When Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)was 28, he relocated to New York City to work for Thomas Edison. There was far more opportunity in New York than back in Serbia, which at the time was dominated and constrained to an agrarian economy by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, itself in decline.
In the new world Tesla saw opportunity everywhere he looked. Edison’s new electrical infrastructure in lower Manhattan inspired other locales to turn on the lights, and it wasn’t long before the trend became worldwide. Edison remained strongly committed to direct current. But Tesla, breaking free, saw great potential for alternating current generation and distribution. Obtaining financial backing, he established laboratories and companies, quickly attracting the attention of George Westinghouse, who bought Tesla’s patents for the ac induction motor and transformer. Westinghouse also hired Tesla as a consultant.
During this period, Tesla and Westinghouse together waged legal battles against their competitors, primarily concerning patent disputes. Such concerns did not, however, impede Tesla’s theoretical and experimental work, which continued apace.
Tesla, through his entire life, was fascinated by the juxtaposition of high frequency and high voltage. He firmly believed that given sufficiently high levels of both these entities, large amounts of power could be transmitted wirelessly, perhaps worldwide. He convinced himself that the earth had a resonant frequency and he sought a way to use it as a flywheel to propel energy so as to benefit humanity.
As the years passed by, Tesla gained a reputation as a wild genius, and rightly so. He envisioned everything electrical, from X-ray imaging to wirelessly controlled ships at sea. He made vast amounts of money and just as rapidly dissipated it in unsuccessful efforts to build huge wireless power transmission projects.
As years passed, Tesla became increasingly eccentric, not to say demented. But always he had a good heart. In later years he lived alone in a succession of New York City hotels, venturing out only to feed pigeons and in at least one instance bringing an injured bird back to his room for a long and labor-intensive recovery.
Despite his great imagination and energetic work schedule, Tesla in certain ways maintained fixed ideas that limited his vision. He refused to accept Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, firmly believing that the idea of curved space was a contradiction. And Michelson-Morley notwithstanding, he upheld the idea of a stationary luminiferous aether pervading the universe.
Despite limitations, Tesla was enormously creative, especially early in life when he conceived the induction motor and transformer-based ac distribution system that made possible the great industrial and later electronic revolutions that shaped modern civilization.
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