NIKOLA TESLA: The Life & Inventions (Top 11 Things You Didn't Know About Nikola Tesla)

NIKOLA TESLA: The Life & Inventions (Top 11 Things You Didn't Know About Nikola Tesla)

Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power. He invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology. Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.

NIKOLA TESLA’S EARLY YEARS

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother managed the family’s farm. In 1863 Tesla’s brother Daniel was killed in a riding accident. The shock of the loss unsettled the 7-year-old Tesla, who reported seeing visions—the first signs of his lifelong mental illnesses.

During the 1890s Mark Twain struck up a friendship with inventor Nilola Tesla. Twain often visited him in his lab, where in 1894 Tesla photographed the great American writer in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light.

Tesla studied math and physics at the Technical University of Graz and philosophy at the University of Prague. In 1882, while on a walk, he came up with the idea for a brushless AC motor, making the first sketches of its rotating electromagnets in the sand of the path. Later that year he moved to Paris and got a job repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison Company. Two years later he immigrated to the United States.

NIKOLA TESLA AND THOMAS EDISON

Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 and was hired as an engineer at Thomas Edison’s Manhattan headquarters. He worked there for a year, impressing Edison with his diligence and ingenuity. At one point Edison told Tesla he would pay $50,000 for an improved design for his DC dynamos. After months of experimentation, Tesla presented a solution and asked for the money. Edison demurred, saying, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.” Tesla quit soon after.

NIKOLA TESLA AND WESTINGHOUSE

After an unsuccessful attempt to start his own Tesla Electric Light Company and a stint digging ditches for $2 a day, Tesla found backers to support his research into alternating current. In 1887 and 1888 he was granted more than 30 patents for his inventions and invited to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on his work. His lecture caught the attention of George Westinghouse, the inventor who had launched the first AC power system near Boston and was Edison’s major competitor in the “Battle of the Currents.”

Westinghouse hired Tesla, licensed the patents for his AC motor and gave him his own lab. In 1889 Edison arranged for a convicted New York murderer to be put to death in an AC-powered electric chair—a stunt designed to show how dangerous the Westinghouse standard could be.

Buoyed by Westinghouse’s royalties, Tesla struck out on his own again. But Westinghouse was soon forced by his backers to renegotiate their contract, with Tesla relinquishing his royalty rights.

In the 1890s Tesla invented electric oscillators, meters, improved lights and the high-voltage transformer known as the Tesla coil. He also experimented with X-rays, gave short-range demonstrations of radio communication two years before Guglielmo Marconi and piloted a radio-controlled boat around a pool in Madison Square Garden. Together, Tesla and Westinghouse lit the 1891 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and partnered with General Electric to install AC generators at Niagara Falls, creating the first modern power station.

NIKOLA TESLA’S FAILURES, DEATH AND LEGACY

In 1895 Tesla’s New York lab burned, destroying years’ worth of notes and equipment. Tesla relocated to Colorado Springs for two years, returning to New York in 1900. He secured backing from financier J.P. Morgan and began building a global communications network centered on a giant tower at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. But funds ran out and Morgan balked at Tesla’s grandiose schemes.

Tesla lived his last decades in a New York hotel, working on new inventions even as his energy and mental health faded. His obsession with the number three and fastidious washing were dismissed as the eccentricities of genius. He spent his final years feeding—and, he claimed, communicating with—the city’s pigeons.

Tesla died in his room on January 7, 1943. Later that year the U.S. Supreme Court voided four of Marconi’s key patents, belatedly acknowledging Tesla’s innovations in radio. The AC system he championed and improved remains the global standard for power transmission.

Top 11 Things You Didn't Know About Nikola Tesla

This week on Energy.gov, we’re revisiting the storied rivalry between two of history’s most important energy-related inventors and engineers: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Check back each day to learn more about their lives, their inventions and how their contributions are still impacting the way we use energy today. Support your favorite with the hashtags #teamedison and #teamtesla on social media, or cast your vote on our website. And be sure to submit questions about the inventors for our live Google+ Hangout with Tesla and Edison experts, happening Thursday, Nov. 21, at 12:30 p.m. EST.

11. Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the Austrian Empire, now Croatia. He was the fourth of five children. After a checkered academic career in Europe, he worked as a telegraph drafter and electrician before moving to the United States to work for Thomas Edison in 1884.

10. If you couldn’t imagine life without your TV remote, thank Nikola Tesla for making it possible. Tesla invented, predicted or contributed to development of hundreds of technologies that play big parts in our daily lives -- like the remote control, neon and fluorescent lights, wireless transmission, computers, smartphones, laser beams, x-rays, robotics and, of course, alternating current, the basis of our present-day electrical system.

9. Innovation runs in Tesla’s blood. Tesla once wrote: “My mother was an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multi fold opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her.” He credited both his parents’ influence for his success.

8. Tesla lived in New York City for 60 years, and remnants of his time there still remain. The corner of 40th Street and 6th Avenue in downtown Manhattan has been designated “Nikola Tesla Corner” -- with its own street sign -- because of its proximity to Tesla’s laboratory at 8 West 40th Street, where he worked in 1900 while building his now-infamous Tesla Tower on Long Island. At nearby Bryant Park Place, a plaque commemorates the Engineer’s Club, which awarded Tesla the Edison Medal on May 18, 1917. During his later years, Tesla fed pigeons in nearby Bryant Park.

7. Tesla received his U.S. citizenship in 1891, the same year he invented the Tesla coil. Tesla coils are a type of electrical circuit used to generate low-current, high-voltage electricity. Today, they’re widely used in radios, televisions and other electronics, and can be used for wireless transmission. A coil at Tesla’s experimental station in Colorado Springs, Colorado, created 30-foot sparks that could be seen from 10 miles away.

6. During the war of the currents, alternating current (AC) -- favored by Tesla -- battled for wide acceptance with direct current (DC), favored by Edison. At stake was the basis for the entire nation’s electrical system. Edison launched a campaign against AC, claiming it was dangerous and could kill people; Tesla countered by publicly subjecting himself to 250,000-volt shocks to demonstrate AC’s safety. Ultimately, alternating current won the fight.

5. Tesla designed the first hydroelectric power plant in Niagara Falls, New York, harnessing the power of the waterfalls he had marveled at since childhood. Construction took three years and power first flowed to homes in nearby Buffalo on Nov. 16, 1896. A statue of Tesla on Goat Island overlooks the falls today.

4. “Teslas,” a unit used to measure the strength of magnetic fields, are named after Tesla. Another namesake is Tesla Motors, the electric car start-up, in homage to Tesla’s role in the invention of the electric motor.

3. In 1901, Tesla received financial backing from J. Pierpont Morgan to build his Wardenclyffe laboratory in Shoreham, Long Island. The facility included the “Tesla Tower,” a 185-foot high structure with a 65-foot copper dome transmitter on the top. Tesla’s vision was to use the tower to transmit signals and free, unlimited wireless electricity all over the world. Thanks to Tesla's early work, wireless transfer of energy is finally being realized today -- from wireless chargers for electric toothbrushes and smartphones, to wireless electric vehicle charging, a technology being researched at the Energy Department’s National Labs.

2. Tesla was not a savvy businessman and suffered financially, despite his achievements. He lost financial backing from Morgan, who felt he couldn’t profit from Tesla’s wireless electricity concept, and sold his assets to make up for dual foreclosures on Wardenclyffe. The property was later sold to a film processing company. In 1917, the U.S. government demolished Tesla’s partially completed tower because it worried German spies would use it to intercept communications during World War I.

1. His long-abandoned Long Island laboratory will soon become a museum. Earlier this year, a non-profit organization raised enough money to purchase the long-abandoned Wardenclyffe. The group plans to restore the building and turn it into a Tesla museum and science education center.