Nikola Tesla, Father of Modern Electricity

By


Butch Criswell

In the last few weeks, we have been talking and writing about energy; it’s applications, how we harness it, and the distribution of that energy to the populace. The one question I have asked myself through all of this was who started the different genres of different energy applications. Surely in this environmental/beatnik society we have created, there has to be heroes. Heroes other than the founders of Greenpeace and Peta; I mean the real life heroes that used scientific knowledge to give us the basis for what we have today. Scientists such as Nikola Tesla, a real hero of the twentieth century and one of the founding fathers of hydroelectricity we use today, among many other things.

Nikola Tesla was born July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika, what was then the Austo-Hungarian Empire, region of Croatia. His father Milutin Tesla was a Serbian Orthodox Priest, and his mother Djuka Mandic was an inventor of household appliances. Tesla studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt in 1873, and the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria and the University of Prague. Tesla was going to study math and physics, but became mesmerized about electrical energy. He then switched to electrical engineering and never looked back. In 1883 while working for the Continental Edison Company in Paris, he built a small prototype of the AC induction motor that is widely used today in many appliances. Tesla left Europe and headed to New York and his dream of harnessing the mighty Niagara Falls.

Once in New York he started working for Thomas Edison, as his personal assistant in his lab in New Jersey. This is where these two great men had a falling out over DC and AC currents and its applications. George Westinghouse appeared before Tesla after giving a speech to the Institute of Electrical engineers in 1888. Together, they both beat Edison and started a new era in electrical energy, which is still the standard today. Tesla saved his greatest accomplishment to humanity for last, and in 1895 built the first hydroelectric power plant , which was the final vindication for alternating current. Tesla’s discoveries are numerous to the point of ridiculous they are the fluorescent light , laser beam, wireless communications, and wireless transmission of electrical energy, the remote control, robotics, and Tesla’s vertical takeoff aircraft. Tesla is the real father of the radio and the modern electrical transmissions systems. He registered over 700 patents worldwide. His vision included exploration of solar energy and the power of the sea. He foresaw interplanetary communications and satellites. Tesla has so many other contributions to humankind that cannot be mentioned in this forum. However, the father of radio might through you a little. In 1901 Marconi, established radio contact with Great Britain and Canada and won the Nobel Peace Prize. All of Marconi’s work was based on other people’s ideas, and one in particular was the patented diagrams of a radio system Tesla had invented and patented in 1896. Tesla was not about to let Marconi, have credit for his radio system. In 1943, the United States Supreme Court found Marconi’s patented invalid, and recognized Tesla as the inventor of radio technology. Nikola Tesla died January 7, 1943 in the Hotel New Yorker, where he lived the last ten years of his life. Tesla was penniless at the time of his death.



References

Vujovic, D. L. (1998, July 10). Tesla Society. Retrieved April 9, 2010, from Tesla Memorial Society of New York: www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm