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Question!
Who was Nikola Tesla? Everybody seems to be
talking about this guy!
Answer:
Nikola Tesla was an inventor, mechanical engineer,
electrical engineer as well as a futurist. He was the
inventor of AC electricity, AC generators, Motors, AC
Light Bulbs. His research also involved free energy.
Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor and researcher who
discovered the rotating magnetic field, the basis of
most alternating-current machinery. He emigrated to the
United States in 1884 and sold the patent rights to his
system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and
motors to George Westinghouse the following year. In
1891 he invented the Tesla coil, an induction coil
widely used in radio technology.
Tesla was from a family of Serbian origin. His father
was an Orthodox priest; his mother was unschooled but
highly intelligent.
Training for an engineering career, he attended the
Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the
University of Prague. There at Graz University he first
saw the Gramme dynamo, which operated as a generator
and, when reversed, became an electric motor, and he
conceived a way to use alternating current to advantage.
Later, at Budapest, 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 Strassburg
in 1883, he constructed, in after-work hours, his first
induction motor. Tesla sailed for America in 1884,
arriving in New York, with four cents in his pocket, a
few of his own poems, and calculations for a flying
machine. He first found employment with Thomas Edison,
but the two inventors were far apart in background and
methods, and their separation was inevitable.
Then in May 1885, George Westinghouse, 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, which
eventually won out.
Tesla soon established his own laboratory, He
experimented with shadowgraphs similar to those that
later were to be used by Wilhelm Röntgen when he
discovered X-rays in 1895. Tesla's countless experiments
included work on a carbon button lamp, on the power of
electrical resonance, and on various types of lighting.
Tesla gave exhibitions in his laboratory in which he
lighted lamps without wires by allowing electricity to
flow through his body, to allay fears of alternating
current. He was often invited to lecture at home and
abroad. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is
widely used today in radio and television sets and other
electronic equipment. That year also marked the date of
Tesla's United States citizenship.
Westinghouse used Tesla's system to light the World's
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.
In Colorado Springs, Colo., where he stayed from May
1899 until early 1900, Tesla made what he regarded as
his most important discovery-- terrestrial stationary
waves. By this discovery he proved that the Earth could
be used as a conductor and would be as responsive as a
tuning fork to electrical vibrations of a certain
frequency. He also lighted 200 lamps without wires from
a distance of 25 miles (40 kilometers) and created
man-made lightning, producing flashes measuring 135 feet
(41 meters).
He then returned to New York in 1900, Tesla began
construction on Long Island of a wireless world
broadcasting tower, with $150,000 capital from the
American financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Tesla claimed he
secured the loan by assigning 51 percent of his patent
rights of telephony and telegraphy to Morgan. He
expected to provide worldwide communication and to
furnish facilities for sending pictures, messages,
weather warnings, and stock reports. The project was
abandoned because of a financial panic, labor troubles,
and Morgan's withdrawal of support. It was Tesla's
greatest defeat.
Tesla's work then shifted to turbines and other
projects. Because of a lack of funds, his ideas remained
in his notebooks, which are still examined by engineers
for unexploited clues. In 1915 he was severely
disappointed when a report that he and Edison were to
share the Nobel Prize proved erroneous. Tesla was the
recipient of the Edison Medal in 1917, the highest honor
that the American Institute of Electrical Engineers
could bestow.
Much of our research has been in duplicating some of
Tesla's work. Our Fuelless Engine and SP500 are based on
some of Tesla's discoveries.
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