Imagine a world without an electric grid. At best, you might have something with a Steampunk, or perhaps Dieselpunk vibe; but in reality, the world would likely be a much darker place with deeper fractures between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Cheap, widely available electric power has been the greatest force in history for raising the general standard of living. Almost all the technological developments of the twentieth century and beyond have been predicated on a stable power grid: from refrigeration to television, factory automation to cellular phones and computers to AI – everything was developed with the expectation that there was an electric power outlet nearby to power the device.
Nicola Tesla at age 40
The life of our next Hero of Tech, Nicola Tesla, is the stuff of folk-legend. He was the visionary’s visionary who not only gifted the modern world with its power grid, induction motors, robots, radio and remote control through over 300 patents but he envisioned concepts as diverse as fax machines, cell phones, the Internet, radar, laser weapons, artificial intelligence and vertical-lift aircraft.
He possessed the rare ability to see and develop complex designs completely in his mind, rarely using physical models to build working inventions. Tesla’s prolific genius also complicated his legacy as his ideas flitted into more quixotic ideas like communicating with extra-terrestrial life among other things. But maybe it’s just that the world still isn’t ready for, what will turn out to be, the foresightedness of some of those ideas?
Bio
The story goes that Nicola Tesla was born during a violent electrical storm at the stroke of midnight between the 9th and 10th of July 1856 in the small village of Smiljan, in what is modern-day Croatia; but was then under the rule of the Habsburg dynasty as part of the Austrian empire.
His early life perhaps explains why he later seemed comfortable as the outsider: his family were Serbian, living in Croatia. His father, Milutin, was an erudite Serbian Orthodox priest in a land where the majority of their neighbours were Roman Catholic. Further, while they speak the same language, Croats use the Latin alphabet while Serbs usually write in Cyrillic.
Tesla attributed his inventiveness to his mother, Djuka, who dealt with the drudgery of being a priest’s wife in a backwater village by inventing several labour-saving devices for her household work, including a mechanical egg beater. As a child, Nicola invented many gadgets including a cornstalk popgun, a specialised hook for catching frogs and a June-beetle powered turbine – where he glued them four abreast to the blades of a home-made propeller.
When Tesla was seven, his twelve-year-old brother, Dane, was thrown from a horse and died from his injuries later that day. It was an incident that profoundly shaped the rest of Nicola’s life. Beyond his personal loss, his parents came to idealise their dead son and every accomplishment made by Nicola was compared to how well Dane would have done, if only he had lived. This left Nicola with a strong sense of inadequacy and led (according to Tesla himself) to many “many strange likes, dislikes, and habits” as he tried to earn his parent’s respect.
Electricity
In 1862 the family moved to Gospic, where at ten, Nicola enrolled at the school. He excelled at maths and science and was so capable at mental calculations that he was accused of cheating by teachers! His interest in electricity was apparently ‘sparked’ during a cold, extremely dry spell when, as he stroked the family cat, Macak’s back:
“It became a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks. My father remarked, this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see on the trees in a storm. My mother seemed alarmed. Stop playing with the cat, she said, he might start a fire. I was thinking abstractly. Is nature a cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded.”
Tesla read all he could find on the subject of electricity and began to experiment with batteries and induction coils at school.
In 1870, Tesla went to live with his father’s sister, Aunt Stanka and Uncle Brankovic (who was an Austrian army colonel) in Karlovac (Carlstadt), where he attended the Higher Real Gymnasium and completed the four-year curriculum in three years, leaving in 1873.
Tesla returned home to Gospic where he succumbed to a Cholera outbreak that swept through the area. He was so close to death at one point that his father, who had wanted Nicola to enter the priesthood, promised that he could attend “the best engineering institution in the world” if only he would get better.
In 1875 Tesla enrolled, on a Military Frontier scholarship, at the Joanneum Polytechnic School - which the Austrian government had taken over in 1874 and renamed the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz. Tesla was an obsessive student, passing nine exams; nearly twice as many as required. It was here during a demonstration by Tesla’s favourite lecturer, physics professor Jacob Poeschl, of a DC electric motor that tesla stated aloud that commutators needed to be eliminated. He was told that would be impossible; which Tesla saw as a challenge.
When Tesla returned home in his second year, rather than receiving praise, his father derided his accomplishments and work habits. This broke Nicola’s spirit. He took up gambling and stopped attending lectures altogether in his third year, losing his scholarship. He did not graduate.
Tesla disappeared to Maribor in Slovenia, working as a draftsman and gambling in the evening. When Milutin finally located his son in March 1879, he went and tried to convince him to return home but was rebuffed. The following month, Tesla was arrested as a ‘vagrant’ and deported back to Gospic. His father died soon after.
Tesla's mother convinced her brothers, Petar and Pavle Mandic, to fund Tesla’s studies. He left for the Karl-Ferdinand University, Prague in January 1880. He attended lectures that summer in philosophy, mathematics, and experimental physics as an unofficial auditor. This was because he didn't study Greek or Czech; both required language classes. Tesla devoted time here to considering designs for an electric motor at the Klementinum Library and the People’s Café.
Budapest
When he heard that Thomas Edison was building a telephone exchange in Budapest, Tesla asked his uncle Pavle for a recommendation to Ferenc Puskas (younger brother of Tivadar Puskás), the project supervisor - who had had served with Pavle in the Hussars. Tesla moved to Budapest in January 1881.
He began working as a draughtsman at the Central Telegraph Office of the Hungarian government, as the exchange project had yet to break ground. He was also continued wrestling with ideas for an AC electric motor. The ‘Eureka’ moment supposedly came during an evening stroll where he was reciting Goethe’s Faust to his life-long friend (and former classmate) Anthony Szigeti.
Tesla realised that the rotating magnetic field - needed to turn the rotor of an electric motor - didn't have to be generated in the rotor. He envisioned using two coils, with AC currents 90 degrees out of phase with each other in the stator - the motor’s stationary component. As one circuit current reached its maximum, it would induce an opposite magnetic field in the rotor (from Lenz's Law) causing it to rotate away. The other circuit would have zero current at that moment, offering no resistance to the turning motion. He (and others) would refine the concept over time.
Tesla was not alone in investigating rotating magnetic fields. Three years earlier, Walter Baily had demonstrated the principle before the Physical Society of London, and Galileo Ferraris had designed an AC system in Turin, Italy. However, neither developed the ideas beyond abstractions. Silvanus P. Thompson, considered at the time to be the best-known writer on electrical subjects, said in his 1897 text on AC motors that Tesla’s work separated itself from others in his “discovery of a new method of electrical transmission of power.”
Tesla worked at the Budapest exchange, once it was operational, as the chief electrical engineer; improving some of the equipment and developing an unpatented conical-shaped amplifier or repeater that was something of a precursor to the loudspeaker.
Paris
After the exchange was completed, Ferenc’s brother, Tivadar, invited Tesla and Szigeti to come to Paris in late 1882 to help install an Edison electric lighting system being built by Edison’s ‘right hand man’ Charles Batchelor in Ivry-sur-Seine.
Tesla rented a room on Boulevard St. Marcel, at the edge of the Latin Quarter pervaded with Sorbonne students and professors. He thoroughly enjoyed his time in Paris, especially the nightlife. One evening, he met and flirted with the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt after she dropped her scarf near his dining table. The two would meet on several occasions over the years in both Paris and New York. Tesla retained Bernhardt’s scarf till the end of his life.
In his spare time, he solidified the mathematics and specifications of his AC invention in a notebook and worked on designs for a flying machine.
That summer, he worked on the lighting at the opera house and furthered arc lighting along the Avenue de l’Opéra and other streets, before traveling to install lighting systems at Berlin cafés and a Bavarian theatre. He also designed an innovative automatic regulator that enhanced the performance of Edison’s dynamos.
In January 1883, Batchelor shipped twelve hundred incandescent lamps to the Strasbourg plant, sixty arc lights and five generators. During the dedication ceremony by German Emperor Wilhelm I, the lighting system short-circuited and exploded. The German government wasn’t impressed.
With his ability to speak German and French, Tesla was sent to resolve the situation. He quickly realised defective wiring in the underground conduits caused the short and set about repairing the facility.
Anticipating a prolonged stay, Tesla brought materials for his first AC motor with him from Paris; constructing it in a mechanical shop opposite the station. It took until summer to get the first motor operational. With the help of a local mayor he had befriended, Tesla tried to interest wealthy investors to no avail.
In spring 1884, with the Strasbourg plant formally accepted, Tesla returned to Paris.
New York
Charles Batchelor subsequently invited Tesla to New York, with a view to improving the dynamos being developed at the Edison Machine Works. With funding from Uncles Petar and Pajo, Tesla packed his gear and caught the next boat for America.
He arrived as the Statue of Liberty was nearing completion. Two years earlier, Thomas Edison’s first electric generating plant on Pearl Street had opened. Tesla met the famous inventor on his second day in New York when Charles Batchelor introduced them. Tesla was able to gain Edison’s confidence when he met Edison (and Batchelor) a second time at 5am after he had spent the night repairing a set of dynamos on (Edison financial backer) Henry Villard’s ocean liner, the SS Oregon, the first ship fitted with electric lighting.
Alternating his time between the Pearl Street Station and the Edison Machine Works, Tesla installed indoor incandescent and outdoor arc lighting. He designed twenty-four types of equipment that became standards, replacing those already used by Edison. At the same time, he worked on patents for arc lamps, dynamos, regulators and commutators for DC apparatus but never managed to devise a way to approach his boss with his AC motor.
Thomas Edison circa 1922
Tesla quit after six months. Why he left is unclear, but one story is that Tesla stated he could dramatically increase the efficiency of Edison’s dynamos and Edison promised him $50 000 ($1.6M in today's money) if he could. Tesla discovered that shorter-core magnets yielded far more energy, tripling the Mary-Ann dynamo’s output; but when he approached Edison for payment, he was told that he had failed to appreciate an American joke.
Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing
Tesla's time at with Edison had shown him how the business side of things worked and in March 1885 he met patent attorney Lemuel Serrell, who had previously worked for Edison.
Serrell helped Tesla break down his complex designs into individual patentable improvements, and on the thirtieth of March they applied for Tesla’s first patent (no. 335,786).
While at Serrell’s office, Tesla was introduced to Benjamin Vail and Robert Lane who were interested in his improved arc lighting system and raised $5000 to launch the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company in Rahway, New Jersey. By August 1886, Tesla's electrical system lit Rahway’s streets and powered its workshops. Tesla assigned the seven patents he acquired to the company in exchange for shares.
Unfortunately, neither Vail (president of the company), nor Lane (vice president and treasurer) had any interest in Tesla's AC work, which he had postponed under the impression his backers would support it after the completion of the Rahway project. They also had no interest in manufacturing arc-lighting equipment, preferring the easy money from operating the Rahway system. Not needing Tesla’s expertise or inventions, was forced out of his own concern, losing control of the patents he had generated. He was forced to work at various electrical repair jobs and even as a ditch digger to survive.
Tesla Electric Company
Impressed by Tesla's ingenuity, his ditch-digging foreman introduced him to Alfred S. Brown, superintendent of Western Union’s New York Metropolitan District. A prominent engineer who held a number of arc lamp patents himself, Brown understood the limitations of the prevailing DC apparatus and realised the value of Tesla’s AC inventions. Brown introduced Tesla to Charles Peck, a patent lawyer from Englewood, New Jersey, who was also secretary of the Mutual Union Telegraph Company.
Tesla, Peck, and Brown formed the Tesla Electric Company in April 1887. Peck knew John C. Moore, a banker with connections to J. P. Morgan and provided the bulk of the capital. The three men equally shared one patent for an AC dynamo, Peck and Tesla split five more patents on commutators, motors, and power transmission, and the rest of the inventions developed were placed in the name of the Tesla Electric Company. Tesla received a third of the profits, Peck and Brown split a third, and the final portion was invested in developing new innovations in the laboratory at 89 Liberty Street, adjacent to what today is the World Trade Center.
Tesla's electric motor patent
Thus began an unprecedented flow of invention which would continue unabated for fifteen years.
Westinghouse
At this point in time, electricity supply was uncoordinated with around twenty different and incompatible electrical “systems” operating in the United States; each designed for a specific purpose. For example, Charles Brush’s high-voltage DC system powered arc lighting, while Thomas Edison’s low-voltage DC system powered incandescent lamps.
In his lab, Tesla built three complete AC systems: single-phase, two-phase, and three-phase, complete with generators, motors and step-up and step-down to allow long-distance power transmission. He even experimented with four and six phase systems. To top it off, he devised ways to interconnect the systems; showing the mathematics behind it all.
Electrical World editor [and president of the newly formed American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE)] T. C. Martin stopped by the shop and coaxed Tesla into writing his first article on his work. He also arranged for the esteemed Cornell University engineering professor William Anthony, to come to Liberty Street and test the efficiency of the new AC motors.
Tesla appeared before the AIEE on May 16, 1888 to read his landmark paper “A New System of Alternate Current Motors and Transformers”. He had already filed fourteen of the forty fundamental patents on the AC system, but he was still reluctant at this juncture to fully announce his work. However, he showed the attendees the mathematics of how to determine the number of poles and speed of each motor, how to construct single-phase, and poly-phase motors, plus how his system could be connected to DC apparatus. William Anthony confirmed the efficiency of Tesla’s motors (at over 60%) as equalling the best DC motors. Tesla went on to demonstrate that his synchronous motors could almost instantaneously reverse direction.
George Westinghouse was already deploying a (greatly improved by William Stanley) Gaulard-Gibbs system which he had bought the American patent rights for in late November 1885. He realised that controlling Tesla’s AC patents would help him win the War of Currents. Brown and Peck negotiated a licensing deal with George Westinghouse in July 1888 for Tesla's polyphase induction motors and transformer designs for $60,000 in cash and stock plus a royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower produced by each motor. Tesla was also hired for one year as a consultant at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs at $2,000 ($65,000 current dollars) per month.
George Westinghouse
The royalty was dropped to keep Westinghouse Electric solvent during the financial panic of 1890, when investors called in their loans; but Tesla was now independently wealthy from the licencing deal.
The 1890s Workshops
Tesla moved from the Liberty Street workshop in 1889 and created some of his most significant work from a series of different Manhattan workshops over the following twelve years. He became a US citizen in July 1891.
Tesla Coil
Visiting the 1889 Paris Exposition, Tesla met Norwegian physicist Vilhelm Bjerknes who had been Heinrich Hertz's assistant in Bonn, making substantial contributions to Hertz' work on electromagnetic resonance. Tesla replicated Bjerknes’ experiments and took them in his own direction, powering a Ruhmkorff coil with his own-design high frequency alternator. This overheated the iron core, causing the insulation between the primary and secondary coils to melt. The Tesla coil was developed as a solution to this problem; with this resonant transformer design becoming central to his wireless power experiments.
Wireless Lighting
Over the next few years Tesla experimented with "electrostatic induction" for wireless lighting and gave a series of lectures demonstrating his work:
- May 20, 1891: "Experiments with Alternate Currents of Very High Frequency and Their Application to Methods of Artificial Illumination" - Delivered before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at Columbia College, New York, this lecture showcased his work on high-frequency currents and their applications in lighting where he lit Geissler tubes (early gas discharge tubes, similar to neon tubes) and even incandescent light bulbs from across the stage.
- February 1892: "Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency" - Presented to Institute of Electrical Engineers, London, February 3, 1892; Royal Institute, London, February 4, 1892 and the International Association of Electrical Engineers and Societe Francaise de Physique, Paris, February 19, 1892. This lecture further explored his high-frequency experiments and their potential applications.
- February 24, 1893: "On Light and Other High Frequency Phenomena" - Delivered at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the National Electric Light Association in St. Louis, this lecture covered his research on light and other phenomena associated with high-frequency currents.
Newspaper image of Tesla demonstrating wireless lighting
World's Columbian Exposition
In early 1893, Westinghouse engineer Benjamin Lamme was able to make the Tesla Polyphase System compatible with existing DC and single-phase systems using a rotary converter, allowing Westinghouse Electric to supply power to any potential customer using Tesla-patented equipment. With this ace up their sleeve, Westinghouse Electric won the bid to light the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago including their own stand in the "Electricity Building". Tesla visited for a week during the fair's six-month run; attending the International Electrical Congress and putting on a series of high-voltage, high-frequency AC demonstrations at the Westinghouse exhibit.
Tesla also presented a steam-powered reciprocating electricity generator that he patented that year in a lecture called "On Mechanical and Electrical Oscillators". It had magnetic armature driven up and down at high speed by a steam-powered piston, creating an alternating magnetic field. This field induced alternating current in adjacent wire coils. The lecture manuscript was lost in a fire that destroyed Tesla's South Fifth Avenue lab in March 1895, along with research material, models, and the demonstration pieces that had been shown at the Worlds Colombian Exposition. Luckily for posterity, journalist T.K. Martin wrote a detailed overview of the lecture and Tesla’s experiments in the press at the time of the fair.
Based on Tesla's advice to Edward Dean Adams and Westinghouse's success at the Columbian Exposition, Westinghouse won the contract to build the polyphase AC generating system for the Niagara Falls power plant.
X Rays
In late December 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen announced a previously unknown energy, that he called X rays, emanating from the Lenard tubes and Crookes tubes in his laboratory at the Würzburg Physical Institute. This discovery shot Röntgen to worldwide fame and caused such a sensation that scientists from all over the world dropped their current projects to join in this exciting new venture. That included Tesla himself, who experimented with what he liked to call “shadowgraphs” and wrote nine articles on the topic in a two-year period.
X-Ray image Tesla took of his own hand
The work Tesla and Edison did in this field was combined by the Kentucky School of Medicine to perform an X ray of a man's foot; allowing doctors to pinpoint and extract around thirty bird shot pellets from that foot.
Radio
Across the year of 1896 Tesla received eight patents for high frequency oscillators and other equipment useful to wireless communication. His first patent specifically in the field of radio communication was in 1897; his second, radio remote control, in 1898 and grew to a total of thirty-three patents, covering all aspects of generating, modulating, storing, transmitting, and receiving wireless signals.
Tesla demonstrated a "telautomaton", as he called it, in the form of a (four feet long and three feet high) radio-controlled boat during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden in 1898. It used a variety of transmitters and frequencies to start, stop, propel, steer, and operate other features, such as turning lights on or off. Tesla tried to sell this idea to the US military (at that time engaged in the Spanish-American war) as a radio-controlled torpedo, but the bureaucracy of the time had little interest in ideas beyond their limited imagination.
'Telautomaton' radio controlled boat
While other researchers, like Marconi, were getting headlines with short-distance radio transmissions (using Tesla’s patent designs), Tesla had a much grander vision for a world-wide telegraphy and power distribution system using the upper atmosphere and the earth itself as transmission media. His plan was to modulate what are today known as telluric currents with gigantic Tesla oscillators; using these earth currents as carrier waves for his transmitter. By precisely measuring the resonant frequency of the planet and constructing transmitters in harmonic relation to it, receivers could be built at pre-mapped nodal points.
Colorado Springs
Tesla set up a high-altitude experimental station in Colorado Springs in May 1899, telling reporters covering his arrival that he planned to conduct wireless telegraphy experiments, transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris.
Complete with a towering Tesla coil that could generate millions of volts, producing lightning arcs to 135 feet, he wanted to study the conductive qualities of low pressure air (both from his own Tesla coil and the frequent electrical storms in the region) to wirelessly transmit light, information, and power over large distances. With funding from John Jacob Astor IV and free power from the El Paso Electric Light Company, he was able to wirelessly demonstrate powering 200 lamps at a distance of 25 miles.
Publicity photo for Tesla's Colorado Springs Lab, December 1899
One July evening around midnight, using the extremely sensitive receivers he developed to allow him to track electrical discharges 500 to 1500 miles away, he received what became one of his most controversial signals. Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals, which he described as "counting codes", that registered one beep followed by two beeps and then three beeps. He first announced this, rather cryptically, in a Christmas message to the local Red Cross Society that year where he stated: ‘Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one…two…three…’. He later elaborated further in a 1901 article ‘Talking with the Planets’ in Collier's Weekly.
Tesla’s view that the signal was extraterrestrial attracted derision from his detractors. There was speculation that Tesla had received the test Morse-code letter S (dot-dot-dot) being used by Marconi while with the British Admiralty and the French Navy in the English Channel, demonstrating his wireless apparatus between ships in mock battle manoeuvres on July 28th 1899. The dates do correlate well. However, later investigations suggested that the signal may have been extraterrestrial after all, in the form of kilometric (VLF) emissions originating from Jupiter that often create signals matching what Tesla heard.
Wardenclyffe
On March 1, 1901, Tesla officially signed a contract with J P Morgan giving him $150,000 funding for 51% of any wireless patents generated in Tesla's new laboratory and tower to be constructed in what is now Shoreham, on the north shore of Long Island, sixty-five miles from New York City.
Tesla’s plan was to construct a “World Telegraphy Center,” with a laboratory, wireless transmitter, and production facilities for manufacturing oscillators and vacuum tubes. Tesla's personal friend, the architect Stanford White, designed the laboratory building housing the power plant and oscillator and oversaw the construction of the 187 foot tower - greatly reduced (due to the cost), from Tesla's original desire for a 600 foot tower.
Wardenclyffe facility circa 1905
On 12 December 1901. Marconi signalled the Morse code letter "S" across the Atlantic from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland. Tesla believed least 17 of his patents were used without permission to accomplish this feat, but it captured the imagination of the world, and hurt Tesla’s credibility with Morgan.
When he went back to Morgan for more funding, he had the bad judgment to reveal the true purpose of his World Wireless System: large-scale wireless power transmission. This turned out to be a fatal mistake for the continuation of the construction. Morgan had invested in a project to capitalize on multichannel wireless message transmissions across the Atlantic, not industrial power transmission. At the end of 1903, J.P. Morgan withdrew his support to the project, with most other financiers quickly following suit.
The project came to a halt in 1905. Despite the financial troubles, it may have been Tesla's health that finally forced him to abandon the Wardenclyffe building in 1906. He had suffered several serious nervous breakdowns brought on by over work. Tesla lost the property in foreclosure in 1915, and in 1917 the Tower was demolished by the new owner.
Later Years
Tesla continued to invent disparate things, for example, demonstrating a 200 horsepower (150 kilowatts) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine in 1906. In a 1917 edition of the magazine Electrical Experimenter, Tesla proposed locating submarines with radio waves and the return signal being viewed on a fluorescent screen - bearing a superficial resemblance to what became radar. In 1928, Tesla received U.S. patent 1,655,114, for a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) biplane design. In 1934, Tesla told reporters he had designed a "teleforce" (or death ray) superweapon with a range 1of 250 miles that he claimed would end all war.
On 7 January 1943, aged 86, Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker. Two days later the FBI seized Tesla's belongings. Many of his papers and drawings are still missing. On the 10th of January, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a eulogy live on WNYC radio while "Ave Maria" and "Tamo daleko" played in the background. Then, on 12th January, two thousand people attended a state funeral for Tesla at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.
Final Thoughts
Nicola Tesla was a prolific of a man out of time. Many of his ideas were too far advanced to be brought into reality in his own time, though other ideas (though brilliant) turned out to be barking up the wrong tree once science caught up with them, and could never have worked.
We have, of course, had to leave out huge numbers of inventions and stories simply because Tesla did so much. Like his work on resonance, where he determined the resonant frequency of the earth and built a resonance ‘earthquake’ machine that nearly demolished a city block before Tesla smashed it to stop its effects. Or that he experimented with cryogenic engineering and successfully created ball lightning in his lab.
Tesla’s legacy in the polyphase power grid, brushless electric motors and radio communication are enough to earn him a place in our Heroes of Tech league, even without the myriad other inventions and prophetic visions for future devices.
Comments