February 4, 2013
The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla and his Tower
Nikola Tesla. Image courtesy of LIbrary of Congress
By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. His inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination.
Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison, who once hired him. “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack,” Tesla once wrote, “he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.”
But what his contemporaries may have been lacking in scientific talent (by Tesla’s estimation), men like Edison and George Westinghouse clearly possessed the one trait that Tesla did not—a mind for business. And in the last days of America’s Gilded Age, Nikola Tesla made a dramatic attempt to change the future of communications and power transmission around the world. He managed to convince J.P. Morgan that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, and the financier gave Tesla more than $150,000 to fund what would become a gigantic, futuristic and startling tower in the middle of Long Island, New York. In 1898, as Tesla’s plans to create a worldwide wireless transmission system became known, Wardenclyffe Tower would be Tesla’s last chance to claim the recognition and wealth that had always escaped him.
Nikola Tesla was born in modern-day Croatia in 1856; his father, Milutin, was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church. From an early age, he demonstrated the obsessiveness that would puzzle and amuse those around him. He could memorize entire books and store logarithmic tables in his brain. He picked up languages easily, and he could work through days and nights on only a few hours sleep.
At the age of 19, he was studying electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute at Graz in Austria, where he quickly established himself as a star student. He found himself in an ongoing debate with a professor over perceived design flaws in the direct-current (DC) motors that were being demonstrated in class. “In attacking the problem again I almost regretted that the struggle was soon to end,” Tesla later wrote. “I had so much energy to spare. When I undertook the task it was not with a resolve such as men often make. With me it was a sacred vow, a question of life and death. I knew that I would perish if I failed. Now I felt that the battle was won. Back in the deep recesses of the brain was the solution, but I could not yet give it outward expression.”
He would spend the next six years of his life “thinking” about electromagnetic fields and a hypothetical motor powered by alternate-current that would and should work. The thoughts obsessed him, and he was unable to focus on his schoolwork. Professors at the university warned Tesla’s father that the young scholar’s working and sleeping habits were killing him. But rather than finish his studies, Tesla became a gambling addict, lost all his tuition money, dropped out of school and suffered a nervous breakdown. It would not be his last.
In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest, after recovering from his breakdown, and he was walking through a park with a friend, reciting poetry, when a vision came to him. There in the park, with a stick, Tesla drew a crude diagram in the dirt—a motor using the principle of rotating magnetic fields created by two or more alternating currents. While AC electrification had been employed before, there would never be a practical, working motor run on alternating current until he invented his induction motor several years later.
In June 1884, Tesla sailed for New York City and arrived with four cents in his pocket and a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor—a former employer—to Thomas Edison, which was purported to say, “My Dear Edison: I know two great men and you are one of them. The other is this young man!”
A meeting was arranged, and once Tesla described the engineering work he was doing, Edison, though skeptical, hired him. According to Tesla, Edison offered him $50,000 if he could improve upon the DC generation plants Edison favored. Within a few months, Tesla informed the American inventor that he had indeed improved upon Edison’s motors. Edison, Tesla noted, refused to pay up. “When you become a full-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke,” Edison told him.
Tesla promptly quit and took a job digging ditches. But it wasn’t long before word got out that Tesla’s AC motor was worth investing in, and the Western Union Company put Tesla to work in a lab not far from Edison’s office, where he designed AC power systems that are still used around the world. “The motors I built there,” Tesla said, “were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision, and the operation was always as I expected.”
Tesla patented his AC motors and power systems, which were said to be the most valuable inventions since the telephone. Soon, George Westinghouse, recognizing that Tesla’s designs might be just what he needed in his efforts to unseat Edison’s DC current, licensed his patents for $60,000 in stocks and cash and royalties based on how much electricity Westinghouse could sell. Ultimately, he won the “War of the Currents,” but at a steep cost in litigation and competition for both Westinghouse and Edison’s General Electric Company.
Wardenclyffe Tower. Photo: Wikipedia
Fearing ruin, Westinghouse begged Tesla for relief from the royalties Westinghouse agreed to. “Your decision determines the fate of the Westinghouse Company,” he said. Tesla, grateful to the man who had never tried to swindle him, tore up the royalty contract, walking away from millions in royalties that he was already owed and billions that would have accrued in the future. He would have been one of the wealthiest men in the world—a titan of the Gilded Age.
His work with electricity reflected just one facet of his fertile mind. Before the turn of the 20th century, Tesla had invented a powerful coil that was capable of generating high voltages and frequencies, leading to new forms of light, such as neon and fluorescent, as well as X-rays. Tesla also discovered that these coils, soon to be called “Tesla Coils,” made it possible to send and receive radio signals. He quickly filed for American patents in 1897, beating the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi to the punch.
Tesla continued to work on his ideas for wireless transmissions when he proposed to J.P. Morgan his idea of a wireless globe. After Morgan put up the $150,000 to build the giant transmission tower, Tesla promptly hired the noted architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead, and White in New York. White, too, was smitten with Tesla’s idea. After all, Tesla was the highly acclaimed man behind Westinghouse’s success with alternating current, and when Tesla talked, he was persuasive.
“As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere,” Tesla said at the time. “He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind.”
White quickly got to work designing Wardenclyffe Tower in 1901, but soon after construction began it became apparent that Tesla was going to run out of money before it was finished. An appeal to Morgan for more money proved fruitless, and in the meantime investors were rushing to throw their money behind Marconi. In December 1901, Marconi successfully sent a signal from England to Newfoundland. Tesla grumbled that the Italian was using 17 of his patents, but litigation eventually favored Marconi and the commercial damage was done. (The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld Tesla’s claims, clarifying Tesla’s role in the invention of the radio—but not until 1943, after he died.) Thus the Italian inventor was credited as the inventor of radio and became rich. Wardenclyffe Tower became a 186-foot-tall relic (it would be razed in 1917), and the defeat—Tesla’s worst—led to another of his breakdowns. ”It is not a dream,” Tesla said, “it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive—blind, faint-hearted, doubting world!”
Guglielmo Marconi in 1903. Photo: Library of Congress
By 1912, Tesla began to withdraw from that doubting world. He was clearly showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was potentially a high-functioning autistic. He became obsessed with cleanliness and fixated on the number three; he began shaking hands with people and washing his hands—all done in sets of three. He had to have 18 napkins on his table during meals, and would count his steps whenever he walked anywhere. He claimed to have an abnormal sensitivity to sounds, as well as an acute sense of sight, and he later wrote that he had “a violent aversion against the earrings of women,” and “the sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit.”
Near the end of his life, Tesla became fixated on pigeons, especially a specific white female, which he claimed to love almost as one would love a human being. One night, Tesla claimed the white pigeon visited him through an open window at his hotel, and he believed the bird had come to tell him she was dying. He saw “two powerful beans of light” in the bird’s eyes, he later said. “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.” The pigeon died in his arms, and the inventor claimed that in that moment, he knew that he had finished his life’s work.
Nikola Tesla would go on to make news from time to time while living on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel. In 1931 he made the cover of Time magazine, which featured his inventions on his 75th birthday. And in 1934, the New York Times reported that Tesla was working on a “Death Beam” capable of knocking 10,000 enemy airplanes out of the sky. He hoped to fund a prototypical defensive weapon in the interest of world peace, but his appeals to J.P. Morgan Jr. and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went nowhere. Tesla did, however, receive a $25,000 check from the Soviet Union, but the project languished. He died in 1943, in debt, although Westinghouse had been paying his room and board at the hotel for years.
Sources
Books: Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, Hart Brothers, Pub., 1982. Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time, Touchstone, 1981.
Articles: “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy With Special References to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy,” by Nikola Tesla, Century Magazine, June, 1900. “Reflections on the Mind of Nikola Tesla,” by R. (Chandra) Chandrasekhar, Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems, School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, Augst 27, 2006, http://www.ee.uwa.edu.au/~chandra/Downloads/Tesla/MindOfTesla.html”Tesla: Live and Legacy, Tower of Dreams,” PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_todre.html. ”The Cult of Nikola Tesla,” by Brian Dunning, Skeptoid #345, January 15, 2003. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4345. “Nikola Tesla, History of Technology, The Famous Inventors Worldwide,” by David S. Zondy, Worldwide Independent Inventors Association, http://www.worldwideinvention.com/articles/details/474/Nikola-Tesla-History-of-Technology-The-famous-Inventors-Worldwide.html. “The Future of Wireless Art by Nikola Tesla,” Wireless Telegraphy & Telephony, by Walter W. Massid & Charles R. Underhill, 1908. http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1908-00-00.htm
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TESLA – the one, the biggest!
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Imagine the wondrous feats this unique mind would have accomplished absent politics. We will never know. Will we ever learn?
Tesla is one of the most important and yet underappreciated figures of that era. Plenty of us history and science nerds know about him but to many he is just a last name vaguely remembered from a paragraph in our High School Social Studies textbooks. Hopefully through renewed interest in his life and work and projects like the Tesla Science Center in New York, Tesla will be remembered in the popular mindset, at least more than he is today.
And as always, a relevant Kate Beaton comic: http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=61
Nikola Tesla was, without a doubt, the smartest human being ever to walk this great earth. No one before him, and certainly no one after him comes close to the genius mind that was inside this great man’s head!
A $25,000 check from russia?
There’s your story!
Not the same claptrap we heard a million times.
Did he cash it?
What did he do with it?
What did russia want?
Did stalin know about this?
Editorial comment. Nikola Tesla was not Serbian born. This implies Tesla was born in Serbia. He was the son of an ethnic Serb priest, but not Serbian born. The village he was born in, Smiljan, near Gospić, was part of the Austrian Empire’s military frontier in 1856. Otherwise, excellent posting.
Thanks for catching that, Gunny!
Its a shame what the world ritchest ppl can afford to do, to hide this scientist from the rest of the world, and he’s magnificant discoveries! Everything we use today, i mean everything, was firstly discovered in the mind of this man, and the wirless transmision of energy was he’s greatest project… I still belive it can be done, just ppl will rather die in smoke then to do something greater then themselfs :(
Benedict Arnold was a great general who “fell”.
Nikola Tesla was a great engineer and a lousy businessman,
but only a crass materialist would suggest that Nikola Tesla ever “fell”.
Tesla achieved eternal fame during his lifetime, and today he is probably more famous than he ever was during his life. Almost none of us have achieved that much.
Did Marconi really transmit across the Atlantic in December 1901, as he (and the above article) had claimed? Why do most over-horizon radio transmission require night-time, and the ionosphere that prevails at night, in order to succeed? But Marconi did it in daylight! No ionosphere, either! Marconi must have been some kind of genius to break the laws of physics like this and for nobody since to replicate his experiment with the same specification equipment and same conditions, eg. doing this at noon. If he didn’t make the transmission in 1901, then, unfortunately, the article is another example of bogus information being perpetuated down the generations.
When I was younger, I helped out a good friend when he was down. His wife had just died, he was suffering from advanced heart disease and his house was in shambles. He needed someone to help him rebuild the deteriorating house, making it worth something that he could sell for a profit and then afford the cost of a good retirement home. I worked single handedly for over a year to turn his pigpen of a house worth only a fraction of market value into a real showplace. I haggled and traded to get him the best finishes and appliances at a rock bottom price and in the end, after a total investment of 18 months of my life, and about fifty thousand in expenses half of which were mine, The house was ready to sell.
At the same time I had worked with my friend, getting him on a diet that helped his heart disease. Despite my long hours on the house, I would take my friend for long walks to get his stamina back. After a year, his doctor said he was making an amazing recovery.He met a woman. They started dating. He was a new man. He had a great new house that was now worth a small fortune.
Finally, my good friend sold his house for over three times the original Bank appraised value.
Did I receive the payment that we both agreed I had coming to me? My good friend had just made a pure and free profit, from my soul effort, of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Surely he would make good.
Did I get the six figured check that would have changed my life the way my effort had changed his? What I got was the realization that Tesla got from Westinghouse and other scavergers that have become this countries downfall. What I got was the knowlage that greed rules this world.
I know, my story is nothing by comparison. But, in the 15 years since my good friend stole from me my faith in my fellow man, and over $100,000, I believe I have come to understand on some small scale, just what drove Tesla into hopeless despair and loneliness. While not all are bad, I have come to believe that most people are capable of justifying anything if it suits their own needs. Westinghouse, Edison, and even, or even a good friend.
Nikola Tesla was an extraordinary man who made the one mistake all honest men make. He gave his fellow man the opportunity to reveal themselves for who they really were. He paid the price much the same as America is now for having trusted it’s elected “good friends”.
I apologize for this personal editorial but whenever I read about the life of Tesla, I am reminded of my own.
You have a lot right, but you may also have some of it wrong. from everything I have read or listened to about this man. The only thing that prevented him from being reconised for his accomplishments was greed by the (big three) at the time.
George Westinghouse was not a very honorable man, to let Tesla wallow in poverty, after Tesla saved him and his business by tearing up their contract. Shame on you George.
Makes me dislike Edison even more.
Not a word about The Oatmeal’s campaign to save Wardenclyffe and turn it into a museum??? For shame! Read about it here: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_museum
Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison were two heavily contrasting figures at a time when our understanding of electricity was being forged. They define the alpha and omega of the scientific approach. Tesla was quite literally a visionary who imagined and patented complex Alternating Current (AC) machinery and Edison, using a more plodding methodology, invented a plethora of electrical devices including the light bulb.
Tesla was like his almost contemporary, Albert Einstein, who conducted thought experiments to conceive general and special relativity; both suffered from antisocial behavior much like their scientific predecessor, Isaac Newton. Einstein had Max Planck and a university system that tolerated his idiosyncratic behavior. The naive Tesla on the other hand was a guppy in the financial shark tank of the gilded age.
Westinghouse convinced Tesla to tear up his patents on AC, but did pay his expenses later in life. However, Edison bore a lifetime grudge against Tesla and turned down the Nobel prize because it would have to be shared with Tesla. He also repeatedly tried to discredit AC current in the electrocution of (Topsy) the elephant and in 1890, William Kempler, who was cooked for eight minutes in an early version of the Electric Chair designed in Edison’s labs. Westinghouse commented later that “they would have done better using an axe,”
Without the 15 comments I have read so far, this standard tale of Tesla would be no news to me. It’s a tribute to the sensibilities backgrounds of the Smithsonian’s readers that so much thought went into their responses. And, by the way, it is heartening that Elon Musk named his electric sports car the Tesla!
Excellent article !!! Very well written, and very interesting.
And to Dave’s reply: Sorry for how you were treated by your so-called friend. It’s too bad more people don’t have your good character.
Greed is one ugly trait that will come back to bite those who possess it.
PBS has produced a great educational webb, http://www.pbs.org/tesla, and documentary “Tesla – Master of Lightning”, exploring the life and accomplishments of this electrical inventor.
http://liberteque.com/en/viewvideo/470/sustainability-and-free-energy/tesla-master-of-lightning.html
Tesla and Westinghouse proved that AC power could be taken from the first hydro-electric turbines at Niagra Falls, constructed by Tesla, to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1883.
Tesla then went on to build the Wardenclyff Tower that would have transmitted radio and electric power for the entire world!
J.P. Morgan, probably on the advice of Thomas Edison, cut off funding so that Marconi (using Tesla patents) could send the first radio signal across the Atlantic!
@Mark Warburton says:
Regarding your question, if Marconi really transmit across the Atlantic in December 1901. It is true.
I have read a article by a scientist and radioamateur studying our suns solar storms. The suns solar storms is changing our planets ionosphere in strange ways at periodic intervalls. Just at this time, in December 1901, the ionosphere changed to reflect the radio signals, at the specific frequency, across the Atlantic.
So, Marconi was a guy of very good fortune. Have he tried before, or after December 1901, he wouldn’t succeeded.
There is often a fine line between genious and insanity as there is between personality cult members and rationality. Perhaps Tesla, in spite of his genious, was ostracized by the business community because his wife the pigeon refused to join their social circles.
I have no doubt that Tesla was smarter than Einstein who was mostly a media concoction.
tesla did not invent the coil–patented by e. thompson, nor
the polyphase motor and generator–patented in europe earlier, nor did he make ac practical–that was charles proteus steinmetz, who was a mathematician.
tesla did not invent radio–hertz did, following the mathematical prediction of maxwell.
do some web searching, tesla CULT.
@susan
Tesla invented the Tesla coil, and you can look it up. There may have been other coil types and specific functions, but his version carried his name. You cannot just assume that, because something has a coil to it, that it’s all the same as other coil devices.
Tesla invented the polyphase system of power distribution, which was adopted first by Westinghouse and later on by General Electric. The first big demonstration of the polyphase system was the powering of the Columbian Exposition in 1893, which was done using Tesla’s polyphase system. Steinmetz ingratiated himself in the history of electricity power distribution by working on the mathematics of efficient polyphase systems, but only after Tesla has invented the system as a practical concern. Tesla innovated and Steinmetz did some mathematics on the efficiency of the phase types and frequency. But this is not a chick or egg first situation because Tesla invented it. Steinmetz was essentially a mathematician and theorist who would have been short of subject matter without Tesla’s invention of the complete A/C power distribution system, whereas Tesla was a doer who made the world a modern place. Just look at the 1897 metal plate at Niagra Falls showing the main contributors to the power system, and how frequently Tesla’s own contributions appear. It’s no fluke. Doers do and procrastinators can complain all that they want.
Tesla invented ‘tuned’ radio. Hertz’s earlier radio work didn’t concern tuned radio. Only when Tesla tuned two Tesla coils to the same frequency in his lab and noticed a spark did he come to the conclusion that a transmitter and receiver tuned to the same frequency can be used for wireless signally. It is light years away from Hertz and the concept of tunable radio still informs our understanding of radio today. “You’re welcome”, as I imagine Tesla might tell you. Radio waves existed before Maxwell. Planets and stars give off radiation that can be detected as radio waves.
tesla coil invented by elihu thompson–sourze smithsonian
institute
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/When_did_Nikola_Tesla_invented_the_Tesla_coil
polyphase motor/gen before tesla
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irvuQFMdNi0
also
http://edisontechcenter.org/AC-PowerHistory.html
tuned circuits in radio invented by oliver lodge, and john
stone stone
http://earlyradiohistory.us/tesla.htm
and, in fact hertz had published it.
nobody conceived that light was a radio wave until faraday
and maxwell proved it mathematically
tesla did not invent alternating current, the alterator, or
the dynamo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_current
an extract
//
The first alternator to produce alternating current was a dynamo electric generator based on Michael Faraday’s principles constructed by the French instrument maker Hippolyte Pixii in 1832.[3] Pixii later added a commutator to his device to produce the (then) more commonly used direct current. The earliest recorded practical application of alternating current is by Guillaume Duchenne, inventor and developer of electrotherapy. In 1855, he announced that AC was superior to direct current for electrotherapeutic triggering of muscle contractions.[4]
A power transformer developed by Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs was demonstrated in London in 1881, and attracted the interest of Westinghouse. They also exhibited the invention in Turin in 1884, where it was adopted for an electric lighting system. Many of their designs were adapted to the particular laws governing electrical distribution in the UK.
//
Elihu Thomson’s patent “Method of and means for producing electric current” (number 500,630). This patent was filed in 1893
Tesla’s earliest patent on the Tesla Coil, “System of Electric Lighting” (number 454,622) was filed in 1891.
http://edisontechcenter.org/tesladebunked.html
anyway, i stand corrected on the tesla coil—which actually
pleases me.
Rather than take the scattergun weblinks-and-quantity approach, I shall try verbal argument, just to keep things varied.
The Tesla coil invention link you give on answers.com is wholly inadequate. Anybody can post answers to any questions on that site. If that is supposed to be a serious source, then it is not a source of credibility.
For the Ferraris Youtube link. Part of the text used is also available on a static web page which provides further information not in the Youtube clip, of the 1901 and 1905 court cases involving Westinghouse. Tesla had nothing to gain financially because he tore up his contract with Westinghouse and Ferraris came out the worst. Who can you believe? Legal decisions where the facts and evidence have been considered over two court cases or a partial Youtube clip that skips over the legal decisions made after a lot of deliberation?
The Edison Tech Centre site is more than a little tricky for someone who wants to drill through to the truth. History has proved Tesla to have been an appalling businessman. He did not invent the alternating current, which was used for lighting incandescent lamps and nothing more in the early years, but then he didn’t claim to have done so. Same goes for A/C motors. In 1883, Tesla demonstrated his A/C motor in Strasbourg, Europe, where his ideas could then be pirated by the Europeans. Anyone working on such systems after that date will surely have been aware of Tesla’s work and ready to copy whatever they could.
The earlieradiohistory.us weblink is amusing. Somebody has taken the trouble to argue away a US Supreme Court decision from 1943 because they have a website to do so! Let’s have websites which say black is white or white is black and then it must be true because it’s on a website. The article mentions Marconi, who wasn’t able to explain at the time of his radio ‘invention’ how the Tesla coil he was using worked in principle. So much for being called a ‘scientist’ or ‘inventor’ by the article. Tesla was the first to patent radio technology; his radio was tunable, and Hertz’s was not. You only have to look at the apparatus schema for Hertz. If you say Hertz invited tunable radio, then I am afraid that I am wasting my time trying to point out the basics. Lodge and Stone-Stone were able beneficiaries of Tesla knowledge spread through early lectures, demonstrations and papers on tuned radio.
The Wikipedia entry on A/C, Telsa never claimed to have invented A/C. or dynamo, but he did invent the distribution of power system that used A/C, and not just for light, but also for industrial and consumer use. Check out the tranche of patents that he formulated for doing this. Why go to the trouble of linking and copy-pasting from Wikipedia if that is a red herring because A/C was around when Tesla was a mere student?
Im not sure what point you are proving by showing Tesla’s lighting system predates Thomson’s electric current system by 2 years except to show that Tesla got there 2 years prior. It is one of the dangers of the weblink scattergun approach, where the context is removed.
Back to the edisontechcenter.org site, loads of stuff, much of it looking suspiciously disingenuous. Some mention of Tesla inventing polyphase power, and then mention of Pixii, who created a single phase A/C gadget. Those are different things so far as their utility in electrical end-use is concerned. Pixxi didn’t conceive polyphase A/C, so why is the webpage padding out its arguments with irrelevant details? The whole page you link is full of irrelevant pontificating on speculation. They talk about myths, but was it Tesla who made some of these claims? No. Look at the Tesla and radar point. Edison headed the US research project during WW1 and turned down Tesla’s, his old foe, idea for a project to check for objects in the distance in a way similar to what we now know as radar. When radar was invented as a practical concern, the inventors did acknowledge Tesla’s ideas as being valid. Thanks to Edison though, USA didn’t have radar in WW1 and therefore neither the advantages of seeing an enemy ship or plane before the enemy knew about it. Tesla never claimed to invent radar, but the website you link to has a problem with that. The mention of A/C from hydroelectric, don’t forget that the early years was for lighting lamps using single phase A/C, which isn’t as useful as also powering industry and domestic use for power appliances using polyphase A/C. Myth 9 on the page is a joke! Tesla was chronically short of money for about the last 50 years of his life. Business-wise, he was naive and not suited to the world of business. This contradicts the webpage you linked. If the person who wrote the page can find quotes from Tesla that back up what they say, then that would be valid. Otherwise, it’s like somebody has plucked things out of thin air and tried to debunk it in their own minds. For example, they say Tesla invented the induction coil. FALSE. Of course it is false. So, why do they propose something false, state the obvious, and then go about debunking their own, false assertions? Mighty strange. Whatever their agenda, it’s more than a little messed up.
It is historically correct to state that Nikola Tesla is of Serbian naitonality, who was born in Austro-Hungarian state, and not in Croatia, or today’s “modern” Croatia. Croatia has nothing to do with Tesla’s birth. And no Croatia existed until 135 years later, in 1991, when it was mysteriously created by the Vatican and Germany.
Therefore, it is mostly appropriate to state that his birthplace was in Austro-Hungary, and that Croatia had no part of the area solely inhabited by the Serbian population.
This comment is intended to correct the often incorrectly labelled biographical item of Nikola Tesla, and I trust that Smithsonian.com will not deem this comment politically incorrect and not allow it to reach the publicity it deserves.
@Martin I was quite disappointed in the naming of that electric car as well.
Susan is right.
Tesla didn’t demonstrate radio. There is not a shred of evidence that Tesla did anything other than just talk radio.
http://earlyradiohistory.us/tesla.htm
Tesla didn’t even believe in Radio waves! Lol!
And what Tesla demonstrated was actually wireless electrostatic induction, not radio.
Marconi’s tuning patents were voided in favour of John Stone and Oliver Lodge, not Tesla,
The supreme court in 1943 mentioned Tesla only in passing – Tesla’s designs were stated as science fiction worthy of Jules Verne.
The Ferraris and The Ferrantis had independently invented the AC Motor. The 2-phase AC motors already existed in Germany/Europe in the 1870s! At least a dozen people have done path breaking work in AC generation.
And just to remind all – our electrical devices actually run on DC, the AC motors are only useful for transporting electricity over long distances to the houses.
Tesla’s biggest patent in the radio field was the Tesla coil, but even that was not something that he did alone.
The Tesla coils were actually invented by Elihu Thomson and William James Morton. This whole coil is nothing but a scaled up version of coils that already existed for decades.
Tesla was just a braggart and a showman. The Tesla cult has made villain out of people that they know nothing about. The FBI suggested that Tesla was a philosopher promoting himself.
Susan, Tesla may have been the first to patent the Tesla coil, but he did not publicly demonstrate/publish it first. Elihu Thomson was the first to publish it in 1890. And unlike Tesla, he was humble enough to admit that his work was not that original. Several others were working on the coil. For example, William James Morton was.
The 1943 US ruling was not about the “core” radio components and it did not go in favor of Tesla, but in favor of John Stone Stone and Oliver Lodge. Tesla’s work was described as science fiction worthy of Jules Verne.
The 1914 ruling was more directly related to core radio components and it declared Tesla’s work as UNRELATED to radio and related to wireless electrostatic induction.
Susan, Tesla may have been the first to patent the Tesla coil, but he did not publicly demonstrate/publish it first. Elihu Thomson was the first to publish it in 1890. And unlike Tesla, he was humble enough to admit that his work was not that original. Several others were working on the coil. For example, William James Morton was.
The 1943 US ruling was not about the “core” radio components and it did not go in favor of Tesla, but in favor of John Stone Stone and Oliver Lodge. Tesla’s work was described as science fiction worthy of Jules Verne.
The 1914 ruling was more directly related to core radio components and it declared Tesla’s work as UNRELATED to radio and related to wireless electrostatic induction.
The 3 phase AC motors were demonstrated first by Galileo Ferraris and he did not believe in patenting. Tesla just claimed that he “dreamed it up” first.
Tesla was a money minded showman who sued other people over patents and tried to build his company and publicly promoted himself.
Once again, there is the same link as used before to the web page on radio run by somebody I never heard of called Thomas White. You don’t even have to go as far ahead as the Supreme Court decision of 1943. Since the early 1890′s and onward, Tesla published papers, gave lectures, and patented inventions. In 1893, for example, St.Louis, he demonstrated wireless, complete with illustrations. His two US patents (no.’s 645576 and 649621) provide yet further information. Anyone who is interested in the history of radio and yet does not consider citing these “shreds of evidence” isn’t looking closely enough! Tesla didn’t just talk it, he publicly lectured on it, published on it, and invented on it! Look up these “shreds” if you want proof! No AOL-like acronyms needed.
So, there is mention of “Marconi’s tuning patents” relating to the 1943 court decision. Let us not forget that the Patent Examiner repeatedly refused Marconi’s earlier attempts to patent tuned radio on account of it having already been anticipated and filed by Tesla. Only when the Examiner was abruptly replaced and a new one put in his place was the Marconi patent accepted. It’s almost like there was political and business pressure on the earlier Examiner. Once Marconi was ‘approved’, the Examiners handed it over to Marconi over Tesla, who had his original work taken from him and credited to someone else. That was a number of decades before the Court ruling, which should never have come to be on account of the dubious decision involving the new Patent Examiner, who never presented the same questions and objections to Marconi as the previous one.
There is a very good Tesla biography by Margaret Cheney called ‘man out of time’, and, in a single page within that book at the end of a particular chapter, she distils the Ferraris myth into what it actually is: that he didn’t invent the A/C motor and that there were legal court cases taken up on his behalf, but they were disproved. The Cheney book even quotes Steinmetz as acknowledging Tesla’s work as being the original multi-phase A/C motor and that Ferraris was not, and that he merely worked on a toy that he could do nothing with. Sometimes, you gotta read a book or two rather than a web page by someone with an ax to grind. Another good biography and source is the Marc Seifer book on the same subject. Not all important information is on the internet.
No need to remind people about the A/C for long distance transmission and D/C transformation for consumer use because it’s all covered in Tesla’s power patents and used for the past century and more by much of the world.
Elihu Thomson invented a three coil dynamo. The Tesla coil, which consists of a primary and a secondary coil, is not a dynamo. How are the two the same thing in terms of functionality? Please explain. Some homework and revised claims may be necessary. In your own time…
Cheney’s book is fan fiction.
The Tesla cult is fueled almost 100% by Margaret Cheney’s fawning biography, which more resembles a movie-star biography written by an adoring fan than anything with academic chops.
Read Paul Nahin’s Science of Radio or Sungook Hong’s Wireless . These are not biographies or autobiographies.
1893 theoretical demonstrations use electrostatic induction according to 1914 court and other non-radio wireless. Also, these demonstrations were theoretical in nature. And the court never reverted these decisions of 1914, not even in 1943.
We also know that some of the “wireless” patents of Tesla were of the type:”I have done enough experiments to feel confident that this system will work IF someone ever figures out how to actually build it”.(e.g. 645576, 649621, etc.)
From his own biographical articles, we also know that he considered the difference between the conceiving of an idea and the production of a physical item to be a “trivial difference”.
The 1943 case side stepped Tesla’s patents as “Science fiction worthy of Jules Verne”. Marconi’s tuning patents were voided in favour of Tesla, but roughly in favor John Stone Stone.
And Marconi did not copy Tesla. He would have greatly benefited if he did. Tesla’s coils were powerful.
My research actually reveals that the first person to transmit radio waves and remotely perform any action over any considerable distance(3 miles) and by penetrating walls was actually India’s J.C.Bose who did that in 1894. It’s well documented and not like Tesla’s 1898 remote control boat case which has only some eye-witness evidence.
Similarly, my research reveals that Tesla’s 3 phase motors were already demonstrated by G.Ferraris much before Tesla patented it. And it seems neither Bose, nor Ferraris believed in patenting.
While Tesla invited many people to his in-lab demonstrations, they tended to be writers, politicians, news reporters, financiers, celebrities, etc.,
and he seems to have been very careful to exclude any contemporaries with significant credible scientific credentials.
“Elihu Thomson invented a three coil dynamo. The Tesla coil, which consists of a primary and a secondary coil, is not a dynamo.”
That’s something he patented.
He publicly demonstrated Tesla coil in 1890, a year before Tesla patented it, and was the first person to do so. These could generate high-frequency waves. And several people were working on such coils including William James Morton.
http://www.electrotherapymuseum.com/2008/APS/StrongLetter.htm
Tesla’s own writing shows that he understands nothing about radio. He doesn’t even consider Hertzian waves a reality even in 1932. He thought the wireless waves were sound waves.
In any case , I can’t go up against an illogical cult. I quit.
Sorry, it should be :
The 1943 case side stepped Tesla’s patents as “Science fiction worthy of Jules Verne”. Marconi’s tuning patents were NOT voided in favour of Tesla, but roughly in favor John Stone Stone.
Margaret Cheney’s 1981 book is fully researched and fully cited. No fiction involved, unless you might point out something made-up, a fiction, from the book. Do give it a try. You might try reading it some time instead of slandering her efforts. You cannot find a so-called cult theory where there is none.
Electrostatic induction is produced by apparatus such as a Van de Graaff generator, a Wimshurst machine, or other static generators, which is something that Tesla was not associated with, if you consider real, serious sources such as 1890′s back issues of Scientific American and Electrical Engineer. The Sungook Hong book is a Marconi-centric publication, notoriously so, where the myth of Marconi is perpetuated by somebody who rehashes the same old Marconi material without discrimination. The Nahin book, I shall be reading when I get a copy, and reserve judgement on that until then.
You imply that Tesla’s patents did not work. That would be a remission of duty on the part of the Patent Examiner if that was the case, wouldn’t it? Can you really patent a theory? Fritz Lowenstein licensed Tesla’s patents, including for a US Navy transmitter. Maybe that was just a “theoretical” radio that the Navy kept and used “as a joke”, because it was “theoretical”? Or, shock-horror, Tesla’s patents worked. Your “Jules Verne” quote seems to have been plucked out of thin air rather than being the opinion of somebody who is qualified and informed on the matter.
Tesla’s R/C boat demonstration was made in front of the Patent Examiner, who didn’t believe such a thing could exist and wanted to see if for himself, as well as in front of members of the public, who were invited to submit commands for steering the boat, to which Tesla obeyed and steered as per their request. It is now just “some” eye witness, but rather a full demo. The R/C boat patent also included the first practical electronic AND logic gate. Half a century on, William Shockley gets a Nobel Prize for getting his lawyers to successfully get his transistor patent supplication finally accepted. They finally found a form of words to bypass Tesla’s anticipation in the area of electronic logic.
Ferraris ideas, a metal core inside a rolled sheet which, once rolled up, it stopped with nowhere else to go and that was it, would never have made a practical A/C power motor, and Ferraris could do nothing more with it. It just would not work for power purposes, and was a dead end. Tesla, however, created a new system which was suited to the task for A/C power. Some dream and some do.
As for excluding contemporaries, you only have to look at Menlo Park. Edison’s employees did much of the work and he filed most of the patents in his name. He also got Tesla, when the latter was an employee, to redesign his D/C motors and then refused to pay him the promised bonus for work which benefitted Edison’s firm financially. Some ideas are worth a lot of money and people learn this the hard way.
If Thomson really patented what we might commonly call or know as the Tesla coil, then of course Tesla would have to have licensed the use of such coils. But that didn’t happen, did it? I can find reference to similar [to the Tesla coil] patents from Stone Stone, Armstrong, Leydorf, etc, but not for Thomson. I can look in a proper, modern dictionary and find the definition of a Tesla coil, which says it all. Or is there a conspiracy with the dictionary?
Just because somebody doesn’t accept a conspiracy theory doesn’t necessarily make them “illogical”. People are free to make up their own minds.
@Milosh Milenkovich:
You obviously don’t know much about Tesla’s life and Croatian history. Tesla once said, i quote him: “I am equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian fatherland”.
To ronaldinho :-
That quote was allegedly said by Tesla to Croatian Bogdan Radisa. There were no other witnesses to this. However, when Tesla visited Belgrade in 1892 he gave a speech where he proclaimed he was proud to be a Serb and that was also proud that his achievements were that of a Serb. In his early patents he put his citizenship as Austro-Hungarian and when he because a US citizen his affiliation in patent applications was American citizen. In the 1970′s, a Croatian-based Yugoslav Army General pressured the Tesla Museum to move Tesla’s objects from the Museum to Croatia. The Director of the Museum told him that if Tesla had remained in Croatia rather than ending up in America that he (Tesla) would have been massacred by Croatian Ustasha units along with his relations and neighbours in August 1942. Tesla’s original home and the church his Orthodox priest father preached at were razed to the ground.
Wow, this comments section is beginning to sound remarkably like the Wikipedia Tesla article’s Talk page.
My brother–tho he is no mathematician–has a very odd(to me) way of looking at electricity and electromagnetism that provides him a seemingly intuitive grasp of complex electrical systems. He can’t even begin to put into words the way he thinks about it, tho he has tried many times at my request. The clearest explanation I’ve gotten out of him so far was that the words we inevitably use to describe electrical systems–like ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ or ‘neutral’ and ‘ground’ and ‘flow’–allow us to construct schematics of working systems that can be read and understood by others, while at the same time completely mischaracterizing what is actually taking place in the system and providing a very false mental picture of the nature of that system. This is why he can’t seem to describe the way he looks at it; the standard electrical vocabulary doesn’t give him the right words.
In any case, the way Tesla is said to have done most of his ‘model building’ inside his head is very much what my brother does. He’s left handed, so maybe that has something to do with his non-standard ways of looking at stuff. Was Tesla a leftie or a rightie? Anyone know?
Ferraris built the first induction motors in 1885, no matter if they were simple toys or if he was not able to predict the importance of his invention. They were complete induction machines. Ferraris also gave in his 1888 paper the theoretical explaination of his discovery, and was the first one in doing it. Michael Dolivo-Dobrowolsky, the engineer who created the modern induction motors, said: “I kissed Ferraris’s hand from afar for the nice idea and decided to investigate the matter intensively and to build a small test motor as soon as possible…” not Tesla’s hand.
The most rigorous article available on Internet explaining why was Marconi who invented radio and not Tesla:
http://earlyradiohistory.us/tesla.htm
For Galis:
Ferraris toyed around with toys. Period.
The URL you provide has been provided a couple of previous times on this web page. Oddly enough, the fawning, rambling, navel-contemplating writings on the site don’t mention that Marconi, in his capacity as the head of Italy’s Science Academy, blocked Jews from joining:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/mar/19/physicalsciences.humanities
That’s the same Marconi who backed the poison gas bombing of civilians in Ethiopia in the 1930′s when the Italians wanted colonies for Il Duce. What a heel he was.
Don’t forget that Marconi was not able to explain to the Patent Examiner at the time how the technology that he had appropriated from Tesla actually worked. It was only when a new, more “friendly” Examiner took over was intuition and common sense turned over on its head.
@Raveej
I’m not interested about Marconi’s political or personal life. The little toys by Ferraris that you’d like to ridicule included all the theoretical framework that make an induction motor an induction motor as Dolivo-Dobrowolsky and many others stated.
Tesla just exploited the idea and (cowardly) took advantage of the premature death of Ferrari to get the paternity of the invention. The first car was a little toy, the first battery was a little toy, the first aircraft was a little toy…Does it mean that Benz, Volta and the Wright brothers were not the inventors of those devices? The document I mentioned is everything but the scientifically and historically groundless emphatic propaganda rubbish we are used to read when dealing with Tesla. The author doesn’t give his opinion but refers to the most authoritative people, books and article in the field of radio telecommunication and electrical engineering. I invite you to challenge the different points of his version of the facts. Marconi didn’t steal anything from Tesla. Marconi’s radio system was original and had nothing to do with that one of Tesla which was never built since it was unworkable.
Marconi’s personality regarding other areas is pertinent because it shows you the character of the man who stole Tesla’s ideas and initially tried to patent them without demonstrating an understanding of how they worked. Being a bad person and a thief go hand-in-hand.
You really need to read up on Ferraris’ item. It can be readily compared with something that rolls up a carpet or roll of cloth. And where does it go beyond that? Tesla’s can be compared to a virtually infinitely rotating wheel. Does industry go for a carpet roller that loses its utility after the carpet is rolled or go for a spinning field that can be practically utilised?
You also need to use a calendar. Ferraris died in 1897. Tesla’s patents were made a decade before that. How can Tesla have taken “advantage of the premature death of Ferrari to get the paternity of the invention”? It’s simple chronology and logic!
You will also find that Tesla was demonstrating radio before Marconi did, so, again, using the magic of chronology, we can determine that Tesla built and demonstrated radio. You can look it up.
Marconi was the first example of scientist/business man, can we blame him for this reason? I don’t think you despise Steve Jobs for having created a successful company as a consequence of his geniality applied in the field of IT. Marconi’s success was the result of his scientific achievements and not the contrary. Till 1899 none was able to repeat Marconi’s results, and even the US government where Mr “I have invented everything before everyone” Nikola Tesla operated, asked Marconi to install his new technology. All this seems quite strange if everyone had already understood everything and patented everything in the radio domain before Marconi. Radio communication before 1895 Marconi’s experiences were only of short range; nothing news, many scientists were able to perform it around the world before Marconi: but it was not radio ! The same 1943 US court verdict, that many naive supporters of Tesla invoke as the evidence of Tesla’s priority, affirms exactly the contrary restating Marconi’s primacy in the invention of radio:
“….The inescapable fact is that Marconi in his basic patent hit upon something that had eluded the best brains of the time working on the problem of wireless communication-Clerk Maxwell and Sir Oliver Lodge and Nikola Tesla….”
“…To find in 1943 that what Marconi did really did not promote the progress of science because it had been anticipated is more than a mirage of hindsight…”
“…Marconi’s reputation as the man who first achieved successful radio transmission rests on his original patent, which became reissue No. 11,913, and which is not here in question….”
Yet brainwashed people around the world parrot-like repeat that the honour of Tesla was saved in 1943: really incredible !!
The description of Tesla’s radio system in the same case gives us the evidence the Tesla was light years away from understanding what radio technology means. Nothing surprising if we remember that he didn’t believe in the basic radio communication principles working then and now. Yet someone dare to call him the father of radio, like calling the greatest astrophysical someone who doesn’t believe in the force of gravity !!
Ferraris pre-dated Tesla in the invention of induction motors, this is now historically acknowledged but Tesla lived others 50 years after Ferraris death and so he was able to promote himself so successfully to make Ferraris forgotten. Thank God nowadays the truth has been established showing that the real crook was Tesla and not Marconi or Ferraris. You can persist in following your “personal cult” although all the historical and scientific evidences says the contrary of what you and unfortunately many others believe. I don’t have any missionary vocation, yet is disturbing to see how the history of science and technology can be so easily disrupted.
Tesla’s radio-related lectures and demonstrations started in 1893 (which pre-dates your given year of 1899 – and Marconi claimed not to know anything about these findings that were published around the world in many languages). Range is not the issue, nor is the business of money-making, which you are making it into, but rather the fact of tuned radio, which is what Tesla invented. Marconi’s wealth or business dealings are a pointless distraction from the facts. Tuned/tuneable radio and it’s inventor, that is the crux. Marconi could not explain how what he was stealing from Tesla worked, and the first Patent Examiner told Marconi that he didn’t believe Marconi when he said that he didn’t know of Tesla’s work. That first Patent Examiner had to ‘retire’ before Marconi’s claim could be ‘legitimate’ amongst the Victorian British business and political classes who could then make money from it, and that is what so many Mickey Mouse, ranting websites choose to ignore.
I didn’t mention the 1943 Supreme Court judgment (who is the “parrot” who is repeating anything? you?), though it would never ever have to have come to that if the British, replacement Patent Examiner, for no explanation given, overruled his retired predecessor in allowing Marconi to have Tesla’s (previously-registered) British patent on tuned radio. The US Patent office then followed their British counterpart. Could there be something amiss? That was the Marconi company 1912 shares scandal that followed, which seemed to indicate the some people within the company, as well as rich people outside of it, could be proved to be up to no good.
Tesla tore up his financial contract with Westinghouse and so did not profit from his invention, so how can he be ‘promoting himself’ for 50 years?! There was a court case 8 years after Ferraris died, but the Ferraris case failed to prove his (Ferraris) paternity. They look at evidence, listen to the legal and technical arguments, and decided it wasn’t Ferraris. Go figure. If you don’t like the result, that’s legal judgements for you.
As you may know radio is not the four tuned circuits. The overall concept of electrical tuning was nothing new examples go back to the days of the telegraph. In the case of radio, four-circuit transformers were just one of a multitude of improvements made over the years. It is like saying that the aircraft was invented by the guy who came up with the idea of replacing the propeller with the jet engine. Moreover, Tesla’s patent didn’t show any presence of a variable inductance as a means of adjusting the tuning the antenna circuit of transmitter and receiver. Tesla actually had only the slightest (if that) understanding of electromagnetic radio physics and the description of his radio system definetely prove it: “….Tesla in fact did not use Hertzian waves. His idea was to make the ether a conductor for long distan es by using extremely high voltage, 20, 000,000 to 30,000,000 volts, and extremely high altitudes, 30,000 to 40, 000 feet or more, to secure transmission from aerial to aerial. Balloons, with wires attached reaching to the ground, were his suggested aerials. His system was really one for transmitting power for motors, lighting, etc ., to ‘any terrestrial distance,’ though he incidentally mentions ‘intelligible messages….”.
Something more likely to be read in a book of Isaac Asimov rather than in a scientific magazine. And this would be the big leap forward in science given us by Tesla? If you know the guy you cannot be surprised of such an imagination. Was not the same Tesla who claimed of being capable to hear thunderclaps at 500 miles distance? Tesla’s admirers claim that Tesla demonstrated message transmission by means of Hertzian waves for the first time in 1893 in his St. Louis lecture. This claim is, however, not supported by any direct evidence (as always when Tesla is involved), and the fact that Tesla used a Geissler tube as a detector (how could one effectively detect Morse-coded signals with the Geissler tube?) strongly weakens the claim. In addition, his ideas about how signals are communicated through space were similar to earth-conductive (wireless) telephony, rather than Hertzian wireless telegraphy. Because Tesla used high-frequency electrical currents in these demonstrations, it is sometimes claimed that he had employed radio signals to illuminate the tubes. But it is clear from his descriptions at the time that he was actually using both conduction through the ground and induction. I’m talking about effective results when remembering 1899, not sci fiction inspired mental trips. In a world crowded by pioneers of radio telecommunication Marconi was the only capable to master the new technology, even with all the patents made public: a rather smart crook! Courts deal with patents and is well known that nTesla was the first one to patent the induction motor simply because Ferraris always refused to patent his discoveries. Ferraris got the idea, Tesla the honours, that’s it. Finally, Marconi from the hell has suggested me to remember a delicate and nice thought by Tesla:
“…Laxity of morals is a terrible evil, which poisons both mind and body, and which is responsible for a general reduction of the human mass in some countries. Many of the present customs and tendencies are productive of similar hurtful results. For example, the society life, modern education and pursuits of women, tending to draw them away from their household duties and make men out of them, must needs detract from the elevating ideal they represent, diminish the artistic creative power, and cause sterility and a general weakening of the race. ..” maybe it can help Nikola in his process of achieving sainthood.