following these rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the award (although Edison received one of 38 possible nominations in 1915 and Tesla received one of 38 possible nominations in 1937).
Other ideas
- Tesla tried to market several ozone-based devices, for which she founded the Tesla Ozone Company, which sold a patented 1896 device based on its Tesla coil, used to bubble ozone through different types of oils in order to produce a therapeutic gel. He also tried to develop a variation of this process a few years later, as a disinfectant system for hospital premises.
- Theorized that the electricity application to the brain improved intelligence. In 1912, he developed "a plan to enlighten the boring students by unconsciously satisfying them with electricity", wiring the walls of a classroom and "saturating [the classroom] with infinitesimal electric waves that vibrate at high frequency. Mr. Tesla says it becomes a stimulating and healthy "electromagnetic bow". The plan was, at least provisionally, approved by the then superintendent of New York City schools, William H. Maxwell.
- In the August 1917 edition of the magazine Electrical Experimenter , Tesla postulated that electricity could be used to locate submarines using the reflection of an "electric beam" of "elevada frequency", with the signal seen on a fluorescent screen (a system that has been observed to have a superficial resemblance to modern radar). Tesla was wrong to assume that high-frequency radio waves would penetrate the water. Emile Girardeau, who helped develop France's first radar system in the 1930s, claimed that Tesla's general speculation that a very strong high frequency signal would be needed was correct. Girardeau said that "(Tesla) was prophesying or dreaming, as he had no means to carry them out, but one must add that if he was dreaming, at least he was dreaming properly."
- In 1928, he received the USPTO Patent 1,655,114, for a biplane capable of taking off vertically (a VTOL plane), which after being "inclined gradually through the manipulation of lifting devices" once he had taken off, was able to fly like a conventional plane. He thought the plane would be sold for less than $1,000, although it was qualified as an unpracticed aircraft. This would be his last patent, then closing his last office at 350 Madison Ave., which he had moved two years earlier.
Death
On January 7, 1943, at the age of 86, Tesla died alone in room 3327 of the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel. His body was found by a maid who entered Tesla's room, ignoring the "do not disturb" sign. that Tesla himself had placed on his doorstep two days before. A coroner examined the body and ruled the cause of death to be coronary thrombosis.
Two days later, the FBI ordered Foreign Property Custody to seize the deceased's belongings, even though Tesla was a U.S. citizen. John G. Trump, a professor at M.I.T. and a well-known electrical engineer, serving as a technical assistant to the National Defense Research Committee, was called in to analyze the Tesla items, which were in custody. After a three-day investigation, Trump's report concluded that there was nothing to be found. could constitute a risk in hostile hands, concluding that:
The thoughts and efforts [of Tesla] for at least the last 15 years were mainly of speculative, philosophical and somewhat promotional character, often related to the production and wireless transmission of energy; but it did not include new, solid and viable principles or methods to perform such tasks.
In a box that supposedly contained a part of the "death ray" from Tesla, Trump found a decade-old box (a simple electrical resistor switch box) that was 45 years old.
On January 10, 1943, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a eulogy by Slovenian author Louis Adamic live on radio station WNYC, while violin pieces &# 34;Hail Mary" and the Serbian folk song "Tamo daleko" were heard in the background. On January 12, two thousand people attended a state funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. After the funeral, Tesla's body was taken to Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York, where he was cremated. The following day, a second service was conducted by leading priests at Trinity Chapel (now St. Java's Serbian Orthodox Cathedral) in New York City.
Possessions
In 1952, at the insistence of Tesla's nephew Sava Kosanović, all of Tesla's property was shipped to Belgrade in 80 trunks marked NT. In 1957, Kosanović's secretary, Charlotte Muzar, transported the Tesla's ashes from the United States to Belgrade. The ashes are displayed in a golden sphere on a marble pedestal in the Nikola Tesla Museum.
Personality
Lifestyle
Since 1900 he had lived in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, racking up a large bill. In 1922, he moved to the St. Regis Hotel, and would follow a pattern thereafter of moving to a new hotel every few years, leaving unpaid bills.
He would walk to a park every day to feed the pigeons. He dedicated himself to feeding them in the window of his hotel room, attracting the injured chicks to heal them.He claimed that he was visited daily by a white dove that he had collected when injured. He spent over $2,000, including building a device that held the animal comfortably so its bones could heal, healing its broken wings and legs.Tesla stated:
I've been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful, pure white bird with clear grey tips on its wings; that was different. She was a female. I just had to want to call her and she was flying towards me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. While I had it, there was a purpose in my life.
Tesla's unpaid bills and complaints about his pigeon-feeding disaster forced him to leave the St. Regis in 1923, the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930, and the Hotel Governor Clinton in 1934. At one point, Tesla he also occupied rooms in the JPMorgan Chase Tower in New York.
In 1934, he moved into the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel, and the Westinghouse Electric & The Manufacturing Company began paying him $125 per month, in addition to paying his rent, expenses that the company would pay for the rest of Tesla's life. The accounts of how this situation came to be vary. Various sources say that Westinghouse was concerned (or had been warned) about potential bad publicity surrounding the impoverished conditions under which his former star inventor lived. The payment has been described as a " consulting" to avoid Tesla's aversion to accepting charity, or as some kind of unspecified compensation.
Birthday press conferences
In 1931, Kenneth Swezey, a young writer who had been associated with Tesla for a time, organized a celebration for the inventor's 75th birthday. Tesla received congratulatory letters from more than 70 pioneers of science and engineering, including Albert Einstein, and was also featured on the cover of Time magazine. The cover caption 'All the World Is Your Powerhouse' 3. 4; highlighted his contribution to the generation of electricity. The party was so celebrated that Tesla made it an annual event, an occasion in which he would bring out a large amount of food and drink (with dishes of his own creation) and invite the press to view his inventions and hear stories of feats. past news, opinions about current events, or sometimes strange or disconcerting announcements.
On his birthday in 1932, Tesla claimed that he had invented an engine that would be powered by cosmic radiation. In 1933, at the age of 77, he told reporters that after thirty-five years of work, he was about to produce evidence of a new form of energy. He claimed it was a theory of energy that was "violently opposed" to the world. to Einstein's physics, and could be harnessed with a device that would be cheap to run and last 500 years. He also told reporters that he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, researching advances in metallurgy and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought.
At a party in 1934, Tesla told reporters that he had designed a superweapon that he claimed would end all wars. He would call it the "teleforce," but was usually referred to as his death ray. He described it as a defensive weapon that would be placed at the border of a country to be used against infantry or aircraft attack. Tesla never revealed detailed plans for how the weapon could work during his lifetime, but in 1984, they came to light in the archive of the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. The treatise, titled "The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Energy non-dispersive through natural media', describes a vacuum tube open on one side with a gas seal that allows particles to escape, a method of charging tungsten or mercury ingots to millions of volts, and directing the resulting current by electrostatic repulsion. Tesla attempted to interest the Department of Defense of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia in the device.
In 1935, at his 79th birthday party, Tesla covered many topics. He claimed to have discovered the cosmic ray in 1896 and invented a way to produce direct current by induction, and made many claims about his mechanical oscillator. Describing the device (which he hoped would earn him $100 million in two years), he told reporters that a version of his oscillator had caused an earthquake in his laboratory at 46 East Houston Street and neighboring streets in downtown New York City in 1898. He went on to tell reporters that his oscillator could destroy the Empire State Building with 5 pounds of air pressure. He also explained a new technique he developed using his oscillators, which he called 'telegeodynamics', using it to transmit vibrations to the ground that he claimed would work at any distance to be used for communication or to locate underground mineral deposits.
Customs
Tesla worked every day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. m. until 6:00 p.m. m. or later, with dinner at exactly 8:10 p.m. m., at Delmonico's restaurant and later at the Waldorf Astoria. He would order his dinner by phone from the maitre d', who also had to be the only one to serve it. & # 34; The food had to be ready at eight o'clock... he dined alone, except on the rare occasions when he gave a dinner to a group to fulfill his social obligations. Tesla would then resume working on him, often until 3:00 a.m. & # 34;
For exercise, he walked 8 to 10 miles each day. Every night he flexed his toes a hundred times, claiming that it stimulated his brain cells.
In an interview with newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane, he said he did not believe in telepathy, commenting that: 'Suppose I thought of murdering you,' he said, 'in a second you would know.. Is not it wonderful? By what process would the mind do all this?" In the same interview, he stated that he believed that all fundamental laws could be reduced to one.
Tesla became a vegetarian in his later years, living on nothing but milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.
Appearance
Tesla was 1.88m tall and weighed 64kg, with almost no change in weight from 1888 to around 1926. His appearance was described by newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane as "almost the tallest man, almost the thinnest and certainly the most serious who goes to Delmonico's regularly'. He was a graceful, trim figure in New York City, meticulous in his grooming and dress, and orderly in his daily activities, a appearance that he maintained to promote his commercial relations. It has also been said that he had light eyes, "very large hands" and "huge thumbs".
Eidetic memory
Tesla read many works, memorized entire books, and allegedly had an eidetic memory. He was a polyglot, fluent in eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. In his autobiography, he recounted experiencing certain specific moments of inspiration. During his early years, he repeatedly suffered episodes in which he was ill. He suffered from a peculiar affliction, in which blinding flashes of light appeared before his eyes, often accompanied by visions. Often the visions were related to a word or idea that he might have found; at other times they would provide him with the solution to a particular problem he had set himself. Just by hearing the name of an item, he could visualize it in realistic detail. Tesla would visualize an invention in his mind with extreme precision, including all its dimensions, before proceeding to the construction stage, a technique sometimes known as mental drawing. Usually he did not draw pictures by hand, but worked from memory. Since his childhood, he had frequent flashbacks relating to events that had happened previously in his life.
Sleep habits
Tesla claimed that he never slept more than two hours a night. However, he admitted to having been "dozing" from time to time "to recharge his batteries". During his second year of study in Graz, he developed a passionate hobby of competing at billiards, chess and cards, sometimes spending more than 48 hours at a time in a card table. On one occasion he worked for 84 hours without a break in his laboratory. Kenneth Swezey, a journalist with whom Tesla befriended, confirmed that the inventor rarely slept. Swezey remembered one early morning, when Tesla called him at 3 a.m. m.: "I was sleeping like a dead man in my room...Suddenly the phone ringing woke me up...[Tesla] spoke animatedly, with pauses, [as he used to do]...solved a problem, he compared one theory with another, commented on it, and when he felt he had reached the solution, he suddenly hung up the phone."
Personal relationships
Tesla never married, explaining that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. He once said that in his youth he felt he could never be worthy enough for a woman, considering women superior in every way. His opinion was influenced in later years as he watched how women were trying to outdo men and become more dominant. This "new woman" she aroused much outrage from Tesla, who felt that women were losing their femininity in trying to achieve power, losing what made her superior to a man. In an interview with the Galveston Daily News on August 10, 1924, he declared: "Instead of the soft voice of my reverent adoration, has come the woman who thinks her chief success in life lies in making as much of itself as possible, adopting the man's dress, voice and actions, in sports and in achievements of all kinds... The tendency of women to push the man away, to supplant the old spirit of cooperation with him in all matters of life, is very disappointing to me". Although he told a reporter in later years that he was sometimes sorry not to have married, and that he had made too great a sacrifice for his work. He chose not to pursue or enter into any known relationships, finding all the encouragement he needed in his work.
Tesla was asocial and prone to isolating himself with his work. However, when he became involved in social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as possessing a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and strength." His secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote: "His genial smile and his nobility always denoted the chivalrous characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Julian Hawthorne wrote that: &# 34;Seldom does one meet a scientist or engineer who is also a poet, a philosopher, a connoisseur of refined music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink".
He was good friends with F. Marion Crawford, Robert Underwood Johnson, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey.
As a mature man, he became a close friend of Mark Twain; they spent much time together in his laboratory and elsewhere. Twain notably described Tesla's invention of the asynchronous motor as "the most valuable patent since the telephone". friend of George Sylvester Viereck, poet, writer, mystic and later, propagandist for Nazism. From time to time, he attended dinners hosted by Viereck and his wife.
At times, Tesla could be harsh and express his distaste for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary for her weight. He was quick to criticize his employees' clothing; and on several occasions, he ordered a subordinate to go home and change his clothes.
Relationship with Edison
Tesla had been an employee of the Edison Company from 1883 to 1885, first in Paris and then in New York. He knew Edison himself personally, but his promising career with the company was cut short because he did not receive the salary he thought he had been promised. Feeling cheated, he started working for him.
Three years later, in 1888, Tesla had started collaborating with Westinghouse, and in 1893 he began his public demonstrations in Chicago to demonstrate the superiority of alternating current over Edison's direct current, then establishing what is known as the "war of the currents".
Edison tried to combat Tesla's theory by campaigning to publicize the dangers of using alternating current. Engineer Harold P. Brown, who had started a crusade against the dangers of alternating current, was funded by Edison to investigate electrocution, contributing to the development of the electric chair and surreptitiously getting it powered by alternating current.
Regarding his rival, Edison went so far as to say that: "Tesla is a guy who is always about to do something", in a derogatory allusion to the usual and high-sounding statements to the press of his competitor. For his part, Tesla came to openly criticize Edison's slovenly way of life, stating that: "Such was his negligence that, if he had not married a woman of outstanding intelligence, who put all his efforts into bringing it to life, would have died many years ago".
When Thomas Alva Edison died, in 1931, Tesla contributed the only negative opinion to The New York Times, burying Edison's life under a dense cloak:
He had no hobby, he did not care about any kind of fun and lived in absolute disregard of the most elementary hygiene standards... His method was inefficient in the extreme, as it had to cover an immense field to get anything, unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sad witness to his acts, knowing that only a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the work. But he had a real contempt for the learning of books and mathematical knowledge, trusting completely in his inventor instinct and in his American practical sense.
Beliefs
On experimental and theoretical physics
He disagreed with the theory that atoms are made up of smaller subatomic particles, stating that an electron did not exist to create an electrical charge. He believed that if electrons existed, they were a fourth state of matter or "subatom"; that it could only exist in an experimental vacuum and had nothing to do with electricity.He was of the opinion that atoms are immutable: they could not change states or split in any way. He believed in the dominant 19th century concept of an omnipresent "ether" that transmitted electrical energy.
He was generally antagonistic to theories on the conversion of matter into energy. He was also critical of Einstein's theory of relativity, saying:
I argue that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it cannot have properties. It could also be said that God has properties. He does not have them, but only attributes and these are of our own creation. Of the properties we can only talk when dealing with the matter that fills the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies the space is curved is equivalent to saying that something can act on nothing. I, for my part, refuse to subscribe to such a point of view.
He claimed to have developed his own physical principle regarding matter and energy, which he began working on in 1892, and in 1937, at age 81, he stated in a letter that he had completed a " dynamic theory of gravity" which [would] put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, such as that of curved space. He pointed out that the theory was worked out in all details and that he hoped to be able to give it to the world soon.This elucidation of his theory has never been found in his writings.
About society
In addition to his gifts as a technological scientist, Tesla is widely regarded by his philosophical biographers as a humanist. This did not prevent him, like many other notables of his time, from becoming an advocate of a version of artificial selection imposed in the form of eugenics.
He expressed the belief that "mercy" Humanity had interfered with the "ruthless workings of nature." Although his argument did not depend on the concept of a & # 34; chosen race & # 34; or the inherent superiority of one person over another, he advocated eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated:
... the new sense of compassion of man began to interfere with the ruthless functioning of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and race is to avoid the reproduction of those not fit by sterilization and the deliberate orientation of the mating instinct... The tendency of opinion among the eugenicists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly, no one who is not a desirable father must be allowed to have offspring. Within a century it will no longer occur to a normal person to pair with an eugenically unfit person, and it will seem as improper as to marry a habitual offender.
In 1926, Tesla commented on the evils of women's social subservience and their struggle for gender equality, stating that the future of humanity would be run by "queen bees" 3. 4;. He thought that women would become the dominant sex in the future.
He made predictions on issues relevant to the immediate aftermath of World War I, in an article titled "Science and Discovery are the great Forces that will lead to the Consummation of the War" (December 20, 1914) He thought the League of Nations was not the right remedy for the problems of his time.
About religion
Tesla was raised in the orthodox religion. During his adult life he did not consider himself a "believer in the orthodox sense", opposing religious fanaticism, and was of the opinion that "Buddhism and Christianity are the greatest religions both in number of believers as in importance". and "what we call 'soul' or 'spirit' it is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the "soul" or the 'spirit' it also ceases".
In his article, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," published in 1900, Tesla wrote:
"For years, the idea that each of us is only a part of all has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not only as meaning of ensuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses this in one way, the Christian of another, but they both say the same thing: We are all one."Tesla
Notable inventions and discoveries
Among the most remarkable inventions and discoveries that have come to the knowledge of the general public, we can highlight:
- Wireless transfer of electrical energy through electromagnetic waves. He subsequently tried to develop a system to send power without cables long distances and wanted to implement it in the project of the Wardenclyffe tower that had the purpose of establishing a global communications system and that ended in failure because before he could finish the project, his investor, the banker J. P. Morgan, stopped financing Tesla's research due to his financial inviability, as well as that Guillermo Marconi managed to carry out first-intermissions transmissions. Some movies from the tower are preserved.
- alternating current generator.
- Bulb without filament or fluorescent lamp.
- Electrotherapy or diagnostic devices, especially a single electrode X-ray generator. There is also a patent record of an ozone generator.
- Turbine without pallets, operated by fluid friction.
- Tesla Coil: I delivered a high voltage and high frequency energy at the output.
- Theoretical principles of radar.
- Teslascope.
- Remote control.
- Bujía for blast engines.
- STOL aircraft.
- X-ray studies.
- Radiogoniometer.
- Electrical telegeodynamic
For a more extensive list of Patents see Annex: Tesla Patents
Awards and recognitions
- Although the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for the invention of radio in 1909, the press published that Edison and Tesla would share the Nobel Prize in 1915. Edison tried to minimize Tesla's achievements and refused to receive the award in case it was shared. Some sources said that because of Edison's envy, none of them won it, despite their great contributions to science. Before, Tesla was said to be nominated for the 1912 Nobel Prize. The nomination was possibly due to its tuned circuits using high voltage resonant transformers and high frequency. The subsequent historical research showed that at that time Tesla's name was not considered for the Nobel Prize, although some press did talk about it.
- Tesla was only awarded the Edison medal, the highest award awarded by IEEE.
- The unit used in the International System to measure magnetic induction is called tesla in its memory.
- Lunar crater Tesla carries this name in his memory.
- The minor planet (2244) Tesla also commemorates its name.
- Belgrade Airport bears the name Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport.
- The electric car manufacturing company, founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, is named "Tesla Motors". It is currently called Tesla, Inc.
- A statue in honor of Tesla was placed in New York in 2013. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic attended the opening ceremony.
- Tesla Outreach Award. The Outreach Award that delivers the largest scientific outreach platform in Hispanic-speaking speaks bears its name.
- The National Bank of Serbia established the 100 dinar ticket with the portrait of Nikola Tesla.
- From 2022 It appears in the Coins of 10, 20 and 50 Centimos euro of chromatic
Media appearances
Cinema
- In the movie The Prestige (2006), led by Christopher Nolan, appears Nikola Tesla, played by David Bowie.
Literature
- In the book The Diary of Tita by Laura Esquivel, Tita says that John Brown met Tesla "his admired scientist" at the Chicago fair.
- In the book Secret Code Waldo L. Parra, in the last chapter, appears a scene where they meet at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, the Chilean-French magnate Federcio Santa María and Nikola Tesla, to whom the famous "El Lemgeton" Clavicule Salomonis" grimorium is given for being the only person in the world who could decipher the secret code that is inside.
Filmography about his life
- Tesla (2015), director Sidney Reed.
- Tesla, documentary (2014) by director Sharon Doyle.
- The Tesla engine (2014), director Mark Oliver.
- The Visionary (2005), director Joel Shapiro.
- The lightning master (2000), director Robert Uth.
- Tesla, television film (1993) by director Slavoljub Stefanovic
- The Secret of Nicola Tesla (1980), director Kristo Papić.
- The Prestige (2006), by director Christopher Nolan.
- Tesla (2020), by director Michael Almereyda, biopic about the scientist, starring Ethan Hawke. He was presented at the Sundance Independent Film Festival.
- Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror (2020), episode of Doctor Who, played by Goran Višnjić.
Anime
- Tesla appears as one of the 13 representatives of humankind in Shuumatsu no Valkyrie, fighting in the eighth round against Belcebu.