Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 14:47, 15 June 2005

This article contains additional biographical information about Nikola Tesla that is not on the main page.

Early years

Tesla was born "at the stroke of midnight" with lightning striking during a summer storm. He was born in Smiljan near Gospić, Lika, (the Military Frontier of the Austria-Hungary, now in Croatia). The midwife commented, "He'll be a child of the storm," to which his mother replied, "No, of light." Tesla was baptised in the Old Slavonic Church rite. His Baptism Certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (Julian calendar; July 10 in the Gregorian calendar) 1856, and christened by the Serbian orthodox priest, Toma Oklobdžija.

His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a Serbian priest in the Orthodox Metropolitanate of Karlovci which gathered the Serbs of the "Greek-rite" as they were legally referred to in Habsburg Monarchy at the time. His father's church in Gospić was destroyed in the 1990s. His mother was Đuka Mandić, a housewife talented in making home craft tools. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother and three sisters. His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a Captain in the Krajina army. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac (then Austria-Hungary), then studied electrical engineering at the Austria Politechnic in Graz, Austria (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. He also developed a telephone repeater (or amplifier). Tesla was fascinated by the Crookes radiometer, believeing that it was a most wonderful invention.

In 1881 he moved to Budapest to work for the telegraph company, American Telephone Company. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the telephone company, later engineer to the Yugoslav government and the country's first telephone system. Tesla invented a precursor to modern wireless telephone, known as a telephone repeater (or sometimes an amplifier). The device could act as an audio speaker (not an audio transducer). The device had its resonance tuned to a particular frequency of other repeaters to communicate between each. In 1916, Tesla described the prior developed audio transducers. According to Tesla, it was the "... implest ways the low frequency gave audible notes. placed a conductor, a wire or a coil, and then Tesla would get a note characteristics of the audible note". The audible sounds were of the quality of the telephones diaphragms of that period of time. The invention was never patented nor released publicly (till years later by Tesla himself). The device also contained the characteristics of modern wireless telephones.

For a while he stayed in Maribor. He was employed at his first job as an assistant engineer. Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. In 1882 he moved to Paris to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company. He worked designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived of the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Tesla visualized the rotating fields and thereby designed the induction motor. Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in 1882. Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidzo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. All his life, Tesla kept a home-spun embroidered travel bag from his mother.

1930's

In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching.

Nobel rumors

Due to the fact that the Nobel Prize was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, it was believed that Tesla and Edison were to share the Nobel Prize of 1912 (or 1915; some accounts differ). Tesla's rumored nomination for the Nobel Prize in Physics was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. It was possible that Tesla was told of the plans of the physics award committee and let it be known that he would not share the award with Edison.

Views on war

Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. He possessed a hatred of war, from his parents and homeland, and sought to end warfare scientifically by devising protective measures that would prevent wars. He found exceptions and some justifiable situations where conflict was necessary. He envisioned wars of machines, not of humans, and of more terrible weapons in the future. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication (for better understanding), transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to insure friendly international relations.

A system for "Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media" known as teleforce was reportedly developed later in his life. Teleforce was supposed to have been a type of defensive particle-beam weapon.

Field theories

When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a Dynamic Theory of Gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and hoped to give to the world the theory soon. The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory, nor that any physicist in the years since it was first postulated. Tesla's theory is ignored by some researchers (and mainly disregaurded by physicists).

The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments for with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for thier ultilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that,

There is no thing endowed with life - from man, who is enslaving the elements, to the nimblest creature - in all this world that does not sway in it's turn. Whenever action is born from force, though it be infinitesimal, the cosmic balance is upset and the universal motion results.

Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, '... magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king...., its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists...', (New York Times, 11 July 1935, p23, c.8).

Death and After

In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls. A similar statue was also erected in the Tesla's hometown of Gospic in the 1981. The statue in Gospic was dynamited by the Croatian forces in 1991.

Perhaps because of Tesla's personal eccentricity and the dramatic nature of his demonstrations, conspiracy theories about applications of his work persist. The common Hollywood stereotype of the "mad scientist" mirrors Tesla's real-life persona, or at least a caricature of it—which may be no accident considering that many of the earliest such movies (including the first movie version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) were produced by Tesla's old rival, Thomas Edison. There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslavian film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, George Westinghouse.

Records seized

According to FBI documents acquired via FOIA request, the sum of Tesla's possessions ("consisting of about two truckloads of material... approximately thirty barrels and bundles") were seized, upon his death in 1943, by agents of the (now defunct) Office of Alien Property Custodian. One document states that " is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments... "