Nikola Tesla is one of the people whose name is shrouded in a veil of secrecy. Although his achievements are undeniable, the myths around his name are so numerous and fantastic that if they were true, then Tesla could be called the greatest scientist of all times and peoples. In fact, everything is somewhat more prosaic.
early years
The family of Nikola Tesla lived in the village of Smilyan, 6 km from the city of Gospic, the main city of the historical province of Lika, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The head of the family, Milutin, served as a priest in the Sremsk diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church; his wife, Georgina Tesla, nee Mandic, was also from a family of priests. On June 28 (July 10), 1856, the fourth child, Nikola, appeared in their family.
Nikola finished the first grade of elementary school in Smiliany. In 1862, his father received a raise, and Tesla's family moved to Gospić, where he completed the remaining three classes of elementary school, and then the three-year lower secondary school, which he graduated in 1870. In the autumn of the same year, Nikola entered the Higher Real School in the city of Karlovac.
In July 1873 N. Tesla received a certificate of maturity. Despite his father's instructions, Nikola returned to his family in Gospic, where there was an epidemic of cholera, and immediately became infected. Here is what Tesla himself told about it: “During one of the attacks, when everyone thought that I was dying, my father rushed into the room to support me with these words:“You will get better”. I can now see his deathly pale face when he tried to cheer me up in a tone that contradicted his assurances. “Maybe,” I replied, “I will be able to get better if you let me study engineering.” “You will enter the best educational institution in Europe,” he replied solemnly, and I realized that he would do it. A heavy load was sleeping from my soul."
The recovered N. Tesla was soon to be called up for a three-year service in the Austro-Hungarian army, but his relatives considered him not healthy enough and hid in the mountains. He returned back only at the beginning of the summer of 1875.
Promotional video:
In the same year, Nikola entered the Higher Technical School in Graz, where he began to study electrical engineering. Observing the work of Gram's machine in lectures on electrical engineering. Tesla came to the idea of the imperfection of DC machines, but Professor Jacob Peschl sharply criticized his ideas, giving a lecture before the whole course on the impracticability of using alternating current in electric motors. This was, perhaps, his first, fortunately temporary, disappointment, from which the future inventor learned a lesson - not to retreat, despite the authorities.
After graduating from college, Tesla got a job as a teacher in a real gymnasium in Gospic, the one in which he studied. But this work did not bring him either moral satisfaction or material wealth. After the death of his father, the family had little money, and only thanks to financial assistance from his two uncles, Petar and Pavel Mandic, young Tesla was able to leave for Prague in January 1880, where he entered the philosophy faculty of Prague University. But there he studied for only one semester, as he was forced to look for work.
Until 1882, Tesla worked as an electrical engineer for the government telegraph company in Budapest, which at that time was involved in the installation of telephone lines and the construction of a central telephone exchange. Work in the telegraph company was routine and did not allow Tesla to carry out his plans to create an AC electric motor. But it was there that the young inventor figured out how to use a phenomenon in an electric motor, later called a rotating magnetic field.
At the end of 1882, he took a job with the Edison Continental Company in Paris. One of the most significant 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 during the installation of lighting equipment. In his spare time, Tesla worked on the manufacture of a model of an asynchronous electric motor, and in 1883 demonstrated the operation of the engine at the Strasbourg City Hall.
By the spring of 1884, work at the Strasbourg railway station was completed, and Tesla returned to Paris, expecting a solid bonus from the company. But the company had other types of money for this money. Nicola resigned with a scandal.
Work in New York
Deciding to seek his fortune on another continent, on July 6, 1884, Tesla arrived in New York. He took a job at Thomas Edison's company as a repair engineer for electric motors and DC generators.
Edison took Tesla's ideas rather coldly and openly expressed disapproval of the direction of the inventor's personal research. In the spring of 1885, Edison promised Tesla 50 thousand dollars (at that time, the amount was approximately equivalent to 1 million modern dollars), if he could constructively improve the electric DC machines invented by Edison Nicolo actively got down to work and soon presented his developments. Approving all the improvements, in response to a question about the reward, Edison refused Tesla, noting that the emigrant did not yet understand American humor well. Insulted Tesla immediately resigned.
During his time with Edison, Tesla gained fame in the business community. Upon learning of his dismissal, a group of electrical engineers invited him to organize his own company related to the issues of electric lighting. Tesla's projects on the use of alternating current did not inspire them, and then they changed the original plan, limiting only to a proposal to develop a draft arc lamp for street lighting. A year later, the project was ready. Instead of money, the entrepreneurs offered the inventor a part of the shares of the company created to operate the new lamp. This option did not suit the inventor.
From the fall of 1886 to the spring, Nikola Tesla was forced to interrupt in ancillary work. He was engaged in digging ditches, slept where he had to, and ate what he found, during this period he made friends with the engineer Brown, who was in a similar position, who was able to persuade several of his acquaintances to provide a small financial support to Tesla. In April 1887, the Tesla Arc Light Company, created with this money, began to develop street lighting with new arc lamps. Soon the company's prospects were proved by large orders from many cities in the United States.
War of currents
For the office of his company in New York, Tesla rented a house on Fifth Avenue near the building occupied by Edison's company. A fierce competition began between the two firms for the use of direct or alternating currents. This confrontation went down in history under the name "War of currents". If Edison had won, then perhaps our sockets would still have polarity: plus, minus and zero, and the plugs, respectively, would have three contacts.
Back in 1880, Edison patented the entire 110-volt power generation and distribution system. At the same time, the unprecedented lifespan of a light bulb was demonstrated - 1200 hours. It was then that Edison said: "We will make electric lighting so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."
But Edison's idea had a significant flaw. The essence of the problem is that the electrical resistance of the wires increases during the transmission of electricity over long distances. When creating an electric line designed to transmit a certain power, losses can be significantly reduced only by lowering the resistance (making the wires thicker) or increasing the voltage (thereby lowering the current). To reduce losses fourfold, one has to either reduce the resistance fourfold or double the voltage. Thus, the transmission of power over long distances is only possible when using high voltage.
Since there were no effective ways to change the DC voltage at that time, Edison's DC power plants used a voltage close to the consumer voltage - from 100 to 200 volts. Such power plants did not allow the transfer of large capacities to the consumer. As a result, consumers located at a distance not exceeding about 1.5 km from the power plant could effectively use the generated electricity. Overcoming this limitation could be difficult and expensive measures: using thick wires or building a whole network of local power plants. In other words, Edison's approach did not allow building a powerful power plant to supply an entire region, as well as building a hydroelectric power station in a suitable location.
Tesla was a proponent of the use of alternating current. The benefit is obvious - the AC voltage can be easily changed using transformers. This makes it possible both to transmit current through trunk lines over long distances (hundreds of kilometers), and to build a network of high-voltage lines of lower voltage to supply energy to transformer substations, and then to consumers. For this reason, alternating current is more versatile for solving industrial and domestic problems.
At first, the spread of alternating current was hampered by the lack of motors and counters. But in 1882 Tesla invents the multiphase electric motor, and in 1888 the first alternating current meter appears.
The DC power supply was reluctant to give up its positions. For example, Helsinki finally switched to alternating current only in the 1940s, Stockholm in the 1960s. In the United States, up to the end of the 1990s, there were 4,600 disparate DC consumers.
Nowadays, direct current is mainly used for traction motors - trams, subway trains and railways. This is due to the fact that this approach simplifies the return of energy generated during braking to the network.
Creative take-off
In July 1888, the famous American industrialist George Westinghouse bought more than 40 patents from Tesla, paying an average of $ 25,000 each. Westinghouse also hired the inventor to be a consultant at factories in Pittsburgh, where industrial designs of AC machines were developed. The work did not bring satisfaction to the inventor. Despite the persuasion of Westinghouse, a year later Tesla returned to his laboratory in New York.
In 1888-1895, Tesla was engaged in research of magnetic fields and high frequencies in his laboratory. These years were the most fruitful: he received many patents.
In those years, Tesla was one of the first to patent a method for reliably obtaining currents that could be used in radio communications. The "Arc lamp control method" was patented, in which the alternator produced high-frequency (by the standards of that time) current oscillations of the order of 10,000 Hz.
An innovation was the method of suppressing the sound produced by an arc lamp under the influence of alternating or pulsating current, for which Tesla came up with the use of frequencies that are beyond the perception of human hearing. In 1891, in a public lecture, Tesla described and demonstrated the principles of radio communication. In 1893, he came to grips with wireless communication and invented the mast antenna.
In May 1899, at the invitation of a local electrical company, Tesla moved to the resort town of Colorado Springs, Colorado. The town was located on a Vast Plateau at an altitude of 2000 m. Strong thunderstorms were not uncommon in these places.
In Colorado Springs, Tesla set up a small laboratory. This time, the sponsor was the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, who allocated $ 30,000 for research. To study thunderstorms, Tesla designed a special device, which is a transformer, one end of the primary winding of which was grounded, and the other was connected to a metal ball on a rod extending upward.
A sensitive self-adjusting device connected to a recording device was connected to the secondary winding. This device allowed Nikola Tesla to study changes in the Earth's potential, including the effect of standing electromagnetic waves caused by lightning discharges in the earth's atmosphere (after more than five decades, this effect was studied in detail and later became known as the Schumann Resonance). Observations led the inventor to the idea of the possibility of transmitting electricity without wires over long distances.
Project "Wardencliff"
Nicolo Tesla acquired a piece of land 60 km north of New York on Long Island. The plot of 81 hectares was located at a considerable distance from the settlements. Here Tesla planned to build his laboratory. By his order, the architect V. Grow developed a project for a radio station - a 47-meter wooden frame tower with a copper hemisphere at the top. It was with difficulty that we managed to find a construction company that took on such a complex project.
The production of the necessary equipment was delayed, because the industrialist who funded it, John Pierpont Morgan, canceled the contract after he learned that instead of practical goals for the development of electric lighting, Tesla planned to study wireless transmission of electricity. On learning about Morgan's termination of funding for the inventor's project, other industrialists also did not want to have a they do.
Tesla was forced to stop construction, close the laboratory and dismiss the staff. Paying off creditors, Nicolo sold the land. The tower was abandoned and stood until 1917, when the federal authorities suspected that German spies were using it for their own purposes. The unfinished object was blown up.
last years of life
In the summer of 1914, Serbia found itself at the center of the events that led to the outbreak of the First World War. Remaining in America, Tesla took part in raising funds for the Serbian army. Then he begins to think about creating a superweapon: "The time will come when some scientific genius will come up with a machine capable of destroying one or more armies in one action." However, Tesla was not destined to come up with such a car. Maybe for the best …
Already in old age, Tesla was hit by a car and received a fractured ribs. The disease caused acute pneumonia, which turned into a chronic form, which made him bedridden.
He died on the night of January 7-8, 1943. Tesla always demanded that he not be disturbed; there was even a special sign on the door of his hotel room in New York. Therefore, the body was discovered by the maid and the director of the New Yorker Hotel only 2 days after his death.
There is an unconfirmed documentary legend that after Tesla's death, the special department of the FBI seized all the papers found in the inventor's number and classified them. On January 12, the body was cremated, and an urn with ashes was installed at Fairncliff Cemetery in New York. Later it was moved to the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
Tesla coil
A special place in the history of the life and discoveries of Nikola Tesla is occupied by the famous coil named after him. It consists of two oscillatory circuits tuned to the same frequency with magnetic coupling between inductances. As a result, it generates a very high voltage, which manifests itself in the form of beautiful sparks. Despite the menacing appearance. discharges from the Tesla coil are relatively safe. Under certain conditions, you can catch them with your fingers.
The photographs of the working reels are fabulously mesmerizing, the audience present often applauds. But looking at the photographs, you need to understand that the most colorful of them were obtained with a very long exposure and in reality the brightness of the discharges is much lower.
The beauty of the phenomenon is undeniable, but why all this? How can this be applied in life? Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it turns out that sparks can be caught by hand, ignited discharge lamps, disabled nearby electronic equipment and several other applications of similar utility.
A beautiful device, in fact, turns out to be a practically useless toy. We can safely say that if it were not for the colorfulness of the described phenomenon, the name Nikola Tesla would not have received such fame, and there would be much less mysticism around him.
Tesla myths
The halo surrounding the personality and discoveries of Tesla contributed to the spread of all kinds of statements of mythical and semi-mythical character. Such statements cannot be verified due to the lack of documents, which does not prevent, however, attributing to Tesla prophetic predictions and non-existent discoveries.
They say one day, seeing off friends after a party, he persuaded them not to get on an approaching train and this saved their lives - the train really derailed, and many passengers were killed or injured. What to do, the majority of the population is made up of esotericists, mystifiers and psychics who dream of a miracle. That is why fantastic projects were hung on Tesla, including a UFO, allegedly shown to Hermann Goering.
Here are some of these "discoveries":
Tesla allegedly announced his creation of an energy protection system, as well as the creation of a new type of weapon - the "death ray". This theory of lethal weapons was successfully played by the Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoy in his science fiction novel "The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin".
Recently, a hypothesis has arisen about the involvement of Tesla's experiments in the Tunguska phenomenon. The mystics claim that the explosion was due to Nikola Tesla, who was testing an energy transfer device.
Rumors of destructive weapons were not born out of nowhere. Once Tesla conducted a series of experiments, studying the processes of self-oscillations. And suddenly the tables and cabinets in the laboratory began to shake. Then the glass in the windows rang … Buildings vibrated, glass poured from windows, gas and heating pipes burst, water pipes - it was an earthquake. Later, rumor attributed the cause of the tremors to an experiment conducted by Nikola.
The so-called. Philadelphia experiment. This is a mythical teleportation experiment, allegedly carried out by the US Navy on October 28, 1943, during which the destroyer Eldridge with a team on board allegedly disappeared and then instantly moved in space for several tens of kilometers.
The legend states that powerful electromagnetic fields were generated, which caused the destroyer to bend around by light and radio waves. When the destroyer disappeared, a greenish fog was observed. Some of the crew returned unscathed, and some literally merged with the structure of the ship, some died of burns and went crazy with fear.
Tesla is also credited with wireless power transmission, a fuel-free car powered by World Ether, and a method of creating fireballs.
Whether Tesla really thought of at least a part of what was attributed to him, or cleverly bluffed, remains a mystery. In any case, these rumors did not interfere, and, possibly, helped him sell his patents for sometimes fantastic sums.
Nowadays, the surname of the Serbian scientist is very widespread. Music groups and songs are named after him. Whole films are made about him and books are written. In computer games, characters and military equipment are named after him. Recently, electric vehicles under the Tesla trademark have become famous, to which the inventor himself has nothing to do.
By becoming a trademark, Tesla immortalized his real achievements and strengthened the myths he generated.
Alexander Kosov
Journal "Discovery and Hypotheses" July 2014
