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Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was an electrical inventor who was born in Smijlan, Croatia in 1856. He had an extraordinary memory and spoke six languages. Inventors have a reputation of being eccentric and Tesla was no exception. His apparent phobias included pearl earrings worn by women, never staying in a hotel room or floor whose number was divisable by three, and insisting on a large number of napkins at every meal with which he would methodically and meticulously polish his silverware. Tesla had a good number of friends, one of which was Samuel Clemmons, also known as Mark Twain.

One of Tesla's main claims to fame was his invention of the alternating current motor. His view was that alternating current was vastly superior to Edison's direct current, but the main problem was designing a practical motor. One of the benefits of alternating current is the fact that it can be altered or converted to suit a variety of situations. For example, if the voltage is made quite high, then the current necessary for a specific level of power is very low. This low current then becomes very efficient when sending electrical power over very long wires.

Tesla also experimented with radio-frequency electromagnetic waves and invented the idea of Radio as we know it today, despite the claims made by Marconi (There are numerous patents which bear this out.) In working with radio waves, Tesla created the Tesla coil as a means to generate and receive this form of energy.

He later went on to experiment with actual wireless transmission of electrical power. In Colorado Springs he built a laboratory to develop this. The lab contained the largest Tesla Coil ever built. He called it the 'Magnifying Transmitter' and it was capable of generating some 300,000 watts of power. His coil could produce a bolt of lightning 130 feet long. According to local accounts, Tesla actually managed to successfully transmit about 30 to 50 thousand watts of power without wires using the 'Transmitter'.

Tesla was also an accomplished mechanical engineer, and patented dozens of devices ranging from speedometers to extremely efficient electrical generators. One device was his bladeless turbine. Instead of using fan-type blades, the turbine utilized solid disks of metal, and relied on what is called the 'boundry-layer effect'. His design ran on either compressed air or steam which was so efficient that a device held in the hand could produce well over 10 horsepower! Today, this bladeless technology is being used in a special type of non-clogging pump designed for the oil industry.

Tesla also pioneered studies to locate objects in the air or in the ground by using radio waves. This is commonly known today as RADAR. Tesla also created radio-control devices. His work with special gas-filled lamps set the stage for the creation of fluorescent lighting.

It is rather sad that a man who gave the world so much died literally pennyless, on January 7th, 1943. He received little recognition for his work. Many texts still credit Marconi with the invention of radio, despite the Supreme Court decision which overruled the Marconi patent, awarding it to Tesla. At the Niagra Falls power generating station, a small statue of Tesla is purposely left unilluminated at night. Tesla is considered the Forgotten Father of Technology. Tesla himself once commented "... The present is theirs. (skeptics of the day) The future, for which I really worked, is mine." How true indeed.

Tesla Nikola

I found a really cool website giving tribute to Nikola Tesla. This website created in remembrance of his life and work is called The Tesla Memorial Society of New York. It was founded in Buffalo, New York in 1979. It is the oldest Tesla society in North America dedicated to keeping the memory of Nikola Tesla alive. They are committed to the pursuit of science, progress and brotherhood among all nations and religions around the world.

The website offers news connected with Nikola Tesla and has many neat pictures of himself, stamps of him, awesome pictures related to his work with electricity, the letterhead on his company stationary (which is another really cool picture) recalling some of his more important inventions, Tesla sitting below the Tesla Coil, which creates millions of volts of electricity with a frequency rate of 100,000 alterations per second, in his Colorado Spring Laboratory, and many other fascinating photos. I highly recommend a browse through at this website, it's very interesting. The pictures alone are worth visiting the site.

https://www.teslasociety.com/

Nikola Tesla History & Civil Business Politics

"The motors I build there were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision and the operation was always as I expected."
-- Nikola Tesla

Tesla Nikola

I did a paper on Tesla awhile ago. By the time I was done with it I asked myself... Is he even from this planet? Maybe Tesla was from the future, I don't know which it is but he doesn't get as much recognition as he deserves. It's only because of the greediness of other men like Thomas Edison that he didn't go further with his inventions.

Tesla Nikola

$1.3m raised to restore Tesla's lab

A six-week internet crowdfunding effort has raised US$1.3 (NZ$1.56 million) million to restore a New York laboratory once used by visionary scientist Nikola Tesla. Ref. Source 1