Scientist born in July | Eduauraa Blog
Who was Tesla?
Nikola Tesla (July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan, Austrian Empire [now Croatia]—January 7, 1943, New York, New York, United States), Serbian American inventor and engineer who developed and patented the rotating magnetic field, which is the foundation of most alternating-current technology.
He also created the three-phase transmission method for electric power.
In 1884, he emigrated to the United States and sold George Westinghouse the patents for his alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors.
He designed the Tesla coil, a type of induction coil that is commonly utilized in radio technology, in 1891.
Family
Tesla was born into a Serbian family. His father was an Orthodox priest, and his mother, though uneducated, was quite brilliant.
He grew up to have a lyrical touch, as well as a fantastic imagination and ingenuity.
Education
He went to the Technical University of Graz in Austria and the University of Prague to prepare for a career in engineering.
He first saw the Gramme dynamo in Graz, which worked as a generator but could also be used as an electric motor when reversed, and he came up with a means to make alternating current work for him.
Later, in Budapest, he imagined the rotating magnetic field's theory and devised ideas for an induction motor, which would be his first step toward practical alternating current use.
Humble beginnings
Tesla joined the Continental Edison Company in Paris in 1882, and while on duty in Strassburg in 1883, he built his first induction motor outside work hours.
Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 with four pennies in his pocket, a few poems, and calculations for a flying machine.
He originally worked with Thomas Edison, but the two innovators' backgrounds and approaches were so unlike that their separation was unavoidable.
Tesla's polyphase system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors was purchased by George Westinghouse, the president of the
Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh, in May 1888.
The deal sparked a massive power battle between Edison's direct-current systems and Tesla-alternating-current Westinghouse's methods, which ultimately won out.
Experimentation and research
Tesla quickly created his laboratory, allowing his creative mind to run wild. He experimented with shadowgraphs, which Wilhelm Röntgen would employ when he discovered X-rays in 1895.
Work on a carbon button lamp, the power of electrical resonance, and different forms of illumination were among Tesla's numerous experiments.
Tesla had demonstrations in his laboratory where he lighted lamps by letting electricity pass through his body to alleviate suspicions of alternating currents.
He was frequently invited to give talks both at home and abroad.
Tesla's coil, which he designed in 1891, is still commonly utilized in radios, television sets, and other electronic devices today.
Tesla became a citizen of the United States in the same year.
A few of his early discoveries and work
The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which took place in 1893, was lit by Westinghouse using Tesla's alternating current technology.
Because of their performance, they were awarded the contract to install the first power apparatus at Niagara Falls, which included Tesla's name and patent numbers. By 1896, the project had brought electricity to Buffalo.
Tesla produced what he considered his most important discovery—terrestrial stationary waves—in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he remained from May 1899 until early 1900.
He demonstrated that the Earth could be utilized as a conductor and made to vibrate at a certain electrical frequency with this discovery.
He also ignited 200 bulbs without wires from a distance of 40 kilometers (25 miles) and generated man-made lightning, which produced 41-meter-long flashes (135 feet).
He was certain that he had received signals from another planet in his Colorado laboratory at one point, a claim that was ridiculed in several scientific publications.
Tesla returned to New York in 1900, and with $150,000 from American investor J. Pierpont Morgan, he began construction on Long Island of a wireless global broadcasting tower.
Tesla said he was able to obtain the money by transferring to Morgan 51 percent of his intellectual rights in telephony and telegraphy.
He planned to enable global communication as well as the ability to communicate photographs, messages, weather forecasts, and stock data.
Because of a financial crisis, labor issues, and Morgan's withdrawal of support, the project was shelved. It was Tesla's most humiliating setback.
Tesla's focus switched to turbines and other projects after that. Due to a lack of funding, his ideas were confined to his notebooks, which are currently being studied by aficionados in search of undiscovered clues.
He was deeply upset in 1915 when a story that he and Edison would split the Nobel Prize turned out to be false.
Achievements and beyond
In 1917, Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
Tesla only allowed a few close pals into his life. The novelists Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, and Francis Marion Crawford were among them.
He was an oddball, driven by compulsions and a developing germ phobia, and he was highly unrealistic in money affairs.
Legacy
Tesla's trunks, which included his papers, diplomas, and other honors, correspondence, and laboratory notes, were detained after his death by the custodian of foreign property.
Tesla's nephew, Sava Kosanovich, finally inherited them, and they are now on display at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
Hundreds of people packed the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City for his burial, as a deluge of tributes mourned the death of a great mind.
Three Nobel Laureates paid homage to “one of the outstanding intellectuals of the world who paved the way for many of the technological developments of modern times.”
