Nikola Tesla
(1856-1943) Inventor,
Physicist,
Electrical Engineer
"Nature and Natures Law's lay hid in
night: God said, Let Tesla be, and all was light." (1916) B.A.
Behrend, Famous Engineer
paraphrasing Newton on bestowing
the Edison
Medal to Tesla.
With over 278 patents to his name, we all
can thank Tesla for a myriad of innovations that the industrialized world
uses daily. Tesla's discovery of induction lighting in the late 1800’s
remains one of his most significant, as it was these principles of
electromagnetic energy that spawned so many of his other creative
developments and remains to this day the essential operating principle
behind all electrode-less induction lighting technologies.
Nikola Tesla; A Creative
Force
Born in Croatia to Serbian parents, Nikola Tesla even as a young boy
displayed an exceedingly intelligent, creative and highly intuitive mind.
Blessed with a prodigious memory Tesla was able to visualize and retain
images and formulas that assisted him solving problems and equations that
often times his instructors had not yet even finished writing on the
board.
This type of ‘autoanalysis’ became almost reflexive and as he matured it
gave him the unusual capability of completely assembling the ‘pictures in
his mind’ to the machines that nearly always worked as he had intended
through his ‘visualizations’. Unfortunately this talent represented a
lifelong difficulty Tesla had when working with other engineers who
demanded written specifications, drawings and blueprints to conceptualize
Tesla’s theories.
With his remarkable photographic memory Tesla was able to speak six
languages fluently and perform calculus equations mentally. While this
talent usually wanes with age Tesla was able to maintain this skill
throughout most of his life.
Nikola Tesla died in his sleep, alone in a small hotel room on January 7,
1943. He had managed throughout his life to reap little financial reward
for all of his inventive pursuits. Instead the financial benefits of his
work were generously lavished upon those who took his findings and blended
them into commercial success.
Induction Lighting: The
History and the Economics
Inda-Gro lighting products would not exist had it not been for Tesla's
invention of induction lighting but what represents an even larger
contribution to all of our lives is the fact that Tesla's vision of an AC
electrical distribution system was adopted over Edison's proposed DC
electrical distribution system. This was no small feat since at the time
Tesla was introducing his concept and the advantages of AC electrical
power over DC, Thomas Edison, with all his wealth and resources was
determined to see the worlds entire electrical distribution system be
developed as a DC system.
The Industrial Revolution could not have occurred without a new
infrastructure of railway systems and an electrical power distribution
network that would provide service to the wide variety of industries that
would fuel our nations expansion. Much of the financing for the new rail
lines was being done by J.P. Morgan.
In addition to expansion of the nations rail systems, Morgan also
envisioned development of a local and national electrical infrastructure
as a way to profit from this growth. Morgan did not particularly care if
the electrical system to be developed was an AC or DC system. Morgan
wanted control of whichever system proved a profitable, stable and better
designed. To that end Tesla and his AC system won out. Morgan began
development of a national electrical distribution system that took
advantage of the routes his rail systems were being laid.
Edison had developed and patented the first commercially viable carbon
filament incandescent light bulb in 1880 that he envisioned would operate
on his DC distribution system, but as fate would have it and to Edison's
chagrin, could also run on the developing AC system as well. With the
Edison lamp having an operational lifespan of 1,200 hours, lamping and
re-lamping of the Edison bulbs represented a steady stream of profit as
the need for lighting our newly electrified world grew at a blistering
pace.
Tesla's approach to lighting relied on electrode-less electromagnetic
induction lighting which by virtue of there being no electrodes or
filaments within the bulb did not suffer from the high temperatures and
carbon build up within the lamp so Tesla lamps, which depended on the AC
distribution system could last, for tens of thousands of hours compared to
Edison’s.
It was J.P. Morgan who provided much of the financing for both Edison's
and Tesla's projects. When Morgan aligned behind the development of the
Tesla AC electrical distribution system, Edison was understandably not
happy with that decision. Then again Edison was somewhat mollified when
Morgan made the decision to provide his complete financial backing to the
success of the Edison incandescent lamp over Tesla's induction lamp. The
stage being set, the Industrial Revolution was now free to begin.
Tesla's Patents, relative to
Induction Lighting Design:
Patent #454,622
System of Electric Lighting
Patent #454,622
System of Electric Lighting
Patent #568,178
Method of Regulating Apparatus For Producing Currents of High Frequency
Patent #568,178
Method of Regulating Apparatus For Producing Currents of High Frequency
Patent #335,786
Electric Arc Amp
Patent #335,786
Electric Arc Amp
Colorado Springs Research Laboratory: 1899-1900
By the end of the 1890s, Tesla had come to
the conclusion that it might be possible to transmit electrical power
without wires at high altitudes. There the air was thinner, and therefore
more conductive.
Colorado Springs: Tesla is shown posed with his "magnifying
transmitter" capable of producing millions of volts of electricity. The
discharge shown is twenty-two feet in length.
A friend and patent lawyer, Leonard E.
Curtis, on being advised of Tesla's work, offered to find land and provide
power for the research from the El Paso Power Company of Colorado Springs.
The next supporter to come forward was Colonel John Jacob Astor. With
$30,000 from Astor, the inventor prepared at once to move to Colorado and
begin building a new experimental station near Pikes Peak. Joining Tesla
were several assistants who were not fully informed of the inventor's
plans.
Arriving at Colorado Springs in May 1899,
Tesla went to inspect the acreage. It was some miles out in the prairie.
He told reporters that he intended to send a radio signal from Pikes Peak
to Paris, but furnished no details.
In the midst of Colorado's own incredible
electrical displays, Tesla would sit taking measurements. He soon found
the earth to be "literally alive with electrical vibrations." Tesla came
to think that when lightning struck the ground it set up powerful waves
that moved from one side of the earth to the other. If the earth was
indeed a great conductor, Tesla hypothesized that he could transmit
unlimited amounts of power to any place on earth with virtually no loss.
But to test this theory, he would have to become the first man to create
electrical effects on the scale of lightning.
The laboratory that rose from the prairie
floor was both wired and weird, a contraption with a roof that rolled back
to prevent it from catching fire, and a wooden tower that soared up eighty
feet. Above it was a 142-foot metal mast supporting a large copper ball.
Inside the strange wooden structure, technicians began to assemble an
enormous Tesla coil, specially designed to send powerful electrical
impulses into the earth.
In the June 1900 Century Magazine this photo shows how Tesla
electrode-less induction lighting technology at work. Here he took three
ordinary incandescent lamps lighted to full candle-power by currents
induced in a local loop consisting of a single wire forming a square of
fifty feet each side, which includes the lamps, and which is at a distance
of one hundred feet from the primary circuit energized by the oscillator.
On the evening of the experiment, each
piece of equipment was first carefully checked. Then Tesla alerted his
mechanic, Czito, to open the switch for only one second. The secondary
coil began to sparkle and crack and an eerie blue corona formed in the air
around it. Satisfied with the result, Tesla ordered Czito to close the
switch until told to cease. Huge arcs of blue electricity snaked up and
down the center coil. Bolts of man-made lightning more than a hundred feet
in length shot out from the mast atop the station. Tesla's experiment
burned out the dynamo at the El Paso Electric Company and the entire city
lost power. The power station manager was livid, and insisted that Tesla
pay for and repair the damage.
For nine months Tesla conducted experiments
at Colorado Springs. Though he kept a day-to-day diary that was rich in
detail, the results of his experiments are not clear. One question has
never been definitively answered: Did Tesla actually transmit wireless
power at Pikes Peak?
There are some reports that he did transmit
a signal several miles powerful enough to illuminate vacuum tubes planted
in the ground. But this can be attributed to conductive properties in the
ground at Colorado Springs.
Another approach pursued by Tesla was to
transmit extra-low-frequency signals through the space between the surface
of the earth and the ionosphere. Tesla calculated that the resonant
frequency of this area was approximately 8-hertz. It was not until the
1950s that this idea was taken seriously and researchers were surprised to
discover that the resonant frequency of this space was indeed in the range
of 8-hertz.
Another approach pursued by Tesla was to
transmit extra-low-frequency signals through the space between the surface
of the earth and the ionosphere. Tesla calculated that the resonant
frequency of this area was approximately 8-hertz. It was not until the
1950s that this idea was taken seriously and researchers were surprised to
discover that the resonant frequency of this space was indeed in the range
of 8-hertz.
A great deal of mystery still surrounds
Tesla's work at Colorado Springs. It is not clear from his notes or his
comments exactly how he intended to transmit wireless power. But it is
clear that he returned back to New York City fully convinced that he could
accomplish it.
The Wardenclyffe
Project: 1901-1917
The Wardenclyffe Tower aka. the ‘Wonder Tower’
When Tesla returned to New York from
Colorado Springs, he wrote a sensational article for Century Magazine. In
this detailed, futuristic vision he described a means of tapping the sun's
energy with an antenna. He suggested that it would be possible to control
the weather with electrical energy. He predicted machines that would make
war an impossibility. And he proposed a global system of wireless
communications. To most people the ideas were almost incomprehensible, but
Tesla was a man who could not be underestimated.
The article caught the attention of one of
the world's most powerful men, J. P. Morgan. A frequent guest in Morgan's
home, Tesla proposed a scheme that must have sounded like science fiction:
a "world system" of wireless communications to relay telephone messages
across the ocean; to broadcast news, music, stock market reports, private
messages, secure military communications, and even pictures to any part of
the world. "When wireless is fully applied the earth will be converted
into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts," Tesla
told Morgan.
Morgan offered Tesla $150,000 to build a
transmission tower and power plant. A more realistic sum would have been
$1,000,000, but Tesla took what was available and went to work
immediately. In spite of what he told his investor, Tesla's actual plan
was to make a large-scale demonstration of electrical power transmission
without wires. This turned out to be a fatal mistake.
For his new construction project, Tesla
acquired land on the cliffs of Long Island Sound. The site was called
Wardenclyffe. By 1901 the Wardenclyffe project was under construction, the
most challenging task being the erection of an enormous tower, rising 187
feet in the air and supporting on its top a fifty-five-ton sphere made of
steel. Beneath the tower, a well-like shaft plunged 120 feet into the
ground. Sixteen iron pipes were driven three hundred feet deeper so that
currents could pass through them and seize hold of the earth. "In this
system that I have invented," Tesla explained, "it is necessary for the
machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth.
It has to have a grip... so that the whole of this globe can quiver."
As the tower construction slowly increased,
it became evident that more funds were sorely needed. But Morgan was not
quick to respond. Then on December 12, 1901, the world awoke to the news
that Marconi had signaled the letter "S" across the Atlantic from
Cornwall, England to Newfoundland. Tesla, unruffled by the accomplishment,
explained that the Italian used 17 Tesla patents to accomplish the
transmission. But Morgan began to doubt Tesla. Marconi's system not only
worked, it was also inexpensive.
Tesla pleaded with Morgan for more
financial support, but the investor soundly refused. To make matters
worse, the stock market crashed and prices for the tower's materials
doubled. High prices combined with Tesla's inability to find enough
willing investors eventually led to the demise of the project.
In 1903 his dream began crumbling as
creditors from Westinghouse confiscated his equipment for nonpayment for
services rendered and he was sued for non-payment of back taxes. And
finally, in 1905, after some amazing discoveries and electrical displays.
Tesla and his shrinking team forced to abandon the project forever. The
newspapers, fueled by competitor propaganda labeled the project “Tesla’s
Million Dollar Folly”.
Humiliated and defeated, Tesla experienced
a complete nervous breakdown. "It is not a dream," he protested. "It is a
simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive... blind,
faint-hearted, doubting world."
