posted January 18, 2009 11:03 AM            

'During the night of January 7th, 1943, an 86 year old man died alone in his room in the new yorker hotel, in Manhatten. Before his body was removed to Campbell's Funeral Parlor at 81st street in Madison Avenue, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation entered the room, opened the small safe that he kept their, and took all the papers that it contained, on the grounds that they might contain details of an important secret weapon.

The man was Nikola Tesla, an electrical engineer whose genius rivalled that of Edison. He has been strangely forgotten, except in the country of his birth, although his name lives on in the Tesla Coil, an invention that exploits some of the more bizarre properties of electrical current discovered by Tesla. But this barely represents the scope of his wide-ranging scientific achievements.

He was born at midnight on 9th July, 1856, in Smiljan, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but now in Yugoslavia. It is said that he was accused of cheating in school because he would give the answer to a mathematical question incredibly quickly. Indeed, from his earliest years until the end of his life, Tesla claimed that all his understanding of the complex engineering problems to which he devoted his attention came to him in flashes of intuition.

An interview published in the American magazine 'The World' on August 22 , 1984, gives us a striking picture of Nikola Tesla at the height of his powers: 'He has eyes sey very far back in his head. They are rather light. I asked him how he could have had such light eyes and to be a Slav. He told me his eyes were once much darker, but that using his mind a great deal had made them many shades lighter. I have often heard that using the brain makes the eyes lighter in colour. Tesla's confirmation of the theory through his personal experience is important.
He is very thin, is more than 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall, and weighs less than 140 pounds (64 kilograms). His thumbs are remarkably big, even for such big hands. The thumb is the intellectual part of the hand. The apes had very small thumbs. Study them , and you will notice this.
Nikola Tesla has a head that spreads out at the top like a fan. His head is shaped like a wedge. His chin is pointed as an ice-pick. His mouth is too small. His chin, though not weak, is not strong enough. His face cannot be studied and judged like the faces of other men, for he is not a worker in practical fields. He lives his life up in the top of his head, where ideas are born, and up there he has plenty of room. His hair is jet black and curly. He stoops - most men do when they don't have enough peacock blood in them. He takes a profound interest in his own work. He has that supply of self-love and self-confidence which usually goes with success. And he differs from most of the men who are written and talked about in the fact that he has something to tell.'

*Migration To America *
And Tesla certainly had something to tell. He had arrived in New York in 1884, his capitol of four cents, and his baggage comprising some technical articles that he had written in Belgrade and Paris, a book of poems that he composed, and some calculations that he made for the design of a flying machine. But in his head, he had all the details of the polyphase, alternating current, generator, which was to become the basis of the Niagara Falls hydro-electric power installation in 1895, and has since become the standard for industrial machinery. As Lord Kelvin, the distinguished British scientist, put it,

"Tesla has contributed to more electrical science than any man up to his time."

Soon after his arrival in New York, Tesla was employed by Edison, for whom he designed 24 types of dynamo. But the two men did not hit it off, and in April 1887, Tesla was set up in his own laboratory. Here he rapidly showed that his AC system was much more superior to Edisons DC system, and in little over a year he had been granted no less than 30 important patents.

In the next 20 years, Tesla made an astounding number of discoveries in the field of electrical and radio engineering. Unhappily, due to a succession of accidents in which many of his writings were destroyed, and to the neglect that his name has suffered, it is not always possible to determine the date at which so many discoveries of his were made, and so he is seldom credited as a pioneer. There is no doubt, nevertheless, that he , not Marconi, was the discoverer of the tuned circuit upon which radio is based, a fact determined by the US Supreme Court, only in the year of his death.

posted January 18, 2009 11:04 AM            

Unlike Marconi however, Tesla was concerned with the transmission not only of minute quantities of energy in the form of radio signals but also of huge amounts of electrical energy for domestic and industrial use. In 1899 he succeeded in pumping power into the atmosphere equivalent to many millions of watts with an immense coil generating some 10 million volts.

The experimental installation that Tesla constructed at Colorado Springs was a barn shaped building nearly 100 feet square (30m ), in diameter. From the center of the roof a skeletal tower supported a mast nearly 200 feet (60m) high on top of which was mounted a copper ball some 3 feet in diameter. Inside the building was a circular enclosure like a fence, some 75 feet (23m) in diameter, on which was wound the primary coil of his transmitter; the secondary coil was about 10 feet (3m) in diameter, and was connected to the mast.

* CIRCUITS IN TUNE *

The principle behind the tuned resonant circuit is very like that of a child's swing. A small push starts the swing, and the same small push applied at the right moment, soon has the swing moving high and wide. In the same way, a succession of electrical pulses applied with the correct frequency to the primary coil, will produce highly magnified pulses in the second coil.
These pulses in the mast connected to Tesla's secondary coil would generate high frequency radio waves that would travel to the far side of the globe then return. If they were precisely tuned to the natural frequency of oscillation of electrical currents in the Earth, they would, on their return,exactly reinforce the voltage pulses in the mast, and boost the current that was drawn from the Earth. An ever-increasing current would surge the the apparatus. The entire planet would be used as a further 'secondary circuit' to amplify the current.

The story of how Tesla , 'properly attired in a cutaway coat and black derby hat for the auspicious occasion', put his apparatus into operation, is dramatically told in John J. O Neill's 'Prodigal Genius' . While Tesla watched the top of the mast from outside the building, his assistant Czito stood apprehensively by the controls within. When he closed the switch the secondary coil was surrounded by a halo of electrical fire, sparks crackled through every part of the building, and there came a sharp snap from high overhead.

"Now it was followed by a tremendous upsurge of sound. The crackling from the coil swelled into a crescendo...the original staccato snap was followed by a sharper one...They came closer together like the rattle of a machine gun The bang high in the air became tremendously louder; it was now the roar of a cannon, with the discharges rapidly following each other as if a gigantic artillery battle was taking place over the building...There was a strange ghostly blue light in the great barn-like structure. The coils were flaming with masses of fiery hair. Everything in the building was spouting needles of flame."

Outside, Tesla stood entranced . From the copper ball on top of the mast, bolts of lightning were shooting out: fingers of fire nearly 135 feet (4om) in length.

posted January 18, 2009 05:22 PM            

Fortunately the company's generator was one of Tesla's own design, and within a week he had it operating again. Some of the implications of the results he obtained from his experiments were indicated in a paper he wrote the following year:-

"That communication without wires to any point of the globe is practical with such apparatus would need no demonstration , but through a discovery I made I obtained absolute certitude. Popularly explained explained it is exactly this: When we raise the voice and hear an echo in reply, we know that the sound of the voice must have reached a distant wall, or boundary, and must have been reflected from the same. Exactly as the sound, so an electrical wave is reflected, and the same evidence which is afforded by an echo is offered by an electrical phenomenon known as a 'stationary' wave - that is, a wave with fixed nodal and ventral regions. Instead of sending sound vibrations toward a distant wall, I have sent electrical vibrations toward the remote boundaries of the earth, and instead of the wall the earth has replied. In place of an echo I have obtained a stationary electrical wave...reflected from afar."

A standard demonstration of the effects of the Tesla coil is to cause an electric light bulb to burn brightly without any connection to an electrical supply. With his giant Colorado Springs installation, Tesla was able to light 200 of Edison's incandescent lamps at a distance of 25 miles ( 40 kilometres).

Seventy-eight years later, the London 'Evening Standard' reported that some remarkable electrical storms had been taking place over Canada, and that Tesla's last surviving assistant, Arthur Matthews, had been intensively interrogated by an un-named Russian electrical engineer. Shortly afterward, the same newspaper reported that Major-General George Keegan, former head of US Air Force Intelligence, had publicly voiced his apprehension that the Russians possessed a 'particle gun' capable of detonating ballistic missiles in flight.

posted January 18, 2009 05:24 PM            

* TESLAS BRAVE NEW WORLD * ...

posted January 19, 2009 05:31 AM            

I would rate Thomas Elva Edison lower then Tesla, he comes no were near Tesla as Tesla was far better good person then Edison.

posted January 20, 2009 01:54 PM            

Orbis Publishing, London, 1984

"Returning from the giant electrical transmitting station he had built at Colorado Springs in 1900, Nikola Tesla embarked upon an even more ambitious project, his so called 'World System' - a way of using the Earth's natural 'electric vibrations' to provide universal and inexpensive electrical power. With the financial support of railroad magnate J.P Morgan, he began the construction of an enormous broadcasting complex on a 2000-acre (800 hectare) estate known as Wardencliff, on Long Island, some 60 miles (100 kilometres) from New York.
A skeletal wooden tower some 154 feet (45m) high was erected, on which Tesla proposed to mount a giant copper electrode 100 feet (30m) in diameter, shaped like a huge doughnut with a tube diameter of 20 feet (6m).

But somehow, things began to go wrong. There was never enough money, and although the tower stood for 12 years until it was demolished during the First World War as a defense risk, the whole scheme came to nothing. And of the associated project, the industrial 'city beautiful' that he had envisaged with his architect friend Stanford White, there was no sign.

From that time on, Tesla seems to have been a spent force. He was never destitute, he never starved; but, while other scientists and engineers developed the practical applications of ideas for which he could claim the original idea, he found few opportunities to advance his own theories. Indeed, as he grew older, he seemed to lose touch with the scientific community, and increasingly made dogmatic assertions that conflicted with the way in which physics was going.

For instance, he could not be persuaded to accept the modern picture of the discrete structure of the atom, and the idea of 'smashing' the atom was to him inconceivable. He accepted the existence of atoms as the in-divisible 'billiard balls' of Victorian physics, and he accepted the idea of the independent existence of the electron, but he could not reconcile one concept with the other. As a result of his experiments with extremely long-wave, high-energy, electrical oscillations, he was convinced that matter existed in a state of vibration, but he saw this in terms of a simple physical relationship between objects rather than in the sophisticated concepts of quantum mechanics.

* PLANET IN RESONANCE *

In his experiments at Colorado Springs, Tesla had set up a kind of pumping action of electrons in and out of the earth, which he understood as setting up planetary electric currents in resonant motion. It is certainly possible that Tesla's extremely long-wave transmissions could have set up such a resonance. Whether a way can be found to exploit this in the generation of usable energy remains to be seen.

At the other end of the wavelength scale, there is evidence to suggest that Tesla also discovered the principle of the laser. The name 'LASER' is an acronym for 'Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation', and the light from a laser is produced by exactly the kind of tuned oscillation that Tesla used to produce his high-voltage discharges, but, of course, at high frequency and short wavelength. It was not until 1960 that the first successful laser was made, when the American physicist T.H Maiman forced a bar of synthetic ruby to produce red light by 'pumping' light energy into it at exactly the right frequency.

The most important aspect of the light produced by the laser is that of a single wavelength. Ordinary light sources produce light of a wide range of wavelengths, which emerges in all directions. Lasers produce light all of one wavelength, the emission moving only in one direction, and with the waves exactly in step (this is called 'coherence'). As a result, a laser beam can be sent over enormous distances without losing its power or being diffused in any way. The first men on the Moon left behind them a reflector designed to send back laser beams transmitted from the Earth. The beams returned without any marked diminuition in their power.

Writing in 1934, Tesla described an apparatus that sounds similarly strange to the laser.

He claimed it 'projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horse-power can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist.'

At his 82nd birthday dinner at the New Yorker Hotel in 1938, he was asked 'could he produce an effect on the Moon sufficiently large to be seen by an astronomer watching the Moon through a high-power telescope?' He replied that he ' would be able to produce, in the dark region of the thin crescent new moon an incandescent spot that would glow like a bright star so that it could be seen without the aid of a telescope.'

All this talk on the part of Tesla led to persistent rumours that he had invented a 'death ray', but in an article in 1935, he stated categorically that 'this invention of mine does not contemplate the use of any so called "death rays".' He hated war, and he wrote;

"We cannot abolish war by outlawing it. We cannot end it by disarming the strong. War can be stopped, not by making the strong weak but by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself... I was fortunate enough to evolve a new idea, and to perfect means which can be used chiefly for defense. If it is adopted, it will revolutionize the relations between nations. It will make any country, large or small, impregnable against armies. My invention requires a large plant, but once established, it will soon be possible to destroy anything, men or machines approaching within a radius of 200 miles (320 kilometres). '

posted January 20, 2009 02:11 PM            

------------------

posted January 20, 2009 03:42 PM            

Edison too stood in the ration line during the world war. I doubt if people even know about that.

posted January 21, 2009 11:08 AM            

Well regarding Edison no doubt he was a pioneer scientist and inventor but he was even a mean commercial capitalist business man.

Tesla was unique among pioneer scientist and inventor at that time because he was far better human being working for mankind then anyone else, this made him to be considered in different league.

League of Mankind

posted January 21, 2009 01:25 PM            

Edison was also a sadistic man who electrocuted innocent animals to death in public in his attempts to ruin Tesla.
Edison was not a nice person who wanted to help the world.
He was a very greedy and cruel man.

Tesla wanted to give the world free energy.
That made the money hungry show offs detest him.

posted January 21, 2009 01:46 PM            

Tesla was from Eastern Europe I think , inimical towards capitalism. In my opinion he is still a jerk. If only he didn't have conflicts with his principles and agreed to JP Morgan , he woud have helped mankind.

But mankind has progressed, took time but we are there. I don't think existence cares about egoistical people like Tesla. They die with their egos.

Edison too had a point. AC cud have been dangerous, and it still is. How many people die from electrocution every year?

posted January 21, 2009 02:35 PM            

Who cares when everyone is opining. He lived his life and gone.

posted January 21, 2009 02:59 PM            

Anyone who has thought about unlimited energy (which is a reasonable outcome given the materials we have available) invariably comes to find out about Tesla.

posted January 21, 2009 03:12 PM            

Any discussion has 2 sides to it. Its common sense isn't it?

posted January 21, 2009 03:14 PM            

He is not that famous. Read the title of the thread "Unsung hero". Maybe some cancerian here would read his bio and succeed where he failed. That "Know thy self" concept?

>>>Because you just enjoy being contrary in general?

Yeah. Why not. Did you forget I said I have mercury conjoined mars . So sounds argumentative to people.

posted January 21, 2009 07:17 PM            

quote:

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But mankind has progressed, took time but we are there.

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I don't think existence cares about egoistical people like Tesla. They die with their egos.

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Edison too had a point. AC cud have been dangerous, and it still is. How many people die from electrocution every year?

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posted January 21, 2009 07:24 PM            

quote:

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Tesla was from Eastern Europe I think ,

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quote:

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In my opinion he is still a jerk.

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