NIKOLA TESLA -LIFE /INVENTIONS/FACT/UNKNOWNS THINGS
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without receiving a degree, gaining practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884 he emigrated to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His alternating current (AC) induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company eventually marketed.
Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless-controlled boat, one of the first-ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and demonstrated his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.
After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943. Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor.There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s
Nikola Tesla was born an ethnic Serb in the village of Smiljan, within the Military Frontier, in the Austrian Empire (present day Croatia), on 10 July [O.S. 28 June] 1856.His father, Milutin Tesla (1819–1879),was an Eastern Orthodox priest.Tesla's mother, Đuka Mandić (1822–1892), whose father was also an Orthodox priest,had a talent for making home craft tools and mechanical appliances and the ability to memorize Serbian epic poems. Đuka had never received a formal education. Tesla credited his eidetic memory and creative abilities to his mother's genetics and influence. Tesla's progenitors were from western Serbia, near Montenegro.
Tesla was the fourth of five children. He had three sisters, Milka, Angelina, and Marica, and an older brother named Dane, who was killed in a horse riding accident when Tesla was aged five. In 1861, Tesla attended primary school in Smiljan where he studied German, arithmetic, and religion. In 1862, the Tesla family moved to the nearby Gospić, where Tesla's father worked as parish priest. Nikola completed primary school, followed by middle school. In 1870, Tesla moved to Karlovacto attend high school at the Higher Real Gymnasium where the classes were held in German, as it was usual throughout schools within the Austro-Hungarian Military Frontier.
Tesla later wrote that he became interested in demonstrations of electricity by his physics professor.[29] Tesla noted that these demonstrations of this "mysterious phenomena" made him want "to know more of this wonderful force".Tesla was able to perform integral calculus in his head, which prompted his teachers to believe that he was cheating.[He finished a four-year term in three years, graduating in 1873.
In 1875, Tesla enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz on a Military Frontier scholarship. During his first year, Tesla never missed a lecture, earned the highest grades possible, passed nine exams (nearly twice as many as required), started a Serb cultural club, and even received a letter of commendation from the dean of the technical faculty to his father, which stated, "Your son is a star of first rank."At Graz, Tesla was fascinated by the detailed lectures on electricity presented by Professor Jakob Pöschl.
Tesla claimed that he worked from 3 a.m. to 11 p.m., no Sundays or holidays excepted. He was "mortified when [his] father made light of [those] hard won honors." After his father's death in 1879,Tesla found a package of letters from his professors to his father, warning that unless he were removed from the school, Tesla would die through overwork. At the end of his second year, Tesla lost his scholarship and became addicted to gambling. During his third year, Tesla gambled away his allowance and his tuition money, later gambling back his initial losses and returning the balance to his family. Tesla said that he "conquered [his] passion then and there," but later in the United States, he was again known to play billiards. When examination time came, Tesla was unprepared and asked for an extension to study, but was denied. He did not receive grades for the last semester of the third year and he never graduated from college
1. Earthquake Machine
In 1893, Tesla patented a steam-powered mechanical oscillator that would vibrate up and down at high speeds to generate electricity. Years after patenting his invention he told reporters that one day while attempting to tune his mechanical oscillator to the vibration of the building housing his New York City laboratory, he caused the ground to shake. During the test, Tesla continuously turned up the power and heard cracking sounds. “Suddenly,” he recalled, “all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been down about our ears in another few minutes.” Police and ambulances arrived on the scene to attend to the commotion, but Tesla told his assistants to remain quiet and tell the police that it must have been an earthquake.
2. Thought Camera
Tesla believed it could be possible to photograph thoughts. The inspiration came while he was doing experiments in 1893, Tesla told a newspaper reporter decades later: “I became convinced that a definite image formed in thought must, by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina, which might possibly be read by suitable apparatus.” The inventor conceived of reflecting an image on an artificial retina, taking a photograph and projecting the image on a screen. “If this can be done successfully, then the objects imagined by a person would be clearly reflected on the screen as they are formed,” he said, “and in this way every thought of the individual could be read. Our minds would then, indeed, be like open books.”
3. Wireless Energy
In 1901, Tesla secured $150,000 from financier J.P. Morgan to build a 185-foot-tall, mushroom-shaped tower on the north shore of Long Island capable of transmitting messages, telephony and images to ships at sea and across the Atlantic Ocean by using the Earth to conduct signals. As work began on the structure, called Wardenclyffe Tower, Tesla wanted to adapt it to allow for wireless power delivery, believing from his experiments on radio and microwaves that he could light up New York City by transmitting millions of volts of electricity through the air. Morgan, however, refused to give Tesla any additional funding for his grandiose scheme. (Some speculate that Morgan cut off funds once he realized that Tesla’s plan would have crippled his other energy-sector holdings.) Tesla abandoned the project in 1906 before it could ever become operational, and Wardenclyffe Tower was dismantled in 1917.
4. Artificial Tidal Wave
The engineer and physicist believed the power of science could be harnessed to prevent war. In 1907 the New York World reported on another of Tesla’s military innovations in which wireless telegraphy would trigger the detonations of high explosives at sea to generate tidal waves so vast that they would capsize entire enemy fleets. The newspaper reported that the artificial tidal wave would “make navies as useless as the paper boats that babies float in bathtubs” and, foreshadowing later claims about the development of nuclear weapons, “by its horrors hasten the day of universal peace.”
5. Electric-Powered Supersonic Airship
From the time Tesla was a boy, he had been fascinated with the idea of flight. Combining his knowledge of electrical and mechanical engineering, he began to think more about aviation after the failure of Wardenclyffe. In an article in the July 1919 issue of Reconstruction magazine, Tesla discussed his work on developing a supersonic aircraft that would travel eight miles above the surface of the Earth and generate speeds allowing passengers to travel between New York City and London in three hours. Tesla’s concept called for the aircraft to be powered by electricity transmitted wirelessly from power plants on the ground, eliminating the need for aircrafts to carry fuel. “The power supply is virtually unlimited, as any number of power plants can be operated together, supplying energy to airships just as trains running on tracks are now supplied with electrical energy through rails or wires,” Tesla said in the article.
6. Death Beam
Tesla’s creative mind continued to spark new visions even late in his life. On his 78th birthday, he told The New York Times that he had come up with this most important invention, one that would “cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks.” The invention? A military weapon that would accelerate mercury particles at 48 times the speed of sound inside a vacuum chamber and shoot a high-velocity beam “through the free air, of such tremendous energy that [it] will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles.” Although the press dubbed it a “death beam,” Tesla believed it a “peace beam” that would foil attacks by airplanes and invading armies and save lives by acting “like an invisible Chinese wall, only a million times more impenetrable.” Tesla offered his particle-beam weapon to numerous governments, including the United States, but the only country to show interest was the Soviet Union, which conducted a partial test in 1939.
The defining event of young Nikola’s childhood was the day he witnessed the death of his older brother Dane in a riding accident. In the years following the tragedy, Tesla (the son and grandson of Serbian Orthodox priests) began seeing visions of the air around him “filled with tongues of living flame.” As an adolescent Tesla learned to exercise his willpower to control the visions, but in later life he would spend much of his time feeding and, he claimed, mystically communicating with New York City’s pigeons.
After graduating from university, Tesla worked for Edison’s electric company in Paris, but traveled to the United States in 1884 in the hopes of working directly for Edison, the leading figure in the race to deliver electric lighting and power to consumers. Tesla quickly gained a job as an engineer at Edison’s headquarters, impressing the “Wizard of Menlo Park” with his hardworking ingenuity. After Edison casually mentioned that he would pay $50,000 for an improved direct current (DC) generator design, Tesla worked nights until he came up with a solution. Edison refused to pay up, claiming he had been joking. Soon after, Tesla quit to form his own electric company. While he searched for backers to support his research into alternating current, Tesla took a job digging ditches for $2 a day to make ends meet.
Twain and Tesla became friends in the 1890s, thanks in part to Twain’s lifelong fascination with technology and new inventions. Visiting Tesla’s lab late one night, Twain posed for one of the first photographs to be lit by incandescent light. In 1895, Tesla and photographer Edward Ringwood Hewett invited Twain back to the lab to pose for another photo, this one lit using an electrical device called a Crookes tube. When Tesla reviewed the resulting photographic negative, he found it splotchy and spotted and decided it was ruined. It was only weeks later, after German scientist Wilhelm Röntigen announced his discovery of what he called “X-radiation” produced by Crookes tubes, that Tesla realized the photograph of Twain had been ruined by the X-ray shadows of the camera’s metal screws.
At the height of the Spanish-American War in 1898, one of Tesla’s side projects was a miniature boat that could be started, stopped and steered with rudimentary radio signals. When he filed a patent for the device, the U.S. Patent Office refused to believe that it could work, and so dispatched an agent to Tesla’s Manhattan lab for a demonstration. Tesla also showed his boat to a string of other important visitors, including J.P. Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt. He told the New York Post that his invention, which would allow battles to be fought without putting humans at risk, would render warfare itself obsolete. “Battle ships will cease to be built,” he predicted, “and the most tremendous artillery afloat will be of no more use than so much scrap iron.”
During the summer of 1899 Tesla set up a field laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to the possibilities of using high-altitude stations to transmit information and electric power over long distances. One July day, while tracking lightning storms, Tesla’s equipment picked up a series of beeps. After ruling out solar and terrestrial causes, he concluded that the signals must be from another planet. The following Christmas, in response to the American Red Cross’s request for a prediction of the greatest scientific achievement of the coming century, Tesla wrote, “Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…” In 1996 scientists published a study replicating Tesla’s
In 1901 Tesla convinced financier J.P. Morgan to invest $150,000 in a new venture—a powerful laboratory at Wardenclyffe, on the northern shore of Long Island, that would be the new center for Tesla’s work on long-distance radio and electric power transmission. Stanford White, the country’s leading architect and Tesla’s longtime friend, designed a single-story lab with classical proportions, backed by a giant, 185-foot tall tower. The tower, which could be seen as far away as New Haven, Connecticut, stood atop an elaborate grounding system Tesla designed to help his transmitter “get a grip on the earth so that the whole of this globe can quiver.” A shaft nearly as deep as the tower was tall linked the transmitter to a series of 16 underground horizontal steel pipes, each 300 feet in length.
When funds ran out before the Wardenclyffe tower could be completed, Tesla begged Morgan for additional funding, but was rebuffed. Although some biographers speculate that Morgan cut off funds once he realized that Tesla’s plan to provide wireless power was unlikely to be profitable, the key factor for Morgan was likely his concern about getting caught up in a rash of market speculation surrounding radio projects. In July of 1903, after a particularly blunt rejection arrived from Morgan, Tesla cranked up his equipment, sending lightning streaking from the Wardenclyffe tower until after midnight. A year later, after another heartfelt request for funding spurred a one-word answer from Morgan (“No”), Tesla wrote back accusing the pious Episcopalian Morgan of being a Muslim fanatic.
Although for decades he had been a part of New York’s high society, age and poverty left Tesla more and more isolated. He lived alone in a succession of ever-cheaper hotels and often preferred the company of pigeons to people. Nevertheless, he kept one element of his days as a renowned showman-inventor, in the form of popular press conferences he held every July 10 to celebrate his birthday. When he turned 79 he announced his invention of a pocket-sized oscillator that could destroy the Empire State Building. A year later he held forth on his secret for longevity: toe-wriggling.
The defunct lab at Wardenclyffe was eventually turned over to the owners of the Waldorf-Astoria in partial payments for Tesla’s debts. Decades later, the managers of the Governor Clinton hotel were given a similar piece of Tesla collateral: a wooden case the inventor said contained a working model of his potentially war-ending particle weapon. Tesla’s “death beam” (he was insistent that it was not, as the press reported, a “death ray”) would be able to stop any invading army, thus making warfare pointless. When he turned over the box containing the model, Tesla warned the hotel’s employees that they must never open it. They fearfully complied, hiding the box in a storeroom. After his death in 1943 the box was pried open and found to contain nothing but harmless old electrical components.
Nickola Tesla museum
In the interview he gave to John B. Kennedy, Tesla explained how wireless energy could help us have long-distance communication: “When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this but through television and telephony, we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” When I read this 25 years ago, I thought: What? At the time, home PCs still had those bulky screens. We used dial-up. No one I knew had a mobile phone. What was that thing you could put in the pocket to see someone on the other side of the world? I couldn’t even grasp the concept. Tesla also predicted Wi-Fi, planes that ride on wireless energy, an MRI camera, and new world order with women in power. He made some sketches of a death ray that could stop all future wars. But the FBI took his documents after death and denied his allegations. Tesla’s life was hard but fulfilling. And it started with a bang.
He was born in Croatia on July 10, 1856, during the lightning storm. In the middle of the childbirth, the midwife was wringing her hands. It didn’t look good. The thunder was a bad omen. She said the baby was going to be the child of darkness. But Tesla’s mother replied: “No, he is going to be the child of light.“ Later, he could often see blinding light before him. It was so strong it blurred his vision. He couldn’t make out what was real and what wasn’t. As he got even older, he used that power in research. As if that thunder signified he would be a scientist and create light through the AC system. But his father wanted a different vocation for him.
He was sensitive to external stimuli. Tesla claimed he could hear thunder 550 miles away. He could even hear the pocket watch ticking three rooms away from him, or a fly as it landed on the table in a thud. When he was in college, he defined the sound of a locomotive 30 miles away from him as “deafening”. Doctors believed he suffered a nervous breakdown. No one at the time was familiar with sensory overload.
When he was a child, he used imagination to calm himself down at night after bad dreams. When he grew up, he could visualize in three dimensions. He could remember precisely whole books and pictures after only several minutes of watching. He claimed he had the power called “cerebral engineering“. He was able to visualize the whole invention in his head and test the alternatives without writing them down. He envisioned his electric motor in a walk. He was in a park in Budapest and recited Goethe’s Faust. Suddenly he had this image of a rotating magnetic field. He immediately drew its diagrams in the sand. He saw this own mind as “the unfathomable mystery”.
Some believe the death of his brother Dane was such a huge shock for small Nikola it influenced his behavior and tendency to mysticism. In the years after Dane’s death, Nikola had vivid visions of fire in the air around him. As he became a teenager, he learned how to control them. But later in life, he fed his strange condition even further. He claimed he could communicate with the pigeons he was feeding in New York City. And he did a few other strange activities, as well.
In 1900, in the periodical The Century, he wrote an article “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy, with Special References to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy”. Tesla discussed how to capture the power of the sun and the wind. People were spending the earth’s resources too fast and poorly. For coal, they used only 2 percent of its energy: “The man who should stop this senseless waste would be a great benefactor of humanity.” He talked with passion about science and became friends with a fan of technology, Mark Twain.
There is a chance Tesla was on the Autism spectrum. According to Professor Michael Fitzgerald and Brendan O’Brien, co-authors of the book How Asperger Talents Changed the World, Tesla would be diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome today. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive syndrome, which shattered his reputation. He hated round objects, jewelry, as well as to touch someone’s hair. Tesla had an enormous focus on work. He claimed only 2 hours of sleep were enough for him. He was either insomniac, or his body didn’t need more sleep. He’d work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Then he had dinner at 8.10 sharp and continued to work until 3 a.m. However, despite his lack of sleep and a lot of work, he lived until 87. He was obsessed with the number 3, as well as the numbers that can be divided with 3. He would wash his hands 3 times in a row. He’d go around his building 3 times before he got in. He would use 18 handkerchiefs to wipe the dining table and cutlery before every meal. Because he suffered from cholera as a teenager, he was also afraid of germs.
He wore white gloves to dinner every evening. Before he’d put a bite into his mouth, he’d calculate the volume of food on the fork. Otherwise, he wouldn’t feel any pleasure while eating. He’d also calculate the volume of a cup and a plate. Because of these strange habits, he preferred to eat alone. Later in life, he became a vegetarian. He would have only milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices. He abstained from beverages, tobacco, and ladies.
Tesla was a handsome man with dark hair and blue eyes. He was 6ft 2'’ tall and slim, with a refined taste and good manners. Women loved him. But he remained in celibacy. He believed sex disturbs a man at his work: “I can’t think of many great inventions behind which are married men“. He didn’t like women’s accessories either.
In 1937 Tesla was nominated for the Nobel Prize. But he got only 1 vote from 38. In 1909 scientists Marconi and Braun received a Nobel Prize for radio. But in 1943, a few months after Tesla’s death, the Supreme Court restored the priority of Tesla’s radio patent he had submitted earlier. Several people were given credits for the inventions he made but he seemed undisturbed by it. He was sorry the others didn’t have great ideas themselves.
The older he got, the less money he earned. From Waldorf Astoria in New York City, he moved to St. Regis because of a huge bill he made. They evicted him from St. Regis as well because of the bill and the mess he made with pigeons. Then he moved to several poorer hotels, always leaving his bills behind. His former employer Westinghouse started paying for his rent and $125 a month as a “consulting fee“. The company was probably concerned the poor scientist was bad for their reputation. They continued with the practice until the end of his life. Tesla also received a modest Serbian pension until death. He died alone on Orthodox Christmas, at the age of 86 in Hotel New Yorker. A maid found him two days later when she ignored the sign “Do not disturb“ and entered the room. The doctor ruled a heart attack as the cause of death. Tesla’s funeral was in New York City on 10 January 1943. His nephew Sava Kosanović managed to ship his entire estate in 80 trunks together with Tesla’s ashes in 1952 to Serbia. The ashes are displayed in Belgrade in the Nikola Tesla Museum. All Tesla’s estate will soon be transferred to another location downtown.
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