Nikola Tesla - Lord of Lightning. Scientific investigation of amazing facts Text
The famous Serbian inventor was born on July 10, 1856 in Croatia. During the period of his life and contribution to science, he was elevated to the level of Leonardo Da Vinci. Tesla not only invented methods for transmitting and “subduing” electricity. His developments became the basis for most modern technologies - television, the Internet, telephone communication, etc.
Despite the fact that the parents wanted to send their son to the clergy, the will of chance gives the scientist the opportunity to go into engineering.
In July 1884, Nicola arrived in the United States and got a job in the company of Thomas Edison, already known at that time. The scientist worked as an equipment adjuster, but he brought very fresh innovative ideas to the company that Edison did not like. So in the spring, Thomas offered Nicola a bet if he could build a new electric car. Tesla offered several dozen options and demands the promised amount, to which Edison laughs off hinting that the emigrant still does not understand the jokes of the Americans. After that, the inventor quit the company.
The inventor gains immense popularity during his experiments with the transmission of electricity over a distance. The scientist claims that our entire planet consists of electric current, so wires are not required to generate and transmit it. A number of experiments prove his theory, moreover, he even manages to tune in for short distances, but his ambitions turned out to be much stronger than his financial capabilities. Financing is stopped and the scientist does not bring his invention to the end. However, some sources say otherwise. The point is that Tesla himself destroyed his transmitter and destroyed all the written data on his experiments. He explains this by the fact that this device can become a weapon of mass destruction, and this is not included in the plans of the inventor.
The great scientist was born in Croatia, but subsequently worked in the Czech Republic, France, the USA, carried out projects for the Soviet Union and Germany. Throughout his life, he invented a large number of mechanisms, most of which were ahead of their time. It is worth noting that it is difficult for scientists to create new designs due to the rapid development of technology. Tesla's inventions are used in three different centuries, which is simply unimaginable in the modern sense.
In the fall of 1938, the scientist was hit by a taxi car. Numerous fractures bedridden Tesla for several months. Health problems worsened due to the outbreak of the war, which also took place in his homeland. Nikola Tesla died in early January 1943 in a hotel room.
The brilliant scientist was born in the village of Smilyan in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Croatia) in the family of a priest in 1856. The Tesla family had five children.
Nikola graduated from the Higher Real School in the city of Karlovarts in 1873, after which he returned to the family, who at that time lived in the city of Gospic. At that time, cholera was rampant in the city. Here is what Nikola Tesla himself says about this:
“Illness knocked me down. Later, cholera led to dropsy, lung problems, and other illnesses. Nine months in bed, almost without movement, seemed to have exhausted all my vitality, and the doctors abandoned me. It was a harrowing experience, not so much because of the physical suffering, but because of my great desire to live. During one of the attacks, when everyone thought that I was dying, my father quickly entered the room to support me with these words: "You will get better." How now I see his deathly-pale face when he tried to encourage me in a tone that contradicted his assurances. “Maybe,” I replied, “I can get better if you let me study engineering.” “You will enter the best educational institution in Europe,” he answered solemnly, and I knew that he would do it.”
The recovered N. Tesla was soon to be called up for a three-year service in the Austro-Hungarian army. Relatives considered him not healthy enough and hid him in the mountains.
In 1875, Nikola Tesla entered the Higher Technical School in Graz, immediately fascinated by lectures on electrical engineering. In his third year, Tesla became interested in gambling. He gave the money he won to the losing players, which is why he was known as an eccentric. The gambling addiction ended because of a big loss that forced Tesla's mother to borrow money.
After the death of his father, Nikola Tesla could no longer study and went to work.
Until 1882, Tesla worked as an electrical engineer for the government telegraph company in Budapest, which at that time was engaged in laying telephone lines and building a central telephone exchange. In February 1882, Tesla figured out how to use the phenomenon, later called the rotating magnetic field, in an electric motor.
One of the largest works of the company was the construction of a power plant for the railway station in Strasbourg. At the beginning of 1883, the company sent Nicola to Strasbourg to solve a number of working problems that the company had encountered while installing lighting equipment for a new railway station. In his spare time, Tesla worked on the manufacture of a model of an asynchronous electric motor, and in 1883 he demonstrated the operation of the engine at the Strasbourg City Hall. When the work at the railway station was completed, Nikola Tesla never received his fee, offended, he quit.
At this time, the budding scientist seriously thought about moving to Russia, but Charles Bachlor managed to persuade him to emigrate to the United States. In 1884, Tesla went to work in the laboratory of Thomas Edison.
It is worth noting that Edison rather coldly perceived Tesla's new ideas and more and more openly expressed disapproval of the direction of the inventor's personal research. Edison soon promised Tesla $50,000 (at the time, roughly the equivalent of $1 million today) if he could constructively improve Edison's DC electric machines. After some time, Tesla proposed 24 options for new projects. However, Edison chose to laugh it off when it came to the reward, citing the fact that "the emigrant does not understand American humor well." Tesla was offended again and quit.
The young scientist, who did not want to become a “goose that lays golden eggs” for large companies, was forced to survive in odd jobs.
He was engaged in digging ditches, "sleeping where he could, and ate what he found." During this period, he befriended a similarly positioned engineer, Brown, who was able to persuade several of his acquaintances to give Tesla a little financial support. In April 1887, the Tesla Arc Light Company, created with this money, began to equip street lighting with new arc lamps. Soon the prospects of the company were proved by large orders from many US cities.
In 1888-1895, Tesla was engaged in research on magnetic fields and high frequencies in his laboratory. These years were the most fruitful: he received many patents. On May 20, 1892, he spoke to an audience that included eminent electrical engineers of the time, and was a great success.
On March 13, 1895, a fire broke out in the laboratory on Fifth Avenue. The building burned to the ground, destroying the latest achievements of the inventor. Tesla restored his discoveries from memory, the Niagara Falls Company allocated money for the project, investing $ 100,000.
In 1899, the "stormy" period begins in the life of Nikola Tesla. The scientist is working on studying the potential of the Earth, including the effect of standing electromagnetic waves caused by lightning discharges in the earth's atmosphere. 
Obsessed with the idea of developing wireless current transmission, Nikola Tesla constructed a 47-meter wooden tower with a copper hemisphere on top to conduct his new experiments. At this time, John Morgan, the main sponsor of the scientist's developments, learns that Tesla, instead of practical goals for the development of electric lighting, is busy developing his super-idea. Funding for Tesla's scientific activities is terminated.
After 1900, Tesla received many other patents for inventions in various fields of technology (electric meter, frequency meter, a number of improvements in radio equipment, steam turbines).
Tesla was one of the first to patent a method for reliably obtaining currents that could be used in radio communications.
Researchers have proven that it was in Tesla's developments that the principles of the Internet connection were first voiced.
In one of the scientific journals, Tesla himself talked about experiments with a mechanical oscillator, by tuning it to the resonant frequency of any object, it can be destroyed. In the article, the scientist said that he connected the device to one of the beams of the house, after a while the house began to shake, a small earthquake began. Tesla took a hammer and smashed the invention. Tesla told the arriving firefighters and policemen that it was a natural earthquake, he told his assistants to keep quiet about this incident.
The ideas of the brilliant scientist are widely used to this day: alternating current is the main method of transmitting electricity over long distances, power plants of various types use electric generators to generate current, modern trams and trolleybuses use electric motors, radio-controlled robotics has become widespread in all areas - starting from the well-known TV remote to military aircraft equipment.
The scientist died at an advanced age - at the age of 86 in a New York hotel. Before his death, the scientist was ill for a long time, the consequences of the accident, as a result of which he was bedridden with chronic pneumonia, had an effect.
Interesting Facts:
Tesla invented the first miniature radio-controlled ship in 1897. Similar toys appeared in our stores only after 100 years.
Mark Twain, being a friend of Nikola Tesla, called his brilliant friend "Lord of Lightning".
The famous tower, on which Tesla conducted his experiments with lightning peals, extremely frightened the inhabitants of the neighborhood. When turned on, the huge structure sparkled with 40-meter flashes of lightning, and thunder could be heard for 25 kilometers around. The steel horseshoes gave horses strong electric shocks, and blue halos could be seen on the metal. For 40 kilometers from the tower, to the applause of the scientist's associates, 200 light bulbs lit up. Electricity was transmitted to them without wires.
Tesla never slept more than two hours in a row. During his studies, he could not sleep for 48 hours, spending time playing billiards, cards and chess.
There is an opinion that Tesla destroyed all the documents related to his brilliant inventions. But according to the employees of the Serbian Tesla Museum, at least 60,000 scientific documents written by Nikola have come down to us. The legacy of the great inventor has not disappeared - just no one wants to study it.
The proposed network of Tesla towers has been designed to make it possible to exploit the Earth's own conductivity and transfer energy through the earth and ionosphere with very little loss.
While the original Tesla Tower on Long Island weighed 60 tons, the prototype the Plekhanovs are about to build weighs only two tons due to advances in structural materials. The length of their Tesla coil will be about 20 meters.
The team hopes to raise $800,000 through an IndieGoGo crowdsourcing campaign that ended July 25, 2014 to build their prototype. They already successfully raised $40,000 last year for research and design work on the tower's power source. The schedule of the project and its budget are given on the website, the authors undertake to make its results freely available on the Internet as soon as the tower is put into operation.
Books about ingenious inventors and experiments:
Great Russians. Russian scientists and inventors. "Rosmen-press", 2003
Mark Seifer. "Nikola Tesla. Master of the universe." Yauza, Eksmo, 2007
Achkasova I., Levinshtein E., Tatarinova M. "General history of inventions and discoveries." Moscow, 2012
It is often said about geniuses that they are born at the wrong time. Often their ideas turn out to be premature for the era in which they live, and then contemporaries are lost in conjecture - a genius in front of them or a madman. Who was Nikola Tesla, his biographers still cannot understand.
two great people
Geniuses can be born anywhere, and not always in big cities. So the future "god of electricity" was born in the village of the Austrian Empire in the family of an Orthodox clergyman. It happened 160 years ago.
Against the background of ordinary provincial life, the boy looked strange: from an early age he seemed to have bright rays of light that no one but him could see. At times, he completely retreated into his own worlds and then very reluctantly returned to reality. Perhaps these visions led Nikola in the future to the path of studying the natural power of electricity.
However, the youth of the inventor was filled with the search for his place in the sun. First of all, he was not attracted by the idea of continuing the family dynasty and becoming a priest. Nikola was not going to devote his life to the Lord under any circumstances, and therefore he began to look for another thing for himself. In his search, Tesla almost went down a wrong path: he became interested in a card game, and one of the losses turned out to be so big that his parents had to borrow money to pay it off.
Since then, the young man has never played gambling.
At some point, Tesla realized that more than anything else he wanted to get a good education. The family was against it, but Nikola persisted and went to study electrical engineering at the Graz Technical High School. After that, he tried to take up philosophy, but quickly lost interest in it - it was time to get a job, and not any, but one that would help him curb the recalcitrant electricity.
The young man got a job as an electrician in the Budapest telegraph company, and a couple of years later he received a flattering offer - to work as an engineer in the Paris branch of Edison's Continental Company, then the electric king. Tesla had long dreamed of going overseas and working with Edison in New York. Moreover, one of the administrators gave him a letter for Edison with a unique recommendation: in it he wrote that he knew only two of the greatest people, the first of which was Edison himself, and the second was the recommended engineer Tesla.
"War of the Currents"
The journey turned out to be difficult: on the way, all the money was stolen from Tesla, and he arrived at his destination without a penny in his pocket. True, a foreign country turned out to be supportive of the visitor - he repaired an electric motor right on the street and received a couple of tens of dollars for it. Edison took the young engineer to work, although the phrase about genius from the letter of recommendation alerted him. It turned out that he himself gave the green light to a potential competitor.
Later, all the fears of the electric bigwig came true, including because the two inventors approached work from completely different positions. Edison was interested in profit and only profit, and Tesla, on the contrary, did only what aroused his interest. In addition, all the inventions of the venerable American were based on direct current, while Nikola recognized only alternating current in his ideas. To prove to the immigrant his failure, Edison instructed Tesla to modify his DC machines, and promised, if successful, to pay a colossal bonus of fifty thousand dollars. Soon, Tesla presented the boss with 24 varieties of machines, and in addition to them, a new switch and regulator, making their operation more profitable. Edison approved all the innovations, and about the award he announced that Tesla did not know English well enough and therefore was not able to appreciate American humor. The offended engineer immediately quit and decided to open his own electric company. His fame in industrial circles by that time was already sufficient to start his own business.
Further events were called the "war of the currents", and Tesla eventually won this battle. By the way, industrialist George Westinghouse provided patronage to the talented electrician: he bought several dozen Tesla patents, paying a significant amount for each, and even invited him as a consultant to his factories.
Genius or madman?
For the sake of profit and bright technical prospects, Westinghouse was ready to endure any whims of the "electrical genius", and the list of his eccentricities consisted of many items. Tesla suffered from mysophobia (panic fear of germs), which is why he avoided shaking hands, and washed his hands twenty times a day, or even more. In hotel rooms, a strange guest demanded 18 towels a day, and settled only in those rooms, on the door of which there was a number that was a multiple of three. The hotel staff was strictly forbidden to approach the guest, and if a fly landed on his table in a restaurant, he demanded to replace the entire dinner.
Tesla's interests, like those of many prominent personalities, were versatile. In addition to electricity, he was keenly interested in linguistics and poetry, he spoke eight languages, understood philosophy and music. All these activities needed time, and therefore the scientist allocated only four hours for rest, two of which he devoted to thinking about experiments and two he left to sleep. He was extremely attentive to his own physical health, every day he took many hours of walks, during which, from excess energy, he could do somersaults several times in front of shocked passers-by. While walking, Tesla often recited Goethe's Faust aloud - according to him, the verses served him as a guide for technical ideas.
The inventor also had cases of foresight. After one party at the station, Nikola forcibly kept his friends from boarding the train, for which they later were very grateful to him - the train crashed, and those who rode in it died or were injured.
Even the demonstration of his inventions, the scientist managed to turn into a show. At one of the exhibitions, Tesla undertook to demonstrate the safety of alternating current for the human body. To the horror of the public, he passed through himself about two million volts and was completely unaffected by the risky experiment. In general, he always clearly proved the viability of his ideas.
Neither a difficult character, nor obvious mental deviations could prevent the nugget from making new discoveries, each time causing a sensation in the scientific world.
Inspirational Prophet of Electricity
In total, Tesla has about three hundred patents for inventions. This is not counting the ideas that he did not give rise to because of their dangerous nature, capable of destroying humanity. Many discoveries in the world have been made as a result of tens and hundreds of experiments. Tesla acted differently: he first modeled his inventions in his head and only then tested them in practice. Even a short list of his inventions is quite impressive. The scientist studied the effect of electrical energy on a person, and safety precautions and some medical methods (for example, x-rays) are based on the results of his experiments to this day.
The incandescent light bulb was already invented by Edison, and Tesla added fluorescent and neon lights to it. Already at the end of the 19th century, he designed a wave radio transmitter, overtaking Marconi and Popov for decades. Following the radio, a brilliant scientist invented a remote control that operated using radio waves.
Tesla's list of works also includes unconfirmed inventions, for which, as contemporaries gossip, he sold his soul to the devil. Until now, there is an opinion that the “god of electricity” is involved in almost all the scientific secrets of the 20th century. According to one version, it was on the day of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite that Tesla experimented with the transmission of energy over long distances, and shortly before that he was interested in maps of the sparsely populated regions of Siberia (where the meteorite fell). Around 1931, the scientist allegedly demonstrated a model of a car moving due to the power of electricity received directly from the ether. No trace of this work has survived. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Tesla is believed to have created a design for "death rays" that he claims could destroy thousands of aircraft at a distance of hundreds of kilometers. And at the very end of his life, the inventor worked on the creation of artificial intelligence and planned to start photographing the signals of the human brain. But his allotted time had already expired.
life ending
Many of Tesla's experiments were dangerous, but his most common mechanism ruined him - an elderly scientist was hit by a car. Broken ribs and the ensuing pneumonia kept him in bed for a long time, and he could not stand inactivity.
There was a war in Europe, Tesla's homeland was under the Nazis, and the world-famous inventor could not do anything to save humanity from the brown plague. All his developments in the field of weapons were lost in the offices of the army command
The great inventor was also a great mystifier. So, the main source of the most fantastic rumors about himself, exciting the public for almost a century and a half, because on July 10, Tesla turns 160 years old. "Around the World" figured out if it's true that ...
Nikola Tesla, 1890
Tesla's experiments caused the "fall of the Tunguska meteorite"
No.
One of the most popular myths: in 1908, it was not a mysterious object from outer space that exploded over the Siberian taiga, but a bunch of energy sent by Tesla to a distance of thousands of kilometers from his Wardenclyffe tower on Long Island in New York. The inventor actually built the tower for experiments on the transmission of electrical signals over great distances, but these experiments, as you know, were not crowned with success.
Tesla became interested in electricity thanks to the cat
Maybe. In 1939, in a letter to a 12-year-old girl, Paula Fotić, the inventor told a story about how, as a child, he ran his hand along the back of a pet and saw a miracle: sparks sparkled on the cat's fur. The father explained to the boy that this is the same electricity as lightning. According to Nikola Tesla, he was then three years old, but the scientist carried the memory of this case, as well as his interest in electricity, through his whole life. However, 80 years passed from the event to the story about it, and the inventor liked to mythologize his biography.
Thomas Alva Edison
Edison “threw” Tesla for 50 thousand dollars
Maybe. Tesla's friend John O'Neil wrote from his words that the inventor who worked in the firm of Thomas Edison offered to improve the design of generators, and the employer agreed, promising 50 thousand dollars for this. But when Tesla completed the task and demanded payment, Edison just laughed and replied: "You don't understand American humor." After that, the offended engineer quit. The author of Tesla's biography, Yevgeny Matonin, writes that seriously tight-fisted Edison simply could not promise employees such amounts.
Tesla invented the radio transmitter
Yes. Italian Guglielmo Marconi, Russian scientist Alexander Popov and Nikola Tesla independently developed equipment for wireless communication using radio waves. In 1943, six months after Tesla's death, a United States court officially declared him, an American citizen, the first inventor of the radio (whereas in Russia back in 1909, the commission of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society recognized Popov's priority). It was Tesla who invented the mast antenna and a number of other important details that improved the quality of radio communications.
Tesla has created a superweapon "death rays"
No. In the period between the two world wars in different countries there were rumors about the invention of the rays of death, capable of destroying people and equipment at a distance. Tesla, too, was fascinated by the idea and told reporters and potential sponsors that he knew how to create something similar. “Whether you send troops to attack where these rays operate, whether you send 10 thousand aircraft or a millionth army, the aircraft will be immediately shot down and the army destroyed,” she was quoted in 1934 New York Herald Tribune interview given to scientists on their 78th birthday. At the same time, Tesla believed that weapons of such power would end wars, making them meaningless. There is no information about successful tests of such Tesla's invention.
Tesla doted on pigeons
Yes. Living in New York, the inventor specially bought seeds every day and went to feed the birds. And if for some reason he could not, he hired a messenger for this. The birds flocked to Tesla's whistle and landed on his head and shoulders without fear. Several times the scientist had to move out of hotels, due to the fact that he tried to keep pigeons.
Tesla believed he made contact with the Martians
Yes.
“The ability to attract the attention of the Martians was the ultimate goal of [my] principle of the propagation of electrical waves,” the famed electrical engineer told reporters in 1896 in a wave of sensation when astronomer Percival Lowell suggested that the channels seen by his colleague on the surface of the Red Planet were man-made structures. Three years later, recording electrical impulses in his laboratory in Colorado Springs, Tesla caught the ordered signals and decided that they could not be anything other than messages from Mars.
Tesla was obsessed with the number three
Yes. “All the repetitive actions that I did had to be divided by three,” the scientist wrote. He counted the number of steps while walking and, wandering around hotels all his life, he always settled in rooms with a number multiple of three. Adherence to repetitive actions and personal signs in combination with phobias are symptoms of neurosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Tesla prepared an experiment on destroyer teleportation
No. Conspiracy theorists are sure that Tesla's works were useful to the US military in 1943 in the so-called Philadelphia experiment, also known as the Rainbow project. Allegedly, the destroyer Eldridge, stationed in the port of Philadelphia, was subjected to electromagnetic effects, due to which the ship disappeared, materialized three hundred kilometers away in Norfolk, Virginia, and immediately returned to its place, with half the crew gone crazy. This legend was launched in 1956 by the mentally ill Carl Allen, who claimed to have observed the experiment from a nearby ship. It is established that the Eldridge did not enter the port of Philadelphia at all in 1943.
Pierce-Arrow is a prestigious car brand in the 1930s and one of the oldest
Tesla has created an electric car with an inexhaustible source of energy
No. The first electric vehicles appeared in the 19th century, but because of the difficulty of recharging, they were replaced by cars with an internal combustion engine. A story is circulating in the media that Peter Savo, who identified himself as Tesla's nephew, told that his brilliant relative solved this problem. According to Savo, in 1931, his uncle tested with him for eight days an electric car, personally converted from a Pierce-Arrow car, and called the mysterious "ether around us" the source of the car's energy. But not a single expert saw this miracle of technology, and the inventor did not have a nephew named Peter Savo. However, an electric car company is named after Tesla. Tesla Motors- in memory of his merits in the improvement of the electric motor.
Tesla was a vegetarian
Yes. In his youth, the inventor was very fond of steak, but over time he refused meat, but drank a lot of milk. Tesla considered tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and chewing gum to be unhealthy, but, as O'Neill testified, he enjoyed "drinking whiskey, considering it to be a source of very useful energy and an invaluable means of prolonging life." The scientist even claimed that this drink would allow him to live one hundred and fifty years.
Tesla faked his own death to participate in secret US military developments
No. Tired and sick, the 86-year-old genius of Serbian origin died on the night of January 7-8, 1943 in his room at the New Yorker Hotel due to coronary artery thrombosis. Tesla was buried in a church in front of two thousand witnesses and buried at Ferncliffe Cemetery near New York. Later, the nephew of the deceased, the Yugoslav politician Sava Kosanovich, ensured that the body was exhumed and cremated. Apparently, with a long-range view: a few years later, in 1957, Tesla's ashes in a golden urn were transferred to the museum of the inventor in Belgrade, where it is still kept today.
Photo: Alamy, SPL / Legion-media (x3), Getty Images, Napoleon Sarony / Library of Congress, iStock (x3), NASA / JPL-Caltech, U.S. Navy
Lord of Lightning Nikola Tesla
Denis Bordakov
Foreword
He spoke several languages (except Serbian and Croatian, spoke German, French, Italian, English), received a classical education, had a broad outlook, knew and loved poetry and literature (the heroes of the books, according to him, aroused in him the desire to become " being of a higher order"), in his workshop, among many other celebrities, there were Mark Twain, Kipling and G. Wells - Tesla was so close to the first that for years after his death he spoke of him as if he were alive (this Twain called Tesla "Lord of Lightning "). Tesla communicated and corresponded with artists, composers (Dvorak, Paderevsky) and artists. Everyone who personally knew Tesla, scientists, engineers, industrialists immediately fell under the inexplicable influence of this thin, sharp-faced, dark-haired man.
The great inventor of the 19th (and also the 20th) century, whose discoveries formed the basis of all modern electric power industry: alternators, induction motor, asynchronous machine, three-phase and polyphase transformers, single-wire line, wireless power transmission and, Tesla radio - here he is ahead and Popova, and Marconi, remote control and automation (a yacht on New York Lake), high-voltage resonant transformers, X-ray detection (before Roentgen), fluorescent lamps, Kirlian effect (long before Kirlian itself), discovery of the biological influence of EM fields (in particular, on the work of the brain), created an original theory of the ether
He seemed to think about everything in the world. "I no longer work for the present, I work for the future," Tesla told reporters gathered in New York more than seven decades ago. "The future belongs to me!" However, Tesla ended his life in a room at the New Yorker Hotel. Alone and in complete poverty. In the thirties, Tesla expectedly refused to accept the Nobel Prize awarded to him jointly with Edison. The world was not ready for his discoveries? Is that what it's all about?
Tesla was not ahead of time. He showed up just when it was supposed to - on time and not by chance. However, he, too, fell victim to the financial system and the social system of the world contemporary to him (and us). This mighty octopus (whose tentacles stretch far, one of them is John Pierpont Morgan), grinds in his millstones everything more or less valuable and burps everything that in his eyes is not capable of bringing instant profit, determining the value of any undertaking only economic from him profit, spitting for the benefit of mankind, the interests of progress, trampling the intellect, morality and ethics, unleashing two of the most difficult wars of our century, ruined the Master.
Tesla's life path was a struggle without a chance of success. But the defeat of Tesla and those like him is only a temporary defeat. The strong hands of others who have come after him will pick up and carry the banner of knowledge and progress that fell so early from his hands.
early years
Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 at 0000 hours, in the village of Smiljany (Croatia), in Lika, the Austro-Hungarian province, to father Milytin Tesla, a Serbian Orthodox priest, and to mother Georgina, nicknamed Duke, born in the Mandic family. Nikola Tesla was the fourth child, and it seemed that he was destined for the usual fate of a rural teenager, especially since his father dreamed of a spiritual career for his son and forbade him to enter the Polytechnic Institute in Graz. However, something happened that can be called "God's providence"
Nikolai fell seriously ill. When the crisis came and it was clear that he might not survive, the father agreed with his son's wishes and Tesla recovered.
In the first grade of elementary school, Tesla studied in Smilany, and then continued his studies and graduated from the primary real school in the town of Gospic, where the whole family moved in 1804. The years of study in Gospic were the beginning of the inventive activity of Nikola Tesla. Nikola built several models of water turbines, installed them on the river, and began to carefully study their operation. Then he began to get acquainted with serious technical literature. In one of the books, Tesla came across a description of Niagara Falls. The boy, who had already seen Plitvica, imagined the majestic view of Niagara and in his dreams began to design a turbine to use its energy and. At this time, Tesla first had the idea to go to America and build a station on Niagara Falls.
In 1875, Nikola Tesla went to Graz, where he entered the Higher Technical School. From the autumn of 1876, carried away by the study of electricity, he was especially willing to work in the laboratory of Professor Jacob Peshl. At lectures on electrical engineering, Tesla conceived the idea of the imperfection of DC machines. Professor Peshl, with whom Tesla shared the idea of an induction alternator, found it crazy. But the professor's conclusion only spurred the inventor on. In 1878, Tesla graduated from the Higher Technical School in Graz and the following year began working as an assistant engineer in the city of Maribor.
Tesla enters the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Prague and studies philosophy, mathematics and physics for a year. The difficult financial situation of the family forced Nikola Tesla in 1881 to interrupt his studies at the University of Prague and look for work. On the advice of Teodor Puskas - one of the friends of his uncle Osip Tesla - he entered the Hungarian Government Telegraph Company in Budapest as an electrical engineer. Tesla enthusiastically took up this work. He made a number of inventions, in particular, he created an original voice amplifier for the telephone. But he still spent all his free time thinking about the electric motor.
One day in February 1882, Tesla, walking with his school friend Szigeti in the city park of Budapest, quickly drew with a cane in the sand a diagram of an alternating current electric motor based on the use of what was later called a rotating magnetic field.
An unusually fruitful period has come in the work of Nikola Tesla. Within a few months, he developed numerous designs of AC motors based on the application of the principle of a rotating magnetic field. Tesla barely had time to put on paper all the options that arose in his head. However, work in the telephone department of the Budapest Government Telegraph did not make it possible to practically implement Tesla's invention, and on the advice of Puskas and with his letter of recommendation, he went to Paris to enter the Edison Continental Company.
At the end of 1882, Tesla began working for the company as an electrical engineer for the installation of electrical installations being built in various cities of Central Europe. Here life taught him a cruel lesson. Tesla, offended by the cynical refusal of the company's management to pay the 25,000 bonus due and promised to him, refused to work for the company and decided to try to realize his plans in some other country.
Discovery of America
His first thought was to go to St. Petersburg, since in Russia in those years many discoveries and inventions important for the development of electrical engineering were made. One of the administrators of the Continental Company, Charles Bechlor, a former assistant and personal friend of Edison, after many hours of conversation, persuaded Nikola Tesla to go to America and offer Edison his services to improve machines. And Bechlor immediately wrote a short note: "It would be an unforgivable mistake to give such a talent the opportunity to go to Russia. You will still be grateful to me, Mr. Petersburg I know two great people - one of them is you, the other is this young man.
And so, with only four cents in his pocket (the chance helped him earn a few dollars in the city on the first day), unknown to anyone in this country, relying only on his extraordinary ability to work and full of the most optimistic hopes, Nikola Tesla entered the land nicknamed " land of golden promises." Soon, very soon, he learned what these "promises" meant. The next morning, Tesla went to the offices of the New York branch of the Edison Electric Lighting Society. Here, in an old house on Fifth Avenue, the laboratory, workshops and personal office of Thomas Alva Edison were located.
The illustrious inventor read Bechlor's letter and listened attentively to Tesla, but remained completely indifferent to his ideas of using multi-phase alternating currents. Even earlier, from the messages of the Continental Company, he knew something about his visitor and valued in the young engineer only his truly exceptional capacity for work.
Relations with the inventor of Tesla did not work out. One day, Edison suggested to Nikola Tesla that he develop constructive improvements in DC electric machines invented by Edison himself. In the case of a successful solution of the task, he promised a bonus of 50 thousand dollars. Tesla got down to business and soon designed twenty-four different versions of the Edison machine, creating a new switch and regulator for it, which greatly improved the performance of these most common electric generators and electric motors in the United States at that time. Edison fully approved of all Tesla's proposals, but about the promised $50,000 he said that, apparently, an immigrant recently living in the United States still does not understand American humor well, and that the promise of this award was nothing more than a joke. Despite the complete financial insecurity, the proud and scrupulous immigrant immediately refused further work for Edison. This happened in the spring of 1885, just a year after his arrival in the United States.
A year later, Tesla developed the design of an arc lamp suitable for lighting streets and squares. However, instead of paying the dealers with whom Tesla dealt, they gave him a part of the shares of the company created to exploit his invention and tried to get rid of him. Tesla's protests were followed by an unbridled campaign of slander, and they tried to discredit him as an engineer and inventor.
From the autumn of 1886 to the spring of 1887, he tried a variety of professions: he worked as a day laborer, a loader, dug ditches. A year lived in extraordinary hardships, when he, by his own admission, "sleep where he can, eat what he finds," had a depressing effect on him. “I lived this year with tears and heartache,” Nikola Tesla later wrote. He had already finally decided to go back to Europe. But...
New Hope
In April 1887, Tesla met the engineer Brown, who was close to some of the leaders of the Western Telegraph Company, but at that time was forced, like Nikola, to live odd jobs. After several months of working together, Brown, carried away by the bold ideas of the inventor, persuaded his acquaintances to provide Tesla with a small financial assistance to create an electric lighting society. Brown himself contributed all his available capital - fifty dollars. Tesla creates his own company "Tesla Arc Light Company".
Tesla got lucky this time. The company he created soon began to carry out on a large scale the lighting of streets and squares of US cities with Tesla arc lamps. Her work has taken on a huge scale. Tesla soon organized the Tesla Electric Company, a much more powerful society that had the necessary funds to ensure the setting up of experiments in the field of alternating currents.
Tesla promotion
Working with Westinghouse
In July 1888, a man with a large, expressive face, unusually mobile for his obese figure, appeared in the laboratory of Nikola Tesla on Fifth Avenue. It was George Westinghouse, one of the most original figures among the capitalists of the United States. Westinghouse purchased more than 40 Tesla patents, averaging $25,000 per patent, and pledged to pay one dollar for every horsepower of two-phase AC generators and motors installed by his firm. In the evening of the same day, Tesla donated half of the amount received to engineer Brown, who had once assisted him in the creation of the Tesla Arc Light Company.
Soon, in the United States alone, the total power of AC electrical equipment based on Tesla's patents exceeded 12 million horsepower (Tesla would waive the fee to save the Westinghouse firm from ruin).
During these years, Tesla's childhood dream came true - the launch of the Niagara station was the last triumph of two-phase current. The undoubted advantages of three-phase current supplanted the less perfect two-phase current not only in Europe, but also in the USA. It is important to note here that Tesla, in his patent of the two-phase generator, also considered the theoretical possibility of using multi-phase currents.
New stage
In 1889, Tesla in his laboratory began to study a huge range of questions relating to a completely new field of science, in which he was most interested in the practical use of high frequency currents (obtained using his resonant transformer) and high voltage.
Step by step, Tesla investigated the effect of alternating electric current on a person at different frequencies and voltages. He experimented on himself. As one of the private tasks, Tesla was interested in the possibility of using the discovery by Maxwell and Hertz of the electromagnetic nature of light. He had an idea: if light is electromagnetic oscillations with a certain wavelength, is it possible to artificially obtain it not by heating the filament of an electric incandescent lamp (which makes it possible to use only 5 percent of the energy and turning into a luminous flux), but by creating such oscillations , which would cause the appearance of light waves? This problem became the subject of research in Tesla's laboratory at the beginning of 1890.
Tesla puts forward an ingenious position on the possibility of transmitting electricity without wires and, as proof, makes both ordinary incandescent lamps and lamps specially created by him without filaments inside glow, introducing them into an alternating high-frequency electromagnetic field. Tesla also passed high-frequency currents through his body and with the touch of his hand made hollow lamps without electrodes glow. Hundreds of astonished spectators witnessed not only the glow of the lamps, but also the starting and stopping of electric motors at a considerable distance. Then Tesla demonstrated the possibility of heating various objects, both conductors and insulators, under the influence of high-frequency currents.
Using only one wire connected to one pole of a high frequency current source, Tesla lit ordinary incandescent lamps, special lamps with a single current input, turned on and drove electric motors. The same experiments proved the possibility of supplying electricity consumers through a single-wire network.
The June 1900 issue of Century magazine published an article by Tesla titled "The Problem of Increasing Energy and Mankind, with Special Recommendations for the Use of Energy and the Sun." How many truly prophetic thoughts Tesla expressed in it! On the role of human muscular strength in the development of civilization and ways to increase it; about the role of other energy resources and about three ways to extract energy and the Sun; about the role of iron in the development of human society and about the metal of the future - aluminum; about ways to increase coal production and about gas engines; on the use of the internal heat of the Earth; about the possibility of creating "self-acting" automata and machines with a "brain"; about the principle of selectivity and the possibility of controlling automata at any distance; on the transmission of electricity and without wires to any point on the globe and on the possibility of interplanetary radio communications
Perhaps the most important among the discoveries made by Tesla in the process of studying the phenomena of the glow of vacuum tubes was the establishment that in the studied lamps with refractory electrodes introduced into the field of high-frequency currents, there are three types of radiation: visible light, absolutely black radiation (that , which is now called ultraviolet rays) and "very special rays" that gave strange prints on metal screens (plates) placed in metal boxes attached to the lamps. - The shadowy image caused by these amazing, "very special rays", which have an extraordinary ability to penetrate objects that are opaque to ordinary light and ultraviolet rays, allows you to "see" objects that are in opaque boxes. Undoubtedly, special attention should be paid to them, to these rays. But not enough data has been accumulated for any more definite conclusions - the study of these rays will be the subject of my special studies in the near future, the scientist said.
Tesla further showed how a gaseous medium (for example, air) turns from an insulator into a conductor as it becomes rarefied, and the lower the pressure of the gas, the more easily it passes electricity. Paradoxically sounded at that time the assertion that under certain conditions gas pipelines could serve as excellent mains for the transmission of electricity and, moreover, a rarefied gas would serve as a conductor. It would be possible to use the highly rarefied upper layers of the atmosphere for the transmission of electrical energy over very long distances without significant losses. Tesla later developed the design of such a transmitting device and received a patent for it not only in the United States, but also in Russia.
On the morning of March 13, 1895, tragedy struck. It was not yet time for employees to arrive at the laboratory on Fifth Avenue, and Tesla, who, as usual, ended his working day at dawn, had just returned to his hotel when the terrible news spread through the city: the huge house that housed the inventor’s laboratory was engulfed in flames. In vain were the efforts of the firefighters, who tried to fight the fire, but were soon forced to retreat and let it devour floor after floor. Every minute the flame destroyed the equipment accumulated over the years, rare instruments, manuscripts and books. In a few hours, the fire destroyed the results of many years of hard work. When Tesla appeared on Fifth Avenue, he saw only the charred shell of the building and the wreckage of crippled instruments. The fire not only destroyed all the results of many years of work, but also ruined the scientist, who did not insure his property. Tesla, without a shadow of a doubt, told newspaper reporters about his intention to restore the burnt manuscripts, since all of them are stored in his memory, as in the most reliable safe. - In my laboratory, the following most recent achievements in the field of electrical phenomena were destroyed. This is, firstly, a mechanical oscillator; secondly, a new method of electric lighting; thirdly, a new method of wireless transmission of messages over long distances; and, fourthly, a method for studying the very nature of electricity. Each of these works, as well as many others, of course, can be restored, and I will make every effort to restore everything in the new laboratory, Tesla said in an interview.
Experiences in Colorado Springs
From Tesla's hypothesis about the change in the insulating properties of gases as they are rarefied, it follows that the globe is a giant capacitor: the upper layers of rarefied air serve as one charged plate of it, the lower layers at normal pressure represent an insulator, and the Earth itself is the second charged plate. This thought, as we shall see, prompted the development of a grandiose project to harness the electrical charge of the earth.
Tesla, with all his energy, took up the development of ideas for the transmission of signals, messages, electricity and over long distances without wires through the earth using the phenomenon of resonance. To do this, it was necessary first of all to establish whether the globe has an electric charge and what are the conditions under which it would be possible to cause its resonance.
Laboratory in Colorado Springs
with transformer outlet on the roof
In April 1899, Tesla found a letter in the morning mail stamped by a small town lost in the gorges of the Rocky Mountains. Written by one of Tesla's many admirers, Lenard Curtis, an electrical engineer who worked at the power plant of the Colorado Springs Resort. He offered Tesla to move to Colorado, where he promised to provide a land plot for the laboratory and electricity from the station where he worked. But the most seductive thing in the letter was the description of frequent thunderstorms with powerful lightning.
Fortunately, the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Tesla had lived for many years, considered him his personal friend and, having learned about the suspension of experiments due to lack of funds, handed him 30 thousand dollars. With bright hopes for the success of the planned experiment, Tesla arrived in Colorado in May 1899 with a small staff of his employees. The place recommended by Curtis - "Colorado Springs" - was located on a vast plateau at an altitude of 2 thousand meters.
Without waiting for the installation of the laboratory, Tesla began observations of thunderstorms, indeed exceptionally frequent and strong in this wilderness. Many of them, Tesla wrote about the lightning he saw, resembled fiery trees with a trunk pointing up or down. I was not able to establish the method of their formation and create them artificially. Tesla's delights had no end: he learned a lot of unknown things about lightning. Soon, according to him, he "knew more about lightning than God himself knows about them."
One of the most important problems that Tesla sought to solve at the Colorado Laboratory was to obtain a clear answer to the question: is the Earth an electrically charged body or not? If the answer to this question were negative, Tesla's plan would have been unfulfilled.
However, Tesla's observation of the phenomenon of standing waves in the Earth clearly indicated both the presence of an electric charge on the Earth and the possibility of artificially inducing standing waves in it. The clarification of this fact allowed Tesla to carry out an experiment that was very important for the possible implementation of his future plans. Is it possible to artificially create standing waves in the Earth by means of a powerful discharge, induce resonant oscillations in it and then use them for various purposes?
But what could this discovery give for practical purposes? Is it possible to capture the antinodes of these standing waves anywhere in the world? Where is the equipment with the help of which it would be possible to realize at least the power expended on the creation of a standing wave?
Wondercliff Project
At the end of 1899, banker John Pierpont Morgan, having learned about Tesla's new financial difficulties and his complete loneliness, offered the inventor $150,000.
Tesla purchased a 200-acre piece of land on Long Island, far north of downtown New York, in Shafrock County. The choice of location was very successful - 60 kilometers from New York, near the Shoreham railway station, the vast possessions of C. Warden were empty and around the acquired site, called Wardenclyffe, not a single building was found for many miles. It was exactly what was needed to create a new laboratory. 20 acres were cleared for the laboratory building, on the rest of the site it was supposed to create a town with a population of at least 2 thousand people invited to build complex structures. Then, as the work was completed, the town was to be populated by thousands of employees of the laboratory and the most powerful radio station in the world. Tesla intended to build a second station for transmitting electricity to all points of the globe and for power needs and lighting at Niagara Falls.
But about five years passed (instead of the planned one year), and the construction was still not completed due to the lack of the required funds.
The trial run of an unprecedented structure nevertheless took place and produced a stunning effect. It would have been a triumph, but ... Back in 1900, Marconi carried out the transmission of a transatlantic signal across the ocean to Canada, and his communication system turned out to be very promising. Although Tesla built the first wave radio transmitter in 1893, years ahead of Marconi, he confessed to Morgan (in one of his letters to Morgan he writes: “What I conceived is not just the transmission of signals over long distances without the use of wire, but rather the transformation of everything globe into a sentient being, which is exactly what a globe is, capable of feeling with all its parts, and through which a thought rushes, as through a brain ... "), that he is interested not in a communication system, but in a wireless transmission of energy to any point on the planet. But Morgan needed a connection, and he stopped funding. Financial panic, a collapse in the market, put an end to Tesla's hopes of financing Morgan or other wealthy industrialists. This left Tesla with no money even to buy coal to run an electrical generator for his transmitter. Tesla has been repeatedly sued for unpaid expenses. George Westinghouse, who bought Tesla's patents for alternating current motors and generators in the 1880s, rejects the inventive proposal for power transmission and. Workers gradually stop visiting the laboratory when there are no funds to pay them. Tesla's strange statements that he regularly communicates with alien civilizations partly contributed to the cooling of the bankers.
Tesla stated: "My project was postponed under the influence of natural laws. The world was not yet ready to accept it. He was too ahead of the time in which he appeared. But the same laws, in the end, will outweigh, and the project will be repeated with triumphant success" .
Tesla World System Tower
Other projects
Tesla made many bold statements in his lifetime. But he was not the kind of person to make empty statements. He repeatedly checked the results of his observations before reporting them to the public. So he stated: "People living near Wardencliff, frightened by my experiments conducted by me two years ago, said that during these two years they were awake more than they slept, and could get acquainted with truly incredible things. Somehow, but not now, I will announce something that is not even in fairy tales." In 1933, he said: "It was my custom to carry out the splitting of the atom without releasing any energy from it and."
In 1931, the already elderly, but still restless Tesla demonstrated a new phenomenon to the public. They removed the gasoline engine from an ordinary car and installed an electric motor. Tesla then attached a small box under the hood with two rods protruding from it. Pushing them out, Tesla said: "So, now we have energy." Then he sat down in the driver's seat, pressed the pedal, and the car went! He rode it for a week, speeding up to 150 km/h. There were no batteries or accumulators on the car.
"Where does the energy I come from?" asked Tesla's puzzled fellow scientists. He calmly replied: "From the ether that surrounds us." Rumors about the madness of electrical engineering began to spread again. Tesla was pissed off. He removed the magic box from the car and returned to the laboratory, burying the secret of his electric car forever.
Shortly before his death, Tesla announced that he had invented something similar to the then widely discussed "death rays". Here is a quote: "it becomes easy to blow up gunpowder and weapons stores by means of high-frequency currents induced in each particle of metal located at a distance of five to six miles or more", "My invention requires large areas, but when used, it makes it possible to destroy everything, people or equipment, within a radius of 200 miles."
Schematic of the (ionospheric?) Tesla weapon
Conclusion
Tesla died on January 7, 1943. Death was the result of a chronic neglected disease. He lay in his room, in a calm pose and was fully dressed, as if he had prepared in advance to face death.
The value of the personality and the scale of the genius of N. Tesla is difficult to underestimate. In this article, we are more interested in another thought. It is impossible to allow the work of lone geniuses, working day and night for the good of their homeland and the world, to be hushed up, persecuted, ridiculed and eventually buried in the vaults of financial tycoons and governments devoted to them, ultimately an infinitely small group of people who are simply unprofitable give up their monopoly on energy production and profits from the trade in heat carriers, for whom it is important to concentrate the maximum possible power in their hands, even if this meant that ordinary people of the world, who are the vast majority, vegetated in hunger and cold, in conditions of suppression of personal freedom, with the use of fraudulent "market levers": the power of money, corrupt mass media and stock market speculation.
