who is nikola tesla essay

Nikola Tesla

Serbian American scientist Nikola Tesla invented the Tesla coil and alternating-current (AC) electricity, in addition to discovering the rotating magnetic field.

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Engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla designed the alternating-current (AC) electric system, which is the predominant electrical system used across the world today. He also created the “Tesla coil” that is still used in radio technology. Born in modern-day Croatia, Tesla immigrated to the United States in 1884 and briefly worked with Thomas Edison before the two parted ways. The Serbian American sold several patent rights, including those to his AC machinery, to George Westinghouse . Tesla died at age 86 in January 1943, but his legacy lives on through his inventions and the electric car company Tesla that’s named in his honor.

FULL NAME: Nikola Tesla BORN: July 10, 1856 DIED: January 7, 1943 BIRTHPLACE: Smiljan, Croatia ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer

Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the Austrian Empire town of Smiljan that is now part of Croatia.

He was one of five children, including siblings Dane, Angelina, Milka, and Marica. Nikola’s interest in electrical invention was spurred by his mother, Djuka Mandic, who invented small household appliances in her spare time while her son was growing up.

Tesla’s father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian orthodox priest and a writer, and he pushed for his son to join the priesthood. But Nikola’s interests lay squarely in the sciences.

Tesla received quite a bit of education. He studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt (later renamed the Johann-Rudolph-Glauber Realschule Karlstadt) in Germany; the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria; and the University of Prague during the 1870s.

After university, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, where for a time he worked at the Central Telephone Exchange. It was while in Budapest that the idea for the induction motor first came to Tesla, but after several years of trying to gain interest in his invention, at age 28, Tesla decided to leave Europe for America.

In 1884, Tesla arrived in the United States with little more than the clothes on his back and a letter of introduction to famed inventor and business mogul Thomas Edison , whose DC-based electrical works were fast becoming the standard in the country. Edison hired Tesla, and the two men were soon working tirelessly alongside each other, making improvements to Edison’s inventions.

Several months later, the two parted ways due to a conflicting business-scientific relationship , attributed by historians to their incredibly different personalities. While Edison was a power figure who focused on marketing and financial success, Tesla was commercially out-of-touch and somewhat vulnerable. Their feud would continue to affect Tesla’s career.

In 1885, Tesla received funding for the Tesla Electric Light Company and was tasked by his investors to develop improved arc lighting. After successfully doing so, however, Tesla was forced out of the venture and, for a time, had to work as a manual laborer in order to survive. His luck changed two years later when he received funding for his new Tesla Electric Company.

Throughout his career, Tesla discovered, designed, and developed ideas for a number of important inventions—most of which were officially patented by other inventors—including dynamos (electrical generators similar to batteries) and the induction motor.

He was also a pioneer in the discovery of radar technology, X-ray technology, remote control, and the rotating magnetic field—the basis of most AC machinery. Tesla is most well-known for his contributions in AC electricity and for the Tesla coil.

AC Electrical System

Tesla designed the alternating-current (AC) electrical system, which quickly became the preeminent power system of the 20 th century and has remained the worldwide standard ever since. In 1887, Tesla found funding for his new Tesla Electric Company, and by the end of the year, he had successfully filed several patents for AC-based inventions.

Tesla’s AC system soon caught the attention of American engineer and businessman George Westinghouse , who was seeking a solution to supplying the nation with long-distance power. Convinced that Tesla’s inventions would help him achieve this, in 1888, he purchased his patents for $60,000 in cash and stock in the Westinghouse Corporation.

As interest in an AC system grew, Tesla and Westinghouse were put in direct competition with Thomas Edison , who was intent on selling his direct-current (DC) system to the nation. A negative press campaign was soon waged by Edison, in an attempt to undermine interest in AC power.

Unfortunately for Edison, the Westinghouse Corporation was chosen to supply the lighting at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Tesla conducted demonstrations of his AC system there.

Hydroelectric Power Plant

In 1895, Tesla designed what was among the first AC hydroelectric power plants in the United States, at Niagara Falls. The following year, it was used to power the city of Buffalo, New York—a feat that was highly publicized throughout the world and helped further AC electricity’s path to becoming the world’s power system.

In the late 19 th century, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, which laid the foundation for wireless technologies and is still used in radio technology today. The heart of an electrical circuit, the Tesla coil is an inductor used in many early radio transmission antennas.

The coil works with a capacitor to resonate current and voltage from a power source across the circuit. Tesla used his coil to study fluorescence, x-rays, radio, wireless power, and electromagnetism in the earth and its atmosphere.

Wireless Power and Wardenclyffe Tower

Having become obsessed with the wireless transmission of energy, around 1900, Tesla set to work on his boldest project yet: to build a global, wireless communication system transmitted through a large electrical tower that would enable information sharing and provide free energy throughout the world.

With funding from a group of investors that included financial giant J. P. Morgan , Tesla began work on the free energy project in earnest in 1901. He designed and built a lab with a power plant and a massive transmission tower on a site on Long Island, New York, that became known as Wardenclyffe.

However, doubts arose among his investors about the plausibility of Tesla’s system. As his rival, Guglielmo Marconi —with the financial support of Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison —continued to make great advances with his own radio technologies, Tesla had no choice but to abandon the project.

The Wardenclyffe staff was laid off in 1906, and by 1915, the site had fallen into foreclosure. Two years later, Tesla declared bankruptcy, and the tower was dismantled and sold for scrap to help pay the debts he had accrued.

After suffering a nervous breakdown following the closure of his wireless power project, Tesla eventually returned to work, primarily as a consultant. But as time went on, his ideas became progressively more outlandish and impractical. He grew increasingly eccentric, devoting much of his time to the care of wild pigeons in the parks of New York City . Tesla even drew the attention of the FBI with his talk of building a powerful “death ray,” which had received some interest from the Soviet Union during World War II.

Poor and reclusive, Tesla died of coronary thrombosis on January 7, 1943, at the age of 86 in New York City, where he had lived for nearly 60 years.

The legacy of Tesla’s work lives on to this day. In 1994, a street sign identifying “Nikola Tesla Corner” was installed near the site of his former New York City laboratory, at the intersection of 40 th Street and 6 th Avenue.

Several movies have highlighted Tesla’s life and famous works, most notably:

• The Secret of Nikola Tesla , a 1980 biographical film starring Orson Welles as J. P. Morgan .
• Nikola Tesla, The Genius Who Lit the World , a 1994 documentary produced by the Tesla Memorial Society and the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.
• The Prestige , a 2006 fictional film about two magicians directed by Christopher Nolan , with rock star David Bowie portraying Tesla.

In 2003, a group of engineers founded Tesla Motors, a car company named after Tesla dedicated to building the first fully electric-powered car. Entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk contributed over $30 million to Tesla in 2004 and serves as the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Tesla Motors unveiled its first electric car, the Roadster, in 2008. A high-performance sports vehicle, the Roadster helped changed the perception of what electric cars could be. In 2014, Tesla launched the Model S, a lower-priced model that, in 2017, set the MotorTrend world record for 0 to 60 miles per hour acceleration at 2.28 seconds. The company’s designs showed that an electric car could have the same performance as gasoline-powered sports car brands like Porsche and Lamborghini.

Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe

Since Tesla’s original forfeiture of his free energy project, ownership of the Wardenclyffe property has passed through numerous hands. Several attempts have been made to preserve it, but efforts to declare it a national historic site failed in 1967, 1976, and 1994.

Then, in 2008, a group called the Tesla Science Center (TSC) was formed with the intention of purchasing the property and turning it into a museum dedicated to the inventor’s work. In 2009, the Wardenclyffe site went on the market for nearly $1.6 million, and for the next several years, the TSC worked diligently to raise funds for its purchase. In 2012, public interest in the project peaked when Matthew Inman of TheOatmeal.com collaborated with the TSC in an Internet fundraising effort, ultimately receiving enough contributions to acquire the site in May 2013.

Wardenclyffe Tower finally joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. Work on its restoration is still in progress. A $20 million redevelopment broke ground in April 2023, but those efforts were complicated by large fire that November. The site is closed to the public “for the foreseeable future” for reasons of safety and preservation, according to the Tesla Science Center.

• Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
• I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.
• The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

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Early years

According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Austrian Empire, located in present-day Croatia . [5] His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10), 1856. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. Tesla was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). [6] His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac, Croatia then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, Austria (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. It is unclear whether he completed a degree at Graz.

Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand branch of the University of Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university , only completing one term. [7]

Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. [8] Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualize an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique which is sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life, this began to happen during childhood. [8]

Hungary and France

In 1881 he moved to Budapest , Hungary , to work for a telegraph company, the American Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, then a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier , but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. [9] For a while he stayed in Maribor, Slovenia , where he was first employed as an assistant engineer. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. In 1882 he moved to Paris to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company , designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived of the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888).

Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in 1882. After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, Croatia , the birthplace of his mother.

United States

In 1884, when Tesla first arrived in the U.S., he had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In his letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison , Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company, Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators .

In 1919 Tesla wrote that Edison offered him the then-staggering sum of $50,000 (almost $1 million today, adjusted for inflation) if he completed the motor and generator improvements. Tesla said he worked nearly a year to redesign them and gave the Edison company several enormously profitable new patents in the process. When Tesla inquired about the $50,000, Edison reportedly replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. [10] Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. [11] He eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time—ironically, for Edison’s company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. [8]

Middle years

In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York City as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887 he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances.

In April 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes, similar to his U.S. Patent 514170 ( PDF ) . This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (“braking radiation”). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays.

Tesla commented on the hazards of working with single node X-ray producing devices, incorrectly attributing the skin damage to ozone rather than the radiation:

Tesla states that the sunburn effects noted by many experimenters are not due directly to the rays, or Roentgen streams, but to the ozone generated by the rays in contact with the skin. He says "Nitrous acid may also be responsible, to a small extent. The ozone, when abundantly produced, attacks the skin and many organic substances most energetically, the action being no doubt heightened by the heat and moisture of the skin." [14]

Tesla later observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Röntgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Röntgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the Fifth Avenue lab fire of March 1895.

On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory at 46 E. Houston Street. He lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission.

Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda . [15]

When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. From 1892 to 1894, Tesla served as vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) to the modern-day Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors , designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, effectively building the first radio transmitter. In Saint Louis , Missouri , Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets.

At the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago , an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was a historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lights and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus."

Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt , so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays .

When Tesla was 41 years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( U.S. Patent 645576 ( PDF ) ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the U.S. military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla developed the " Art of Telautomatics ," a form of robotics. [10] In 1898 Tesla demonstrated a radio-controlled boat to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained U.S. Patent 609250 ( PDF ) , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines," on this mechanical ignition system.

Colorado Springs

In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado , where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris . Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. [16] At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor , and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). [17]

Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). [18] Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. [19]

In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla "recorded" signals of what he believed were extraterrestrial radio signals, though these announcements and his data were rejected by the scientific community. He noted measurements of repetitive signals from his receiver which are substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla spent the latter part of his life trying to signal Mars . In 1996 Corum and Corum published an analysis of Jovian plasma torus signals which indicate that there was a correspondence between the setting of Mars at Colorado Springs and the cessation of signals from Jupiter in the summer of 1899 when Tesla was there. [20] [21]

Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted U.S. Patent 685012 ( PDF ) for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus").

Later years

In 1900, Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street.

In 1904, the U.S. Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio , and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 horsepower (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910–1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100–5000 horsepower.

Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award despite their enormous scientific contributions and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award and that both men refused to accept the award if the other received it first, and both rejected any possibility of sharing it. [22] In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). [7] Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers.

In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. Around 1916, Tesla filed for bankruptcy because he owed so much in back taxes and was living in poverty. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the United States Marine Corps, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies.

Prior to World War I , Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building and demanded a stack of three folded cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal. The nature of the disorder was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity , and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation.

At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria, to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received American Institute of Electrical Engineers's highest honor, the Edison Medal.

In August 1917, Tesla first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive radar units. [23] In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French radar systems, stated he was building radar systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla." By the 1920s, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray." It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations.

On Tesla's 75th birthday in 1931, TIME magazine put him on its cover. [24] The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft . In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching.

Field theories

When he was 81, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. [25] The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Most believe that Tesla never fully developed the unified field theory.

The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that:

There is no thing endowed with life - from man, who is enslaving the elements, to the nimblest creature - in all this world that does not sway in its turn. Whenever action is born from force, though it be infinitesimal, the cosmic balance is upset and the universal motion results.

Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: ...[a] magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king...., its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists.... [26]

Tesla also argued:

I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view. [27]

Tesla also believed that much of Albert Einstein 's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview:

...the relativity theory, by the way, is much older than its present proponents. It was advanced over 200 years ago by my illustrious countryman Ruđer Bošković, the great philosopher, who, not withstanding other and multifold obligations, wrote a thousand volumes of excellent literature on a vast variety of subjects. Bošković dealt with relativity, including the so-called time-space continuum... [28]

Directed-energy weapon

Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon [29] The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. [30] [31]

In total, the components and methods included: [32]

• An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished.
• A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished.
• A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism.
• A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention.

Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s until the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media concerning charged particle beams. [7] Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war." This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade . It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). [7]

Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation:

[The nozzle would] send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation's border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks. [33]

The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. [34]

Tesla tried to interest the U.S. Department of War in the device. [35] He also offered this invention to European countries. [36] None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device, and he was unable to act on his plans.

Theoretical inventions

Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp or change space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave , a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction , including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen.

Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as “Tesla's Flying Machine." Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an on-board fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. This fact later enticed UFO conspiracy theorists.

Death and afterwards

Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel , some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents , Tesla was essentially destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the United States Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number, U.S. Patent 645576 ( PDF ) , in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio .

Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his U.S. citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the “teleforce” weapon, or “death ray,” that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was composed of a particle beam weapon. The U.S. government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisors, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret," because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]." Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. [37]

Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade , Serbia . [38] Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City . After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day.

Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy, but that portrait is lost. His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend, Croat Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum and a statue (1955-1956) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb . This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls , New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986.

The year of 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the “Year of Tesla.” On this anniversary, July 10, 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum ) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by and about Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society in New York. [39] Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named for Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade ) was presented.

In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about “ hidden knowledge .” Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. [8]

Personality

Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbian/Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English , French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin .

Tesla had a distinct look. He was very tall for his time, towering at six feet seven inches. Tesla was slender, fair-skinned, with pale blue eyes and "wavy brown hair," which he would always wear brushed back briskly. He dressed formally everywhere, often sporting a Prince Albert coat and a derby hat.

Tesla, an obsessive-compulsive , had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry , notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He had a great dislike of touching round objects and human hair other than his own.

Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contently about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak" as he would call it.

Except at formal dinners, he always dined alone, and never, under any circumstances, would he dine with a woman by himself. At the Waldorf-Astoria and at the famous Delmonico's restaurant, he had picked out particular discrete tables, which were always reserved for him, along with eighteen clean linen napkins upon his request.

Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. [8] Nonetheless, there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense.

Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink."

Strangely, Tesla displayed occasional streaks of cruelty that seemed to be motivated by his obsessive-compulsiveness. Overweight people disgusted him, and he made little effort to conceal his feelings, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions.

Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe.

In his middle life, Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain . They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. He remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died, The New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla who was quoted as saying, "He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene." [8] Tesla continued:

His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. [40]

As Edison was a very old man, he went as far as to say that looking back, his biggest mistake he had made was never respecting Tesla or his work. This did little for their almost non-existent relationship.

Tesla was also good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey.

Tesla made his first million at the age of 40, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather inept at finances, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth to counter this. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors.

Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. The pigeon, Tesla would say, was very precious to him. As the story goes, one day the white pigeon fell ill. Tesla attempted to nurse it back to health, but it died in his hands. Tesla was not a religious man in the traditional Christian fashion; he believed that there must be a scientific explanation for everything. But when that white pigeon died, Tesla swears he saw a very bright light coming out of its eyes, so bright that even he could not have managed to create so luminous a light. It made him believe that the white pigeon was of something spiritual in origin. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work.

Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. [41] He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. [42]

He predicted that:

One day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheel work of the universe... and the very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery. [43]

Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics . In a 1937 interview, he stated,

...man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct...The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal. [44]

In a 1926 interview, Tesla, commenting on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees." He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. [45]

In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine , he wrote, "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large amounts of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel." [46]

Recognition and honors

As the result of his achievements in the development of electricity and radio, Tesla received many awards and accolades. He was selected as a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), at the time the American Institute of Electrical Engineers) and was awarded its most prestigious prize, the Edison Medal. He was also made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and accepted invitations to become a member of the American Philosophical Society, and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Because of his research in electrotherapy and his invention of high frequency oscillators, he was also made a fellow of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association.

In 1975 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) created a Nikola Tesla Award via an agreement between the IEEE Power Engineering Society and the IEEE Board of Directors. It is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power . The Tesla award is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. [47]

For his work Tesla received numerous honorary doctoral degrees from a number of universities.

Tesla was featured on the currency of the former Yugoslavia. The current 100 Serbian dinar banknotes issued by the National Bank of Serbia have a picture Tesla on the obverse (front side). On the reverse side there is portion of drawing of an induction motor from his patent application and a photograph of Tesla holding a [gas filled tube] emitting light as a result of electric induction.

The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are named in his honor.

Tesla Motors, an electric car company that is producing high end sports cars, named their company in tribute to Tesla: "The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla...We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval." [48]

• ↑ Manu Mitra, Nikola Tesla's Free Electricity Electronic Circuit Journal of Electronics and Communication 1(1) (2018). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ David Hatcher Childress (ed.), The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000, ISBN 0932813860 ).
• ↑ Robert Lomas, “The Essay: Spark of Genius,” Independent Magazine (August 21, 1999). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Robert Lomas, The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century (London: Headline Book Publishers, 1999, ISBN 0747275882 ).
• ↑ Carol Dommermuth-Costa, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius (Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 1994, ISBN 0822549204 ), 11-12.
• ↑ Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth, Tesla: Master of Lightning (Monroe Township, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1999, ISBN 0760710058 ), 3.
• ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Marc Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996, ISBN 1559723297 ).
• ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Touchstone, 2001, ISBN 0743215362 ).
• ↑ “Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?” Twenty First Century Books . Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ 10.0 10.1 Nikola Tesla, Ben Johnson (ed.), My Inventions (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995, ISBN 0760700850 ).
• ↑ Jill Jonnes, "Empire of Light" (New York: Random House, 2004, ISBN 0375758844 ), 110.
• ↑ Hugo Gernsback, Nikola Tesla and his inventions Electrical Experimenter , 1919. Scan of article available from The Tesla Society. Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Tesla's invention of the AND logic gate Twenty First Century Books . Retrieved July 14, 2021. This pertains to two U.S. patents, U.S. Patent 723188 ( PDF ) and U.S. Patent 725605 ( PDF ) .
• ↑ Nanette South Clark, Nikola Tesla - X-Ray Experiments, Blindness and Fertilizers Manufactured by Electricity An Engineer's Aspect . Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Toby Grotz, The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy Theoretical Electromagnetic Studies and Learning Association .
• ↑ Nikola Tesla, The True Wireless Electrical Experimenter (May 1919). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Charles Coulston Gillispie, “Tesla, Nikola,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975, ISBN 0684101211 ).
• ↑ Kenneth L. Corum, James F. Corum, and Abdul Hamid Aidinejad, Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors (1994).
• ↑ Kenneth L. Corum and James F. Corum, Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves (1994).
• ↑ Nikola Tesla, Talking with Planets Collier's Weekly (February 19, 1901). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Kenneth L. Corum and James F. Corum, Nikola Tesla and The Planetary Radio Signals The Tesla Society . Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ John J. O'Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (Lulu Press, 2018, ISBN 0359045146 ), 228-229.
• ↑ R.M. Page, "The Early History of RADAR," Proceedings of the IRE 50(5) (May 1962).
• ↑ Photo of the cover of TIME magazine The Tesla Society . Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla Inventions and Experiments of Nikola Tesla . Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Tesla, 79, Promises to Transmit Force New York Times , July 11, 1935. Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Marc J. Seifer, Einstein vs Tesla New Dawn Magazine . Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Quoted in Leland I. Anderson (ed.), Nikola Tesla: Lecture Before the New York Academy of Sciences April 6, 1897: The Streams of Lenard and Roentgen and Novel Apparatus for Their Production (Breckenridge, CO: Twenty First Century Books, 1994, ISBN 096360127X ).
• ↑ Tesla's Ray TIME (July 23, 1934). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam' New York Times (July 11, 1934). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Tesla Invents Peace Ray New York Sun (July 10, 1934). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Death-Ray Machine Described New York Sun (July 11, 1934). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Joseph W. Alsop, Jr., Beam to Kill Army at 200 Miles, Tesla's Claim on 78th Birthday New York Herald Tribune (July 11, 1934). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ 'Death Ray' for Planes New York Times (September 22, 1940). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U.S. By Tesla Baltimore Sun (July 12, 1940). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ John J. O'Neill, Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II (unpublished chap. 34 of Prodigal Genius ). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ http://www.teslasociety.com/muzar.htm Tesla Memorial Society of New York . Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Nikola Tesla Museum. Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Tesla Memorial Society of New York Retrieved July 14, 200721.
• ↑ Tim Law, The Future of Thermal Comfort in an Energy-Constrained World (Springer, 2015, ISBN 3319033336 ).
• ↑ H. Winfield Secor, Tesla's Views on Electricity and the War Electrical Experimenter 5(4) (August 1917). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ A Giant Eye to See Around the World Albany Telegram (February 25, 1923). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Liliana Usvat, The Genius Nicola Tesla and Mathematics Mathematics Magazine . Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ George Sylvester Viereck and Nikola Tesla, A Machine to End War - A Famous Inventor, Picturing Life 100 Years from Now, Reveals an Astounding Scientific Venture Which He Believes Will Change the Course of History Liberty (February 1937). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ John B. Kennedy, When Woman is Boss, An Interview with Nikola Tesla Collier's Weekly (January 30, 1926). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Nikola Tesla, The Problem of Increasing Human Energy Century Illustrated Magazine (June 1900). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ IEEE Nikola Tesla Award Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• ↑ Why the Name "Tesla"? Tesla Motors . Retrieved July 14, 2021.

References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Anderson, Leland I. (ed.). Nikola Tesla: Lecture Before the New York Academy of Sciences April 6, 1897: The Streams of Lenard and Roentgen and Novel Apparatus for Their Production . Breckenridge, CO: Twenty First Century Books, 1994. ISBN 096360127X
• Anderson, Leland I. Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi . Antique Wireless Association, 1980.
• Cheney, Margaret. Tesla: Man Out of Time . New York: Touchstone, 2001. ISBN 0743215362
• Cheney, Margaret, and Robert Uth. Tesla: Master of Lightning . Monroe Township, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058
• Childress, David Hatcher (ed.). The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power . Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN 0932813860
• Corum, Kenneth L., and James F. Corum. Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves . 1994. OCLC 68213460
• Corum, Kenneth L., James F. Corum, and Abdul Hamid Aidinejad. Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors . 1994. OCLC 68215290
• Dommermuth-Costa, Carol. Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius . Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 1994. ISBN 0822549204
• Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Dictionary of Scientific Biography . New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975. ISBN 0684101211
• Grotz, Toby. “The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy” Theoretical Electromagnetic Studies and Learning Association. Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World . New York: Random House, 2004. ISBN 0375758844
• Kennedy, John B. “When Woman is Boss, An Interview with Nikola Tesla." Collier's Weekly (January 30, 1926). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• Law, Tim. The Future of Thermal Comfort in an Energy-Constrained World . Springer, 2015. ISBN 3319033336
• Lomas, Robert. “The Essay: Spark of Genius.” Independent Magazine (August 21, 1999). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• Lomas, Robert. The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla, forgotten genius of electricity . London: Headline Book Publishers, 1999. ISBN 0747275882
• Martin, Thomas Commerford. The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla . New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993. ISBN 088029812X
• Nichelson, Oliver. Tesla's Fuelless Generator and Wireless Power Transmission. Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• O'Neill, John J. Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla . Lulu Press, 2018. ISBN 0359045146
• Secor, H. Winfield. "Tesla's Views on Electricity and the War" Electrical Experimenter 5(4) (August 1917). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• Seifer, Marc. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius . Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN 1559723297
• Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar. “Electric Mind,” Wired Magazine (October 1998). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• Tesla, Nikola. "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy." Century Illustrated Magazine (June 1900). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• Tesla, Nikola. “The True Wireless,” Electrical Experimenter (May 1919). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• Tesla, Nikola, Ben Johnson (ed.). My Inventions . New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995. ISBN 0760700850
• Viereck, George Sylvester and Nikola Tesla. A Machine to End War Liberty (February 1937). Retrieved July 14, 2021.
• Weisstein, Eric W. Tesla, Nikola (1856-1943) Science World . Retrieved July 14, 2021.

External links

All links retrieved November 14, 2022.

• The Tesla Memorial Society
• The Tesla Memorial Society of New York
• The Nikola Tesla Museum
• Works by Nikola Tesla . Project Gutenberg
• The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection by Jim Bieberich
• Tesla Research – Lost Arts Media

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Nikola Tesla: Biography, Inventions & Quotes

Nikola Tesla is often called one of history’s most important inventors, one whose discoveries in the field of electricity were way ahead of his time and continue to influence technology today. Despite his accomplishments, however, Tesla died penniless and without the accolades that would he would ultimately earn over a century later.

The “genius who lit the world” is now commemorated with an electrical unit called the Tesla, has a place in the inventor’s hall of fame, streets, statues, and a prestigious engineer’s award in his name, but in life he wasn’t always so successful.

Brilliant scientist, terrible businessman

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in a town called Smiljan, today part of Croatia but then located within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest and his mother, despite not having any formal education, tinkered in machinery and was known for having a spectacular memory.

Tesla’s career as an inventor began early; while working at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, at the age of just 26, he is reported to have first sketched out the principles for a rotating magnetic field — an important idea still used in many electromechanical devices. This major achievement laid the groundwork for many of his future inventions, including the alternating current motor and ultimately led him to New York City in 1884, lured by Thomas Edison and his groundbreaking engineering factory, Edison Machine Works.

It is often said that as brilliant a scientist as Tesla was, he was an equally terrible businessman, unable (or possibly unwilling) to see the commercial value behind his ideas. Thomas Edison was both an inventor and a business mogul focused on the bottom line, and he often clashed with Tesla over methods and ideology. It was also unlikely, perhaps, that two minds so brilliant could coexist in peace for very long and, indeed, Tesla quit Edison Machine Works only a year later.

Tesla’s creativity was given free rein at the new laboratory he established, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing, where he experimented with early X-ray technology, electrical resonance, arc lamps and other ideas. Moves to Colorado and then back to New York coincided with other great scientific feats, including advances in turbine science, the installation of the first hydroelectric power station at Niagara Falls and, most importantly, the perfection of his alternating current system.

Through it all, the compulsive, eccentric and often sensational Tesla provided terrific sound bites for reporters, speaking frequently to the press about new, futuristic ideas up to a few years before his death, when he became a recluse. Tesla died in 1943, broke and alone in a New York City hotel room.

Tesla’s legacy has experienced a resurgence of sorts in recent years, thanks to a handful of supporters who have popularized his work in the media, in the hopes of having a Nikola Tesla science museum built on the grounds of a former laboratory on Long Island, New York.

Innumerable patents

The exact number of patents held by Tesla is disputed, as some likely remain undiscovered, historians believe. He is thought to be responsible for at least 300 inventions (many related to each other), in addition to countless unpatented ideas that he developed over the course of his career.

Alternating current

Perhaps Tesla’s most famous and important idea, alternating current (AC), was an answer to his old boss Edison’s inefficient — as Tesla put it — use of direct current (DC) in the new electric age. While DC power stations sent electricity flowing in one direction in a straight line, alternating currents change direction quickly, and could do so at a much higher voltage.

Indeed, Edison’s power lines that crisscrossed the Atlantic seaboard were short and weak due to DC, while AC was able to send electricity much farther afield. Though Thomas Edison had more resources and an established reputation, Tesla’s AC power grids eventually became the norm. Several dozen of Tesla’s patents were related to alternating current science.

The Tesla Coil

Since named for its inventor, this impressive machine transforms energy into extremely high voltage charges, creating powerful electrical fields capable of producing spectacular electrical arcs. Besides the lightning-bolt shows they can put on, Tesla Coils had very practical applications in wireless radio technology and some medical devices. Tesla experimented with his coils in the last years of the 19th century.

The true father of radio

Tesla tinkered with radio waves as early as 1892, debuting a radio wave-controlled boat in 1898 with great fanfare at an electrical exhibition at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Expanding on the technology, he patented more than a dozen ideas related to radio communication, before Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi leapt ahead of a financially unstable Tesla and completed the first transatlantic radio transmission (a bit of Morse code, sent from England to Newfoundland) on the back of Tesla’s science. Marconi and Tesla’s battle for intellectual recognition waged for decades before the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately revoked some of Marconi’s patents in 1943, restoring Tesla as the father of radio, at least legally.

Tesla quotes

“Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.” — "A Visit to Nikola Tesla" by Dragislav L. Petković in Politika (April 1927)

“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.” — “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” — “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

Further reading:

• Tesla Memorial Society

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Nikola Tesla summary

Nikola Tesla , (born July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan, Lika, Austrian Empire [now in Croatia]—died Jan. 7, 1943, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Serbian U.S. inventor and researcher. He studied in Austria and Bohemia and worked in Paris before coming to the U.S. in 1884. He worked for Thomas Alva Edison and George Westinghouse but preferred independent research. His inventions made possible the production and distribution of alternating-current electric power. He invented an induction coil that is still widely used in radio technology, the Tesla coil (1891); his system was used by Westinghouse to light the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Tesla established an electric power station at Niagara Falls that delivered power to Buffalo, N.Y., by 1896. His research also included work on a carbon button lamp and on the power of electrical resonance. He discovered terrestrial stationary waves (1899–1900), proving that Earth is a conductor. Due to lack of funds, many of his ideas remained only in his notebooks, which are still examined by enthusiasts for inventive clues.

Biography of Nikola Tesla, Serbian-American Inventor

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Nikola Tesla (July 10, 1856–January 7, 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, and futurist. As the holder of nearly 300 patents, Tesla is best known for his role in developing the modern three-phase alternating current (AC) electric power supply system and for his invention of the Tesla coil, an early advancement in the field of radio transmission.

During the 1880s, Tesla and Thomas Edison , inventor and champion of direct electrical current (DC), would become embattled in the “War of the Currents” over whether Tesla’s AC or Edison’s DC would become the standard current used in long-distance transmission of electrical power.

Fast Facts: Nikola Tesla

• Known For: Development of alternating current (AC) electrical power
• Born: July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia)
• Parents: Milutin Tesla and Đuka Tesla
• Died: January 7, 1943 in New York City, New York
• Education: Austrian Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria (1875)
• Patents: US381968A —Electro-magnetic motor, US512,340A —coil for electro-magnets
• Awards and Honors : Edison Medal (1917), Inventor’s Hall of Fame (1975)
• Notable Quote : “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

Early Life and Education

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan in the Austrian Empire (now Croatia) to his Serbian father Milutin Tesla, an Eastern Orthodox priest, and his mother Đuka Tesla, who invented small household appliances and had the ability to memorize lengthy Serbian epic poems. Tesla credited his mother for his own interest in inventing and photographic memory. He had four siblings, a brother Dane, and sisters Angelina, Milka, and Marica. 

In 1870, Tesla started high school at the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac, Austria. He recalled that his physics teacher’s demonstrations of electricity made him want “to know more of this wonderful force.” Able to do integral calculus in his head, Tesla completed high school in just three years, graduating in 1873.

Determined to pursue a career in engineering, Tesla enrolled at the Austrian Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, in 1875. It was here that Tesla studied a Gramme dynamo, an electrical generator that produces direct current. Observing that the dynamo functioned like an electric motor when the direction of its current was reversed, Tesla began thinking of ways this alternating current could be used in industrial applications. Though he never graduated—as was not uncommon then—Tesla posted excellent grades and was even given a letter from the dean of the technical faculty addressed to his father stating, “Your son is a star of first rank.”

Feeling that chastity would help him focus on his career, Tesla never married or had any known romantic relationships. In her 2001 book, “ Tesla: Man Out of Time ,” biographer Margaret Cheney writes that Tesla felt himself to be unworthy of women, considering them to be superior to him in every way. Later in life, however, he publicly expressed strong dislike what he called the “new woman,” women he felt were abandoning their femininity in an attempt to dominate men.

The Path to Alternating Current

In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he gained practical experience as the chief electrician at the Central Telephone Exchange. In 1882, Tesla was hired by the Continental Edison Company in Paris where he worked in the emerging industry of installing the direct current-powered indoor incandescent lighting system patented by Thomas Edison in 1879. Impressed by Tesla’s mastery of engineering and physics, the company’s management soon had him designing improved versions of generating dynamos and motors and fixing problems at other Edison facilities throughout France and Germany.

When the manager of the Continental Edison facility in Paris was transferred back to the United States in 1884, he asked that Tesla be brought to the U.S. as well. In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States and went to work at the Edison Machine Works in New York City, where Edison’s DC-based electrical lighting system was fast becoming the standard. Just six months later, Tesla quit Edison after a heated dispute over unpaid wages and bonuses. In his diary, Notebook from the Edison Machine Works: 1884-1885 , Tesla marked the end of the amicable relationship between the two great inventors. Across two pages, Tesla wrote in large letters, “Good By to the Edison Machine Works.”

By March 1885, Tesla, with the financial backing of businessmen Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail, started his own lighting utility company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. Instead of Edison’s incandescent lamp bulbs, Tesla’s company installed a DC-powered arc lighting system he had designed while working at Edison Machine Works. While Tesla’s arc light system was praised for its advanced features, his investors, Lane and Vail, had little interest in his ideas for perfecting and harnessing alternating current. In 1886, they abandoned Tesla’s company to start their own company. The move left Tesla penniless, forcing him to survive by taking electrical repair jobs and digging ditches for $2.00 per day. Of this period of hardship, Tesla would later recall, “My high education in various branches of science, mechanics, and literature seemed to me like a mockery.”

During his time of near destitution, Tesla’s resolve to prove the superiority of alternating current over Edison’s direct current grew even stronger.

Alternating Current and the Induction Motor

In April 1887, Tesla, along with his investors, Western Union telegraph superintendent Alfred S. Brown and attorney Charles F. Peck, founded the Tesla Electric Company in New York City for the purpose of developing new types of electric motors and generators.

Tesla soon developed a new type of electromagnetic induction motor that ran on alternating current. Patented in May 1888, Tesla’s motor proved to be simple, dependable, and not subject to the constant need for repairs that plagued direct current-driven motors at the time.

In July 1888, Tesla sold his patent for AC-powered motors to Westinghouse Electric Corporation, owned by electrical industry pioneer George Westinghouse. In the deal, which proved financially lucrative for Tesla, Westinghouse Electric got the rights to market Tesla’s AC motor and agreed to hire Tesla as a consultant.

With Westinghouse now backing AC and Edison backing DC, the stage was set for what would become known as “The War of the Currents.”

The War of the Currents: Tesla vs. Edison

Recognizing the economic and technical superiority of alternating current to his direct current for long-distance power distribution, Edison undertook an unprecedently aggressive public relations campaign to discredit AC as posing a deadly threat to the public—a force should never allow in their homes. Edison and his associates toured the U.S. presenting grizzly public demonstrations of animals being electrocuted with AC electricity. When New York State sought a faster, “more humane” alternative to hanging for executing condemned prisoners, Edison, though once a vocal opponent of capital punishment, recommended using AC-powered electrocution. In 1890, murderer William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in a Westinghouse AC generator-powered electric chair that had been secretly designed by one of Edison’s salesmen.

Despite his best efforts, Edison failed to discredit alternating current. In 1892, Westinghouse and Edison’s new company General Electric, competed head-to-head for the contract to supply electricity to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. When Westinghouse ultimately won the contract, the fair served as a dazzling public display of Tesla’s AC system.

On the tails of their success at the World’s Fair, Tesla and Westinghouse won a historic contract to build the generators for a new hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls. In 1896, the power plant began delivering AC electricity to Buffalo, New York, 26 miles away. In his speech at the opening ceremony of the power plant, Tesla said of the accomplishment, “It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.”

The success of the Niagara Falls power plant firmly established Tesla’s AC as the standard for the electric power industry, effectively ending the War of the Currents.

The Tesla Coil

In 1891, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, an electrical transformer circuit capable of producing high-voltage, low-current AC electricity. Though best-known today for its use in spectacular, lightening-spitting demonstrations of electricity, the Tesla coil was fundamental to the development of wireless communications. Still used in modern radio technology, the Tesla coil inductor was an essential part of many early radio transmission antennas.

Tesla would go on to use his Tesla coil in experiments with radio remote control, fluorescent lighting , x-rays , electromagnetism , and universal wireless power transmission. 

On July 30, 1891, the same year he patented his coil, the 35-year-old Tesla was sworn in as a naturalized United States citizen.

Radio Remote Control

At the 1898 Electrical Exposition in Boston’s Madison Square Gardens, Tesla demonstrated an invention he called a “telautomaton,” a three-foot-long, radio-controlled boat propelled by a small battery-powered motor and rudder. Members of the amazed crowd accused Tesla of using telepathy, a trained monkey, or pure magic to steer the boat.

Finding little consumer interest in radio-controlled devices, Tesla tried unsuccessfully to sell his “Teleautomatics” idea to the US Navy as a type of radio-controlled torpedo. However, during and after World War I (1914-1918), the militaries of many countries, including the United States incorporated it.

Wireless Power Transmission

From 1901 through 1906, Tesla spent most of his time and savings working on arguably his most ambitious, if a far-fetched, project—an electrical transmission system he believed could provide free energy and communications throughout the world without the need for wires. 

In 1901, with the backing of investors headed by financial giant J. P. Morgan, Tesla began building a power plant and massive power transmission tower at his

Wardenclyffe laboratory on Long Island, New York. Seizing on the then commonly-held belief that the Earth’s atmosphere conducted electricity, Tesla envisioned a globe-spanning network of power transmitting and receiving antennas suspended by balloons 30,000 feet (9,100 m) in the air. 

However, as Tesla’s project drug on, its sheer enormity caused his investors to doubt its plausibility and withdraw their support. With his rival, Guglielmo Marconi—enjoying the substantial financial support of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison—was making great advances in his own radio transmission developments, Tesla was forced to abandon his wireless power project in 1906.

Later Life and Death

In 1922, Tesla, deeply in debt from his failed wireless power project, was forced to leave the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City where he had been living since 1900, and move into the more-affordable St. Regis Hotel. While living at the St. Regis, Tesla took to feeding pigeons on the windowsill of his room, often bringing weak or injured birds into his room to nurse them back to health.

Of his love for one particular injured pigeon, Tesla would write, “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”

By late 1923, the St. Regis evicted Tesla because of unpaid bills and complaints about the smell from keeping pigeons in his room. For the next decade, he would live in a series of hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills at each. Finally, in 1934, his former employer, Westinghouse Electric Company, began paying Tesla $125 per month as a “consulting fee,” as well as paying his rent at the Hotel New Yorker.

In 1937, at age 81, Tesla was knocked to the ground by a taxicab while crossing a street a few blocks from the New Yorker. Though he suffered a severely wrenched back and broken ribs, Tesla characteristically refused extended medical attention. While he survived the incident, the full extent of his injuries, from which he never fully recovered, was never known.

On January 7, 1943, Tesla died alone in his room at the New Yorker Hotel at the age of 86. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as coronary thrombosis, a heart attack.

On January 10, 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivered a eulogy to Tesla broadcast live over WNYC radio. On January 12, over 2,000 people attended Tesla’s funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Following the funeral, Tesla’s body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York.

With the United States then fully engaged in World War II ., fears that the Austrian-born inventor might have been in possession of devices or designs helpful to Nazi Germany , drove the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seize Tesla’s possessions after his death. However, the FBI reported finding nothing of interest, concluding that since about 1928, Tesla’s work had been “primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

In his 1944 book, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla , journalist, and historian John Joseph O’Neill wrote that Tesla claimed to have never slept more than two hours per night, “dozing” during the day instead to “recharge his batteries.” He was reported to have once spent 84 straight hours without sleep working in his laboratory.

It is believed that Tesla was granted around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions during his lifetime. While several of his patents remain unaccounted for or archived, he holds at least 278 known patents in 26 countries, mostly in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Tesla never attempted to patent many of his other inventions and ideas.

Today, Tesla’s legacy can be seen in multiple forms of popular culture, including movies, TV, video games and several genres of science fiction. For example, in the 2006 movie The Prestige, David Bowie portrays Tesla developing an amazing electro-replicating device for a magician. In Disney’s 2015 film Tomorrowland: A World Beyond, Tesla helps Thomas Edison, Gustave Eiffel , and Jules Verne discover a better future in an alternate dimension. And in the 2019 film The Current War, Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult, squares off with Thomas Edison, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, in a history-based depiction of the war of the currents.

In 1917, Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal, the most coveted electrical prize in the United States, and in 1975, Tesla was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. In 1983, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Tesla. Most recently, in 2003, a group of investors headed by engineer and futurist Elon Musk founded Tesla Motors, a company dedicated to producing the first car fittingly powered totally by Tesla’s obsession—electricity.

• Carlson, W. Bernard. “Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age.” Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Cheney, Margaret. “Tesla: Man Out of Time.” Simon & Schuster, 2001.
• O'Neill, John J. (1944). “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla.” Cosimo Classics, 2006.
• Gunderman, Richard. “The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla.” Smithsonian.com , January 5, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/extraordinary-life-nikola-tesla-180967758/ .
• Tesla, Nikola. “Notebook from the Edison Machine Works: 1884-1885.” Tesla Universe, https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/books/nikola-tesla-notebook-edison-machine-works-1884-1885 .
• “The War of the Currents: AC vs. DC Power.” U.S. Department of Energy , https://www.energy.gov/articles/war-currents-ac-vs-dc-power .
• Cheney, Margaret. “Tesla: Master of Lightning.” MetroBooks, 2001.
• Dickerson, Kelly.“Wireless Electricity? How the Tesla Coil Works.” LiveScience , July 10, 2014, https://www.livescience.com/46745-how-tesla-coil-works.html .
• “About Nikola Tesla.” Tesla Society , https://web.archive.org/web/20120525133151/http:/www.teslasociety.org/about.html .
• O’Neill, John J. “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla.” Cosimo Classics, 2006.
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Nikola Tesla

Amongst many inventors throughout the history of science, one of the most prominent inventors was Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla was an inventor, an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. Nikola Tesla was also a Serbian-American Engineer who was highly regarded for his achievements in energy for the advancement and growth of Alternating Current (AC) in electrical systems. He also provided his extraordinary contributions to electromagnetism and wireless radio communications.

Table of Contents

Introduction of nikola tesla, nikola tesla’s education, awards and achievements, contribution in alternating currents (ac).

• Tesla Turbine

Nikola Tesla was a mastermind inventor who shaped some ground-breaking inventions. He was an engineer who was awarded about 300 patents for his innovations in history. He also collaborated with many prominent names and companies in history.

Nikola Tesla was born on 10th July in 1856 to a priest father in the Croatian town of Smiljan (Austrian Empire).

Tesla’s inventions constitute significant technological breakthroughs throughout his lifetime. He invented the widely used Tesla coil and induction coil in radio technology. This math and physics genius made a substantial impact on our daily lives through his important innovations.

Tesla studied at several places in Europe, which also included Germany, Austria, and Prague. At the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, he pursued electrical engineering, and later, joined the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.

He had the opportunity to go to Budapest in the late 1870s, where he worked at the Telephone Exchange. He made enhancements to some inventions and came up with an idea for the induction motor, which produced an alternating current system, and used electromagnetic induction from the magnetic field instead of electrical connections to the rotor.

At age 28, in 1884, he decided to move to the U.S., in search of more opportunities. Tesla met Thomas Edison in the U.S. Tesla worked alongside him for a couple of months. When Edison declined to pay Tesla for his work, Tesla decided to quit and pursue his journey as an inventor.

Tesla’s legacy holds nine decorations with certificates of honours with which the scientist was decorated between 1892 and 1939.

Nikola Tesla’s best-known invention was Alternating Current . AC power permits electricity to be sent over extended distances much more efficiently.

Tesla’s AC patents were accepted by Westinghouse and used for the lighting of the Chicago World’s Fair. Tesla’s apparent essential skill for invention and profound imagination made him one of the most prolific inventors of our times. Clearly, his genius was unmatched in his time and perhaps ours.

Perhaps the most well-known symbol of Tesla’s work is the Tesla coil. It is a transformer that produces high-voltage, low-current, high-frequency alternating-current electricity.

A Tesla coil comprises a primary coil and secondary coil, each coil with its own capacitor to store electrical energy. A spark gap links both the coils and capacitors. The system is powered by a high-voltage source. As the current flows out of the capacitor down the primary coil, a magnetic field is created.

This field breaks down quickly and produces an electric current in the secondary coil. The subsequent high-frequency voltage can lighten fluorescent bulbs several feet away with no wire connection.

Watch Video :Charging By Induction

Tesla revealed that he could use his coils to transmit and receive powerful radio signals before his lab burned down. Tuning those radio signals to resonate at the same frequency radio signals could be sent and received. He was ready to convey a signal 50 miles from his lab to West Point, New York, by early 1895. But the fire in Tesla’s lab demolished his work.

Guglielmo Marconi (inventor of the wireless telegraph system) established long-distance demonstrations in the future, and he used a Tesla oscillator to spread the signals across the English Channel.

Tesla Turbine and Induction Motor

As a way to make a change in the world, Tesla saw the growth of piston engines in the automobile industry. Therefore, Tesla developed his own turbine engine that used the combustion process to rotate the disks.

With 90% of fuel efficiency, this engine was a significant achievement.

Also, Nikola Tesla and Galileo Ferraris independently invented the first AC commutator-free three-phase induction motor in 1885, and it was Tesla who filed for a patent first. This type of motor is generally used in vacuums, blow dryers, and power tools, even today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Define alternating current..

Alternating current is an electric current that periodically reverses direction, in contrast to DC which flows in only one direction.

Where is Nikola Tesla Tower located?

Shoreham, Long Island, Newyork

Nikola Tesla was most famous for which inventions?

Tesla Coil, Alternating Current (AC) and discovery of rotating magnetic field.

What is a Tesla Coil?

A form of Induction coil used for producing high-frequency alternating currents.

Which principle is responsible for the working of induction motor?

Electromagnetic Induction.

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History | Updated: April 24, 2024 | Originally Published: February 4, 2013

Nikola Tesla and the Tower That Became His ‘Million Dollar Folly’

The eccentric inventor’s dream of a wireless-transmission tower would prove to be his undoing

Gilbert King ; Updated by Sonja Anderson

By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian American physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent his days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him— pigeons —and his sleepless nights ruminating on mathematical equations and scientific problems. He designed and perfected his inventions in his head, a habit that would confound scientists and scholars for many years after his death.

Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison , who once hired him. If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, Tesla once said , “he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once, with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.”

But what his contemporaries may have been lacking in scientific talent (by Tesla’s estimation), they made up for in other ambitions. Inventors like Edison and George Westinghouse possessed one trait that Tesla did not: a mind for business. In the last days of America’s Gilded Age , Tesla made a dramatic attempt to change the future of communications and power transmission around the world. He managed to convince J.P. Morgan that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, and the financier gave Tesla more than $150,000 to fund what would become a gigantic, futuristic and startling tower in the middle of Long Island in New York. In 1898, as Tesla’s plans to create a worldwide wireless transmission system became known, Wardenclyffe Tower would be Tesla’s last chance to claim the recognition and wealth that had always escaped him.

The eccentric engineer

Nikola Tesla was born in modern-day Croatia in 1856. His mother , Đuka Tesla, was a hard-working caretaker of their home and farm; she developed small appliances to ease her labor, including a mechanical eggbeater, and Tesla later credited her for his inventiveness. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church . From an early age, Nikola Tesla demonstrated an obsessiveness that left those around him puzzled and amused. He could memorize entire books and store logarithmic tables in his brain. He picked up languages easily, and he could work through days and nights on only a few hours of sleep.

By age 19, he was studying electrical engineering at the Imperial and Royal Technical College in Graz, Austria, where he quickly established himself as a star student. He found himself in an ongoing debate with a professor over perceived design flaws in the direct-current (DC) motors that were being demonstrated in class.

He would spend the next six years of his life thinking about electromagnetic fields and a hypothetical motor powered by alternating current (AC). The ideas obsessed him, and he was unable to focus on his schoolwork. Professors at the university warned Tesla’s father that the young scholar’s working and sleeping habits were killing him. Rather than finishing his studies, Tesla dropped out of school during his third year in 1878. He became addicted to gambling, lost all his tuition money and suffered a nervous breakdown . It would not be his last.

After recovering, Tesla moved to Budapest to work as a draftsman in 1881. “I hated drawing,” he wrote , “It was for me the very worst of annoyances.” But one day, he was walking through a park with his new friend Antal Szigety , reciting verses from Goethe’s Faust , when an “idea came like a lightning flash.” And there in the park, with a stick, Tesla drew a crude diagram in the dirt: a motor using the principle of rotating magnetic fields created by two or more alternating currents. While AC electrification had been employed before, there would never be a practical, working motor run on alternating current until he invented his induction motor several years later.

Tesla’s rise to the top

In June 1884, Tesla sailed for New York City, arriving with four cents in his pocket and a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor —a former employer—to Edison, which was purported to say , “My Dear Edison: I know two great men and you are one of them. The other is this young man!”

A meeting was arranged, and once Tesla described the engineering work he was doing, Edison, though skeptical, hired him. According to Tesla, Edison offered him $50,000 if he could improve upon the DC generation plants Edison favored. Within a few months, Tesla informed the American inventor that he had indeed improved upon Edison’s motors. Edison, Tesla noted, refused to pay up. “When you become a full-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke,” Edison told him.

Tesla promptly quit and took a job digging ditches. But it wasn’t long before word got out that Tesla’s AC motor was worth investing in, and the Western Union Company put Tesla to work in a lab not far from Edison’s office, where he designed AC power systems that are still used around the world. “The motors I built there,” Tesla said, “were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision, and the operation was always as I expected.”

Tesla patented his AC motors and power systems, which were said to be the most valuable inventions since the telephone. Soon, Westinghouse, recognizing that Tesla’s designs might be just what he needed in his efforts to unseat Edison’s DC current, bought his patents for $60,000 in stocks, cash and royalties based on how much electricity Westinghouse could sell. Ultimately, he won the “ War of the Currents ,” but at a steep cost in litigation and competition for both Westinghouse and Edison’s General Electric Company .

Fearing ruin, Westinghouse begged Tesla for relief from the royalties he had agreed to. “Your decision determines the fate of the Westinghouse Company,” he said. Tesla, grateful to the man who had never tried to swindle him, tore up the royalty contract, walking away from millions of dollars in royalties that he was already owed and billions that would have accrued in the future. He would have been one of the wealthiest men in the world—a titan of the Gilded Age.

A ‘faint-hearted, doubting world’

Tesla’s work with electricity reflected just one facet of his fertile mind. Before the turn of the 20th century, Tesla had invented a powerful coil capable of generating high voltages and frequencies, leading to new forms of light, such as neon and fluorescent, as well as X-rays. Tesla also discovered that these coils, soon to be called “ Tesla coils ,” made it possible to send and receive radio signals. He quickly filed for American patents in 1897, beating the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi to the punch.

Tesla continued to work on his ideas for wireless transmissions, which he pitched to J.P. Morgan. After Morgan put up the $150,000 to build the giant transmission tower, Tesla promptly hired the noted architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead and White in New York . White, too, was smitten with Tesla’s idea. After all, this was the highly acclaimed man behind Westinghouse’s success with alternating current, and when Tesla talked, he was persuasive. As the inventor said at the time:

As soon as completed, it will be possible for a businessman in New York to dictate instructions and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind.

White got to work designing Wardenclyffe Tower in 1901 , but soon after construction began it became apparent that Tesla was going to run out of money too quickly. An appeal to Morgan for more funding proved fruitless, and in the meantime, investors were rushing to throw their money behind Marconi. In December 1901, the Italian inventor successfully sent a signal from England to Newfoundland, the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission . Tesla grumbled that Marconi was using 17 of his patents, but litigation eventually favored Marconi, and the commercial damage was done. (The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld Tesla’s claims, clarifying his role in the invention of the radio—but not until 1943, shortly after he died.) Thus, Marconi was credited as the inventor of radio and became rich. Wardenclyffe Tower became a 186-foot-tall relic (it would be razed in 1917 ) known as Tesla’s “ million dollar folly .” The defeat—his worst yet—led to another breakdown. “It is not a dream,” Tesla said, “it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive—blind, faint-hearted, doubting world!”

By 1912, Tesla began to withdraw from that doubting world. He was showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder . He became consumed with cleanliness and fixated on the number three: excessively washing his hands, counting his steps, staying only in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three and setting 18 napkins on his table during meals. He claimed to have an abnormal sensitivity to sounds, as well as an acute sense of sight, and he later wrote that he had “a violent aversion against the earrings of women,” and “the sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit.”

Near the end of his life, Tesla became fixated on pigeons, especially a specific white female, which he claimed to love almost as one would love a human being. Tesla said the white pigeon visited him through an open window at his hotel one night, and he believed the bird had come to tell him she was dying. He saw “two powerful beams of light” in the bird’s eyes, he recalled. “Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.” The pigeon died in his arms, and the inventor claimed that in that moment, he knew that he had finished his life’s work.

Throughout the following years, Tesla would make news from time to time, while living on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel . In 1931, he made the cover of Time magazine, which featured his inventions on his 75th birthday. And in 1934, the New York Times reported that Tesla was working on a “Death Beam” capable of knocking 10,000 enemy airplanes out of the sky. “When put in operation, Dr. Tesla said, this latest invention of his would make war impossible,” surrounding countries like an impenetrable, invisible wall, the Times reported. He hoped to fund the prototypical defensive weapon in the interest of world peace, but Tesla’s appeals to J.P. Morgan Jr. and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went nowhere. The Soviet Union did fund his investigations of beam weapons in 1939, to the tune of $25,000, but the project languished.

Though the inventor’s genius had forever changed the world of electrical engineering, Tesla’s final days were clouded by his business and social ineptitudes. He died at age 86, in debt, though Westinghouse had been paying his room and board at the hotel for years.

Additional Sources “ Reflections on the Mind of Nikola Tesla ” by R. (Chandra) Chandrasekhar Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney (1981) “ The Cult of Nikola Tesla ” by Brian Dunning “ Tesla: Live and Legacy, Tower of Dreams ,” PBS My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla by Nikola Tesla (1982) “ The Future of Wireless Art ” by Nikola Tesla “ The Problem of Increasing Human Energy With Special References to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy ” by Nikola Tesla “Nikola Tesla, History of Technology, The Famous Inventors Worldwide” by David S. Zondy

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How did Nikola Tesla change the way we use energy?

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When you flip a switch and a lamp bathes the room in light, you probably don't give much thought to how it works -- or to the people who made it all possible. If you were forced to acknowledge the genius behind the lamp, you might name Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the incandescent light bulb. But just as influential -- perhaps more so -- was a visionary named Nikola Tesla .

Tesla arrived in the United States in 1884, at the age of 28, and by 1887 had filed for a series of patents that described everything necessary to generate electricity using alternating current , or AC. To understand the significance of these inventions, you have to understand what the field of electrical generation was like at the end of the 19th century. It was a war of currents -- with Tesla acting as one general and Edison acting as the opposing general.

The State of Electricity in 1885

Edison unveiled his electric incandescent lamp to the public in January 1880. Soon thereafter, his newly devised power system was installed in the First District of New York City . When Edison flipped the switch during a public demonstration of the system in 1881, electric lights twinkled on -- and unleashed an unprecedented demand for this brand-new technology. Although Edison's early installations called for underground wiring, demand was so great that parts of the city received their electricity on exposed wires hung from wooden crossbeams. By 1885, avoiding electrical hazards had become an everyday part of city life, so much so that Brooklyn named its baseball team the Dodgers because its residents commonly dodged shocks from electrically powered trolley tracks [source: PBS ].

The Edison system used direct current , or DC. Direct current always flows in one direction and is created by DC generators. Edison was a staunch supporter of DC, but it had limitations. The biggest was the fact that DC was difficult to transmit economically over long distances. Edison knew that alternating current didn't have this limitation, yet he didn't think AC a feasible solution for commercial power systems. Elihu Thomson, one of the principals of Thomson-Houston and a competitor of Edison, believed otherwise. In 1885, Thomson sketched a basic AC system that relied on high-voltage transmission lines to carry power far from where it was generated. Thomson's sketch also indicated the need for a technology to step down the voltage at the point of use. Known as a transformer , this technology would not be fully developed for commercial use until Westinghouse Electric Company did so in 1886.

Even with the development of the transformer and several successful tests of AC power systems, there was an important missing link. That link was the AC motor. On the next page, we'll look at how Tesla made the connection.

Tesla's Spark of Genius

How did nikola tesla change the way we use energy: author's note, nikola tesla change the way we use energy: cheat sheet.

While Edison toiled to commercialize his electric lamp, Tesla worked through a problem that had intrigued him since he was a student at the Joanneum Polytechnic School in Graz, Austria. While a student there, Tesla saw a demonstration of a Gramme dynamo . A dynamo is a generator that uses a commutator -- contacts mounted on the machine's shaft -- to produce direct current instead of alternating current. Tesla mentioned to his instructor that it might be possible to do away with the commutator, which sparked horribly as the dynamo operated. This suggestion brought ridicule from his teacher, but it captured Tesla's imagination.

In 1881, Tesla had an inspired idea: What if one were to change the magnetic field in the stator of a dynamo instead of altering the magnetic poles of the rotor? This was a revolutionary concept that turned convention on its head. In a traditional dynamo, the stationary stator provides a constant magnetic field, while a set of rotating windings -- the rotor -- turns within that field. Tesla saw that if this arrangement were reversed, the commutator could be eliminated.

Of course, bringing this idea to reality would take years of work. Tesla began in 1882 while employed at Continental Edison Company in Paris. During the day, he would install incandescent lighting systems based on Edison's DC power system. In his spare time, he would experiment with AC motor designs. This went on for two years, until Tesla transferred to the Edison Machine Works in New York City. By some accounts, Tesla described his ideas about AC to the famed American inventor, but Edison showed no interest. Instead, he had Tesla make improvements to existing DC generation plants. Tesla did so, only to be disappointed when Edison failed to pay him properly. Tesla quit, and the paths of the two men diverged permanently.

After digging ditches and getting caught in a bad business deal, Tesla finally received financial backing from Charles Peck, an attorney, and Alfred S. Brown, a superintendent at Western Union. Peck and Brown helped Tesla establish a laboratory just a few blocks away from Edison's lab in Manhattan, and encouraged the young engineer to perfect his AC motor. Tesla did just that, building what would become known as a polyphase induction motor . The term polyphase refers to a motor based on multiple alternating currents, not just one. The term induction refers to the process whereby the rotating stator magnets induce current flow in the rotor. Tesla's original motor was a two-phase version that featured a stator with two pairs of magnets , one pair for each of two phases of AC.

In 1887, Tesla filed for seven U.S. patents describing a complete AC system based on his induction motor and including generators, transformers, transmission lines and lighting. A few months later, Tesla delivered a lecture about his revolutionary new system to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. The lecture caused a sensation and, despite an anti-AC campaign initiated by Edison, convinced many experts that an AC power system was more than just feasible -- it was far superior to DC.

To bring a good idea to market, it takes some clout. In this case, the clout came from an inventor who made a fortune in the railroad industry. Read more about his support of Tesla's work on the next page.

George Westinghouse, whose own electric company was struggling to work out the details of a successful AC power system, heard about Tesla's 1888 lecture and immediately was intrigued. When Peck and Brown approached Westinghouse about commercializing Tesla's inventions, the entrepreneur responsible for the railroad air brake made a generous offer. He agreed to pay $25,000 in cash, as well as $50,000 in notes and a small royalty for each horsepower of electricity originating from the motor.

Westinghouse carried Tesla's inventions back to Pittsburgh, Penn., where he hoped to use the technology to power the city's streetcars. Tesla followed, and as an employee of the Westinghouse Electric Company, consulted on the implementation. The project didn't proceed smoothly, and Tesla frequently battled with Westinghouse engineers. Eventually, however, everyone pulled together to come up with just the right formula: an AC system based on three-phase, 60-cycle current. Today, almost all power companies in the United States and Canada supply 60-cycle current, which means the AC completes 60 changes of direction in one second. This is known as the frequency of the system.

By the early 1890s, Edison and the supporters of DC felt genuinely threatened. They continued to make claims that AC was dangerous and pointed to a disastrous electrocution attempt in 1890 as evidence. But they suffered a severe blow in 1893, when Westinghouse won the bid to illuminate the Chicago World's Fair. His competition was General Electric (GE), the company formed by the merger between Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston. GE was the leading torchbearer for DC-based power. Westinghouse won the bid on cost, but when President Grover Cleveland flipped a switch to light 100,000 incandescent lamps across the fairgrounds, very few doubted the superiority of AC power.

Westinghouse mollified many remaining doubters in 1895 by designing a hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls that incorporated all of the advances made in AC. At first, the plant only supplied power to Buffalo, New York. But it wasn't long before power was being transmitted to New York City, helping to cement Broadway as the Great White Way in the public imagination.

By this time, Tesla had withdrawn from the day-to-day details of power plants and practical implementations of AC. He had moved back to New York City, where he opened a new lab in which he could explore other ideas, machines and devices. Many of these inventions were not related to power generation or electricity. But his impact on the field of electrical engineering was enormous. In fact, it can be said that Tesla's AC motor and polyphase AC system won the war of currents because they form the basis of all modern power generation and distribution. However, direct current -- Edison's baby -- didn't disappear completely. It still operates automobile electrical systems, locomotives and some types of motors.

For more information on electricity and other illuminating ideas, visit the links on the next page. 

When I was a kid, "Schoolhouse Rock" sang its lessons from the TV every Saturday morning. Remember the one about Mother Necessity? The one about America's great inventors: Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell and, of course, Thomas Edison. Funny that Nikola Tesla didn't make an appearance. Then again, one thing that strikes you as you read about Tesla and the great electricity wars of the late 19th century is just how ruthless the major players could be. After all, there was a lot at stake, like who was going to get rich from wiring the entire nation. Edison may have been a great inventor, but he wasn't always nice, and he didn't always play fair. In many ways, he tried to muscle Tesla out of the way to make sure his model of DC power generation -- and his reputation -- remained firmly planted in the public's mind.

The other thing that struck me as I wrote about this time in American history was not the coming light, but the darkness. Before engineers wired New York City and incandescent bulbs blazed from every corner, the streets must have been dark, dark places, even with gas lamps. A late-night walk at the turn of the century would have brought a touch of fear to even the bravest souls. And only when the lights finally came on could the great Gotham become what it always aspired to be -- The City That Never Sleeps.

• Carlson, W. Bernard. "Inventor of Dreams." Scientific American. March 2005.
• Cheney, Margaret. "Tesla: Man Out of Time." Simon & Schuster. New York. 1981.
• Encyclopedia Britannica 2005. "Tesla, Nikola." CD-ROM, 2005.
• General Electric. "Thomas Edison & GE." http://www.ge.com/company/history/edison.html
• Klein, Maury. "The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America." Bloomsbury Press. New York. 2008.
• PBS. "Tesla: Master of Lightning" http://www.pbs.org/tesla/
• World Book 2005. "electric current."
• World Book 2005. "Tesla, Nikola."

Stuff You Need to Know:

• In the late 19th century, two competing systems existed to generate electricity: direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC).
• Thomas Edison was a staunch supporter of DC power generation, but it could not be transmitted economically over long distances.
• Nikola Tesla, who immigrated to the United States in 1884, believed in AC power generation.
• Tesla invented the polyphase induction motor and, with it, ushered in what some have called the Second Industrial Revolution.
• Just three years after arriving in America, Tesla filed for seven U.S. patents describing a complete AC system based on his induction motor.

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Nikola Tesla

Introduction.

Nikola Tesla was born on July 9 or 10, 1856, in Smiljan, Austria-Hungary (now Croatia). His parents were Serbian. Nikola was an excellent student who easily memorized books and solved math problems. He studied electricity in college.

In 1880 Tesla graduated from the University of Prague. In 1882 Tesla discovered a type of current, or flow of electricity. It was different from the type being used in the world’s first two electric power stations, which opened that year. Both stations used direct current (DC), which could not change direction. However, Tesla’s alternating current (AC) could. Tesla built his first AC motor in 1883.

In 1884 Tesla moved to the United States. He worked for the renowned inventor Thomas Edison . Unlike Tesla, Edison preferred DC to AC. After two years Tesla left Edison’s laboratory.

In 1887 Tesla opened a laboratory in New York City. The next year he sold his AC idea to George Westinghouse, head of Westinghouse Electric Company. By 1891 he had invented the Tesla coil, which was widely used for many years in radios, television sets, and other electronic equipment. Tesla became a U.S. citizen in 1891.

In 1893 AC power was used to light the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. People started to agree that AC worked better than DC over distances. By 1896 Tesla and Westinghouse had constructed an AC power station that was driven by the energy of Niagara Falls.

Tesla died in New York City on January 7, 1943. The Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, was founded in his honor.

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Nikola Tesla, a man of his time

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Richard Bradley; Nikola Tesla, a man of his time. Physics Today 1 March 2020; 73 (3): 51–52. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4432

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Today, a futuristic electric car carries the name Tesla in honor of a man who, more than a century ago, imagined transforming the world. Nikola Tesla was an electrical engineer notable for his innovative work on alternating current (AC) power distribution systems, polyphase motors, and induction coils. Many biographies of Tesla written after his death in 1943, such as Margaret Cheney’s Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981), paint him as an esoteric genius and a neglected underdog out of step with the cutthroat entrepreneurial culture of the Victorian era. Is this a true portrait of the man or a caricature?

An 1899 promotional photograph of Nikola Tesla with an inscription for English physicist William Crookes.

In Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future , historian of science Iwan Rhys Morus examines this “man of apparent contradictions” in the context of the cultural and technological revolutions of the late 19th century. The book includes an extensive bibliography and endnotes; the author clearly is an authority on the history of electrical technology. Morus convincingly dispels the image of Tesla as a man out of time and replaces it with a more realistic view of a brilliant inventor who was nevertheless the product of his era, his interests and activities shaped by the world in which he lived.

Morus’s journey into the world of Nikola Tesla has five parts. The first, “The Electrical Century,” describes how the Industrial Revolution influenced Tesla from his early childhood in Croatia through his college years and up to his first job at Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb factory in Paris. Part 2, “Battle of the Systems,” recounts Tesla’s decision to come to the US to work in Edison’s laboratory. Tesla had viewed Edison as a hero, but that hero worship quickly soured and was replaced by a new conviction that he alone was responsible for his destiny as an inventor.

Morus delves into the famous AC/DC controversy, which pitted Edison’s preferred direct current (DC) distribution against Tesla’s more stable AC system, and explains the roles that both Tesla and businessman George Westinghouse played in the conflict with Edison. Although Edison initially gained ground by instilling unwarranted fear in the public’s eye about the dangers of AC, its technological superiority, lower cost, and more manageable safety risks would eventually enable AC systems to flourish.

In part 3, “Scientific Showman,” Morus examines Tesla’s epiphany that being an inventor required business savvy and self-promotional efforts in addition to new ideas. The author describes Tesla’s involvement with a successful hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls in New York and his public lectures at international exhibitions where he became known as a master showman, able to exploit the power of spectacle to promote his ideas. However, Tesla’s dream of limitless power distribution and worldwide communications via Earth’s crust, as Morus shows in part 4, “Selling the Future,” ended in dismal failure when his massive communications tower, the Wardenclyffe, failed to produce the breakthroughs for which he had hoped. The book concludes with an examination of Tesla’s life, his prognostications, and his posthumous image in the final part, “Visions of Tomorrow.”

Morus’s argument that Tesla was a product of his time is carefully developed and supported with clear and convincing evidence. Tesla lived in a world where the wonders of electricity appeared boundless. The grand exhibitions of the day provided a glimpse into the future for everyone to see, and larger-than-life personalities like Edison were the iconic figures whom many, including Tesla, sought to emulate. But Tesla quickly discovered that he wasn’t the type of person who collaborated well with others—he wanted to control the outcome of his visions. Succeeding as an inventor, however, required him not just to make new things, but to sell a vision of the future to those who had the money to back him. Morus shows the reader how Tesla learned from his experiences and crafted an image as an iconic, eccentric inventor through his showmanship and connections with the media.

Morus emphasizes that Tesla was a great inventor with a gift for visualizing new apparatuses and accurately imagining how a new instrument would work in response to various stimuli. But Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future also shows that the man was not a traditional scientist or engineer. He appreciated only his version of the future and downplayed major breakthroughs by others; for instance, he dismissed the “illusion of Hertzian waves” and declared that “there is no such element as Radium.” Furthermore, although Tesla’s visions always held great promise for the future of society, they often lacked the details necessary to make his imagined future a reality.

Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future is not simply another biography of Tesla, but rather, a scholarly study of him in the context of his place and time. In a seamless and comprehensive narrative, Morus successfully weaves together Tesla’s personal life with the cultural influences that shaped it and illuminates a very complex person. The clear and engaging writing is a pleasure to read. Although the book was written for a general audience, it would also serve nicely as supplemental reading in a course on the history of technology.

Morus concludes the book by examining how our ideas about the art of invention have and have not changed since Tesla’s day. The melding of invention with business has strengthened over the years, while the role of individualism has waned. Nonetheless, inventiveness—the cornerstone of Tesla’s life and afterlife—can have far-reaching and perhaps unintended consequences. There is an important lesson here for all of us.

Richard Bradley is a scientist and senior research engineer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also holds adjunct positions in the departments of astronomy and electrical engineering at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on the development of advanced instrumentation for hydrogen-based cosmology studies of the early universe. Bradley is a fellow of the International Union of Radio Science and an associate editor of Radio Science .

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Nikola Tesla's Archive

Nikola Tesla's Archive consists of a unique collection of manuscripts, photographs, scientific and patent documentation which is indispensable in studying the history of electrification of the whole Globe.  Nikola Tesla, (1856 - 1943) Serbian-born, American inventor and scientist, a pioneer in electrification, significantly influenced the technological development of our civilization by his polyphase system inventions. This system is the cornerstone of modern electro-energetic system of production, long distance transmission and usage of electrical currents, electricity and communication.  Since the beginning of its exploitation towards the end of last century up to now, the polyphase system, together with the asynchronous motor, has been perfected and improved to a remarkable and hitherto unconceivable dimensions.  He is credited as being a very imaginative scientist whose ideas were paths to many important discoveries without which our civilization would lack many of its technological comforts (radio, radar, television, motors of all kinds, high frequency fields, coils, computers). Some of his ideas are still to be realized.  Way ahead of his time, he was one of the first to become aware of the emerging energy problem (1900) as a conclusion of his famous experiments in Colorado Springs (1899-1900).  In his honour, the magnetic induction unit (tesla) of the SI system is named after him.  Simply speaking, the collection documents the most important era of the history of development of the modern world, which, thanks to the Tesla system, made easy energy production and distribution possible.

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The Mystery of Nikola Tesla’s Missing Files

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: June 1, 2023 | Original: May 3, 2018

After Nikola Tesla was found dead in January 1943 in his hotel room in New York City, representatives of the U.S. government’s Office of Alien Property seized many documents relating to the brilliant and prolific 86-year-old inventor’s work.

It was the height of World War II, and Tesla had claimed to have invented a powerful particle-beam weapon, known as the “Death Ray,” that could have proved invaluable in the ongoing conflict. So rather than risk Tesla’s technology falling into the hands of America’s enemies, the government swooped in and took possession of all the property and documents from his room at the New Yorker Hotel.

What happened to Tesla’s files from there, as well as what exactly was in those files, remains shrouded in mystery—and ripe for conspiracy theories. After years of fielding questions about possible cover-ups, the FBI finally declassified  some 250 pages of Tesla-related documents under the Freedom of Information Act in 2016. The bureau followed up with two additional releases, the latest in March 2018. But even with the publication of these documents, many questions still remain unanswered—and some of Tesla’s files are still missing.

Three weeks after the Serbian-American inventor’s death, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was tasked with evaluating his papers to determine whether they contained “any ideas of significant value.” According to the declassified files, Dr. John G. Trump reported that his analysis showed Tesla’s efforts to be “primarily of a speculative, philosophical and promotional character” and said the papers did “not include new sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

The scientist’s name undoubtedly rings a bell, as John G. Trump was the uncle of the 45th U.S. president, Donald J. Trump. The younger brother of Trump’s father, Fred, he helped design X-ray machines that greatly helped cancer patients and worked on radar research for the Allies during World War II. Donald Trump himself cited his uncle’s credentials often during his presidential campaign. “My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear,” he once told  an interviewer.

At the time, the FBI pointed to Dr. Trump’s report as evidence that Tesla’s vaunted “Death Ray” particle beam weapon didn’t exist, outside of rumors and speculation. But in fact, the U.S. government itself was split in its response to Tesla’s technology. Marc Seifer, author of the biography Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla , says a group of military personnel at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, including Brigadier General L.C. Craigee, had a very different opinion of Tesla’s ideas.

“Craigee was the first person to ever fly a jet plane for the military, so he was like the John Glenn of the day,” Seifer says. “He said, ‘there’s something to this—the particle beam weapon is real.’ So you have two different groups, one group dismissing Tesla’s invention, and another group saying there’s really something to it.”  

Then there’s the nagging question of the missing files. When Tesla died, his estate was to go to his nephew, Sava Kosanovic, who at the time was the Yugoslav ambassador to the U.S. (thanks to his familial connection with Serbia’s most celebrated inventor). According to the recently declassified documents, some in the FBI feared Kosanovic was trying to wrest control of Tesla’s technology in order to “make such information available to the enemy,” and even considered arresting him to prevent this.

In 1952, after a U.S. court declared Kosanovic the rightful heir to his uncle’s estate, Tesla’s files and other materials were sent to Belgrade, Serbia, where they now reside in the Nikola Tesla Museum there. But while the FBI originally recorded some 80 trunks among Tesla’s effects, only 60 arrived in Belgrade, Seifer says. “Maybe they packed the 80 into 60, but there is the possibility that…the government did keep the missing trunks.”  

For the five-part HISTORY series The Tesla Files , Seifer joined forces with Dr. Travis Taylor, an astrophysicist, and Jason Stapleton, an investigative reporter, to search for these missing files and seek out the truth of the government’s views on the “Death Ray” particle-beam weapon and Tesla’s other ideas.

Despite John G. Trump’s dismissive assessment of Tesla’s ideas immediately after his death, the military did try and incorporate particle-beam weaponry in the decades following World War II, Seifer says. Notably, the inspiration of the “Death Ray” fueled Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program, in the 1980s. If the government is still using Tesla’s ideas to power its technology, Seifer explains, that could explain why some files related to the inventor still remain classified.

There is evidence that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, discussed “the effects of TESLA, particularly those dealing with the wireless transmission of electrical energy and the ‘death ray’” with his advisors, according to FBI documents released in 2016. Along the same lines, Seifer and his colleagues in  The Tesla Files  uncovered the role played by Vannevar Bush, whom FDR appointed as head of the  Manhattan Project , in the evaluation of Tesla’s papers. They also looked at the possibility that FDR himself may have sought a meeting with the inventor just before he died.

By visiting some of the key places in Tesla’s life—from his laboratory in Colorado Springs to his last living quarters at the Hotel New Yorker to the mysterious wireless tower he built at Wardenclyffe, Long Island—Seifer, Taylor and Stapleton sought to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding the celebrated, enigmatic inventor. They also traveled to California, where some of Tesla’s other groundbreaking ideas —many of which were seen as unrealistic or even crackpot during his own lifetime—now fuel some of the most dominant industries in Silicon Valley.

Although some of his more sensitive innovations may still be hidden, Tesla’s legacy is alive and well, both in the devices we use every day, and the technologies that will undoubtedly play a role in our future. “Tesla is the inventor of wireless technology. He’s the inventor of the ability to create an unlimited number of wireless channels,” Seifer says of the inventor’s lasting impact. “So radio guidance systems, encryption, remote control robots—it’s all based on Tesla’s technology.”

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Nikola Tesla: The extraordinary life of a modern Prometheus

Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University

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Match the following figures – Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, Alfred Nobel and Nikola Tesla – with these biographical facts:

• Spoke eight languages
• Produced the first motor that ran on AC current
• Developed the underlying technology for wireless communication over long distances
• Held approximately 300 patents
• Claimed to have developed a “superweapon” that would end all war

The match for each, of course, is Tesla. Surprised? Most people have heard his name, but few know much about his place in modern science and technology .

The opening of a new biopic of Tesla provides a timely opportunity to review the life of a man who came from nowhere yet became world famous; claimed to be devoted solely to discovery but relished the role of a showman; attracted the attention of many women but never married; and generated ideas that transformed daily life and created multiple fortunes but died nearly penniless.

Early years

Tesla was born in what is now Croatia on a summer night in 1856, during what he claimed was a lightning storm – which led the midwife to say, “He will be a child of the storm,” and his mother to counter prophetically, “No, of the light.” As a student, Tesla displayed such remarkable abilities to calculate mathematical problems that teachers accused him of cheating. During his teen years, he fell seriously ill, recovering once his father abandoned his demand that Nikola become a priest and agreed he could attend engineering school instead.

Although an outstanding student, Tesla eventually withdrew from polytechnic school and ended up working for the Continental Edison Company , where he focused on electrical lighting and motors. Wishing to meet Edison himself, Tesla immigrated to the U.S. in 1884, and he later claimed he was offered the sum of US$50,000 if he could solve a series of engineering problems Edison’s company faced. Having achieved the feat, Tesla said he was then told that the offer had just been a joke, and he left the company after six months.

Tesla then developed a relationship with two businessmen that led to the founding of Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing . He filed a number of electrical patents, which he assigned to the company. When his partners decided that they wanted to focus strictly on supplying electricity, they took the company’s intellectual property and founded another firm, leaving Tesla with nothing.

Tesla reported that he then worked as a ditch digger for $2 a day, tortured by the sense that his great talent and education were going to waste.

Success as an inventor

In 1887, Tesla met two investors who agreed to back the formation of the Tesla Electric Company. He set up a laboratory in Manhattan, where he developed the alternating current induction motor , which solved a number of technical problems that had bedeviled other designs. When Tesla demonstrated his device at an engineering meeting, the Westinghouse Company made arrangements to license the technology, providing an upfront payment and royalties on each horsepower generated.

The so-called “ War of the Currents ” was raging in the late 1880s. Thomas Edison promoted direct current, asserting that it was safer than AC. George Westinghouse backed AC, since it could transmit power over long distances. Because the two were undercutting each other’s prices, Westinghouse lacked capital. He explained the difficulty and asked Tesla to sell his patents to him for a single lump sum, to which Tesla agreed, forgoing what would have been a vast fortune had he held on to them.

With the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 looming in Chicago, Westinghouse asked Tesla to help supply power; they’d have a huge platform for demonstrating the merits of AC. Tesla helped the fair illuminate more light bulbs than could be found in the entire city of Chicago, and wowed audiences with a variety of wonders, including an electric light that required no wires. Later Tesla also helped Westinghouse win a contract to generate electrical power at Niagara Falls , helping to build the first large-scale AC power plant in the world.

Challenges along the way

Tesla encountered many obstacles. In 1895, his Manhattan laboratory was devastated by a fire, which destroyed his notes and prototypes. At Madison Square Garden in 1898, he demonstrated wireless control of a boat, a stunt that many branded a hoax. Soon after he turned his attention to the wireless transmission of electric power. He believed that his system could not only distribute electricity around the globe but also provide for worldwide wireless communication.

Seeking to test his ideas, Tesla built a laboratory in Colorado Springs . There he once drew so much power that he caused a regional power outage. He also detected signals that he claimed emanated from an extraterrestrial source. In 1901 Tesla persuaded J.P. Morgan to invest in the construction of a tower on Long Island that he believed would vindicate his plan to electrify the world. Yet Tesla’s dream did not materialize, and Morgan soon withdrew funding.

In 1909, Marconi received the Nobel Prize for the development of radio. In 1915, Tesla unsuccessfully sued Marconi, claiming infringement on his patents. That same year, it was rumored that Edison and Tesla would share the Nobel Prize, but it didn’t happen. Unsubstantiated speculation suggested their mutual animosity was the cause. However, Tesla did receive numerous honors and awards over his life, including, ironically, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers Edison Medal .

A singular man

Tesla was a remarkable person . He said that he had a photographic memory, which helped him memorize whole books and speak eight languages. He also claimed that many of his best ideas came to him in a flash, and that he saw detailed pictures of many of his inventions in his mind before he ever set about constructing prototypes. As a result, he didn’t initially prepare drawings and plans for many of his devices.

The 6-foot-2-inch Tesla cut a dashing figure and was popular with women, though he never married, claiming that his celibacy played an important role in his creativity . Perhaps because of his nearly fatal illness as a teenager, he feared germs and practiced very strict hygiene, likely a barrier to the development of interpersonal relationships. He also exhibited unusual phobias, such as an aversion to pearls, which led him to refuse to speak to any woman wearing them.

Tesla held that his greatest ideas came to him in solitude. Yet he was no hermit, socializing with many of the most famous people of his day at elegant dinner parties he hosted. Mark Twain frequented his laboratory and promoted some of his inventions. Tesla enjoyed a reputation as not only a great engineer and inventor but also a philosopher, poet and connoisseur. On his 75th birthday he received a congratulatory letter from Einstein and was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Tesla’s last years

In the popular imagination, Tesla played the part of a mad scientist . He claimed that he had developed a motor that ran on cosmic rays; that he was working on a new non-Einsteinian physics that would supply a new form of energy; that he had discovered a new technique for photographing thoughts; and that he had developed a new ray, alternately labeled the death ray and the peace ray, with vastly greater military potential than Nobel’s munitions.

His money long gone, Tesla spent his later years moving from place to place, leaving behind unpaid bills. Eventually, he settled in at a New York hotel, where his rent was paid by Westinghouse. Always living alone, he frequented the local park, where he was regularly seen feeding and tending to the pigeons , with which he claimed to share a special affinity. On the morning of Jan. 7, 1943, he was found dead in his room by a hotel maid at age 86.

Today the name Tesla is still very much in circulation. The airport in Belgrade bears his name, as does the world’s best-known electric car, and the magnetic field strength of MRI scanners is measured in Teslas. Tesla was a real-life Prometheus: the mythical Greek titan who raided heaven to bring fire to mankind, yet in punishment was chained to a rock where each day an eagle ate his liver. Tesla scaled great heights to bring lightning down to earth, yet his rare cast of mind and uncommon habits eventually led to his downfall, leaving him nearly penniless and alone.

This article has been updated to correct Tesla’s birthplace. Though he was of Serbian ethnicity, he was born in present day Croatia.

• Electricity
• History of science
• Thomas Edison
• Nikola Tesla

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Archival Collections

Collection overview, collection contents, nikola tesla papers, 1894-1931, summary information, at a glance.

Legacy Finding aid

This collection is located on-site.

Use of microfilm is required for Boxes 1-6. CCR. 2021-05-19.

Description

Correspondence of Nikola Tesla and Robert Underwood Johnson include letters of Tesla to Johnson's wife and daughter, clippings, photographs, and miscellaneous materials. Letters to George Scherff, 1902-1930, and others, manuscripts, printed articles, patents, and brochures. The material is of a technical nature and the letters deal primarily with Tesla's work on transformers, turbines, steam and gas oscillators, compressors, pumps, induction motors, and wireless transmitters. Also, printed materials by and about Tesla, including DR. NIKOLA TESLA BIBLIOGRAPHY (1979) by John T. Ratzlaff and Leland I. Anderson; and published selections from diary entries, correspondence, patents, and patent wrappers by Tesla published by the Tesla Book Company. There is also a videotape cassette "Nikola Tesla the Genius Who Lit the World".

• Nikola Tesla papers

Arrangement

Selected materials cataloged; remainder arranged. Arranged by material type. Cataloged correspondence arranged chronologically.

Using the Collection

Other finding aids, restrictions on access.

You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.

Terms Governing Use and Reproduction

Reproductions may be made for research purposes. The RBML maintains ownership of the physical material only. Copyright remains with the creator and his/her heirs. The responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.

Preferred Citation

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Nikola Tesla papers; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

Related Material - at Columbia University

Robert Underwood Johnson Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Materials may have been added to the collection since this finding aid was prepared. Contact [email protected] for more information.

Alternate Form Available

Microfilm is available for Boxes 1-6. See MN# 3840-3843.

Custodial History

1961: purchase of Robert U. Johnson correspondence, 1894-1931, from Agnes Holden, Johnson's daughter (6 boxes, with others types of material). 1962: purchase of Tesla/Johnson letters, 1895-1903, 1930, from Walter Benjamin Autographs; Lillian M. McChesney was the source of origin (28 items). 1962: purchase of articles on Tesla from Erik Monberg. 1962: gift of 80th birthday commemoration from Richard MacGraw. 1963: purchase of letters from Walter Benjamin Autographs (15 items). 1963: gift of memorial volumes from Veljko Korac. 1969: purchase of letters to George Scherff, 1902-1930, from Walter Benjamin Autographs (142 letters, misc papers and photos). 1970: purchase of Johnson and Scherff letters from Leland I. Anderson (32 and 44 letters, respectively). 1981: Ratzlaff photographs. 1993: Videotape given by the Tesla Memorial Society. 1996: purchase of 5 letters from Swann Galleries.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Source of acquisition--07285H. Method of acquisition--Purchase on the Friends' Book Account; Date of acquisition--1961. Accession number--M-61.

Source of acquisition--Ratzlaff, John T. and Tesla Book Company. Method of acquisition--Gift; Date of acquisition--1981. Accession number--M-81.

Vidoetape cassette: Source of acquisition--Tesla Memorial Society. Method of acquisition--Gift; Date of acquisition--10/19/1993. Accession number--M-93-10-19.

7 Tesla letters: Source of acquisition--6731B (Smith) and 4019B (Duplicates). Method of acquisition--Purchase; Date of acquisition--07/16/1996. Accession number--M-96-07-16.

About the Finding Aid / Processing Information

Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Processing Information

Cataloged Christina Hilton Fenn 09/--/1989.

Cataloged Lynn A. Grove 03/--/1990.

Vidoetape cassette Processed HR 10/19/1993.

7 Tesla letters Cataloged HR 06/13/1997.

Revision Description

April 2020 PDF replaced with full finding aid, YH

2021-05-21 Added additional information on microfilm and access restrictions. CCR.

Biographical / Historical

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was an electrician and inventor.

Robert Underwood Johnson (1843-1938) was an editor and author.

Subject Headings

The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches for other collections at Columbia University, through CLIO , the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, and through ArchiveGRID , a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.

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