We all live in the world of Tesla, in the world of his alternating current, the generators that create this current and the electric motors rotating from it. Having laid such a technical foundation for modern civilization, the inventor did not remain without the recognition of grateful humanity: the unit of magnetic induction, tesla, was named in his honor. And having "your" unit of measurement is much cooler than the Nobel Prize, which Tesla did not receive due to a misunderstanding. But Nikola Tesla is not only a recognized genius of electrical engineering, but also a man who masterly mastered what is called self-PR in modern language. And the myths generated by himself or others are alive to this day.
Leader of the second revolution
By the way, let's agree from the very beginning that Nikola Tesla is not a scientist, but a great, even brilliant inventor, also because the fundamental laws of physics from the section "electricity" were discovered not by him, but by Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Ohm and more a number of scientists. But it was Tesla who managed to practically apply these laws, sometimes without even knowing about their existence, and in an incredible volume and with outstanding efficiency.
Tesla was born in 1856, as he always emphasized, on the full moon night (already smells like mysticism!) In the town of Smiliany in the family of a Serbian Orthodox priest. But not in Serbia, but in the Croatian part of what was then Austria-Hungary.
That is why Serbs - by blood, Croats - by birthplace, Hungarians - by first citizenship, and even Czechs - their homeland was also part of Austria-Hungary, and he studied at Charles University in Prague. However, only a year, and the genius of electricity did not receive any other education. From 1884 until his death in 1943, that is, for almost 60 years, he lived in America, where he made and realized all his major inventions. So Tesla is still a great American inventor, albeit of Slavic origin. To the delight of the mystics, we add that Tesla was left-handed, and left-handed people are seven times less than right-handed.
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This happened in 1882 while Tesla was working at the Budapest State Telephone Company - at least that's what he always said, although Tesla's patents on a rotating magnetic field and electric motors using this phenomenon were only published in 1888, when the inventor was already several years old. lived in America and worked for Edison. At first, Tesla seemed like a wonderful find for the famous inventor, but it soon became clear that Edison had acquired a rather obstinate employee. First of all, he tried to convince Edison of the advantages of alternating electrical current over direct current, which was only the boss's business.
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The fact is that the generator invented by Tesla for generating electric current - a device "inverse" to the electric motor - produces exactly alternating current, which, moreover, is easy to transmit over long distances. However, at that moment such a generator “in hardware” did not yet exist, and Edison had already fully invested money and intellectual resources in direct current. Not finding a common language with the owner, Tesla left Edison and organized his own company - a dashing act for a recent immigrant.
However, he turned out to be a bad businessman and in the same 1888 sold the remains of the company to the shark of capitalism Westinghouse and got a job with him. After that, the famous "war of electric currents" broke out between Edison and Tesla, in which, as you know, it was the immigrant who won. And if the reader, in whatever room and at whatever point of the planet he is, looks around, then, if desired, he will find that both the lighting and all electrical appliances around him operate on alternating current. Let us emphasize again - Tesla did not discover alternating current, but it was he who carried out the second industrial revolution on the basis of this current. Let's call it electric, in contrast to the first, which can be described as steam.
Let us also clarify that direct current will not be thrown into the "dustbin of history." On the contrary, there are areas of human life and activity, where you cannot do without it. First of all, these are power sources for mobile and portable devices, which include submarines and hundreds of millions of cars, flashlights and other lighting devices that do not require a network connection. Yes, and all electronic circuits use direct current, however, obtained after converting a conventional AC from the network into it. But in any case, alternating current is almost the absolute king of electrical engineering, and direct current is nothing more than a nominal head of state, like the English queen, who, although she reigns, rules only her servants and dogs. The same car batteries are charged (through a rectifier) with alternating current.
Finally we come to Tesla's main invention. More than 60 years before him, Dominic Arago discovered the "magnetism of rotation". He placed a copper disk over a rotating magnet and found that the disk was carried away by the magnet and also began to rotate. It seemed as it should be, but the disk is copper, and copper is non-magnetic!
This phenomenon - electromagnetic induction - was explained by Michael Faraday, and Tesla thought of replacing the permanent magnet, which Arago, even though he was an academician, personally rotated simply by his hand, rotating a magnetic field, and the copper disk - with a permanent magnet (the rotor of an electric motor).
The latter is not a problem, but how to make the magnetic field rotate? Tesla came up with the idea of supplying two alternating currents to the windings of the stator magnetic poles, differing from each other only in phase displacement. The alternation of these currents will cause the alternating formation of the north and south magnetic poles, which, in fact, corresponds to the rotation of the magnetic field. This field should then cause the rotor of the motor to rotate.
It only remained to build a two-phase current source (two-phase generator) and a two-phase electric motor, which Tesla soon did, choosing 90 degrees as the phase shift value. At that time, he did not guess until the shift of 120 degrees and only later came up with three-phase generators and electric motors, but he was a little late, and our compatriot Dolivo-Dobrovolsky had developed a three-phase motor before him. By the way, also not quite "ours": Mikhail Osipovich worked and invented in Germany.
Tesla did not much better with the priority on the rotation of the magnetic field itself: just a couple of months before the publication of Tesla's patent, the Italian Ferraris made a demonstration of electric motors using such rotation for their work. But Dolivo-Dobrovolsky always emphasized the secondary nature of his invention in relation to Tesla's idea, and the date of invention is the date of registration of the application in the patent office, which Tesla filed a year before Ferraris's lecture. So now the priority of the American Serb is not in doubt, although Galileo Ferraris is also mentioned in any article about a rotating magnetic field (even in our TSB). But priority is a priority, and the fact that the first grandiose hydroelectric power station in America on the Niagara River was equipped with Tesla's alternating current generators is undeniable and is the best proof of Tesla's technical genius.
The next remarkable invention, although again not a discovery, was the use of the glow of various objects in a high-frequency electric field. The phenomenon itself has been known since the end of the 18th century, but Tesla put it “on stream” and in 1891 demonstrated a bright glow of flasks and tubes, from which air was pumped out, in the field created by Tesla's own transformer. He was perhaps the first to describe the glow of biological objects in a high-frequency field, and one of such objects was himself!
Subsequently, this effect was used by our compatriots, the spouses Kirlian, who were seriously sure - and many esotericists still talk about this, that they discovered an aura emitted exclusively by living objects. This is nonsense, but Tesla is not to blame for spreading this nonsense.
Then Tesla independently discovered radio communications, and he invented the mast antenna certainly earlier than others. Although the most revolutionary breakthrough in the history of radio - the transmission of a signal from Europe to America - was made by Marconi. Tesla received this signal, but, considering that radio waves could not pass through the kilometer-long hump of water between Europe and America (due to the curvature of the Earth), he decided: these are the signals of the Martians.
There is nothing to be done, Tesla is what he was. Our great chemist Butlerov, by the way, was fond of table-turning and sincerely believed in ghosts. But the radio-controlled boats and submarines were definitely invented, designed, patented and demonstrated by Tesla. And even offered to use them for sabotage at sea! It is not excluded that he was the first to invent mechanical oscillators - generators of mechanical vibrations of ultrasonic frequency.
Mysterious tower
And it is in this place that you can turn to the story of myths and legends associated with the personality of the great inventor and his inventions. In more than detail, hundreds of articles and many books about Tesla retell the story of how he once installed a generator on a beam in his Broadway laboratory, turned on and caused the destruction of the room due to resonance with the natural vibrations of the building. Moreover, he even assured that with the help of a small generator he could easily bring down the Brooklyn Bridge and split the Earth, falling into resonance with the natural vibrations of the earth's crust. Alas, the inventor with an unfinished higher did not know anything about the power of oscillations, or about their so-called quality factor, or about the fact that the Earth has not one period of natural oscillations, but a multitude, a whole spectrum. Of course, Tesla did not break anything and could not break anything,and this whole story was invented by him and decorated with the yellow press.
The most legendary design of the inventor was the so-called tower in the town of Wardencliff on Long Island, now a suburb of New York. It was built by Tesla with the money of another shark of capitalism J. P. Morgana, who was fond of yachting, loved to watch the regattas in the Atlantic Ocean and wanted to receive information on the progress of the competition by radio. It was for receiving and sending radio signals that the radio mast ordered by Tesla was intended. For which he received huge money at that time - 100 thousand dollars, which corresponds to today's approximately two million, although an ordinary antenna could be built at a cheaper rate.
But Tesla did something absolutely unthinkable for an American contractor and began to build not so much a radio mast as a tower. And in it he placed a wireless transmitter of energy across the globe, free of charge and without loss. For some reason, he believed that electricity is in the bowels of our planet, and as soon as it is pushed, the electricity will burst to the desired point. At the same time, Morgan was not told anything about the changed plans, and when the billionaire found out about everything, he became furious and stopped funding. A couple of times the tower still worked, but simply as a source of electrical discharges, after which it was mothballed in 1903, and the contents were written off for debts. In 1917, the building was completely demolished due to fears that something would be transferred from it to German submarines - there was a world war.
Tesla is even credited with organizing the famous Tunguska disaster. Like, he shot from his tower, to test his theories, with electricity in some obviously deserted place, in Siberia, in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska river. According to another version, Tesla, with a powerful explosion and many-day glow of the atmosphere, which, by the way, was recorded even in Western Europe, was going to illuminate the sky for Robert Peary, who was making his way to the North Pole in the Arctic darkness. So we recall that the fall of the Tunguska body occurred on June 30, 1908, and Robert Peary went on a campaign to the pole on February 20, 1909. Nikola Tesla himself at that time wandered sadly around the tower inaccessible to him, locked in a large granary castle five years before the Siberian disaster.
In general, the entire creative life of the great inventor is divided into exactly two periods, and in a mystical way, Tesla made almost all of his original inventions in the first forty-four years, and he continued to fool the public and engage in self-promotion until his death for the next forty-three years of a long life. Mystically, this metamorphosis of Tesla coincided with the transition from the 19th century to the 20th century and took place around 1900. As if to warm up, Tesla "invented" the rays of death, and not even rays, but a stream of the smallest metal particles, accelerated to desperate speed. The idea is not devoid of wit, but, of course, absolutely unrealizable. Already at the end of his life, at the age of 84, the inventor frightened journalists with his new invention: he promised to send a thin, but terribly powerful beam of certain particles or waves into the ionosphere, which would heat this ionosphere so,that she will incinerate the enemy under her.
Tesla is credited with the authorship of the so-called "Philadelphia experiment". Allegedly in 1943, ingenious installations on the destroyer Eldridge created such electromagnetic fields that the ship became invisible. Then, for some reason, he instantly moved with the whole team for a couple of hundred kilometers. Long ago it was proved that there was no experiment, and in general all this was invented by a certain semi-literate sailor who saw how the ship was wrapped with copper wire (to demagnetize the hull so as not to explode on a magnetic mine).
The last myth is about the fate of Tesla's papers after his death. Allegedly, they were all confiscated either by the FBI or the CIA (created, however, four years after the death of the inventor) in order to hide ingenious inventions from spies. In fact, the specialists involved did not find anything interesting or of interest to a potential enemy in the documents, and in the end the inventor's entire archive was transferred to the Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
But there really were great inventions. Dozens of his monuments have been installed in different countries, he is depicted on postage stamps and Serbian banknotes, he has been awarded various medals and prizes, and the Belgrade airport is named after him.
And in general - show me a Russian or an American who would not have heard of Tesla, even if he only knows about electricity, which button on the television remote to press?
