Tesla - Inventor of the Modern World Documentary

The man known to history as Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika, which was originally part of the Austro-Hungarian empire but is now located in Croatia. His father was Milutin Tesla, a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church and son of Nikola Tesla's grandfather, who was also called Nikola. His grandfather had served as a military officer of the French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars and had risen to the rank of sergeant, before marrying Tesla's grandmother, Ana Kalinic, daughter of a respected colonel. After Napoleon's defeat, Nikola Tesla returned to Lika, which was assimilated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he had two sons, including Milutin and his brother Josif, as well as three daughters named Stanka, Janja and another whose name is unknown. .

Milutin Tesla and his brother were sent to the Austrian Military Officer Training Academy to follow their father's career, and while Josif prospered and eventually became a mathematics teacher at a military academy in Austria, where he authored several books standard mathematics textbook, Milutin decided instead to opt for a devotional path, enrolling in the Plaski Orthodox Seminary to train as a priest after being punished during training for not maintaining the shine of his brass buttons. Nikola Tesla's mother was Djuka Mandic, daughter of a Gracac priest named Nikola Mandic, and sister of three very successful brothers, including Nikolai, who rose through the ecclesiastical ranks to become archbishop of Sarajevo and metropolitan of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Bosnia. , Pajo, who became a colonel on the General Staff of the Austrian army, and finally Trifun, who stood out in the business

world

as a respected hotelier and landowner.

In addition to being a dedicated homemaker, Djuka Mandic possessed a great intellect and a strong work ethic and was herself an innovator in her home appliances, which she often modified to make them more efficient. She was "an

inventor

of the first order" according to Tesla and a creative influence on him until her death in 1892. Milutin Tesla was a talented student and graduated with highest honors in 1845, marrying the 25-year-old Djuka Mandic in 1847. . after being delegated to oversee the parish of Senj on the Adriatic coast. Settling into a house situated atop a cliff overlooking the ocean, the newlyweds started a family: Djuka gave birth to her eldest son, Dane, in 1848, her first-born daughter, Angelina, in 1850, and finally to another daughter, Milka, in 1852.

However, due to poor pay and the salty sea air causing health problems, Milutin Tesla was reassigned to the Church of St. Apostles Peter. and Paul in Smiljan, which meant "the place of basil", in the province of Lika, where he was provided with a picturesque farm, a plot of fertile land and even an Arabian horse so he could ride to see his parishioners, he was It was given to him by a Turkish pasha living in Bosnia as a reward for helping some local Muslims. In addition to being an extremely intelligent man who assembled a vast library filled with volumes on religion, mathematics, science, and literary works in many different languages, Milutin Tesla was also an arduous reformer of the Serbian people, regularly writing articles for a variety of newspapers and newspapers. tirelessly promoting the creation of language schools where Serbs could learn to read and write.

According to his family, Nikola Tesla was born at midnight, sometime between July 9 and 10, 1856, in the middle of a terrible storm. Three days later, Nikola was baptized at his family's home and, with his future apparently already planned, he too enlisted as a member of the First Lika Regiment of the Ninth Medak Company, a squadron he would join when he was 15. years. law. By all indications, Tesla's childhood was a happy one, shared with his older siblings, as well as his younger sister Marica, born in 1859, who often accompanied him to the church cemetery or to the farmyard to play with the chickens, the geese, sheep and other animals that his father had.

Tesla was often joined by his black cat Macak, who first introduced him to the phenomenon that would define his life's work after he gave off a strong spark when petting it, an event his father explained as a secretion of electricity. In another formative experience also involving Macak, Tesla one day noticed how a halo of light suddenly surrounded his beloved cat, briefly illuminating the candlelit room in which he was sitting. Inspired by such wonders, Tesla devoted much of his childhood energy to experimenting. and encouraged by his mother's inventive streak, he drew up plans for flying machines very similar to how a helicopter would later work, he dismantled watches to see how they worked and even designed a wooden sword himself so he could pretend to be a brave Serbian. warrior.

However, behind the fascination was a troubled young mind, as Tesla revealed that as a child he suffered from a strange affliction whereby he could not distinguish images from reality, which worried him greatly. Tesla's childhood trauma was exacerbated by the death of his older brother Dane in 1863, who was killed in front of Tesla by the family's Arabian horse in a traumatic experience that would haunt him endlessly, and was also the reason for Tesla's death. that his distraught father moved his family from the idyllic Croatian countryside to the larger city of Gospić, an unfamiliar environment where Tesla struggled to adapt to urban life.

Dane's untimely death cast a long shadow over Tesla's own relationship with his father, who, mired in grief, always underestimated his youngest son's talents, an abandonment that the young Nikola attempted to compensate for by striving to be perfect in everything he did. toward. He did it so he could regain the love of his parents. Blinded by grief, Milutin Tesla treated his young son with contempt, becoming enraged when he caught him reading in his private library, and on one particularly painful occasion, after Nikola accidentally ruined a local noblewoman's dress by accidentally jumping on it. him while dragging While walking down a church aisle, he slapped his son in public as punishment.

As a result of his strained relationships, Tesla developed a number of peculiar phobias as a child, such as a repulsion for women who wore earrings and pearls, a strong aversion to hair, a dislike for the smell of camphor, as well as a number of other strange habits, including an obsession with counting his steps and measuring the contents of his meals by volume, calculations with which he was only satisfied if they were divisible by three. Overwhelmed by a plethora of strange neuroses, Tesla was able to regain some sense of balance after coming across a novel called Abafi, published in 1836 by Hungarian author Miklós Jósika, which presented the story of Olivér Abafi, an impulsive and hedonistic young nobleman. recast as a brave national hero who sacrifices himself for the country's well-being.

Tesla was particularly inspired by the protagonist's character, seeing his desire to improve his moral character while ignoring frivolous distractions as a masterful example of self-control, showing Tesla that it was, in fact, possible for him to control his wild emotions. Tesla realized that a good coping strategy was to work with, rather than against, the nebulous visions that assaulted his consciousness, and delving further into the imaginary

world

of his imagination, Tesla began to embark on strange journeys in which he He would stumble upon fantastic countries, people and cities that he dreamed of. As Tesla honed that untamed imagination that would later serve him so well in his profession, he began theorizing about the nature of reality itself, concluding that he could trace all of his mental images back to something he saw, smelled, or touched. in an early echo of the mechanistic view of the world that he would later embrace.

It was also an idea that had real-life application for Tesla, who was once hailed as a hero by a group of firefighters after he saw a small kink in a fire hose that he instinctively knew was preventing water from reaching the fire. to a burning building. a problem he quickly solved by smoothing the groove. Tesla's ingenuity would be further fostered at the Royal Gymnasium, the primary school he attended in Gospić, where he would surprise his mathematics teachers by demonstrating a natural ability to calculate numbers, but while he excelled in scientific pursuits, Tesla was unable to translate their talents. to drawing class, where Tesla's preference for quiet contemplation greatly distracted him, leading to such extremely low grades that his father had to talk to the principal, instilling in young Nikola an aversion to drawing. diagrams that would last a lifetime.

During his studies at the Royal Gymnasium, Tesla began to get serious about invention, devising schematics for a flying machine that would use vacuum pressure to push air molecules, a concept that an adult Tesla would later refute. Shortly after graduating from the Royal Gymnasium in 1870, Tesla, perhaps due to his overactive imagination, became seriously ill with a series of illnesses serious enough that the doctors treating him almost abandoned his case entirely. Throughout his recovery, Tesla began to read voraciously, and it was during this period that he was first introduced to Mark Twain's stories. It was a story that he would later tell to Mark Twain himself, who burst into tears upon hearing it.

After a period of convalescence, Nikola Tesla enrolled in the Royal Superior Gymnasium of Karlovac in 1873, where, in accordance with his father's wish that Tesla continue the family profession, he enrolled in classes at the seminary. local. However, Tesla's true desire was to learn everything he could about electricity, a passion ignited by an inspiring physics professor who taught him about the radiometer invented by British scientist William Crookes, a device that powered a vacuum bulb with energy produced by four rapidly rotating sheets of aluminum foil. paddles, this prompted Tesla to perform some of his first experiments with batteries, induction coils, and electrostatic generators.

However, Tesla had to suspend some of his projects after becoming seriously ill with cholera upon his return to his home in Gospić, which caused the young prodigy to remain bedridden for more than 9 months and experience various troubles with the death. After a particularly disturbing incident, Tesla allegedly implored his father that if he studied engineering instead of entering the priesthood, he could recover, prompting Milutin, desperate to avoid the excruciating pain of losing another son, to solemnly promise that Nikola I would go to the best technical institution in the world. Having finally been heard, Tesla made a miraculous recovery, but before he could become a student, he was sent to the Croatian mountains by his father with nothing more than a pack of books and some hunting equipment, who, concerned for Tesla's health, his son, did everything possible.

It is his power to hide his son from the authorities, since by law, Tesla would have to serve in the Austrian armed forces for 3 years. For nine months, beginning in the early fall of 1874, Tesla wandered the forests and lakes of the Eastern European countryside, becoming physically and mentally stronger as he thought deeply about the invention, transforming the vividness of his visions from a weakness. debilitating to a powerful contemplative tool. that could be used to develop the gadgets that crossed his mind, such as a pipeline installed underwater that could transport letters and packages placed in capsules using the principles of hydraulic pressure, and a ring built around the Earth's equator that could be used as a high-tech transportation network.

When Tesla returned, his father had kept his promise and secured him a scholarship from the Military Border Administration Authority that would allow him to study for three years at the Polytechnic School in Graz, Austria. Receiving from his mother an embroidered bag made of typical Serbian materials that he would always cherish, in 1875 Tesla left Gospić to start anew in a completely different culture and environment, just as his own Serbian relatives had adapted to life. in the South. -Hungarian border decades before. During his first year, Tesla proved to be a perfect student, never missing a lecture and supposedly studying from 3 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day, a schedule that was considered so extreme that a professor wrote to Milutin warning him that unless his son was accompanied. out of school, so he could work until he died, while others praised him for his zeal, like the Dean of the Technical Faculty, who informed Milutin Tesla that his son was, quote: “a star of the first rank.” .

In fact, Tesla kept himself very busy, managing his early experiments with alternating current or 'AC' that would later make a name for him, but during his second year Tesla would go off track, develop a destructive gambling habit and gamble his entire tuition fund . in the process. Almost destitute, Tesla had also neglected his studies, obtainingextremely poor exam results, and with no grades recorded for his final semester, he was also unable to graduate and was forced to leave the university in December 1878, a failure he made sure to overcome. keep it a secret from both his family and his classmates, as he was plagued with guilt and shame.

In 1879, Tesla would live for a time in self-imposed exile, heading first to the city of Maribor where he became a draftsman and earned 60 florins a month, while in his free time he continued to play cards and bet money. on the streets with the locals, but Tesla's stay in Slovenia was short-lived, as a couple of months into his stay, authorities arrested him for not possessing a proper residence permit and returned him to Gospić escorted by armed police. . At home, Tesla's father did not have much time to set his son straight, as only a month later, on April 17, 1879, Milutin died, heartbroken because his son had been labeled a "tramp" and had decided to turn himself in to a life of vice.

Not content to see his talented nephew squander his skills, in January 1880 two of Tesla's uncles gave him enough money to begin courses at the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague, even though Tesla did not meet the language requirement, which It specified that students had to be fluent in both Czech and Czech. Greek. However, communication problems aside, he also arrived too late and was unable to enroll in classes, so the entire time Tesla was only allowed to attend lectures and received no formal grades. In 1881, Nikola Tesla got his first job working for a telecommunications company in Budapest called The American Telephone Company, where he was recruited as an electrical engineer by Tivador Puskas, who had previously worked alongside Thomas Edison, the

inventor

of the light bulb, at the Edison Laboratories in Menlo Park.

Becoming a valued employee and sharing his findings with his co-worker Anital Szigety, Tesla continued his study of the concept of alternating current in his spare time, proposing that a motor driven by out-of-phase circuits could maintain power levels to supply a flow constant electricity, but for the system to work, Tesla realized he needed to figure out how to rotate the magnetic fields. Walking in the park with Anital Szigety in February 1882, Tesla had a sudden stroke of genius and solved the problem of the rotating magnetic field, and then explained the concept of the induction motor to his friend by drawing its basic plans in the sand with a stick. , outlining a new type of motor that, unlike its direct current or 'DC' counterpart, did not need a commutator, an inefficient cylindrical device segmented with metal that had to receive periodic maintenance.

Impressed by Tesla's genius, Tivador Puskas recommended that Tesla move to Paris to work for his old acquaintance Thomas Edison at his Continental Edison Company, a firm specializing in electrical equipment, where he was first assigned by his boss Charles Batchelor, a manager who had worked for Edison since 1870, designing dynamos, a contraption that converted mechanical energy into electrical energy and was most commonly used in direct current circuits. However, after hours, Tesla continued to advance AC theory after he was sent to work on a project in Strasbourg, where he built the first prototype induction motor. However, Tesla was unable to generate any serious interest in alternating currents.

This was unfortunate, as alternating current is now recognized as a better method of supplying electrical current than direct current. Direct current, the type that came to dominate electricity delivery systems in the late 19th century, constantly sends electricity in one direction along an electrical grid. Alternating current, on the other hand, reverses and changes direction periodically throughout a network or system as its magnitude alternately reverses its course. Alternating current is considerably more efficient than direct current. Tesla's mistake, if it can be defined as such, is that he was simply ahead of his time in attempting to propose alternating current as the best method of power generation.

He was right, but the technology available at the time simply favored the cruder direct current method. Tesla soon found himself in another personal financial crisis after spending his entire salary, but he had done enough during his time at the company to impress his supervisor Charles Batchelor, who was convinced that Tesla had the intellectual fortitude to work alongside himself. Thomas Edison. In 1884, having been mistakenly registered as an migrant from Sweden after the immigration officer misheard him saying "Smiljan", Nikola Tesla arrived in the United States armed with a letter of introduction written by his mentor Charles Batchelor, which stated : "I know two great men." "Although Tesla fundamentally disagreed with the notion of direct current, he set to work improving the direct current motors devised by Edison, who believed that the alternating current devices that Tesla imagined they were too dangerous and unviable, a divergence of opinions that would develop into a lifelong rivalry.

Forced to develop an invention in which he did not believe, Tesla became disillusioned and began to outline the weaknesses of direct current and defend the advantages. advantages of alternating current, pointing out the inefficiency of Edison's direct current, which only weakly illuminated lamps, and proposing instead that generators be designed with what he called the "polyphase principle", according to which energy would be recycled. constantly, as he believed in the cyclical nature of electricity. Tesla also insisted that a huge disadvantage of direct current was its dependence on expensive power stations installed at 2-mile intervals, since it was incapable of maintaining high voltage levels at over distance, in contrast arguing that alternating current, in which the direction of energy was changed 50 to 60 times per second, was much more effective, as it could flexibly sustain variable levels of high energy. voltage and minimize power loss over long distances.

That is why today, the power delivered to consumers through power grids is AC, which sustains power over long distances through transformer substations, these reduce the AC voltage over a given distance. Once the AC power reaches its destination, such as a house, the AC power is used directly for electrical appliances such as washing machines, but for other smaller appliances it is possible to convert the power from AC to DC, through diodes inside from the appliance's power supply, these will only allow electrical current to flow in one direction, thus ensuring that the appliance receives a constant flow of power.

Parting ways with Edison and eager to spread the gospel of alternating current, Tesla founded his own company in 1885 called the Tesla Electric Light Company with the financial backing of two wealthy benefactors, Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail, who were certain that alternating current It was the future. . However, in a common problem that would prevent almost all of his subsequent efforts from being successful, Tesla asked for too much money from his backers, who, increasingly fearful that AC was too risky, kicked Tesla out of his own company that same year, forcing him to earn his living for most of 1885 as a repairman and even as a manual laborer, work in which he was paid only $2 a day for digging ditches.

Having learned from his mistakes, in 1886, with the help of philanthropists Alfred S. Brown, superintendent of Western Union, and Charles F. Peck, Tesla founded another company, this time called Tesla Electric Company, headquartered in Manhattan, New York. , where he finalized the designs for the polyphase induction motor and revealed it to the astonishment of the scientific community in 1888, when he presented a landmark paper to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers titled "A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers." , an investor famous for inventing the railroad air brake and director of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, was particularly impressed, and his curiosity was piqued by a visit to Tesla's laboratory a few days later, where he was shown one of the first polyphase prototypes. .

Convinced that Tesla's groundbreaking invention could power America, Westinghouse purchased Tesla's 40 pioneering patents related to the generators, motors, and transformers needed to build a polyphase alternating current circuit and recruited Tesla as an advisor to work for 12 months. at the Westinghouse plant in Philadelphia, where some of the first commercially available AC devices would be produced. The launch of the first AC machine in 1886 was the harbinger of a bitter conflict that broke out between Westinghouse and Edison, known as the "War of the Currents," which pitted AC against DC from 1888 to 1892. During the dispute, Edison He would try to use his resources to sway public opinion in his favor and, despite the evidence clearly showing that AC was safe and more effective over long distances, he published several articles in major publications, warning about the dangers of AC. alternating current.

However, Edison could not convince his greatest benefactor of DC's superiority, and the wolf of Wall Street, John Pierpoint Morgan, who in 1892 merged Edison General Electric with the AC-focused Thomas Houston Company, dropped Edison's name to create "General Electric". and switched completely to alternating current instruments. With Edison sidelined, alternating current emerged as the undisputed winner of the "War of the Currents," as Westinghouse increased its annual turnover from $800,000 in 1887 to $4.2 million in 1890, while Tesla collected around $105,000 in royalties from late 1891, a period that also witnessed several other personal and professional triumphs for Tesla, who officially became an American citizen in July 1891, while also establishing two personal laboratories in New York, located on South Fifth Avenue and East Houston Street.

On the other hand, Tesla's dividend controls would come to an abrupt end after Westinghouse's finances were left in disarray and his plans to expand the company through heavy debt failed in November 1890, after the firm's collapse. brokerage Baring Brothers will force creditors to panic. to claim their loans. To cover his losses, Tesla continued to focus his attention on high-frequency AC experiments, inventing a lamp that required only a wire, an oscillating transformer, and a high-frequency alternator, which he exhibited at a conference in the spring of 1891 at the Columbia. College in New York on behalf of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to a stunned crowd, who were amazed by the ways in which AC could be implemented in

modern

lighting circuits.

The Colombia conference established him as the leading electricity researcher of his time, and in later experiments, Tesla would consistently demonstrate that electricity for light and power could be transmitted over long distances. Before long, Tesla was also outlining the foundations of radio technology. In an 1893 lecture at the Franklin Institute, later popularized by Century magazine, in which he illustrated the concept of wireless telegraphy, he first stressed the importance of grounding the transmitter and receiver to astonished spectators. . The same year, Tesla's company achieved its greatest achievement to date, after fully lighting the Chicago site hosting the World's Columbian Exposition with alternating current, an honor Tesla earned after outbidding General Electric by $1 million. of dollars.

By 1894, Tesla had won the admiration of his peers and received honorary doctorates from Columbia and Yale Universities, as well as the Elliot Cresson Medal from the Franklin Institute. More good news followed after Tesla Electric Company was contracted to build the first hydroelectric power station at Niagara Falls, a childhood dream of Tesla's that became a reality in 1895 after the first schematics were revealed. The Niagara facility was an achievement that represented the definitive defeat of the direct energy school of thought, and Tesla was lavished with the highest praise and honors, including even the Order of Danilo from King Nicholas of Montenegro, while his achievement was celebrated. throughout the world as an important step for the future of humanity.

Tesla remained unfazed after a March 1895 fire in his laboratory destroyed much of his early research, including hundreds of models, notes, scientific tools and photographs that had a combined value of $50,000. Despite this, in 1896 he demonstrated some of the first uses of X-rays, discovered around the same time by the German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, and surprised his contemporaries with the firstx-ray of a man, published in The Electrical. Review, printed using rudimentary x-ray tubes of our own design. Having revealed some of the most innovative features of X-rays, Tesla devised the basic elements of the radio transmitter and in 1896 built a rudimentary unit that received radio waves.

He evaluated his new invention at the Gerlach Hotel located on 27th Street in Manhattan, where he lived, by sending radio waves to it from his New York laboratory on Fifth Avenue South. Tesla presented his ideas at an 1898 exhibition at Madison Square Gardens, where he demonstrated to a stunned audience a radio-controlled ship he called the Telautomaton, and by 1901 he had been granted a patent clarifying that he had created a system for transmitting electricity. energy. Between 1899 and 1900, after John Jacob Astor commissioned him to assemble a new lighting system in a contract valued at $100,000, Tesla moved his laboratory to Colorado Springs where, completely disobeying his patron's instructions, he decided to explore the "stationary earth waves." , which he considered his greatest discovery.

In this rural outpost located far from the hustle and bustle of New York City, Tesla began assembling a huge transmitter powered by millions of volts of electricity in an experimental facility built on the outskirts of the town of Knob Hill, keeping curious onlookers away. a sinister line from Dante nailed to the main entrance that read: "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." It was here that Tesla first discovered that the Earth had electrical potential and could be employed as a finely tuned conductor to transfer electrical energy wirelessly, and he later noticed that when his experimental Tesla coil was turned on, it emitted sparks at a distance of up to 30 meters. feet. which could be detected by antennas 10 miles away.

Realizing that he could now transmit signals wirelessly using the planet's electromagnetic frequencies, Tesla explored practical applications and managed to light 200 lamps powered by a power source located 42 kilometers away. By exploiting the same phenomenon, he was even able to produce an artificial lightning bolt. Tesla noted that the discovery of standing electromagnetic waves and how they interacted with the Earth had far-reaching implications. It was a discovery that Tesla would spend most of the rest of his career researching, as he felt that he had the potential to transmit electrical energy over great distances without the need for wires; In fact, he hoped that his work could achieve this day by providing the entire world with free, clean electrical energy;

However, as with many of Tesla's ideas, it was funded by investors, such as J.P Morgan, who intended to market their inventions for profit and were only willing to fund research that would earn a return on their investments, so they would be the almighty market forces that would eventually ruin many of Tesla's imaginations. It was during this fertile period of discovery that Tesla also made some less orthodox claims, claiming that he had come into contact with extraterrestrial beings, which had caused a series of ominous beeps to sound from one of his receivers. Tesla first heard this strange combination of noises from the device in the middle of the night, and interpreted the regularity of the beeps as a sign that they were being manipulated by an intelligent entity, a theory he publicly advanced in a letter to the US government. .

Red Cross in January 1901. Although many skeptics dismissed Tesla's story, there were still some who believed him. Influenced by the notion of an intergalactic race of Martians, first popularized in 1895 with the publication of a book called "Mars" written by American astronomer Percival Lowell, Tesla's supporters noted that he might have established contact with extraterrestrials from the Planet Red. However, convinced of the revolutionary potential of terrestrial standing waves, Tesla returned to New York in January 1900 eager to secure funding for a major invention that would eclipse his scientific rivals also researching wireless systems, such as Reginald Fessenden, Lee de Forest, and in particular Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, an Italian inventor who became Tesla's next archenemy after Edison.

Eager to fulfill his May 1899 promise to communicate wirelessly with Paris in 1900, Tesla sought a source of funding after patenting the magnifying transmitter he had built in Colorado Springs. Since the device he envisioned had to generate enormous volumes of electricity from AC equipment, Tesla first approached his former ally George Westinghouse, who refused to get involved but lent him the necessary machinery, while most of the Funding for the project came from the coffers of Wall Street. the genius J.P. Morgan, who signed a deal with Tesla after negotiations over the purchase of Marconi's wireless patents failed. After convincing him that wireless transfer of information would render obsolete the expensive undersea cables his company used to send transatlantic messages, Morgan informed Tesla that he was willing to support him with a $150,000 investment on the condition that he own a 51% stake. % in the inventor's patents.

Between 1901 and 1905, with the backing of the world's greatest financial titan, Nikola Tesla built the 187-foot-tall transmission tower at Wardenclyffe Laboratory, topped with a 68-foot copper dome, which was the first wireless transmission system. never built. and was largely powered by a gigantic boosting transmitter designed to channel large concentrations of electricity to any imaginable destination. Confident that by installing receivers attached to the ground he could capture the electromagnetic waves emitted by the tower anywhere, Tesla was desperate to eclipse his rival Marconi, who in December 1901 in St Johns, Newfoundland, was hailed as the inventor of wireless telegraphy. by the world press, after triumphantly reporting that he had successfully received the first transatlantic signal sent by Poldhu's colleagues in Cornwall, England.

With a jaded Tesla making it explicitly clear in newspaper interviews that he believed Marconi had stolen many of his ideas from the 1890s, and wanting to keep his benefactor on his side, he next announced that he was going to create a Worldwide Telegraphy System. , a cutting system. Edge communications set similar to the World Wide Web of the 1990s, in which individual receivers would pick up messages and news transmitted by broadcast facilities. Tesla envisioned several different types of receivers, one that anticipated the fax machine, acting as a printer and publishing diaries, one that was a speaker that could play voice messages, and another that was a portable contraption connected to a vertical cable in a short pole, which could decode radio waves, presaging the

modern

mobile phone.

By the summer of 1902, Tesla had moved permanently to the Wardenclyffe laboratory and was focusing exclusively on increasing power levels. On the other hand, after creating a partnership with Morgan to help the company, Tesla had difficulty selling shares to New York's wealthy elite, who believed the investment was too risky, a valuation not shared by Tesla, which sold for $33,000. of his personal assets and borrowed another $10,000 to realize his dream. Faced with an additional $30,000 bill from Westinghouse for the equipment, a lawsuit from owner James Warden taking Tesla to court for failing to pay property taxes, as well as another bill from the phone company that had installed a special line In the laboratory, Tesla had financial problems.

Tesla's promise to extend the coverage of his system so that it could be detected as far as Australia failed to persuade Morgan, who in July 1903 let Tesla know that he was not willing to invest any more capital, a fatal and unexpected blow to the world. . Telegraphy System that infuriated Tesla, who, in true mad scientist style, furiously increased the voltage of the surge transmitter at Wardenclyffe to the maximum level and threw lightning bolts into the New York sky. From a risk perspective, Morgan's decision was quite understandable, since after 2 and a half years Tesla had not fulfilled its promise to provide a transatlantic system in 6 to 8 months and a Pacific branch a year later, although others have postulated that Morgan abandoned Wardenclyffe. because he was concerned that Tesla would make energy completely free for everyone and thus deprive his company of a lucrative paycheck, while another interpretation questions that Morgan had less and less confidence in the wireless industry, which had been mired in scandal. of the actions of Lancelot E.

Pike. He was a con artist who had stolen money from investors after promising to create wireless service between Philadelphia and New York. In addition, Morgan was more inclined to invest in automobiles from Deforest Wireless, a company founded by another of Tesla's rivals that was projected to make $5 million a year and had already secured a major contract with the US Navy. USA in February 1903 to supply De Forest wireless transmitters. After this, Tesla, no longer the darling of electrical engineering, continued to have no luck attracting investors, as the failure of his Wardenclyffe project had turned public and academic opinion against him, with the once famous genius, now portrayed as a man who could never fully fulfill his promises.

Determined to restore his credibility with investors by launching a commercial product, Tesla devised a plan to sell small Tesla coils to laboratories across the country, through a company called Tesla Electric and Manufacturing Company, but it ultimately failed due to lack of investment. . Oppressed and maligned in America, Tesla would learn that not even his reputation in his homeland could save him, after Serbian bankers refused to finance him, while his former business partner John Jacob Astor, still upset that Tesla had spent his loan of 1899 investigating the Earth. standing waves instead of wireless lighting, they politely declined to get involved.

By early 1904, Tesla was engaging his services as a consultant and had embarked on a new project that aimed to harness the power of Niagara Falls in partnership with businessman William B. Rankine, but Tesla's true desire was always restart his experiments at Wardenclyffe, a prospect that was becoming increasingly unlikely as investors were discouraged by the fact that Morgan still owned 51% of Tesla's patents, meaning business partners would always have to consult him to derive any financial benefit from Tesla's inventions. In response, Tesla bombarded Morgan with impassioned appeals to rehire him, in a series of letters that could come in many forms, with some carefully crafted proposals promising Morgan unrealistically high profit margins, while in others Tesla desperately scribbled emotional outbursts denouncing his unfair management. treatment.

Unable to secure financial backing and still struggling to get the Wardenclyffe Tower up and running, Tesla found himself in a dark place and began to spiral into a full-blown nervous breakdown after the untimely death of his business partner Rankine and the collapse of the company. Canadian Niagara Power in the fall of 2015. 1905. A man who was always fascinated by human psychology, in the 1920s Tesla shared his experience of emotional breakdown with author George Sylvester Viereck in a highly publicized book on Freudian theory, explaining how, in his delirium, he was haunted by images of his deceased brother Dane and his mother.

Tesla would recover from his collapse in 1906, and with a new determination to prove himself a valuable asset, he shifted his focus from electrical engineering to mechanical engineering, delving into the science of flight in an attempt to raise money so he could continue his career. work at Wardenclyffe, which in 1904, due to lack of funds, had mortgaged it to George C. Boldt, the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel where Tesla lived for many years. The result was the invention of a turbine that worked without blades, but Tesla's contraption was not received with much enthusiasm by John James Astor, who refused to invest in the idea in 1909, but Tesla still remained very confident in his design and issued two patents for a pump and a turbine in October and even started a new company, Tesla Propulsion Company.

However, after Tesla again failed to impress at a demonstration at the Waterside Power Station in New York, and was still daydreaming about restarting his wireless power research, he approached J.P Morgan's son Jack Morgan in 1913 to ask whether you could become a potential investor. . More interested in his turbine designs, Jack Morgan allocated $20,000 to Tesla, who inInstead of using the money as planned, he spent it all trying to persuade Sigmund Bergmann, a German industrialist, to finance his project, which was interrupted after the outbreak of the First World War. Over the next 10 years, as his personal wealth began to evaporate, Tesla continued to evaluate his turbine and work closely with manufacturers such as Pyle National in Chicago, Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee, and the Budd Company in Philadelphia, but he was unable to solve a recurring problem that ultimately spelled doom for the project, as if it ran at more than 10,000 rpm, the thin discs of the internal machinery would begin to warp and there were no stronger materials available.

Tesla's inability to obtain financing for any of his activities and his tendency to overspend led to his bank accounts being nearly emptied and, beginning in 1916, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. Tesla admitted that his monthly income did not exceed $350 or $400 after declaring that he could not pay $935 in taxes to the New York treasury, and although he was still technically the president and treasurer of the Nikola Tesla Company, more than 90% of the The company's shares were owned by friends, bankers, and creditors, and by then many of its patents had expired, leaving Tesla virtually penniless. In an attempt to save himself from financial ruin, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi in August 1915, accusing the Italian of illegally patenting radio technology in 1904, but the case went nowhere and Marconi remained the official owner for the time being. moment, with the decision later overturned by the Supreme Court in 1943, just a few months after Tesla's death.

Consequently, Tesla was forced to make a living creating minor inventions and recording various improvements in speedometers, frequency meters, and flow meters for automobiles, which he licensed to the Waltham Watch Company in 1918. The company used the Tesla name as a strategy of marketing to sell "scientifically". speedometers", for despite Tesla's changing circumstances, his name still had a certain gravitas, and Tesla's opinions and thoughts still attracted much interest from the press, such as in 1917 when, heralding the advent of radar technology in In the 1930s, he predicted that microwave radiation could be used to detect ships. Amid his financial problems, Tesla still had admirers, and in 1915 the New York Times reported that he had jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics, an honor that he earned.

He would share with his former ally and now sworn enemy of Thomas Edison, but when it was presented at the award ceremony it was given to William H. Bragg and his son, since Tesla refused to share the prize with his nemesis nor had he forgiven him. institute for recognizing Marconi as the pioneer of radio communication technology after he was awarded the same award in 1909. However, two years later, in 1917, Tesla's individual efforts would be recognized when he accepted the Institute's Edison Medal. American Association of Electrical Engineers, the most prestigious award in electronic engineering, where his life's work was praised in a speech by the organization's vice president, who said: “If we seized and eliminated from our industrial world the result of Mr.

Tesla's work , the wheels of industry would stop turning, our electricity cars and trains would stop, our cities would be dark and our factories would be idle and dead. His name marks an era in the advancement of electrical science.” However, Tesla cared very little about the decoration and chose to leave the Engineers Club where the award ceremony was being held shortly before receiving the medallion, forcing his friend and the person who had nominated him, B.A Behrend , to embark on a frantic search. That ended in Bryant Park, across the street, where Tesla was busy feeding pigeons. Tesla especially hated the fact that the prize was in the name of his rival.

Despite being praised for his work in the field of electricity, Nikola Tesla remained poor throughout the 1920s, and because he made only a small income from the royalties he received from licensing his minor inventions, he became involved in a series of legal disputes, such as in June 1925 when he was sued by attorney Ralph J. Hawkins for failing to pay $913 in fees. It was during this decade that Tesla began to withdraw from public view, living from hotel to hotel as an eccentric recluse and spending much of his time feeding pigeons in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, that end from the park.

Nikola Tesla Corner now lives up to his name. However, on his 75th birthday in 1931, Nikola Tesla suddenly returned to the spotlight, appearing on the cover of Time magazine, and through the efforts of a young science writer named Kenneth Swezey, he received more than 70 letters from congratulations published in a Testimonial Volume from some of the most esteemed scientists of the time, including Albert Einstein. Interviewed by Time magazine, Tesla described many of his future plans and confidently revealed how he was going to refute Einstein's theory of relativity, how he was not convinced that energy would be released from a split atom, as well as defending the possibility of interplanetary communications in a conversation that he enjoyed so much that every year thereafter, Tesla hosted a press conference on his birthday, usually a 6-hour event in which Tesla spoke to various journalists and updated them on his scientific and personal progress.

For example, in 1932 he informed the general public of his desire to build an engine powered by cosmic rays, and in 1936 he told reporters that he wiggled his toes hundreds of times before going to bed, an exercise he believed would tone his body and allow it to live to 135 years. The 1934 party was a particular highlight, where Tesla first revealed that he was in the process of creating a particle beam weapon, stating in the New York Times that he could: "...send concentrated beams of particles at through the open air, such tremendous energy. that will shoot down a fleet of 10,000 enemy aircraft within 250 miles of a defending nation's border and cause armies of millions to drop dead on the spot.” Anticipating the later doctrine of "Mutually Assured Destruction" and the concept of nuclear stalemate, Tesla believed that his laser beam could end the war entirely, as it was so devastating that any defensive measures imaginable would be useless against it.

Although Tesla was susceptible to flights of fancy at times, the death ray was a real project, and was the subject of a rediscovered Tesla study in 1984 titled "The New Art of Projecting Nondispersive Concentrated Energy Through Natural Means." ", which laid out the foundations of a weapons system that discharged tungsten and mercury particles at 48 times the speed of sound to produce devastating projectiles. Even though Tesla's invention was impossible, it caused a lot of publicity, prompting Tesla to hire Hungarian architect Titus deBobula to design a new tower to evaluate the death ray, but the project never got off the ground, as in 1935 , Tesla was no longer there.

He was no longer working with deBobula, who had proven to be a slippery character after attempting to borrow money from Tesla and attempting to involve him in an illegal arms deal in Paraguay. However, Tesla, always astute, knew how to take advantage of the furor that surrounded him in some situations, offering a working prototype of the laser beam, valued at $10,000, to the managers of the Governor Clinton Hotel as compensation for the $400 he owed them. while warning them that the box he gave them that supposedly contained the gun would explode if handled incorrectly, causing the terrified staff to deposit it in the back of the hotel vault.

The laser beam also caught the attention of the international community, and Tesla soon found himself embroiled in negotiations with the League of Nations, the United Kingdom government, and even the Soviet Union, which signed a contract in April 1935 stipulating that Tesla must supply them. with the information needed to build the weapon, although it is unknown if Soviet scientists actually carried out the research. The project, however, would begin to disintegrate from January 1938, after the British concluded negotiations with Tesla, while the last nail in the coffin would come in 1940, after it was left empty-handed after a Desperate attempt to persuade the US government that the laser beam could be a viable weapon in World War II.

What hampered Tesla in his final desperate attempts to establish contact with international governments was his declining health, which had begun to deteriorate in 1937 after he was hit by a taxi and refused medical treatment for injuries he suffered from. would never recover. Subsisting on a meager diet of boiled vegetables and warm milk, and making sure to stay three feet away from everyone to avoid contracting germs, Tesla's personal health decisions did not lead to any improvements, and by 1942 he spent most of his days confined to his bed where his grip on reality began to loosen, when in July, for example, Tesla attempted to send money to Mark Twain, who had died in 1913.

He chose to see only a few select visitors, including Prince exiled from Yugoslavia Peter II and a young scientist named Bloyce Fitzgerald, the creator of an anti-tank weapon who would come to discuss inventions, Tesla isolated himself from the world as he deteriorated. Nikola Tesla died of a heart attack in his sleep on January 7, 1943 in his executive suite in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, where he had been living for the previous 10 years. Flooded with letters of condolence from leading scientific and political figures around the world, including Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the President of the United States, Vice President Henry Wallace and a host of Nobel laureates, Tesla's funeral took place in St John the Divine Cathedral in New York City on January 12, attended by more than 2,000 people and presided over by members of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Subsequently, Nikola Tesla, who at the end of his life had more than 700 patents in his name, was cremated and his ashes were placed inside a golden sphere, which is still on display in the Tesla Museum in Belgrade. After his death, the United States government was curious whether Tesla's surviving notes might contain information that would help them in the war effort, so they investigated his documents but found nothing of profound importance, and by 1951 they had They were repatriated to the Tesla Museum in Belgrade and were accompanied a few years later, in 1957, by Tesla's ashes. For decades, however, the mystery surrounding the laser gun persisted, as the US government consistently denied having in its possession one of Tesla's microfilms, which official records said had been intensively reviewed for decades. more than a month, some time after his death: the truth.

However, these claims remain unproven. Born to Serbian parents on the Austro-Hungarian border, Nikola spent his early childhood in a pastoral paradise, playing for hours in the farm yard and cemetery with his brothers and his cat Macack, who was the first to start Tesla's lifelong obsession after showing him the strange ways in which electrical phenomena interacted with the material world. As a young man, Tesla was besieged by a catalog of bewildering illnesses, including a hypersensitivity to mental images that made products of his imagination seem real, as well as a fixation on quantifying everything he saw and experienced.

Tesla was a classic eccentric genius, possessing an irrepressible self-confidence in his own ability to come up with fresh and original concepts, which he presented with the flamboyance and performance style of a showman, while on stage he was as electric as his subject. , coming in the words of New York World reporter Arthur Brisbane, as: “A most radiant creature, with a light flaming from every pore of his skin, from the tips of his fingers and from the tip of every hair on his head.” By the mid-1890s, Tesla was at the height of his power and making important contributions to other academic fields, but Tesla, who prioritized his intellectual pursuits and never took a wife or started a family, also had his fair share of anxieties.

The pressure of his job made him particularly susceptible to emotional outbursts of despair and anger when things did not go his way. Tesla's misfortunes often arose because he was too confident in his perspective, produced only a few tangible commercial results from his experiments, and had no qualms about irresponsibly spending all of his investor's money while continuing to ask for more, a habit that would irreparably damage his reputation. in his final years and transforming him into an impoverished recluse hiding in New York hotels. When he startedFalling ill in the 1930s, Tesla enjoyed a renewed wave of international popularity when he revealed that he was planning to assemble a laser gun that he anticipated would be so powerful that it would end all conflict, but like many of his plans, it would never come to fruition. , failing in 1940 after its last effort to interest the United States government failed, although many decades later, curiosity about the death ray would still persist.

After a period of physical and mental decline in 1942, Nikola Tesla died in his room at the New Yorker Hotel on January 7, 1943, but was immortalized for his fundamental contributions to science. Today, one of the most prominent and valuable companies in the world is called Tesla Inc. It is a company that seeks to revolutionize transportation systems and the way energy is delivered around the world and, while it has no direct connections With Nikola Tesla the man, it is fitting that his life's work has been remembered in this way. Tesla, an ethnic Serbian, was born in Croatia in the mid-19th century, at a time when the Balkans were far from the center of technological and industrial development and were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a backward power that did not contribute much to social development. largest of the time.

And yet, despite these impediments, he made enormous progress during his lifetime in a wide range of different fields. It was Tesla who pioneered alternating current, who made important advances in radio technology, and who first devised many of the systems used in renewable energy systems today. Perhaps most impressive is that he came up with the entire concept of wireless technology and communication. In this sense, he is part of a small lineage of individuals in modern history that includes Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, whose life's work has transformed our understanding of modern science and how science works. society.

Given all this, we might wonder why Tesla was not given as much credit as he should have received in his life for his successes. The answer to this riddle is relatively clear. Tesla's ideas and the systems he devised were simply ahead of their time and he was overshadowed by the innovations introduced into Western society by Thomas Edison, a similar genius whose designs around electricity were more suited to the level of technological development that he It was prevalent in Europe and North America in the second half of the 19th century. But while many of Edison's inventions and pioneering work around electricity generation are now considered somewhat archaic and inefficient, Tesla's designs and ideas are still widely praised.

Perhaps in this regard the last word on Tesla should be left to Edison. Although he dismissed the Serbian idea of ​​alternating current as impractical at the time, Edison ultimately concluded that Tesla was one of the truly great figures in the development of our electrical world. Edison was absolutely right in this assessment. While Edison won the contest to become the leading figure in electrification in North America in the late 19th century, today when you boil a kettle or use many other electrical appliances, you are most likely using an alternating current device. instead of direct current, which Edison advocated.

As such, while Tesla lost the current war in the 19th century, he was a prophet of 20th and even 21st century technology and energy efficiency. Although Nikola Tesla did not invent or discover AC power, his genius lies in his ability to find powerful real-world applications to new discoveries and natural phenomena. He possessed a vision that few of his contemporaries could match, even Thomas Edison, and there is no doubt that he changed the world, as much as his former employer, since the light bulb would be almost useless without a reliable medium. and sure. of power supply over long distances.

In fact, there are few people whose work has had more impact on modern society than Nikola Tesla, as electrical power is now available to the majority of the human race, largely thanks to his work. He even tried to devise a way in which energy could be freely delivered to consumers, which perhaps explains why it is so prized today, but also why he never managed to monetize his work in the same way he did. people like Edison. . Perhaps what endears us most to people like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and the breed of latter-day inventors and scientists who with little or no formal education revolutionized their respective fields, is the image of the eccentric, mad scientist, working alone. in experiments and calculations.

In an age when the discoveries and achievements of individual scientists are now subsumed by the multinational corporations they work for, including the one that bears Tesla's name, there is something romantic and inspiring about a human being having a such positive impact on human civilization through your own efforts. Nikola Tesla is one of these people and, although he may not have received the money or recognition that he deserved in life, since his death he has been immortalized as one of the greatest and most important inventors who ever lived. . What do you think of Nikola Tesla? Do you think he was a more brilliant scientist than Einstein?

Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime thank you very much for watching.