With all due respect to Thomas A. Edison, Nikola Tesla was an equal, if not greater, American inventor. Edison is highly praised. Tesla is almost forgotten.
Generally speaking, Edison could be described as an innovator. Improved existing technology. He did not invent the incandescent light bulb, for example.
That was patented and publicly demonstrated by Joseph Swam of Great Britain in 1878, a year before Edison. Later, Swam and Edison formed a brief partnership and Edison bought it.
Tesla, a native of Serbia, also started out as an innovator. I wanted to be an electrical engineer. At that time, “direct current” electricity was produced by chemical batteries charged by a steam generator.
Direct current is affected by resistance in the wire that carries it. In about a mile, electricity is consumed in the form of heat. At the University of Prague, Tesla was challenged to solve the distribution problem.
Tesla had a phenomenal memory. He memorized the complete works of Goethe and Voltaire. While strolling through a park, reciting poetry about the sun, Tesla suddenly perceived the direct current solution.
An electrical current alternating from negative to positive could be sent on separate wires. At the receiving end, the two currents would be “induced” to flow into separate magnets, one stationary and the other rotating like the sun.
Tesla patented his idea. “Alternating current” and “induction motors” is the main system we use today for our homes and factories.
After graduating in 1882, Tesla worked for the Continental Edison Company in Paris. He came to the United States a year later to work directly with Edison. When he arrived, he had four cents in his pocket and a sheaf of his poems.
Edison owned several patents on DC improvements, which he leased from General Electric. His installation of a complete DC lighting system in lower New York City was widely acclaimed.
Inevitably, the two men fought over the merits of their two systems. Tesla resigned, opened his own laboratory, and became a naturalized citizen in 1891. He sold his alternating current patents to George Westinghouse. A battle of the titans followed.
Edison tried to convince the public that the Edison-General Electric low-voltage system could be operated safely, while the high-voltage Tesla-Westinghouse system was dangerous.
Someone at Camp Edison toured state fairs and mildly surprised stray cats and dogs with direct current and then killed them with alternating current. The argument was that Tesla / Westinghouse high voltage alternating current was fatal if accidentally touched.
First human electrocution
During this public relations war, New York State spoiled several gruesome hangings. Convicted prisoners were sometimes slowly strangled or beheaded.
A Dr. Brown, a dentist and spokesman for the New York Medico-Legal Society, sought a “more humane and scientific way” to apply capital punishment.
He convinced state authorities that alternating current electricity was the fastest and safest.
The director of the Albany Penitentiary asked Westinghouse to install an AC generator with which to execute an ax murder named William Kemmler.
Both Westinghouse and Tesla strongly opposed capital punishment and refused.
Through a subterfuge, someone, historian Theo Benson says it was Edison, obtained a Tesla generator for the world’s first human execution by electricity.
The voltage was too low. Kemmler literally cooked after repeated shocks of current. The disgruntled Westinghouse later said, “They would have done better with an ax.”
For years thereafter, people who accidentally died from electrical accidents were said to have been “Westinghoused.”
The Tesla system wins
Westinghouse and Tesla beat General Electric and Edison by winning a contract to light the Chicago Exposition of 1893 with 200,000 light bulbs. It was a sensation.
Three years later they installed the first alternating current hydroelectric system at Niagara Falls for the city of Buffalo. Edison and General Electric later made light bulbs and other devices compatible with alternating current.
With royalties pouring in, Tesla could focus on the nature of electricity and its potential.
His approach to exploring the nature of energy was science, as opposed to inventing things for specific purposes. Over the next several years, he filed 830 patents.
Tesla’s defining invention was a particular coil of wire that ushered in hundreds of uses that we take for granted today. However, they were too futuristic for the time.
He achieved illumination with “non-filament” bulbs filled with various gases. Today we recognize them as fluorescent lights and neon advertising letters.
He experimented with “shadow graphics” of human bones through clothing years before Roentgen published his work.
Its “Tesla coil” created high voltage “energy waves” by means of which it projected radio signals to “telautomaton” model ships. They maneuvered in response to the levers of a control box.
Tesla said it could replace the lever case with a phone to transmit voices, music, and ultimately images. No commercial sponsor was interested because there were no instruments to receive ethereal waves.
This was two years before Marconi managed to transmit a single telegraph click. After a lawsuit, Tesla’s primacy was upheld.
The Navy was mildly interested in a tiny unmanned submarine that could be controlled by the Tesla waves. However, the admirals did not foresee today’s smart bombs and torpedoes.
The “high-power oscillator,” which Tesla invented to control ships at sea, is the power source for our cathode ray television picture tube.
Artificial lightning
The United States War Department in 1893 asked Tesla to expand its wireless communications systems. The request came at an awkward moment. Tesla’s patents expired. His lab and papers in New York had been burned.
The manager of the Colorado Springs municipal lighting system offered Tesla free electricity for his project. He moved to Colorado Springs and built an experimental radio station 10 miles out of town.
He determined that the Earth is a large magnet with energy flowing between the positive and negative poles. In addition, he calculated the frequency required to project an electric jet completely across the planet and recover the jet when it bounced.
His intention, using a huge Tesla coil, was to add additional jets to successive bounces. When a massive voltage had built up, he would release it from a tall antenna to zoom around the world.
When everything was ready, Tesla, wearing shoes with two-inch-thick rubber soles for insulation, flipped the switch for a second “to see what it would do.” The plateau was momentarily carpeted with blue St Elmo Fire, but there was no explosion.
Tesla flipped the switch again and went out to measure the expected beam. Amid deafening thunder, lightning leapt from the antenna and lengthened as ground charges built up.
The people of the city were alarmed. Sparks crackled from the fire hydrants. People in leather shoes or bare feet jumped in the heat.
At 130 feet, the bolt collapsed. Everything was in silence.
Tesla ran to the phone and called the Colorado Springs Municipal Power Plant. “Have you ruined my experiment?”
“To hell with you,” was the reply. “You have burned our generators.” They sent him a bill for damage and electricity. .
However, Tesla had learned a great deal about earth resonance and airborne radio wave propagation. He became obsessed with the possibility of capturing the energy of the earth and transmitting it for free to everyone.
Search for free energy
Tesla returned to New York City to build a radio transmitter capable of reaching Europe. He got the backing of JP Morgan, a prominent funder of promising projects.
A huge Tesla coil and 85 foot transmission tower were built at Wardenclyffe on Long Island. It soon became clear to Morgan that Tesla was more interested in broadcasting free energy than commercial radio shows.
Morgan wanted to know: “Where will you put the meter?” He refused to advance any more money. Work stopped. The huge transmission tower fell into disrepair and was eventually demolished as a hazard.
The laboratory and land were purchased by the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in payment of a room bill of $ 20,000.
In the following years, Tesla experimented with a “particle beam accelerator” that could destroy invading aircraft. The newspapers called it a “death ray.” Today we call it a microwave for kitchen ovens.
He invented a small “power turbine” consisting of closely spaced discs on a shaft that rotate on any energy-containing gas or liquid (gasoline, hydrogen, propane, or methane) without burning the fuel.
Unfortunately, the discs are deformed or melted by the molecular action of the energy atoms. The energy and pollution problems would be solved if we could invent a suitable disc material.
Tesla postulated that sunlight could be converted directly into electricity (solar panels), energy could be extracted from atoms (bombs), hundreds of messages could be transmitted simultaneously through a circuit (fiberglass cable), drones they could run on electricity (NASA has one powered by solar cells circling indefinitely at high altitude).
During World War I, he proposed bouncing radio waves off enemy planes to determine their approach. The War Department ignored his proposal. It was not until World War II that RADAR was introduced.
He detected radio waves from outer space and thought they might be signals from aliens. We now know that radio waves from space are static remnants from the creation of the universe.
Talking about free energy, death rays and aliens led people to consider him a “mad scientist”.
Tesla died in 1943, still single, and almost penniless, in a cheap hotel. Gone and forgotten.
Or maybe not. On the day of his death, government agents went to his hotel room and confiscated his papers. They are classified as “Top Secret”.