Nikola Tesla

• 1. Introduction

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  Nikola Tesla was born on the 10th of July 1856 in Smiljan, a village then in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire and now in Croatia. His father wanted him to become a priest. Instead, this son of an Eastern Orthodox clergyman would help shape the way electricity reaches nearly every home. A taxicab struck him near his hotel one night in the fall of 1937, breaking three ribs. He refused to see a doctor, an almost lifelong custom. He died alone in a New York hotel room on the 7th of January 1943, his body found by a maid who ignored a do-not-disturb sign placed three days earlier. Between that birth and that lonely death lies a strange arc. How did a draftsman earning 60 florins a month become a millionaire inventor, then a man leaving unpaid bills behind in a parade of hotels? Why did the man who could perform integral calculus in his head spend his final decades claiming he had built a death beam? And what made a unit of magnetic measurement carry his name, seventeen years after he was gone?

• 2. A Star Of First Rank

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  At the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz, Tesla passed nine exams, nearly twice as many as required. The dean wrote a letter of commendation to Tesla's father stating, "Your son is a star of first rank." He had arrived there in 1875 on a Military Frontier scholarship, fascinated by lectures on electricity given by professor Jakob Poeschl. By his third year at Graz he was failing and never graduated, leaving in December 1878. One biographer suggests he may have been expelled for gambling and womanizing. His family stopped hearing from him after he left school. A rumor spread among his classmates that he had drowned in the river Mur. In January, one of them ran into Tesla in the town of Maribor, where he was working as a draftsman for 60 florins per month. His father located him in March 1879 and tried to convince him to continue his education in Prague. Milutin Tesla died the next month, on the 17th of April 1879, at the age of 60. Tesla's eidetic memory and creative gifts he credited to his mother, Georgina Mandic, who made home craft tools and could memorize Serbian epic poems despite never receiving a formal education.

• 3. The Edison Years

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  "This is a damned good man," Thomas Edison reportedly said of Tesla, after the young engineer stayed up all night repairing the damaged dynamos on the ocean liner Oregon. Tesla had emigrated in June 1884 and began working almost immediately at the Edison Machine Works on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Historian W. Bernard Carlson notes Tesla may have met Edison only a couple of times. The job that brought him there came through Charles Batchelor, an Edison manager who had overseen the Paris installation where Tesla first gained practical experience. After only six months, Tesla quit the Machine Works. What event precipitated his leaving is unclear. In his autobiography, Tesla claimed a manager offered a fifty thousand dollar bonus to design twenty-four different types of standard machines, then called it a practical joke. Later versions have Edison himself reneging, quipping, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor." Tesla's diary records only one line about it, scrawled across two pages covering early December 1884 to January 1885: "Good By to the Edison Machine Works." His next venture turned bitter fast. Backers formed a new utility company, abandoned his firm, and left him penniless. He worked electrical repair jobs and dug ditches for two dollars a day. He later wrote, "My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery."

• 4. The Polyphase Breakthrough

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  In 1887, Tesla developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current, a self-starting design that needed no commutator and avoided the sparking and maintenance of mechanical brushes. He claimed to have conceived its rotating magnetic field principle in 1882. Backing came from Alfred S. Brown, a Western Union superintendent, and New York attorney Charles Fletcher Peck, who formed the Tesla Electric Company in April 1887 and set up a laboratory at 89 Liberty Street in Manhattan. On the 16th of May 1888, Tesla demonstrated his AC motor at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, arranged by physicist William Arnold Anthony and Electrical World editor Thomas Commerford Martin. Engineers reported to George Westinghouse that Tesla had a viable system, exactly what Westinghouse needed for the alternating current he was already marketing. In July 1888, Brown and Peck negotiated a licensing deal for the polyphase patents worth sixty thousand dollars in cash and stock, plus a royalty of two dollars and fifty cents per AC horsepower. Westinghouse also hired Tesla as a consultant in Pittsburgh for two thousand dollars a month. Tesla found Pittsburgh frustrating, clashing with engineers over how best to implement AC power. They settled on a sixty-cycle system he proposed, then found it would not run streetcars, since his induction motor ran only at constant speed.

• 5. Surviving The Currents

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  Westinghouse, Edison, and Thomson-Houston were locked in extreme competition in 1888, undercutting each other in a capital-intensive business. A war of currents propaganda campaign ran alongside it, with Edison Electric claiming direct current was safer than Westinghouse alternating current. The near collapse of Barings Bank in London triggered a financial panic in 1890, and lenders called in loans to Westinghouse Electric. The new lenders demanded cuts, including the per-motor royalty in the Tesla contract. The company was paying a fifteen thousand dollar yearly guaranteed royalty even though working motors were rare and the polyphase systems needed to run them rarer still. In early 1891, George Westinghouse explained his difficulties to Tesla in stark terms. If he failed his lenders, Tesla would have to deal with the bankers himself to collect future royalties. Tesla agreed to release the company from the royalty clause. Six years later, Westinghouse purchased the patent for a lump sum of two hundred sixteen thousand dollars, part of a patent-sharing agreement with General Electric, the firm created from the 1892 merger of Edison and Thomson-Houston. Vindication came at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where Westinghouse won the bid to light the fair with alternating current and branded the technology the Tesla Polyphase System.

• 6. Coils, Sparks, And Showmanship

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  In the summer of 1889, Tesla traveled to the Exposition Universelle in Paris and learned of Heinrich Hertz's experiments proving the existence of electromagnetic radiation. Trying to power a Ruhmkorff coil with a high-speed alternator, he found the high-frequency current overheated the iron core and melted the coil's insulation. His fix, an oscillating transformer with an air gap, became the Tesla coil, producing high-voltage, high-frequency electricity. With it he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent bulbs from across a stage, a demonstration he performed across America and Europe. On the 30th of July 1891, aged 35, Tesla became a naturalized citizen of the United States, the same year he patented the coil. Beginning in 1894, Tesla investigated what he called radiant energy after noticing damaged film in his laboratory. He may have inadvertently captured an X-ray image weeks before Wilhelm Roentgen's December 1895 announcement, while trying to photograph Mark Twain illuminated by a Geissler tube. The only thing captured was the metal locking screw on the camera lens. In 1898, at an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden, Tesla demonstrated a wirelessly controlled boat he dubbed the telautomaton, one of the first wirelessly controlled vehicles ever produced. He tried to sell the U.S. military on a radio-controlled torpedo, but they showed little interest.

• 7. Wires To Nowhere

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  At Colorado Springs in 1899, Tesla operated a coil in the megavolts range, producing artificial lightning with discharges up to 135 feet long. At one point he inadvertently burned out the generator in El Paso, causing a power outage. The El Paso Electric Light Company had supplied his alternating current free of charge, and John Jacob Astor IV had invested one hundred thousand dollars to fund the work. There Tesla observed unusual signals on his receiver, which he speculated were communications from another planet. Reporters jumped to the conclusion he was hearing signals from Mars. In a Collier's Weekly article titled "Talking With Planets," he allowed the signals could have come from Mars, Venus, or other planets. In March 1901, Tesla obtained one hundred fifty thousand dollars from J. P. Morgan in return for a 51 percent share of any wireless patents, and began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York, 100 miles east of the city. In December 1901, Marconi transmitted the letter S from England to Newfoundland, defeating Tesla in the race to complete such a transmission. The press turned against Wardenclyffe, calling it a hoax, and the project halted in 1905. Tesla mortgaged the property to cover debts at the Waldorf-Astoria that eventually reached twenty thousand dollars, a setback biographer Marc J. Seifer suspects contributed to a nervous breakdown in 1906.

• 8. Pigeons And Death Beams

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  On his 75th birthday in 1931, Tesla received congratulations from Albert Einstein and appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the caption "All the world's his power house." He turned the celebration into an annual event, inviting the press to hear stories of past exploits and sometimes baffling claims. At the 1932 party he claimed a motor that ran on cosmic rays. In 1934 he described a superweapon he called a death beam, claiming it could destroy an invading army 200 miles away and bring down a fleet of ten thousand enemy planes 250 miles away. He later called it Teleforce and sent diagrams to the U.S. War Department, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Away from the spectacle, Tesla walked to the park every day to feed pigeons, nursing injured birds back to health. He said a certain injured white pigeon visited him daily, and he spent over two thousand dollars caring for her, including a device to support her while her broken wing and leg healed. A lifelong bachelor, he became a vegetarian in later years, living on milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices. After his death, fears that his beam weapon plans might reach enemies led the Office of Alien Property Custodian to seize his belongings. MIT professor John G. Trump examined the items and concluded nothing constituted a hazard in unfriendly hands. In a box said to hold part of the death ray, Trump found a 45-year-old resistance box. In 1960, the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor, and his archive of over 160,000 documents now sits in the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme.