Maison d'Être Philosophy Bookstore

Nikola  Tesla
[1856-1943]

        Born at exactly midnight, between 9 and 10 July 1856, in what is now Croatia, Nikola Tesla soon displayed his brilliance by learning English, French, German, & Italian as well as his native Serbian. His childhood dream was to harness the energy of America's Niagara Falls. He studied at Karlstadt in Croatia, at Graz in Austria and, unofficially, at the University of Prague. He was tall and intense, eventually growing to stand 6 feet & 6 inches tall. Ill with cholera at age 17, 'Niko' convinced his father to allow him to switch from mathematics & physics to the study of mechanical & electrical engineering.

        After leaving school in 1881, he took a job with the new telephone company in Budapest as an electrical engineer, where he solved certain problems of rotating magnetic fields in relation to induction motors. While working at Continental Edison, he built a working induction motor on his own, but found no one in Europe who was interested in promoting the device. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1884, at age 28, and accepted an offer to work for Thomas Alva Edison. He worked improving dynamos at Edison's lab/factory in New Jersey, eventually resigning over Edison's refusal to pay as promised. He eventually found backers for his design for an electric arc lamp; the backers made money, Tesla made none. Then Western Union's A.K. Brown invested in Tesla's AC power concepts, comprising seven patents.

        Tesla delivered his classic paper, "A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers" before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1888, attracting the attention of George Westinghouse, Jr. [1846-1914], who bought Tesla's 40 extant AC patents. A 'War of The Currents' erupted over the competing technologies of direct current [Edison's inefficient system] versus alternating polyphase current [Tesla's brilliant superior system]. The 'Tesla coil' was patented in 1891, the same year that Tesla became a U.S. citizen. He lectured on the principles of 'wireless telegraphy' [broadcast radio] at the Franklin Institute in February 1893. Westinghouse arranged a commission to construct the 'City of Light', a display of AC technology at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in May 1893, which was a ripping success. Westinghouse also engineered a deal for Tesla to design the first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls in 1895, with the ceremonial switch being thrown 16 November 1896. This was the final victory for AC current: it soon became the worldwide standard.

        Though the destruction by fire of his laboratory on Fifth Avenue in New York City in March 1895 was a devastating setback, Tesla eventually continued his experiments at a laboratory on Grand Street, and later on Houston Street. His other discoveries and improvements encompassed fluorescent & neon lighting, wireless communications, wireless remote control devices & robotics [he used the term 'teleautomatons'], the laser beam, radar, a bladeless turbine, and vertical take-off aircraft. Though he published X-ray photographs before Roentgen, he never attempted to claim priority in the invention of the X-ray tube. He built his first working radio transmitter & receiver devices in 1896, five years before Marconi. In all he registered over 700 patents in his lifetime. One discovery became a lifelong obsession: wireless transmission of electrical energy.

        In 1899, Tesla built a laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, partly funded by John Jacob Astor, for experimentation in high voltage & high frequency electricity and other phenomena. There he made what he considered to be his most significant discovery: terrestrial stationary waves, which allowed him to further his experimentation in transmitting electrical energy over long distances. In one experiment, he lit 200 bulbs from a distance of 25 miles [40km]; in another, he shorted out the power plant of the city of Colorado Springs. His nine-month stay in Colorado is documented in the book "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899-1900".

        Banker J. Pierpont Morgan's attempt to corner the electrical power supply in the U.S. threatened Westinghouse Electric & General Electric. Tesla tore up his lucrative royalty contract, saving the day, but Tesla was ever afterward unable to find adequate financing for his work. Marconi received backing from Thomas Edison and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and by 1901 had improved his radio system and was able to transmit a radio signal across the Atlantic Ocean. But he used a Tesla oscillator and other hardware based on 17 of Tesla's patents. The U.S. Patent Office reversed itself in 1904, awarding Marconi priority for patents on broadcast radio (most likely under pressure from Edison and his cronies). Tesla was infuriated when Marconi won a shared Nobel Prize in 1909; he filed suit for infringement against Marconi in 1915, but had little means to pursue the litigation properly. Finally, basing their decision on Tesla's lectures of 1893, which were widely published in translation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tesla as 'the father of radio' – in 1943, only a few months after Tesla's death.

        Upon securing financial support from J.P. Morgan, Tesla began to construct the Wardenclyffe laboratory and 'magnifying transmission tower' on Long Island. When Morgan realized that Tesla intended to provide free electrical power to the world, he withdrew funding; Marconi's success in 1901 caused further doubt. A stock market crash doubled the price of materials, and work on the project was halted in 1905, and the site finally abandoned in 1912. The tower was demolished for scrap in 1917; the laboratory has been restored.

        Nikola Tesla described the cellular telephone in 1926: "When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but thru television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles, and the instruments thru which we shall be able to do all of this will fit in our vest pockets."

        Another Tesla story: In 1931, Nikola Tesla took the gasoline engine out of a Pierce-Arrow automobile and replaced it with an 80-horsepower alternating current (A.C.) air-cooled motor with no obvious external source of power. At a [Buffalo, New York] radio shop, he bought twelve vacuum tubes, some wires and assorted resistors, and assembled them in a circuit box 24-inches long, 12-inches wide and 6-inches high, with a pair of 3-inch rods sticking out. Getting into the car with the circuit box in the front seat beside him, he pushed the rods in, and announced, “We now have power”, and proceeded to test drive the car for a week, often at speeds of up to 90 mph. Everyone wanted to know where the power came from. Several newspapers in Buffalo reported this test. When asked where the power came from, Tesla replied, “From the ethers all around us”. Several people suggested that Tesla was mad and somehow in league with sinister forces of the universe. He removed his mysterious box, returned to his laboratory in New York City — and the secret of his power source died with him. (source: New Mexico Mercury blog, dated March 2014)

        Penniless and defeated, Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown. But he soon determined that the solution was to produce another commercial invention. His bladeless turbine was a failure; his obsession with rescuing injured pigeons from Central Park did not help his reputation. At the beginning of World War I, he described (but did not patent) the first concepts that later became radar. His last patent was for a vertical take-off aircraft, but he was unable to fund building of a prototype. In 1934, partly in reaction to Hitler's rise in Germany, he announced the invention of a 'peace beam', a weapon which would prevent war. Finding neither private nor government backing, he forwarded an elaborate technical paper to the Allied nations, describing a charged particle beam weapon. The Soviet Union did some work on such a device, paying Tesla $25,000 when early tests were successful.

        He remained a lifelong bachelor, living at the famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, hosting dinners for fellow public figures, usually inviting them to his laboratory afterward for demonstrations of his latest wonders. Mark Twain was a close friend until Twain's death in 1910. Another lifelong friend, editor of Century Magazine Robert Underwood Johnson, was active socially and introduced Tesla to many important people of the time; Johnson's pretty and intellectually restless wife Katharine traded love notes with Tesla, a relationship that was by all reports intense but platonic; she died in 1925. J.P. Morgan's young daughter Anne adored Tesla, and stayed in touch until Tesla's death.

        During most of his career, Tesla was acclaimed both in print and by awards from universities and governments and the scientific community, even while opponents spread lies about him. In 1915, the New York Times announced that Tesla and Edison were to receive the Nobel Prize; this never came to pass, reportedly because Tesla refused to share with Edison. He was offered the Edison Prize in 1917 and at first resisted, but friends persuaded him to accept the honor that was his due. In 1937, Felix Ehernhaft of Vienna nominated Tesla for an undivided Nobel prize in physics, but he did not win.

        On the occasion of Tesla's 75th birthday, he was featured on the 20 July 1931 cover of Time Magazine. Further accolades came his way, but financial setbacks prevented continued scientific work. He moved from the Waldorf around 1933 to the Hotel New Yorker, greatly in need of the $7200 stipend later paid to him by the Tesla Institute in Yugoslavia, in honor of "the greatest inventive genius of all time". He died alone in the hotel on 7 January 1943, and was found two days later by a maid. The funeral was attended by thousands; he was cremated and his ashes encased in a golden sphere. He left no will, but had verbally bequeathed all of his papers and effects to Yugoslavia, where a Nikola Tesla Museum was begun in 1952. His ashes were transported to the Museum in 1957, where the sphere remains on display.
        When Tesla's nephew, a minor Yugoslavian diplomat, arrived at the hotel to see to his uncle's effects, he found that many of Tesla's papers were missing. The F.B.I. was called in, and because World War II was in progress, the U.S. government took custody of everything: two truckloads from the hotel, and dozens of barrels from storage elsewhere. A post-war U.S. Army particle beam weapon project made use of 'copies of Tesla's papers', but after discontinuation of testing, the papers were again lost. The papers that were finally released to the Museum in 1952 were incomplete.

        In more recent times: an 'International Unit of Magnetic Flux Density' was named in Tesla's honor; he was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 1975; the Institute of Electrical Engineers established its distinguished Nikola Tesla Award, given annually since 1976; a statue of Tesla was erected on Goat Island in the middle of Niagara Falls to honor his work in A.C. power; and the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in 1983.
        Recent claims that the U.S. government's HAARP (High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Project) in Alaska is based on Tesla's work are denied by HAARP and others; the Tesla concepts cited are for grounded transmission, while HAARP operates in the ionosphere, based on the work of Maxwell.
        New Voyage Communications produced a fine documentary "Tesla: Master of Lightning", which aired on the Public Broadcasting System in December 2000; the video and a companion book are available. Director Ken Russell announced plans in May of 2002 for "Charged: The Life of Nikola Tesla", which then morphed into "Tesla & Katharine", a feature film scheduled for release in 2005, but those sites/pages are now gone (Russell died in 2011).

        ADDED 2012: When the Wardenclyffe laboratory and surrounding land were put up for sale, a non-profit was formed, crowdfunding was initiated on the Indiegogo website, and more than $1.3M was pledged; the land purchase was successful. Funding for a film about the earlier fundraising ended in July 2015.

        ADDED July 2014: Elon Musk of Tesla Motors pledged $1M for building a new Tesla Tower & Museum at the Wardenclyffe site on Long Island.