Nikola Tesla, a Serbian inventor born on July 1856 was a dreamer with a poetic touch. What's so amazing about Tesla was he can imagine his invention in his head and execute it without the need of any blueprints or detail calculations. He attended Technical University at Graz, Austria and the University of Prague. After observing the Gramme dyname, his amazing brain conceived an idea of alternating current which later become the most important type of current during that era as well as nowadays.
During the time where even electricity is considered as "ethereal mystery", Tesla already had a vision about electromagnetic fields which was first discovered by Micheal Faraday. Even the great Micheal Faraday had a problem convincing his idea of electromagnetic field let alone Tesla. Due to his eccentric genius, Tesla had only a few friends and always kept things to himself. Never had a home in America, he chose to live in hotel in which during his final few decades, only granting interviews and making annual public appearance during his birthday.
In 1884, he arrived at New York, America with only 4 cents in his pocket, a few poems and calculations for a flying machine, he first found a place for employment with Thomas Edison who also was his employer during 1882 where he worked for Continental Edison Company in Paris. But because of the difference in the background and methods of doing things, the separation of these two inventors was inevitable.
Tesla continued to work on his inventions and in 1888, seizing the momentous opportunity, sold some of his patents to George Westinghouse. And for a mere $60,000 , the company acquired the patent for polyphase alternating current technology. Tesla's fame increased further when the company won the contract to supply the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 with electricity. Tesla's idea of alternating current which was owned by the company George Westinghouse set Edison's company in trouble, because he was promoting direct current. Due to this, Edison as quoted from viewzone2.com "mounted an ugly publicity stunts designed to discredit Tesla and to save his own financial investment in DC".
You can read about the cheap method Edison used in order to humiliate Tesla's innovation in the passage below, taken from here.
"Animals were brutally electrocuted with AC, including an elephant, which were recorded by Edison and shown at public gatherings.
Edison embarked on a number of propaganda campaigns which attempted to persuade the general public that AC was dangerous. Nicknamed the "death current" by Edison, public demonstrations were staged in which animals were brutally electrocuted with AC, including an elephant, which were recorded by Edison and shown at public gatherings.Despite the public's fear of AC, Tesla had the upper hand. Direct current was good only for short distances. The accumulated resistance in metallic wires and cables greatly reduced the electrical power as it traveled through the transmission lines. AC, on the other hand, did not suffer the same loss and was able to travel great distances with little loss of potential.
Also, because alternating current could react with coils of wire (transformers) to increase or decrease the voltage, electricity could be produced at high power levels at the generation stations and then reduced just prior to being distributed locally. Eventually, Edison lost his battle and alternating current became the electric industry standard. To this day, the three-phase form of Tesla's polyphase system is still used for the generation and transmission of most electricity. Moreover, the conversion of electricity into mechanical power is made possible by updated versions of Tesla's three-phase and split phase motors.
Tesla's experiments with high frequency and high potential alternating currents resulted in the development of the "Tesla coil." This device is a transformer with an air core that has both its primary and secondary tuned in resonance. As part of other experiments Tesla also developed the precursors of modern neon and florescent lights. He constructed these lights, elongated glass tubes filled with gas and coated with phosphor, excited in his high voltage experiments. He also discovered that high voltage current could be made harmless by using an alternating current scheme at very large frequencies.Returning 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."
Right now, many physicist and electrical engineer are trying to discover the long lost idea of Tesla about electricity. I read somewhere that Tesla was a paranoid genius, and together with his photographic memory, he didn't write most of his idea on a paper. Many great ideas hence died with him. For what its worth, may he rest in peace despite of the turbulence and trouble that affected his life.
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