When you think of the great inventors of the time, some names like Henry Ford, Wright Brothers, and Thomas Edison come to your mind but there is one name that is not so well known. When you turn on the power plug to charge your cell phone or turn on the refrigerator, you have Nikola Tesla to thank. This is the story of a forgotten genius and the story begins at the end.
On January 7, 1943, a maid working at the New Yorker Hotel
in New York City, USA, found the body of an 86-year-old man in room number
3327, who had made the hotel his home for the past several decades. He ate a
diet of warm milk and biscuits and was very enthusiastic about feeding the
pigeons outside. One of the greatest inventors of all time
slipped into obscurity and died in a coma. There was a reason for what happened
to Tesla which will become clear to you at the end of the story.
Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, a city in
present-day Croatia. Tesla was born during stormy rain and lightning.
According to family legends, the midwife said at his birth that the boy would
be a child of darkness, to which his mother replied that he would not be a
child of darkness but of light. When Tesla was five years old, he saw his older
brother fall from a horse and then die. Due to this incident, he was troubled
all his life. In childhood, he began to see flashes of light as well as dreams
that left him confused as to what was real and what was fantasy. The confusion
never ended.
This concept stimulated his ability to think of inventions
to such an extent that he never needed to draw them. In an article published in
1919, Tesla explained how the designs in his mind were completed. Always my
device works as I imagined it should and the experience comes across exactly
the way I planned it. There is not a single example in twenty years in which
this did not happen. Tesla credits his mother with his interest in his
inventions. His mother Đuka Mandić invented many household
appliances in her spare time.
His mother was gifted with imaginative memory which is the ability to
accurately create images from memory and she passed this on to her son.
Tesla's father was a priest and he wanted his son to become
a priest but Tesla was interested in engineering. When he had gastroenteritis
at a young age and was on the verge of death, his father promised that if Tesla
survived, he would send Tesla to an engineering school, and by some miracle, he
kept his promise.
Tesla enrolled in a vocational college in Graz, Austria,
where it is said that he worked from 3 am to 11 pm every day. The professors
were afraid that he might die of exhaustion. Tesla had a beautiful mind. He
could do calculus calculations with his mind and could speak eight languages.
In the beginning, he was a very good student but still, he could not complete his
schooling. He was expelled from school for his gambling addiction.
He had cut off contact with his family so that they could
not find out about this. His friends did not know what happened to him. They
thought that he had drowned in a river. Tesla moved to Europe and eventually
took a job as an electrician at a telephone company in Budapest, the capital of
Hungary.
One day while walking in a park in the city, he got the
inspiration for a new way of generating electricity by using alternating
current (AC current). It was his great invention that could change the world.
In 1882, he settled in Paris and started working in a branch of Thomas Edison's
company in France. He started to install electricity inside the house but the
manager tested his skills and forced him to do more important work which
included designing and manufacturing dynamo and motors. He soon traveled
throughout Europe to solve problems in other branches of Edison in Europe. Two
years later, in 1884, Tesla's manager offered him a job at Edison Machine Works
in New York City. He agreed and he came to America with only 4 cents in his
pocket because someone stole his money while on the boat.
Tesla initially impressed Edison greatly. Edison himself
was very impressed with Tesla once Edison said "I have had many hard-working
assistants but you are the best of them all".
The relationship between Edison and Tesla did not last
long. They became bitter rivals. Both of them did not agree on how electricity
should be produced and how it should be provided. Edison favored a direct
current (DC current) system in which electrical charges move in only one
direction. While Tesla was a supporter of alternating current (AC Current) in
which electrical charges periodically change their direction. Alternating current
is essential for a continuous supply of electricity because it does not supply
more than a certain amount of power to objects. This means that it can transmit
more power over longer distances. For this reason, alternating current is used
to power our homes and other large appliances, while small items such as
flashlights use direct current. But Edison didn't care because doing so would
have directly hurt his sales because he owned all the patents or rights to the
non-reversible electric current.
According to Tesla, Edison's company manager offered him a
$50,000 reward if he could improve some machines that run on DC. When he did this, the manager refused to give him the
reward. In another instance of this story, Edison wrote to Tesla saying,
"You don't understand our American joke."
However, how did the dispute end? Tesla remained silent and
started his own electric company in 1885. But his investors weren't that
interested and decided to get all the company and Tesla's patents they could
because Tesla had given the company patents in exchange for equipment that was
now useless.
After losing his company, Tesla worked as a ditch digger
for a living, earning two dollars a day. But his luck was about to change.
In 1887, Tesla invented an induction motor that worked on alternating current.
The motor was the most efficient way of converting electrical current into
mechanical power. A variant of it powers the vehicles of the Tesla company,
named after its inventor. Tesla received the motor's license and demonstrated
the invention at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers the following
year. It was here that a major figure in the electrical market
caught the attention of George Westinghouse, who realized that Tesla's
alternating current motor was what he needed to complete his alternating
current system. And also, that he could compete with Edison's non-reversible
current system. So, Tesla licensed Westinghouse to Westinghouse for $60,000,
plus stock and royalties. Westinghouse also hired him as a consultant at 2,000
a month, which is about 50,000 dollars a month today.
The battle of the lightning currents began. Tried to
discredit Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla. He secretly financed the electric
chair to prove how dangerous a reversing electric current can be. (The electric
chair was used to punish criminals at that time).
Edison's company publicly tortured animals to prove their point. In 1903, he
electrocuted a circus elephant named Topsy and made a film about it called
"Electrocuting an Elephant".
Despite Edison's plans, Westinghouse and Tesla's business
did not make a significant difference. In 1893, Edison and his newly
established company, General Electric, won the contract for the famous Columbia
exhibition in Chicago. It was the first electronic exhibition to mark the 400th
anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America. About 3 crore people
participated in this exhibition, who knew that the trend of changing
electricity flow will provide electricity to the world in the future. Their
success continued until they once again defeated Edison's company, General
Electric, to build the world's first reversing electric current powerhouse in
Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power station was a huge success and Beflo
helped light up New York City. The construction of the factory also meant that
Tesla became the creator of renewable energy. His statue is still standing near
Niagara Falls.
Westinghouse and Tesla had won the battle of alternating
current and DC current was out of this battle. But there were some problems.
Westinghouse's company suffered from a lack of funds and eventually became over
a million dollars in debt. In 1897, Westinghouse came to Tesla and asked to
reduce his royalties to save the company. Tesla took pity on his friend and terminated
his contract. He was grateful to Westinghouse for believing him so little when
no one was ready to be his friend. Tesla waived nearly $200 million in
royalties, which is equivalent to more than $30 million today.
If he had been receiving his royalties regularly, he might
have become the richest man on the planet and the first person to have a
billion dollars. Out of sympathy for his friend, he broke his contract and
saved Westinghouse. In return, Westinghouse paid Tesla 216,000 dollars for the
certificate of ever-changing electric current, which is equivalent to 6 million
dollars today. With this money, Tesla became financially independent and
established a series of experiments in New York for new projects, where famous
and wealthy people came to visit, including his close friend and famous
American writer Mark Twain.
This was the era of Tesla's inventions. He held more than
300 patents in his life. He developed the first prototype of neon lighting, the
Tesla Turbine, the turbine wheel used in automobiles. He was the founder of
X-ray technology experimenting with radiation. Another important invention of
his was the remote control. In 1898, he operated a small boat in New York by remote
control. He was so ahead of his time
that the crowd thought he was using magic to propel the ship. In a sense, Tesla
can be called the father of remote-control drones.
One of Tesla's most famous inventions is the Tesla coil, a
device that can produce a large amount of high-voltage electric current.
Because of the coil, he discovered that if the radio signals vibrated at the
same frequency, he could send and receive powerful radio signals. Tesla was
ready to broadcast his first radio signal but a disaster struck. In 1895, his laboratory
was destroyed by fire. His years of research and tools were wasted. Tesla
applied for a radio license two years later. The fire proved to be a turning
point in his life due to which his life began to travel towards decline.
At the same time
that he was working on the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, an inventor from Italy,
was also working on the invention of the radio in England. It tried to license
the rights in the US but was rejected because the work was similar to Tesla's
work. However, things changed when Marconi succeeded in sending the world's first
radio message across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901 using Tesla's 17 patents.
Edison then cut off his financial support to Marconi. Tesla was not concerned
with Marconi's success, but in 1904 the US Patent Office suddenly reversed its
decision and granted Marconi a patent for the invention of the radio. No reason
was ever given for this decision, but a strong financial backing behind Marconi
may have been an important reason. Marconi was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 1911 for this invention, which could only have been
possible using Tesla's work.
Tesla was furious and sued Marconi. The case dragged on in
court for years and only after Tesla's death was the verdict in Tesla's favor.
This radio accident had a negative impact on the rest of Tesla's life. For
example, Tesla was obsessed with giving the world a wireless communication
system and built a giant transmission station on New York's Long Island called
the Wardenclyffe Tower. It envisioned a world where we could send and receive
messages wirelessly. He was once again ahead of his time.
But financiers were not so confident in his plan that they took their hands off
Tesla and invested their money in Marconi's radio project. This situation left
Tesla financially devastated. There was only one way left for him to abandon
his project and in 1905 he completely scrapped this project. Tesla's mental
health deteriorated. He spent the last decade of his life from 1933 at the New
Yorker Hotel. The Westinghouse Corporation hired him as a consultant and paid
his room rent. He lived without paying the rent but ended up in debt. So why
did the greatest inventor of that time
go into obscurity and die in poverty? You could say that Tesla was having a bad
time
ever since his New York laboratory.html
caught fire but the main reason for this is that Tesla was not a capitalist, he
made decisions that businessmen could not make, such as giving up his royalties
on the AC motor, which others could not do. He didn't care about money. He was
concerned about the achievements of science for the betterment of humanity. He
wanted to change the world and he did it.
1.
Faraday's
Law of Electromagnetic Induction
2.
What is the purpose of a transformer?
3.
What are Aphelion and Perihelion?
4.
Does lightning strike mobile phones?
5.
The Future of Humanity: Advancements
in Editing Human DNA
