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Nikola Tesla, who discovered the rotating magnetic field, which is the basis of practically all alternating-current machinery, has been called the genius who ushered in the power age. He is also renowned for his invention of the Tesla coil, which is still used whenever anyone wants to make a spectacular display of high-voltage, high-frequency discharges. (Some people call it man-made lightning.)
Tesla's pioneering work in generators not only launched the power industry in the U.S. One day, at Niagara Falls, New York, he was able to generate more electricity with his machinery than the combined power of all the other generating stations then operating in the United States. He also developed for the yet-to-come wireless industry the transformers they needed to produce radio waves. Tesla went on to invent an arc-lighting system as well as innumerable dynamos, transformers, coils, condensers and other electrical apparatus.
But Tesla was no mere tinkerer. He was also a first class mathematician and physicist "whose blueprints were plausible, even though they were far ahead of the technical resources of his day." One friend said he belonged "to the passing age of heroic invention of which Edison was the most distinguished exemplar -- the age of technical poets who expressed themselves in generators, inductance coils and high voltages rather than in drama and verse and who were the real architects of culture."Tesla was born at exactly midnight on July 9, 1856, in Smiljan, Serbia. His father was a Serbian-Orthodox priest and orator, his mother Djuka Mandic, an inventor. He gave those parents a good deal of pleasure with his own early, if failed, attempts at flying. Once, he tried to fly, puffing his cheeks and unfurling an umbrella, by jumping off the roof of a barn. He ended up in a heap on the ground below, unconscious for a few moments, but unhurt. He also experimented with a sixteen-bug-power flying machine, a light contraption made of splinters forming a windmill, with a spindle and pulley attached to live June bugs. When the glued insects beat their wings, as they did desperately, the bug-power engine was supposed to take off. Young Nikola abandoned this line of research forever when a young friend dropped by who fancied the taste of June bugs. Noticing a jarful standing near, he began eating them. Nikola threw up.
Nikola received a good mathematical education in his homeland, then began his engineering education at the Technical University of Graz, Austria, and, in 1879 and 1880, the University of Prague. His first employment was in a government telegraph engineering office in Budapest, where he put together his first invention, a telephone repeater. Later, he visualized the principle of the rotating magnetic field and developed plans for an induction motor, that would become his first step toward the successful utilization of alternating current. In 1882 Tesla went to work in Paris for the Continental Edison Company, and while on assignment to Strasbourg in 1883, he constructed, in after-work hours, his first induction motor.
In 1884, he set sail for the United States. At the age of 27, he stepped off the boat at the Battery in New York City with four cents in his pocket, some calculations for a flying machine, and a few of his own poems. He got immediate proof that America was indeed a land of opportunity. As he walked up Broadway, he met a group of workmen trying to repair an electric motor. They paid him $20 to fix it.
Tesla had come to the U.S. with high hopes of landing a job with Thomas Edison. Edison recognized his talent, and put him to work immediately at his lab in West Orange, New Jersey, designing motors and generators which would make wireless radio transmission possible -- at a time when Marconi had yet to make his mark.
In May 1885, George Westinghouse, head of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh, bought the patent rights to Tesla's polyphase system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors. The transaction precipitated a titanic power struggle between Edison's direct-current systems and the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating-current approach. Eventually, Westinghouse -- and Tesla -- won out. Westinghouse used Tesla's system to light the World Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. His success was a factor in winning him the contract to install the first power machinery at Niagara Falls, which bore Tesla's name and patent numbers. The project carried power to Buffalo by 1896.
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