Tesla - The Real Man Behind America's Geniuses

by Jason Margolis
originally printed April 9, 1998

Although it's not really something to brag about, I can remember the lyrics to at least one hit song from most of the monsters of rock that dominated the airwaves of the 1980s: Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, Guns n' Roses. It's a fine party trick - not as useful as knowing the lyrics to the themes to Scooby Doo or Who's The Boss? - but it can pass the time. Ironically, the one band I always draw a blank at is Tesla, the band named in honour of the past century's most maligned inventor, the all-but-forgotten Nikola Tesla.

Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi and Alexander Graham Bell are now legendary for their breakthroughs in electrical engineering. Nikola Tesla was very much their peer - if not their superior - improving on their designs, or creating the foundations for their various discoveries.

Tesla was appropriately born during an electrical storm at the stroke of midnight July 9, 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia. The son of an Orthodox priest and a highly-creative mother who designed many inventions to aid her in housework, young Tesla took a shine to poetry. However, he quickly demonstrated himself to be a budding scientist by developing the first working water wheel without paddles - at the age of four!

Many Imaginary Friends

A strange little boy, he regularly spoke to himself or some imaginary friends unbeknownst to others. He was an overly-sensitive child. Not emotionally sensitive, as children can be today, but his actual senses were astoundingly acute. He claimed to be able to hear a fly land on a table with a thud.

He possessed an incredible photographic memory, which manifested itself later in his life by the lack of blueprints or prototypes for his inventions. He was able to develop, test, and even predict the wear and tear of all of his electric devices within the comfort of his own head. It was said he mastered no less than six languages at a young age. Then again, it was alleged that he slept less than two hours a night, so he had to have something to do with his time.

After attending the Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague - where he often found himself teaching his professors about the new field of electrical engineering - Tesla spent a few years improving the designs of the trolleys and trains of Hungary. In his spare time, he made his first electrical invention, a "telephone repeater," which we now know as the loudspeaker.

In 1882, he moved to Paris to work for the Continental Edison Company. During his off-hours while on assignment in Strasbourg, he developed the concept of the rotating magnetic field, which eventually he soon put to application in the polyphase induction motor. This invention continues to provide a source of power to most of the world's industrial machinery.

In 1884, he set forth to America. His voyage got off to a shaky start as poor Tesla was robbed of his luggage, ticket and money while on his way to the steam ship. The ship's captain, possibly sensing greatness in his presence, allowed Tesla to sail anyway.

Tesla then fell in love with a tempestuous young woman engaged to an American industrial heir and ran around screaming that he was the "King of the World." No, wait, wrong story...

Working for the Man of the Bulb

According to legend, Tesla arrived in the United States with four cents in his pocket, a selection of his own poems, and the plans for a flying machine. He soon found employment with Thomas Edison.

As history has now revealed, Edison was more businesman than scientific innovator. Various accounts also claim him to be an industrial thief, a bigot, and downright cruel to animals. He did invent the lightbulb, mind you, and that is something that has proven useful over the years. He later claimed invention for several other popular mechanical instruments, like phonographs and kinetoscopes, although his motto of "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" never specified whether his own perspiration was involved.

It was in this environment that Tesla laboured seven days a week, from 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. Tesla really didn't appreciate Edison's research into direct current (D.C.) electricity, favouring his own exploration with alternating current (A.C.). Direct current had already proven to be less efficient that alternating current, particularly in dealing with electrical shorts and its provoking of fires. However, Edison promised a percentage of profits if Tesla could find means to save time and money in the installation of direct current electrical systems. Tesla hoped to use this money to set up his own lab.

After a year's work, Tesla managed to provide Edison with 24 improvements to the direct current system, thus saving Edison over $100,000 - not chump change in 1885. Tesla then found himself waiting in vain for payment that was not to come. Edison's reply was reportedly "Tesla, you don't understand our American humour."

Tesla and Edison parted ways and became bitter enemies - a rivalry greater than that of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and one that would never be resolved. Fortunately, Tesla found a new patron in George Westinghouse, head of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh. Tesla sold the patent rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, motors, and transformers to Westinghouse for $60,000, which included shares of Westinghouse stock. He was also promised $2.50 for every horsepower of electricity sold - a deal which would have made him a billionaire - but again found himself getting the short end of the proverbial stick in this arrangement.

Powering up the World's Fair

Westinghouse did provide Tesla with a more pleasant work environment than Edison, and he was a great promoter of Tesla's work. Tesla broke into the engineering mainstream when he and Westinghouse were awarded the contract to install the electrical and lighting systems for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. No previous World's Fair had ever had electricity, and this demonstration proved that Tesla's alternating current was the superior of the two competing electrical systems.

Edison did not take this news well. He seized upon Sing Sing Prison's use of alternating current for its electric chair. He had articles printed in prominent newspapers about the deleterious "killing" power preached by Tesla. These articles tarnished Tesla's name for years to come. Edison seemingly took glee in electrocuting puppies - and on one occasion an elephant - in his further effort to disgrace the image of "deadly" A.C.

Meanwhile. Tesla and Westinghouse moved on to the installation of the world's first power machinery at Niagara Falls, which provided electricity to the city of Buffalo in 1896. The patents on the machinery bore Tesla's name.

Tesla continued developing an impressive array of useful things. In 1891, he invented the Tesla Coil, an induction coil that made radio and television technology possible. A larger manifestation of the coil is infamously remembered as the "coil with blue electrical waves flickering up it" from old mad scientist movies.

In 1893, Tesla invented radio. Yes, you read that correctly.

Tesla - not Marconi - invented radio. Tesla's invention was a wireless broadcast demonstration held in St. Louis, a full two years before Marconi's claim to fame and five years prior to Marconi's patent. Tesla and Marconi eventually took the matter to court, and Tesla won. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States granted full patent rights for the invention of the radio to Nikola Tesla.

Cosmic death ray

It is interesting to note that Tesla's "fundamental radio patent" of 1898 specified not only the transmission of audio data, but also visual data such as stock market information and weather reports. He later amended these concepts during his work developing primitive forms of radar some two decades before its practical application - and in the process wound up patenting the early ancestors of our modern television picture tubes.

Tesla wasn't just the first person to expose the use of radio waves for listening enjoyment, he also might have beaten Wilhelm K. Roentgen to the 1895 discovery of X-Rays. Tesla's work with "shadowgraphs" in the previous year attest to that. He also built a vacuum tube amplifier years before Lee de Forest popularized it, and was an early proponent in the use of fluorescent lighting - which he used to illuminate his laboratory decades before its credited creation.

Among Tesla's other useful inventions to aid modern living was the 1898 patent for the "electrical igniter for gas engines," now commonly known and used as the automobile ignition system. Its primary component, the ignition coil, remains essentially unchanged from Tesla's original design. That same year , Tesla announced his creation of "a teleautomatic boat guided by remote control" which was promptly greeted with much disbelief. He appeased such concerns with a successful display before a crowd at Madison Square Garden.

Tesla's innovations sparked such developments as air conditioning, airplanes, and possibly even time travel - at least if the persistent rumours of his involvement with the Philadelphia Experiment are true. He patented many unique devices, including a hypersensitive vacuum tube to perceive the presence of ghosts and "An Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy," which was described as a superpowerful cosmic ray motor... whatever that means.

That's one huge rod

One his greatest experiments resulted in the record setting formulation of the largest flash of man-made lightning - some 135 feet long! This occurred during his stay in Colorado Springs over the turn of the century. At this point in time, Tesla had accurately concluded that he could use the Earth as a giant conductor and that the whole planet would be responsive to electrical vibrations of a certain frequency. Tesla used this property to light 200 electrical lamps from a distance of 40 km.

Later, when he set the lightning record, he managed to nearly destroy the town's power plant, setting off a major blackout. When asked why he would try such an ambitious experiment, his response was "Just to see what would happen."

His feud with Edison almost ended when the two were rumoured to share the 1915 Nobel Prize, but again, it never came to pass. However, in 1917, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers awarded Tesla its highest honour, ironically named the Edison Medal.

Lack of funding continually hampered Tesla's research. Many projects never made it out of his notebooks. As he grew older, he became something of a hermit, plagued by massive germ phobias similar to those experience by Howard Hughes. Once a year, on his birthday, he held forth at a press conference during which he would make claims about communications with other planets, and outlandish prophecies of the future - some of which have proven true.

Tesla taunted the media by stating his invention of a death ray, now speculated to be an early incarnation of the "Star Wars" satellite defence system supposedly developed by the United States.

After Westinghouse passed away in 1913, his company forgot about its founder's dear friend and benefactor, Tesla. Although the scientist was not broke, he spent his last few years living quietly and alone in his New York hotel room. He died on January 7, 1943. The FBI promptly seized his notebooks for further research into his death ray.

Back to Jump Communications articles and links