Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla (July 9, or July 10, 1856 - January 7, 1943) was a Serbian-born inventor and electrical engineer whose most famous contribution to the world was the first alternating current generator, invented in 1882.

He is also noted for inventing the Tesla coil, and a bladeless turbine that functioned on fluid viscosity. The scientific compound derived SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic inductivity, the tesla unit, was named in his honor.

Tesla studied in Karlovac, Croatia, and worked in Budapest, Paris, and New York City. He was fluent in seven languages and was a good friend of Mark Twain. For a while he stayed in Maribor.

Though he had worked for Thomas Edison for a time, he would soon become his adversary due to Edison's promotion of direct current for electric power distribution over Tesla's more efficient alternating current. At the time, direct current was the standard, and Edison was not about to lose all his patent royalties to a former employee. A huge political battle ensued, including the use of Tesla's patents (by one of Edison's employees) to construct the first electric chair for the state of New York in order to promote the idea that alternating currents were deadly. But with the financial backing of George Westinghouse, Tesla's alternating current gradually replaced direct current, enormously extending the range and improving the safety and efficiency of power distribution.

Of the 700-plus patents accumulated by Tesla, the most controversial today is his Wardenclyffe Tower. The tower was meant to be the start of a national (and later global) system of towers broadcasting power to users as radio waves. Instead of supplying electricity through the current grid system, users would simply "receive" power through an antenna in their roof. At the time the power grid was quite limited in terms of who it reached and the Tower represented a way of significantly reducing the cost of "electrifying" the countryside.

Though never completed successfully in Tesla's lifetime due to lack of funding, and finally dismantled for scrap during wartime, its principles are being implemented by a U.S. military project in Alaska, spanning several hundred acres. However, Project HAARP, as it is called, supplies a different objective. While Tesla's tower was to be his supreme test of the applicability of transmitted power, HAARP is being used to study ionospheric effects on radio communication.

Tesla's Serbian-Orthodox family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with American authorities after Tesla's death due to the potential power of some of Tesla's research. Perhaps because of Tesla's personal eccentricity and the dramatic nature of his demonstrations, conspiracy theories about applications of his work persist. The common Hollywood stereotype of the "mad scientist" mirrors Tesla's real-life persona, or at least a caricature of it -- which may be no accident considering that many of the earliest such movies (including the first movie version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) were produced by Tesla's old rival, Edison.

Tesla disputed the claim that Marconi invented the radio. An ongoing lawsuit regarding this was finally resolved after his death, with the government granting Tesla the patent on radio devices. At the time, the United States Army was involved in a patent infringement lawsuit with Marconi regarding the radio, leading some to posit that the government granted Tesla the patent to nullify any claims Marconi would have to recompensation.

There are at least two films describing his life in a whole. In the first arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Serb actor Rade Serbedzija.

A document purporting to be a copy of Tesla's autobiography is also circulating on the Internet.

External links and resources

• Tesla Wardenclyffe Project, whose mission is the preservation and adaptive reuse of Wardenclyffe, Tesla's laboratory located in Shoreham, Long Island, New York.
• Tesla pages at PBS Web site
• Twenty First Century Books -- "a mail-order bookstore specializing in titles related to the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla."