NIKOLA
TESLA - BIOGRAPHY
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Aug
7, 2017
Unesoft
Nikola
Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother
managed the family’s farm. In 1863 Tesla’s brother Daniel was killed in a
riding accident. The shock of the loss unsettled the 7-year-old Tesla, who
reported seeing visions—the first signs of his lifelong mental illnesses.
Tesla
studied math and physics at the Technical University of Graz and philosophy at
the University of Prague. In 1882, while on a walk, he came up with the idea
for a brushless AC motor, making the first sketches of its rotating
electromagnets in the sand of the path. Later that year he moved to Paris and
got a job repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison
Company. Two years later he immigrated to the United States.
NIKOLA
TESLA AND THOMAS EDISON
Tesla
arrived in New York in 1884 and was hired as an engineer at Thomas Edison’s
Manhattan headquarters. He worked there for a year, impressing Edison with his
diligence and ingenuity. At one point Edison told Tesla he would pay $50,000
for an improved design for his DC dynamos. After months of experimentation,
Tesla presented a solution and asked for the money. Edison demurred, saying,
“Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.” Tesla quit soon after.
NIKOLA
TESLA AND WESTINGHOUSE
After
an unsuccessful attempt to start his own Tesla Electric Light Company and a
stint digging ditches for $2 a day, Tesla found backers to support his research
into alternating current. In 1887 and 1888 he was granted more than 30 patents
for his inventions and invited to address the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers on his work. His lecture caught the attention of George Westinghouse,
the inventor who had launched the first AC power system near Boston and was
Edison’s major competitor in the “Battle of the Currents.”
Westinghouse
hired Tesla, licensed the patents for his AC motor and gave him his own lab. In
1889 Edison arranged for a convicted New York murderer to be put to death in an
AC-powered electric chair—a stunt designed to show how dangerous the
Westinghouse standard could be.
Buoyed
by Westinghouse’s royalties, Tesla struck out on his own again. But
Westinghouse was soon forced by his backers to renegotiate their contract, with
Tesla relinquishing his royalty rights.
In
the 1890s Tesla invented electric oscillators, meters, improved lights and the
high-voltage transformer known as the Tesla coil. He also experimented with
X-rays, gave short-range demonstrations of radio communication two years before
Guglielmo Marconi and piloted a radio-controlled boat around a pool in Madison
Square Garden. Together, Tesla and Westinghouse lit the 1891 World’s Columbian
Exposition in Chicago and partnered with General Electric to install AC
generators at Niagara Falls, creating the first modern power station.
NIKOLA
TESLA’S FAILURES, DEATH AND LEGACY
In
1895 Tesla’s New York lab burned, destroying years’ worth of notes and
equipment. Tesla relocated to Colorado Springs for two years, returning to New
York in 1900. He secured backing from financier J.P. Morgan and began building
a global communications network centered on a giant tower at Wardenclyffe, on
Long Island. But funds ran out and Morgan balked at Tesla’s grandiose schemes.
Tesla
lived his last decades in a New York hotel, working on new inventions even as
his energy and mental health faded. His obsession with the number three and
fastidious washing were dismissed as the eccentricities of genius. He spent his
final years feeding—and, he claimed, communicating with—the city’s pigeons.
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