27/09/2023, 18:03 Nikola Tesla -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, (born July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan,
Austrian Empire [now in Croatia]—died January 7,
1943, New York, New York, U.S.), Serbian American
inventor and engineer who discovered and patented
the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most
Nikola Tesla alternating-current machinery. He also developed the
three-phase system of electric power transmission. He
immigrated to the United States in 1884 and sold the patent rights to his system of
alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse. In 1891 he
invented the Tesla coil, an induction coil widely used in radio technology.

Tesla was from a family of Serbian origin. His father was an Orthodox priest; his mother
was unschooled but highly intelligent. As he matured, he displayed remarkable imagination
and creativity as well as a poetic touch.

Training for an engineering career, he attended the Technical University at Graz, Austria,
and the University of Prague. At Graz he first saw the Gramme dynamo, which operated as
a generator and, when reversed, became an electric motor, and he conceived a way to use
alternating current to advantage. Later, at Budapest, he visualized the principle of the
rotating magnetic field and developed plans for an induction motor that would become his
first step toward the successful utilization of alternating current. In 1882 Tesla went to work
in Paris for the Continental Edison Company, and, while on assignment to Strassburg in
1883, he constructed, after work hours, his first induction motor. Tesla sailed for America
in 1884, arriving in New York with four cents in his pocket, a few of his own poems, and
calculations for a flying machine. He first found employment with Thomas Edison, but the
two inventors were far apart in background and methods, and their separation was
inevitable.

In May 1888 George Westinghouse, head of the Westinghouse Electric Company in

Pittsburgh, bought the patent rights to Tesla’s polyphase system of alternating-current
dynamos, transformers, and motors. The transaction precipitated a titanic power struggle
between Edison’s direct-current systems and the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating-current
approach, which eventually won out.

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Tesla soon established his own laboratory, where his inventive mind could be given free
rein. He experimented with shadowgraphs similar to those that later were to be used by
Wilhelm Röntgen when he discovered X-rays in 1895. Tesla’s countless experiments
included work on a carbon button lamp, on the power of electrical resonance, and on
various types of lighting.

In order to allay fears of alternating currents, Tesla gave exhibitions in his laboratory in
which he lit lamps by allowing electricity to flow through his body. He was often invited to
lecture at home and abroad. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is widely used today
in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment. That year also marked the date
of Tesla’s U.S. citizenship.

Westinghouse used Tesla’s alternating current system to light the World’s Columbian
Exposition at Chicago in 1893. This success was a factor in their winning the contract to
install the first power machinery at Niagara Falls, which bore Tesla’s name and patent
numbers. The project carried power to Buffalo by 1896.

In 1898 Tesla announced his invention of a teleautomatic boat guided by remote control.
When skepticism was voiced, Tesla proved his claims for it before a crowd in Madison
Square Garden.

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he stayed from

May 1899 until early 1900, Tesla made what he
regarded as his most important discovery—terrestrial
stationary waves. By this discovery he proved that
Earth could be used as a conductor and made to
Nikola Tesla resonate at a certain electrical frequency. He also lit
200 lamps without wires from a distance of 40 km (25
miles) and created man-made lightning, producing flashes measuring 41 metres (135 feet).
At one time he was certain he had received signals from another planet in his Colorado
laboratory, a claim that was met with derision in some scientific journals.

Returning to New York in 1900, Tesla began construction on Long Island of a wireless
world broadcasting tower, with $150,000 capital from the American financier J. Pierpont
Morgan. Tesla claimed he secured the loan by assigning 51 percent of his patent rights of
telephony and telegraphy to Morgan. He expected to provide worldwide communication
and to furnish facilities for sending pictures, messages, weather warnings, and stock

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reports. The project was abandoned because of a financial panic, labour troubles, and
Morgan’s withdrawal of support. It was Tesla’s greatest defeat.

Tesla’s work then shifted to turbines and other projects. Because of a lack of funds, his
ideas remained in his notebooks, which are still examined by enthusiasts for unexploited
clues. In 1915 he was severely disappointed when a report that he and Edison were to share
the Nobel Prize proved erroneous. Tesla was the recipient of the Edison Medal in 1917, the
highest honour that the American Institute of Electrical Engineers could bestow.

Tesla allowed himself only a few close friends. Among them were the writers Robert
Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, and Francis Marion Crawford. He was quite impractical
in financial matters and an eccentric, driven by compulsions and a progressive germ
phobia. But he had a way of intuitively sensing hidden scientific secrets and employing his
inventive talent to prove his hypotheses. Tesla was a godsend to reporters who sought
sensational copy but a problem to editors who were uncertain how seriously his futuristic
prophecies should be regarded. Caustic criticism greeted his speculations concerning
communication with other planets, his assertions that he could split the Earth like an apple,
and his claim of having invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000 airplanes at a
distance of 400 km (250 miles).

After Tesla’s death the custodian of alien property impounded his trunks, which held his
papers, his diplomas and other honours, his letters, and his laboratory notes. These were
eventually inherited by Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovich, and later housed in the Nikola
Tesla Museum in Belgrade. Hundreds filed into New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the
Divine for his funeral services, and a flood of messages acknowledged the loss of a great
genius. Three Nobel Prize recipients addressed their tribute to “one of the outstanding
intellects of the world who paved the way for many of the technological developments of
modern times.”
Inez Whitaker Hunt

Citation Information
Article Title: Nikola Tesla
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 26 June 2023
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikola-Tesla
Access Date: September 27, 2023

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