In the age of Edison, Westinghouse, Marconi and J. P. Morgan, Tesla was a giant of innovation because of his contributions in the fields of electricity, radio and robotics. Tesla was born July 10, 1856 in Croatia on a summer night 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.
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.
George Westinghouse provided funding for Tesla’s A.C. induction motors and devices, which soon came to dominate manufacturing and urban life. Unlike the D.C. motors of the time, Tesla’s motors didn’t create sparks or require expensive permanent magnets to operate. Instead, they used a rotating magnetic field that used power more efficiently in a basic design that is still the core of most electric motors.
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.
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.
Tesla’s achievements were awesome but incomplete. He created the A.C. energy system and the basics of radio communication and robotics but wasn’t able to bring them all to fruition. His life shows that even for a brilliant inventor, innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires a broad spectrum of talents and skills. And lots of capital.
Tesla’s legacy includes the first working large-scale hydroelectric power station, and the first remote control demonstration. (A remote control toy boat, but still.) Tesla was also among the first scientists in the world to take X-rays, to design a fluorescent lightbulb, and (probably the first) to discover the ideas of radio transmission and radar. He wirelessly lit lightbulbs several feet away and found experimental hints of the resonant frequencies of the earth’s atmosphere, which were not to be theoretically and experimentally validated for another 50 years. He died owning roughly 300 patents.
In the popular imagination, Tesla played the part of a mad scientist. His money long gone, Tesla spent his later years moving from place to place, leaving behind unpaid bills. 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. SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine, New York Times
Near Shore Radio 