He created much of the modern devices we use today and yet very little is known about the man. Do you use an electric motor? He designed it in the 1880's. So why don't we know him as well as we do the other inventing giants from the turn of the century?
Born in 1856 in Croatian Krajina
Nikola Tesla made many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that we rely on to this day.
He was a success story coming to the United States and making his way. He had an enemy though, Thomas Edison. Edison feared
Tesla's knowledge often creating diversions that would belittle the man.
One of Tesla's patents is the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor. Because of his work in this medium he has been dubbed " The Father of Physics" and "the man who invented the twentieth century" and "the patron saint of modern electricity".
He formed Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing in 1886. For a year he worked in New York as a labourer to support himself after his investors disagreed on his plan for an alternating current motor and relieved him of his duties. In 1888 he reemerged at Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh lab. There he started his work on transmitting alternating current electricity over large distances.
Have you needed an X-ray lately? Again Tesla is the man to thank for the beginnings of the science behind the medical procedure. He worried about the skin damage that came from the rudimentary foundations of radiation testing. His findings though were mostly lost in a lab fire in March 1895.
When Tesla powered the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago he was the man of the hour.
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.
He spoke six languages. He had mental illness. He was a genius.
He created a world wide communications system at the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. J.P. Morgan financed his dream and then destroyed it. His dream would provide free energy for the world and that is why Morgan stopped his funding.
Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown.
His inventions touched every phase of our lives. He worked in so many areas that everyone living in the modern world is touched by his work. He not only changed the world with his electrical inventions but also with his work in robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics and theoretical physics.
Have you listened to your radio today? In 1943 the Supreme court of the United States credited him with inventing the device.
J. Edgar Hoover took his papers as soon as he died a poor man alone in a hotel at the age of 86 thought to be a mad scientist.
So why is all of these so important for us living in the year 2008?
Tesla had papers with his work on beam weaponry stolen from his estate right after his death. Those papers are the source of many top secret weapons projects to this day. His notes of being able to project lethal beams of energy through the atmosphere have never been able to come to reality but his ideas have lingered in labs.
The fact that his ideas on circuits could still power the world for free is another source that governments may not want out.
Perhaps we need to be looking at the past for ways to survive the future. Could Tesla be the key to global change? Can humanity survive without his work leading us on?
Opinion: Who Was Nikola Tesla And Why Should We Still Thank Him?
Email
Print
Share
