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Nikola Tesla: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla was born on the 10th of July 1856 in the village of Smiljan, within the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire, now part of modern-day Croatia. His father, Milutin Tesla, was an Eastern Orthodox priest, while his mother, Georgina Mandić, possessed a remarkable talent for memorizing Serbian epic poems and crafting mechanical tools without ever receiving formal education. Tesla credited his eidetic memory and creative abilities to his mother's genetics, a trait that would define his entire career. As a child, he experienced a terrifying moment when a small tornado destroyed his family's garden, an event that sparked a lifelong fascination with the power of nature. This early encounter with atmospheric violence set the stage for a life dedicated to understanding and harnessing the forces of electricity and magnetism. Tesla's early education was marked by his ability to perform complex integral calculus in his head, a skill that led his teachers to suspect he was cheating. He graduated from high school in three years instead of four, demonstrating an intellectual prowess that would soon outpace the institutions designed to teach him.
The War Of Currents
In 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City with little more than a letter of introduction and a dream. He began working at the Edison Machine Works, where he quickly distinguished himself by solving complex engineering problems that had stumped other employees. However, his relationship with Thomas Edison was fraught with tension, culminating in a famous dispute over a promised bonus of $50,000 for redesigning generators. Edison allegedly dismissed the offer as a practical joke, telling Tesla, You don't understand our American humor. This betrayal led Tesla to leave the company and strike out on his own. He formed partnerships with investors to develop his ideas, eventually creating the Tesla Electric Company. In 1888, he patented his alternating current induction motor, a device that used polyphase current to generate a rotating magnetic field. This innovation became the cornerstone of the polyphase system, which George Westinghouse licensed for $60,000 in cash and stock, plus a royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower. The War of Currents, a propaganda campaign between Edison's direct current system and Westinghouse's alternating current system, raged through the 1880s and 1890s. Westinghouse Electric won the bid to light the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a pivotal moment that demonstrated the safety and efficiency of alternating current. Tesla's motor was central to this victory, proving that AC power could be transmitted over long distances and used to power the modern world.
The Colorado Springs Experiment
Common questions
When and where was Nikola Tesla born?
Nikola Tesla was born on the 10th of July 1856 in the village of Smiljan, within the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire, now part of modern-day Croatia.
What major invention did Nikola Tesla patent in 1888?
Nikola Tesla patented his alternating current induction motor in 1888, a device that used polyphase current to generate a rotating magnetic field.
Where did Nikola Tesla conduct his high-voltage experiments in 1899?
Nikola Tesla established an experimental station in Colorado Springs in 1899, where he operated megavolt-range coils that produced artificial lightning and thunder.
What happened to Nikola Tesla in 1943?
Nikola Tesla died alone in his hotel room on the night of the 7th of January 1943, and his body was found by a maid the next day.
How many patents did Nikola Tesla obtain worldwide?
Nikola Tesla obtained around 300 patents worldwide, with at least 278 known patents issued to him in 26 countries.
In 1899, Tesla established an experimental station in Colorado Springs, where he could safely operate much larger coils than in his New York lab. The El Paso Electric Light Company supplied alternating current free of charge, allowing Tesla to conduct experiments with megavolt-range coils that produced artificial lightning and thunder. He generated discharges of up to 135 feet in length, creating a spectacle that drew crowds of reporters and onlookers. During this time, Tesla observed unusual signals from his receiver, which he speculated were communications from another planet. He mentioned these signals in a letter to a reporter in December 1899 and to the Red Cross Society in December 1900. Reporters treated the story as sensational, jumping to the conclusion that Tesla was hearing signals from Mars. He expanded on the signals in a 1901 Collier's Weekly article entitled Talking With Planets, where he said it had not been immediately apparent to him that he was hearing intelligently controlled signals. The article, titled The Problem of Increasing Human Energy, appeared in the June 1900 edition of The Century Magazine. Tesla explained the superiority of the wireless system he envisioned, but the article was more of a lengthy philosophical treatise than an understandable scientific description of his work. His experiments in Colorado Springs laid the groundwork for his later attempts to transmit power wirelessly across the globe.
The Wardenclyffe Tower
Tesla made the rounds in New York trying to find investors for what he thought would be a viable system of wireless transmission, wining and dining them at the Waldorf-Astoria's Palm Garden, The Players Club, and Delmonico's. In March 1901, he obtained $150,000 from J. P. Morgan in return for a 51% share of any generated wireless patents, and began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility to be built in Shoreham, New York. By July 1901, Tesla had expanded his plans to build a more powerful transmitter to leap ahead of Marconi's radio-based system, which Tesla thought was a copy of his own. In December 1901, Marconi transmitted the letter S from England to Newfoundland, defeating Tesla in the race to be first to complete such a transmission. Investors on Wall Street put money into Marconi's system, and some in the press began turning against Tesla's project, claiming it was a hoax. The project came to a halt in 1905, perhaps contributing to what biographer Marc J. Seifer suspects was a nervous breakdown on Tesla's part in 1906. Tesla mortgaged the Wardenclyffe property to cover his debts at the Waldorf-Astoria, which eventually amounted to $20,000. After Wardenclyffe closed, Tesla continued to write to Morgan; after the great man died, Tesla wrote to Morgan's son Jack, trying to get further funding for the project. The failure of Wardenclyffe marked the beginning of Tesla's financial decline, as he struggled to find investors for his increasingly ambitious and impractical ideas.
The Hotel Years And The Death Ray
After Wardenclyffe closed, Tesla lived at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City and ran up a large bill. He moved to the St. Regis Hotel in 1922 and followed a pattern from then on of moving to a different hotel every few years and leaving unpaid bills behind. Tesla walked to the park every day to feed the pigeons, nursing injured birds back to health. He spent over $2,000 to care for a certain injured white pigeon, including a device he built to support her comfortably while her broken wing and leg healed. His unpaid bills, as well as complaints about the mess made by pigeons, led to his eviction from St. Regis in 1923. He was forced to leave the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930 and the Hotel Governor Clinton in 1934. At one point he took rooms at the Hotel Marguery. Tesla moved to the Hotel New Yorker in 1934, where Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company began paying him $125 per month in addition to paying his rent. Accounts of how this came about vary, with several sources claiming that Westinghouse was concerned about potential bad publicity arising from the impoverished conditions in which their former star inventor was living. In 1933, at age 77, Tesla told reporters at his birthday party that, after 35 years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy. He claimed it was a theory of energy that was violently opposed to Einsteinian physics and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years. He also told reporters he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, working on breakthroughs in metallurgy, and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought. In 1934, at his 79th birthday party, Tesla covered many topics, including his claim to have discovered the cosmic ray in 1896 and invented a way to produce direct current by induction. He also proposed using his oscillators to transmit vibrations into the ground, a technique he called telegeodynamics. In 1937, at his event in the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel New Yorker, Tesla received the Order of the White Lion from the Czechoslovak ambassador and a medal from the Yugoslav ambassador. On questions concerning the death ray, Tesla stated: But it is not an experiment... I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.
The Final Years And Legacy
In the fall of 1937, at the age of 81, Tesla left the Hotel New Yorker to make his regular commute to St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Public Library to feed the pigeons. While crossing a street a couple of blocks from the hotel, Tesla was struck by a moving taxicab and was thrown to the ground. His back was severely wrenched and three of his ribs were broken in the accident. The full extent of his injuries was never known; Tesla refused to consult a doctor, an almost lifelong custom, and never fully recovered. On the night of the 7th of January 1943, at the age of 86, Tesla died alone in his hotel room. His body was found by a maid on the next day when she entered his room, ignoring the do not disturb sign that had been placed on his door three days earlier. An assistant medical examiner examined the body, estimated the time of death as 10:30 p.m. and ruled that the cause of death had been coronary thrombosis. Since this was during World War II, there were concerns raised in the US government that Tesla's effects, including plans for a purported beam weapon, would go to his nephew Sava Kosanović, an exiled Yugoslav politician who could conceivably hand them over to enemies of the US. With the papers going to Kosanović, a non-US citizen, the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked the Alien Property Custodian to seize Tesla's belongings two days after his death. John G. Trump, an electrical engineering professor at MIT serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee, was called in to analyze the Tesla items. After a three-day investigation, Trump's report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands. In a box purported to contain a part of Tesla's death ray, Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box. On the 10th of January 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a eulogy for Tesla at his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In 1952, following pressure from Tesla's nephew, Yugoslav politician, Tesla's entire estate was shipped to Belgrade in 80 trunks marked N.T. In 1957, Kosanović's secretary Charlotte Muzar transported Tesla's ashes from the United States to Belgrade. They are displayed in a gold-plated sphere on a marble pedestal in the Nikola Tesla Museum. His archive consists of over 160,000 documents and is included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. Tesla obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions, with at least 278 known patents issued to Tesla in 26 countries. In 1960, the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the International System of Units (SI) measurement of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s, and in 2013, Time named Tesla one of the 100 most significant figures of all time.