Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), circa 1896.
Born	10 July 1856(1856-07-10) Smiljan, Austrian Empire
Died	7 January 1943 (aged 86) New York City, New York, USA
Residence	Austrian Empire (Austria–Hungary) Hungary France USA
Citizenship	Austrian Empire (pre-1891) American (post-1891)
Ethnicity	Serbian
Fields	Mechanical and electrical engineering
Institutions	Edison Machine Works Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co.
Known for	Tesla coil Tesla turbine Teleforce Tesla's oscillator Tesla electric car Tesla principle Tesla's Egg of Columbus Alternating current Induction motor Rotating magnetic field Wireless technology Particle beam weapon Death ray Terrestrial stationary waves Bifilar coil Telegeodynamics Electrogravitics
Influences	Ernst Mach
Influenced	Gano Dunn
Notable awards	Edison Medal (1916) Elliott Cresson Gold Medal (1893) John Scott Medal (1934)
Religious stance	Serbian Orthodox[1]
Signature

Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was an inventor and a mechanical and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Austrian Empire, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen.^[2] Tesla is often described as the most important scientist and inventor of the modern age, a man who "shed light over the face of Earth".^[3] He is best known for many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have regarded him as "The Father of Physics", "The man who invented the twentieth century"^[4] and "the patron saint of modern electricity."^[5]

After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1894 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as one of the greatest electrical engineers who worked in America.^[6] Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture,^[7] but due to his eccentric personality and his seemingly unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist.^[8][9] Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86.

The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960), as well as the Tesla effect of wireless energy transfer to wirelessly power electronic devices which Tesla demonstrated on a low scale (lightbulbs) as early as 1893 and aspired to use for the intercontinental transmission of industrial energy levels in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project.

Aside from his work on electromagnetism and electromechanical engineering, Tesla has contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics,^[10] and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio.^[11] Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early New Age occultism.

Tesla is honored in Serbia and Croatia, as well as in the Czech Republic and Romania. He was awarded the highest order of the White Lion by Czechoslovakia.

Biography

Early years

Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan

Tesla was born to Serbian parents in the Croatian village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. According to legend, he was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm.

His baptismal certificate reports that he was born on 28 June (N.S. 10 July), 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Father Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Raduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from medieval nobleman Pavle Orlović^[12] that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read.^[13] His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier.

Nikola was the fourth of five children, having one older brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica).^[14]:3 His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years.^[15]

c.1879 at age 23

Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz.^[16][17][18] However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures.^{[19][20][21][22]} In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. Here he was influenced by Ernst Mach. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term.^[23]

Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books, supposedly having a photographic memory.^[24] Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood.^[24]

Hungary and France

3phase rmf

In 1880, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company,^[25] the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young, Serbian inventor who lived in Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker.^[26] In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields for which he received patents in 1888.

Patent

Soon thereafter, Tesla was awakened from a dream in which his mother had died, "And I knew that this was so".^[27] After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, his mother's birthplace.

United States

On 6 June 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City^[28] with little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, a former employer. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving some of the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was even offered the task of completely redesigning the Edison company's direct current generators.^[29]

Tesla claims he was offered US$50,000 (~ US$1.1 million in 2007, adjusted for inflation)^[30] if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, making an improvement in both service and economy.^[24]:54-57 Tesla said he worked night and day on the project and gave the Edison Company several profitable new patents in the process. In 1885 when Tesla inquired about the payment for his work, Edison replied, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," thus breaking his word.^[31][32] Earning a mere US$18 per week, Tesla would have had to work for 53 years to earn the amount he was promised. The offer was equal to the initial capital of the company. Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to US$25 per week.^[33]

Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – coincidentally for the Edison company. Tesla even used this time to focus on his AC polyphase system^[24], which Edison (believing DC electricity was the future) had never wanted to hear about.

Middle years

In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over long distances.

In April 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent #514,170 ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays.

In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus".^[49] He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with conventional X-ray production, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He believed early on that damage to the skin was not due to the Roentgen rays, but the ozone generated in contact with the skin, and to a lesser extent, Nitrous acid. Tesla held that these were in fact longitudinal waves, such as those produced in waves in plasma. In a plasma or a confined space, there can exist waves which are either longitudinal or transverse, or a mixture of both. There are known examples of this and these plasma waves can occur in the situation of force-free magnetic fields.^[50][51] His hypotheses and experiments were confirmed by others.^[52]

Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895.

A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural media with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon,^[53] and has been proposed for disabling vehicles.^[54][55]

Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor).^[56][24]:174

Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891.

On 30 July 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings but, due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived.^[57] He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission.^[58]

Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda.^[59]

When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating:

At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was a historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. An observer noted:

Within the room was suspended two hard-rubber plates covered with tin foil. These were about fifteen feet apart, and served as terminals of the wires leading from the transformers. When the current was turned on, the vacuum bulbs or tubes, which had no wires connected to them, but lay on a table between the suspended plates, or which might be held in the hand in almost any part of the room, were made luminous. These were the same experiments and the same apparatus shown by Mr. Tesla in London about two years ago, where they produced so much wonder and astonishment.^[60]

Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in US .

Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus".

Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays.^[61]

When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent (U.S. Patent 645,576 ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio-controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control.^[62] In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race."^[63] Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained U.S. Patent 609,250 , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work.

Colorado Springs

Main article: Magnifying transmitter

Publicity picture of a participant sitting in his laboratory in Colorado Springs with his "Magnifying Transmitter" generating millions of volts. The arcs are about 7 meters (23 ft) long. (Tesla's notes identify this as a multiple exposure photograph.)

An experiment in Colorado Springs. This bank of lights is receiving power from a distant transmitter

Colorado Springs experiment where grounded tuned coil is in resonance with distant transmitter; a light is glowing near the bottom.

In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves.^[64] At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long).^[65] Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques).^[66] Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time.^[67]

Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance).

In Colorado, Tesla carried out various long distance power transmission experiments. Tesla effect is the application of a type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Through longitudinal waves, Tesla transferred energy to receiving devices. He sent electrostatic forces through natural media across a conductor situated in the changing magnetic flux and transferred power to a conducting receiving device (such as Tesla's wireless bulbs).

In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars.^[68] He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with,^[69] or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals.^[70]

Tesla left Colorado Springs on 7 January 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted U.S. Patent 685,012  for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus").

Later years

In 1900, with US$150,000 (51 % from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly". In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910–1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100–5000 hp.

Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it.^[71]

In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937).^[72] Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers.

In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against Marconi's claims. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies.

Before World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his patents in European countries. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (20 December 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation.

At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria, to pay a US$20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal.

Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units.^[73] In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the 1920s, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations.

On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. By the end of 1931, Tesla released "On Future Motive Power" which covered an ocean thermal energy conversion system. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained a message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who had initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, choosing instead to live on a modest pension received from Yugoslavia, and to continue his research.

In 1936, Tesla wrote in a telegram to Vladko Maček: "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland. Long live all Yugoslavs."^[74]

Field theories

When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a "dynamic theory of gravity". He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world.^[75] The theory was never published.

The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that:

Nikola Tesla, with Ruđer Bošković's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York.

Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it:

Tesla also argued:

Tesla also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview:

Directed-energy weapon

Later in life, Tesla made remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon.^[79] The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray.^[80][81] In total, the components and methods included:^[82][83]

• An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished.
• A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished.
• A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism.
• A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention.

Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon from the early 1900s until his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams.^[84] Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion).^[85]

His records indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation:

The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes.^[87]

Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device.^[88] He also offered this invention to European countries.^[89] None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans.^[90]

Personal life

Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbian, he spoke seven other languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.

Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder,^[91] and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts mysophobic. He greatly disliked touching human hair other than his own as well as round objects.

Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities.^[24] Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense.

Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force". His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote: "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul". Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink".

Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight.^[24]:110 He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions.^[24]

Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe.

Mark Twain in Tesla's lab, spring 1894

In middle age, Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere.

Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying:

He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene  ... His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense.

Shortly before he died, Edison said that his biggest mistake had been in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp.^[14]:19

Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors.

Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, Tesla showed signs of encroaching mental illness, claiming to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work.

Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general.^[92] He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations.^[93]

Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated:

... man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct .... The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.^[94]

In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future.^[95]

In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance". He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel".^[96]

In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences.^[97]

Death

Tesla died of heart failure alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of 5 January and the morning of 8 January 1943, at the age of 86.^[98] Despite having sold his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number,^[99] in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio.

Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the government's Alien Property Custodian office took possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing his work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma, and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents.^[100] One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property.

Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, won possession of some of his personal effects, which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.^[101] Tesla's funeral took place on 12 January 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. His body was cremated and his ashes taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day.

Tesla's pigeon

According to John J. O'Neill, author of Prodigal Genius, the Life of Nikola Tesla, Tesla told him this story in the presence of William L. Laurence, the New York Times science writer.

Tesla had been feeding pigeons for years. Among them, there was a very beautiful female white pigeon with light gray tips on its wings that seemed to follow him everywhere. A great deal of rapport developed between them. As Tesla confessed, he loved that pigeon: "Yes, I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me." If the pigeon became ill, he would nurse her back to health and as long as she needed him and he could have her, nothing else mattered and there was purpose in his life.

One night as he was lying in bed, she flew in through the window and he knew right away that she had something important to tell him: she was dying. "And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes - powerful beams of light". "...Yes," "...it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory."

Tesla admitted to O'Neill that when that particular pigeon died, something went out of his life. Before that time, he could complete the most ambitious programs he could ever dream of but after the pigeon flew into the beyond, he knew his life's work was done for good.^[102]

Legacy and honors

Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York.

He did not like posing for portraits, doing so only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy.^[103] His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate.

In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986.

The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power.^[104] The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him.

Tesla was featured on several Yugoslav- and Serbian dinar notes and coinage. The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On 10 July 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday.

The company, Tesla was a large, state-owned electrotechnical conglomerate in the former Czechoslovakia. It was renamed in Tesla's honour from the previous Electra on 7 March 1946. Some of its subsidiaries still trade in the Czech Republic.

An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval.^[105]

The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication.

The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist , as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, 10 July 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented.

The song "Tesla's Hotel Room" by the Handsome Family, on their 2006 album Last Days of Wonder, is a fictionalized account of Tesla's later years at the New Yorker hotel.

In the years since his death, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and controversially, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about "hidden knowledge". Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity.^[24] This belief is maintained in present times by followers of Nuwaubianism.

Monuments

A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. This monument is a copy of a monument standing in front of the Belgrade University Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.^[106] The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, 9 July 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Tesla's most famous statue is the one erected on 23 May 1879 at Sycamore Peak showing him and Dr. Brian S. Whitecross. Belgrade International Airport is called "Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport".^[107]

See also

• List of Tesla patents
• Nikola Tesla in popular culture
• Electrical Experimenter
• Timeline of low-temperature technology

Further reading

Publications

• A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888.
• Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,.
• Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24
• Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47
• Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49
• The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55

Books

• Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856–1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956.^[108]
• Auster, Paul, "Moon Palace", 1989. Tells Tesla's story - among other's - within the history of the United States.
• Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1981. ISBN .
• Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN
• Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN
• Jonnes, Jill "Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN
• Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X
• O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN . (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online)
• Lomas, Robert,"The man who invented the twentieth century : Nikola Tesla, forgotten genius of electricity," 1999. ISBN
• Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla.
• Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC)
• Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899–1900", ISBN-X
• Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at "My Inventions", 1919. ISBN
• Trinkaus, George "TESLA: The Lost Inventions", High Voltage Press, 2002. ISBN 09-7096-182-0
• Valone, Thomas, "Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy," 2002. ISBN

Journals

• Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 Vol. 292 Issue 3 p. 78(7).
• Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, 28 July 2003 Vol. 19 Issue 15 p. 9(1)
• Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, November 1999, Vol. 16, Issue 11.
• Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, March 1988, Vol. 10 Issue 6.

Filmography

See also: Nikola Tesla in popular culture

• There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović.
• "Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video)
• Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems.
• David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of several scenes in the film, which featured speculations on the explosive power of Tesla's electrical experiments.
• In The Bucket List, the character Carter Chambers, played by Morgan Freeman, tells his co-worker about how Tesla invented radio years before Guglielmo Marconi.
• Tesla: Master of Lightning, produced by Robert Uth for New Voyage Communications in 2003, tapped Stacy Keach to supply the voice of Tesla.

Notes

References

External links

• Nikola Tesla at Find A Grave
• The Nikola Tesla museum
• Nikola Tesla Biography
• Nikola Tesla Niagara Falls Power
• Frank Germano's great site on Dr. Tesla
• Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary
• Nikola Tesla 150
• Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc.
• World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfram Research
• Nikola Tesla Page
• Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site
• Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist
• The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower
• Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla
• Tesla - The European Years
• Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena
• Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks.
• Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs)
• Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection
• Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers
• Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998.
• Works by Nikola Tesla at Project Gutenberg
• Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes.
• Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf
• Nikola Tesla Complete Patents in pdf
• Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891–1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources.
• The Case Files of Nikola Tesla - Franklin Institute