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NIKOLA TESLA



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Age: 104
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City: COLORADO SPRINGS
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Friday, January 02, 2009 

Category: School, College, Greek

Nikola Tesla - The Genius Who Lit the World





SCIENCE HERO:
NIKOLA TESLA




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Nikola Tesla was a man born ahead of his time. He was one of the weirdest and smartest men of his time, but because of that nobody accepted him. He is responsible for many modern inventions that we use now. Even though he didn't get credit in his time, he is now being rediscovered as the genius he was.

Nikola Tesla was born at the stroke of midnight on July 9, 1856. Nikola Tesla was born just as an electrical storm hit which could have helped him with his electrical inventions. Nikola's first invention was at age four. It was the first water wheel without paddles, which he made from a crude disk and an axle made from a twig. He was very excited when the wooden axle turned the disk in the water.

Tesla's mother, although she didn't go to school, and couldn't even read or write, was very inventive and very smart. When she was young she memorized thousands of poems and legends about her country. A lot of the devices around the house were invented by her to make her home run smoother.

From the time he was a child, Tesla was always considered eccentric. These are some of his eccentricities:

Nikola was a night person. He would always get to work at noon and always had the shades drawn so it would be dark. However, during lightning storms he would open the curtains, lay on the couch and talk to himself. Although he talked to himself a lot, during lightning storms he talked even more. And sometimes during the storms he would explain entire inventions while picturing them in his mind.

He also had very acute senses. As Tesla said, "In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object at a distance of 12 feet by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead." He also claimed that a fly landing on a table would produce a slight thud, and a carriage a mile away seemed to shake his body.

Nikola had visions all of his life. He would create, as a youngster, whole worlds which he would visit. He would talk to the people, etc. who were as real to him as real life. When he got older and became an inventor he would envision, build and test complete machines in his mind. So accurate were his visions he could even sense if his machines were out of balance.

Because of these visions he didn't build actual models, which are called prototypes, for testing his machines because he did it all in his head. He claimed that his visions were so accurate that after twenty years of testing, in his mind, he never had to change a prototype. They always worked as he envisioned.

When Nikola was a little boy he loved playing in the woods and fields where he watched the birds. One day he even brought home an eagle, convinced that from it he could learn to fly.

In 1884 Tesla was invited to come to America and work for the Edison Company and redesign Edison's machines. He took a ship to America to start his work there.

Before he got to the steam ship he had been robbed of all his luggage, ticket and money. The captain let him sail anyway and he arrived in America with four cents in his pocket, a book of his own poems, a scientific article and a package of calculations for his plans for a flying machine.

Edison made him work from 10:30 am to 5:00 the next morning, seven days a week. Even though Tesla did not believe in Edison's direct current motors he worked hard to improve them. Edison told him if he could do that he would give him a bonus of $50,000. Tesla worked day and night because the $50,000 would let him set up his own lab and work on his inventions. He came up with twenty-four new designs to replace the old ones of Edison's. Edison was delighted with the results but did not pay Tesla the $50,000 he had promised. When Tesla finally asked him about it, it is said that Edison told him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor." That is when Tesla left the Edison Co. and they became rivals.

A group of inventors approached him and offered him a chance to form a company of his own - the Tesla Electric Light Company. Tesla developed a light that was simpler, more reliable, safe, and economical than what was being used. He patented the lights and they were installed throughout the town.

This was a great success, however, all of a sudden the investors took over the company from Tesla. Now, once again, he had no job, no money, and he didn't even own the patents on the things he had developed.

He couldn't get an engineering job, so, for a year Tesla worked as a laborer on street gangs, digging ditches and building streets. He said that it was the most depressing time of his life.

He worked on his inventions during this time and received several more patents. A lot of his inventions didn't really have any use at the time, but became useful years later. For example, he developed a way to transform heat directly into mechanical or electrical energy. This process was "rediscovered" in the 1970's and Tesla was never given credit for it.

While working in the street gang, the foreman of the crew took Tesla to meet the manager of Western Union Telegraph Company, A.K. Brown. Mr. Brown was not only familiar with Tesla's concept of alternating current but agreed that it was a better system than Edison's. They formed the Tesla Electric Company specifically to develop an alternating current motor.

Now everyone knew and respected him. In 1887 George Westinghouse, who owned most of the electric companies and was a competitor of Edison, went to see Tesla and his alternating current motor. Westinghouse was kind of like Edison in that he was ruthless, but Tesla liked him.

Tesla sold his patents to Westinghouse for $60,000 (only $5,000 in cash and 150 shares of stock), and went to work for Westinghouse. He was also supposed to get $2.50 for every horsepower of electricity sold. If that had happened he would have been a billionaire!

In 1893 Tesla & Westinghouse got the contract to install all the electrical and lighting systems for the Chicago World's Fair. This was the first World's Fair with electricity and would prove that alternating current was the electrical system of the future.

After the World's Fair everybody believed in Tesla's alternating current and soon the whole country had switched to Tesla's system. This was the end of Edison and his direct current.

Two years later a man named Marconi came out with a wireless radio in London. His equipment was exactly what Tesla had demonstrated in St. Louis two years earlier, and had been published around the world. Marconi said he had never read about Tesla's design, so Marconi was credited with inventing the radio. However, twenty years later they went to court and Tesla won. He is now recognized as the real inventor of the radio.

Tesla invented so many things that we use and take for granted today: air conditioning; air flight and motor powered boats (this was the time of the steamship and railroads); to the coolest thing - a hypersensitive vacuum tube to detect ghosts.

Much of his work was so ahead of his time that it was not practical and had no use at the time. Today, a lot of the research and experiments he did almost 100 years ago are being used for modern day uses.

In his day Tesla was not given the credit he deserved and was not treated the way he should have been. However, recently, Tesla is being recognized as the great genius that he was.





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Friday, October 19, 2007 



"I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device." Nikola Tesla Brooklyn Eagle, July 10th, 1931.







Dr. Nikola Tesla : The man who invented the twentieth century is now shaping the twenty-first century as the "Father of Free Energy."






----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: NIKOLA TESLA
Date: Oct 18, 2007 6:13 AM


Nikola Tesla was the great scientist who specialized in the field of electricity and electromagnetic fields, he did invent the electric energy ,as we know it today,but he died in a hotel room, alone and poor.He was of Serb descent and most of his work was conducted in the United States. Tesla's electricity runs everything electrical on this planet and lights cities, towns, and villages on all continents.But he never became known as the "worlds greatest inventor" like Thomas Edison who he marketed himself relentlessly as such, as opposed to the brilliant but reclusive wacko Tesla .But Tesla spend all his money by building more elaborate .He invent also remote control , radio , laser, x-rays, spark transmitter , electric spark system used to run all gasoline engines, and several hundred patents, like possibility to transmit electrical power from one place to another without electrical cables! In 1895, Tesla and Westinghouse built the first large hydro-electric power plant at Niagara Falls, NY, this was the final victory of Alternating Current Electricity Nikola Tesla not only wanted to give the world free energy , he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity, and he had a lot of brilliant ideas and unfortunately we will never know all of them since he kept most of them. He had a vision of the one sun-station will provide all the electricity for the whole world. His scheme is that in every city and town the local authorities shall build one or more of these sun-stations by public taxation for the use of the whole population, just as these cities now have waterworks and gas plants. He did recognize the possibility of free and unlimited energy .Free energy devices, this is a technology which may revolutionize the socio-economic status quo on planet Earth. But his work was obstructed by Thomas Edison and J.P.Morgan .Tesla's vision of free power did not agree with .Morgan's worldview; nor would it pay for the maintenance of the transmission system.His lab was burned down in 1895, and his visions have been delayed for more than 100 years. Wireless transmission of power and free energy have not happened yet. Today, thirty thousand people starve to death every day on this planet, most of them are children. What drives our economy in the western world, allows us to enjoy a high standard of living, a life of leisure compared to our neighbors south of the imaginary line called a border? We do know that the standard of living that a nation enjoys is directly related energy consumption. Nikola Tesla visions of free energy for everyone are very possible in future and more actual today .He died on January 7, 1943 in a New York hotel room, alone, rather poor and surely forgotten .But his life is a triumph.Among us is a triumph of his life, his achievement which we celebrate here .








Tribute to Nikola Tesla : Video by "Teodor The Glass Man", Music : "Epilogue" by Balkanika







Video : The Missing secret of Nikola Tesla










----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: NIKOLA TESLA
Date: Feb 27, 2007 2:19 PM




Tom talk Tesla _ rare interview


Additional information can be seen at
Enlarge
Additional information can be seen at Nikola Tesla's PowerPedia entry
Dr. Nikola Tesla : The man who invented the twentieth century is now shaping the twenty-first century as the
Enlarge
Dr. Nikola Tesla : The man who invented the twentieth century is now shaping the twenty-first century as the "Father of Free Energy.

Dr. Nikola Tesla not only wanted to give the world free energy, Tesla developed components of technology whereby it could be accomplished. Tesla was a physicist, inventor, and electrical engineer of unusual intellectual brilliance and practical achievement. He was of Serb descent and most of his work was conducted in the United States.

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Table of contents.. type=text/javascript>showTocToggle("show","hide")..> [hide]
1 Introduction

1 Overview Links
2 Inventions of Nikola Tesla

2.1 Patents
2.2 Free Energy Related Inventions

2.2.1 Radiant Energy
2.2.2 Magnifying Transmitter
2.2.3 Wardenclyffe

2.3 Technologies Not Yet Fully Tapped

2.3.1 Tesla Turbine
2.3.2 Wireless Lighting
2.3.3 Dynamic Theory of Gravity
2.3.4 Telegeodynamic

2.4 Conventional Energy Inventions

2.4.1 A.C. Power
2.4.2 Radio
2.4.3 X-ray
2.4.4 Radar
2.4.5 Tesla Coil
2.4.6 Induction Motor

2.5 Military Inventions

2.5.1 Tesla Shield
2.5.2 Teleforce
2.5.3 Death Ray

2.6 Other Discoveries

2.6.1 Extraterrestrial Signals

3 Collections

3.1 Electrotherapy Museum

4 In the News
5 Movies About Tesla
6 Related Sites

6.1 Twenty First Century Books

7 Related Sites
8 See also

[edit]

Introduction

Tesla's investors dropped the project when they realized there was no way to meter the power to make money on the end user. We've been trying to catch up for 100 years and are still far behind where he was with his understanding of radiant energy. With reportedly over 700 patents awarded him worldwide, no wonder it has taken us so long to catch up. The man who shaped the twentieth century, with his invention of the radio, radar, x-ray, AC power, and the induction motor, is now shaping the twenty-first century as we finally begin implementing his methods of tapping and distributing free energy.

[edit]

Overview Links

  • Nikola Tesla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla) - Encyclopedic entry at Wikipedia.
  • PBS Special on Tesla (http://pesn.com/2005/02/25/6900063_Tesla_Master_of_Lightning/) - PBS ran a special on Tesla in 2000, which took a comprehensive look at the life, work and legacy of this controversial electrical genius. Reprint of original press release.
[edit]

Inventions of Nikola Tesla

  • My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla - Available for reading online (http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96jul/teslaautobio.html), also for sale (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0910077002/greaterthingsboo) in paperback. (Johnston, Ben [Ed.]. Hart Brothers Publishing, October, 1982. ISBN 0910077002)
  • The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla - 1894 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1564597113/greaterthingsboo), by Thomas Commerford Martin; Kessinger Publishing Company, March, 1997. ISBN 1564597113.
[edit]

Patents

Tesla accumulated in excess of 700 patents.

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Free Energy Related Inventions

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Radiant Energy

Nikola Tesla had a special conversion tube for radiant energy. Its function was to convert a normal electric current into radiant energy. This tube had a sphere of copper for an electrode and a sphere of carbon for its counter-electrode. (Does anyone know which was the anode and which was the cathode? Powerful magnets were arranged to create a magnetic field perpendicular to the discharge path between the electrodes. This is similar to a maser except that instead of swirling the electrons in a magnetic field to release light the electrons are "disintegrated" into light. This means a very large quantity of "radiant energy" (high energy photons) is produced from the electron. How? The electron is not a particle it is a self-sustaining vortex of aether. The electron spins in a vortex absorbing aether from the medium to sustain itself. By sending a stream of electrons at high voltage against a magnetic field, it interferes with the electrons ability to sustain itself; it becomes light. For more information on this you can look up data from Peter Lindemann or Roentgen (the German who investigated electrons then called "cathode rays" and believed contrary to the British that electrons were vortices).

[edit]

Magnifying Transmitter

Tesla's Magnifying Transmitter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnifying_Transmitter) is the largest Tesla Coil ever built (a variation). Located in Tesla's Colorado Springs lab, it measured 52 feet in diameter and produced lightning bolts more than 100 feet long. According to accounts, Tesla used it to transmit tens of thousands of watts of power wirelessly. It was the final basis for the Wardenclyffe tower.

[edit]

Wardenclyffe

The tower was meant to be the start of a global system for wireless telecommunications and a national (and later global) system of towers broadcasting power to users as radio waves. Instead of supplying electricity through a current grid system, users would simply "receive" power through antennas on their roofs. The tower was scrapped for metal to be used in WWII (so that today we can war over oil). Today, its principles are implemented by HAARP, which is used for weather modification, and was recently bought by the Carlyle Group from the U.S. Govt.

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Technologies Not Yet Fully Tapped

[edit]

Tesla Turbine

  • Tesla Turbine (http://www.greaterthings.com/News/FreeEnergy/Directory/Devices/TeslaTurbine/) - Rather than using blades and friction, the Tesla Turbine uses parallel, closely spaced disks that tap viscosity of the gas passing by. (FreeEnergy.GreaterThings.com)
[edit]

Wireless Lighting

Tesla invented cordless gas discharge lamps.

Jeff Bahary of ElectroTherapymuseum (http://electrotherapymuseum.com/) has replicated this device and says that it is a feasible technology that should be implemented today.

[edit]

Dynamic Theory of Gravity

Tesla's work on flying craft is perhaps the least well known, and perhaps the most revolutionary in how it would change the way we live if it were implemented today. As of this date, Tesla's work in this area is still classified by the U.S. Government.

There are several references to an "ideal flying machine" Tesla wanted to develop (see (http://www.pritchardschool.com/Teslas_Flying_Machine.pdf)). It had no "sustaining planes, wings, propeller nor gas bag". Tired of all the recurring hostilities and hoping that with such a machine these wars could be finally ended, Tesla proposed his ideal flying machine for a patent at the Swiss patent office. Prior to this, he had proposed his machine to the American government (as he always did with his inventions) but nobody there believed him. Even after his death his discovery remained unnoticed to the American government until reports started coming in about strange flying objects in the European skies. Nearly one year after his death, all his notes and dossiers (truckloads) were hastily transferred from the Office of Alien property warehouse where they were stored at his death to a secured place, and all of them were classified, and are still today.

See also: PowerPedia > Tesla's Dynamic Theory of Gravity

[edit]

Telegeodynamic

Telegeodynamics is a system for geophysical exploration. Based on his reciprocating mechanical oscillator, it employs a mechanical earth-resonance concept for underground seismic exploration. It is published in his book, Nikola Tesla's Teleforce & Telegeodynamics Proposals ISBN 0963601288. Tesla explained that a long sequence of small explosions could be used to find ore and create earthquakes large enough to destroy the Earth. He did not experiment with this as he felt there would not be "a desirable outcome". (Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_TeslaMoving_in))

[edit]

Conventional Energy Inventions

Devices that have made it into everyday life in the modern world.

[edit]

A.C. Power

The backbone of today's energy distribution system -- alternating current -- was invented by Tesla.

  • Alternating Current (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_current) - an electrical current, where electrical charge oscillates (i.e., moves back and forth), rather than flowing continuously in one direction as is the case with direct current. (Wikipedia)
[edit]

Radio

Tesla made the first public demonstration of radio communication in 1893 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Claims have been made that Nathan Stubblefield (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Stubblefield) invented radio before either Tesla or Marconi, but his device seems to have worked by induction transmission rather than radio transmission. (Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio))

[edit]

X-ray

  • X-ray (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray) - Wikipedia describes Tesla's discovery process.
[edit]

Radar

Tesla conceived of radar in 1917, and built the first primitive device in 1934. ([1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_TeslaRadar|Wikipedia))

[edit]

Tesla Coil

A Tesla Coil is a high-voltage, air-core, self-regenerative resonant transformer that generates very high voltages at high frequency. (Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_coil))

[edit]

Induction Motor

Tesla built the first induction motor (electric motor), invented in 1882.

  • Induction Motor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_motor) - Wikipedia entry
[edit]

Military Inventions

[edit]

Tesla Shield

An electromagnetic shell which armaments could not penetrate. Tesla shields would transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive effects at a distance. ([2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_TeslaViews_on_war).)

[edit]

Teleforce

A charged particle beam projector for "Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media." It was was primarily intended to be used as an instrument of national defense akin to an invisible "Chinese Wall of Defense". Tesla stated that nations, when detecting invading armies, could destroy their opponent's military units and reduce incoming aerial craft as far as 200 to 250 miles away. In 1937, Tesla remarked, "But it is not an experiment ... I have built, demonstrated, and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world." (Wikipedia > Teleforce (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleforce).)

[edit]

Death Ray

Tesla was ignored by the US War Department when he told them had been working on some form of teleforce weapon, or death ray. But when he wound up dead in his apartment a few days later, they classified his documents Top Secret. (Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_TeslaDeath_and_afterwards))

The concept of a death ray is generally portrayed as some form of directed energy weapon that projects energy at a person or object in order to destroy them. Tesla's iteration was apparently related to his research into ball lightning and plasma. (Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_ray))

[edit]

Other Discoveries

[edit]

Extraterrestrial Signals

In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla recorded what he concluded were extraterrestrial radio signals and announced his findings in some of the scientific journals of the time. [3] (http://www.teslasociety.com/mars2.htm) He noted measurements of repetitive signals from his receiver which are substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of clicks 1, 2, 3, and 4 clicks together. He published these findings and his interpretations in an article: "A Giant Eye to See Round the World", Albany Telegram; Feburary 25, 1923.

[edit]

Collections

[edit]

Electrotherapy Museum

Jeff Bahary of ElectroTherapymuseum (http://electrotherapymuseum.com/) has refurbished or built to era specs around 100 Tesla devices, most all of which are in functioning order. His collection also includes:

  • The Turn Of The Century Electrotherapy Museum DVD: Over 1 Gigabyte of text and photos; 2.5 Gigabytes of Multimedia; 25,000 files in 1000 folders.
  • The Turn Of The Century Tesla Library: Over 5.000 pages of rare documents.
  • The Turn Of The Century Patent Collection: Over 300 pages of Tesla-related patents.
  • Turn Of The Century Electrotherapy And Forgotten Tesla Technology Movies: Over 3 dozen movies.
[edit]

In the News

  • James McCanney Announces Plans to Replicate Tesla's Tower (http://pesn.com/2005/05/01/6900091_James_McCanney_Tesla_Tower/) - Having written a book on the subject, he now intends to build a full-scale version of this tower that he says will both tap into free energy and disseminate it wirelessly. Counterpoint presented. (PESN; May 1, 2005)
  • Inventor of Dreams (http://winyurl.com/5j28y) - "Nikola Tesla, the father of today's AC electrical system and other key inventions, often failed to bring his visionary ideas to real-world fruition." (Scientific American; March 2005)
  • Untold story of Edison (http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050305/LIFESTYLES/503050409/1075) - Brilliant Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla brought out the worst in our famous inventor. (News-Press, Florida; Mar. 5, 2005)
[edit]

Movies About Tesla

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Tesla Conspiracy (http://www.teslaconspiracy.com/) - Feature film being produced will present a fictional story to highlight the suppressed technologies of one of the most brilliant and hushed scientists of all time. Image:TeslaConspiracy 95x95.jpg
The Secret of Nikola Tesla (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000083C6E/greaterthingsboo) (1979) - Outstanding. Focuses on AC/DC war with Edison, and Wardenclyffe. Music is awful. Credits are not in English, and one brief portion of movie is spoken in German, with no subtitles. (Netflix (http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=70023692&trkid=6243)) B000083C6E.01.TZZZZZZZ.jpg
Nikola Tesla: The Genius Who Lit the World (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009LDJ4Y/greaterthingsboo) - You have to look past the poor lettering and other low-quality production facets of this movie. Content-wise, it does a great job providing an accurate and helpful documentary of the life of one of the most incredible inventors of all time. (Netflix (http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=70023677&trkid=189533)) 70023677.jpg
Tesla: Master of Lightning - PBS Documentary (not available on DVD yet)

Nikola Tesla

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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"Tesla" redirects here. For other uses, see Tesla (disambiguation).
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Enlarge
"I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device." - Nikola Tesla; Brooklyn Eagle, July 10, 1931.
Born :


July 9/July 10, 1856
Smiljan, Habsburg Empire (today Croatia)
Died :

circa January 7, 1943
New York City, New York, USA

Nikola Tesla (July 10, 1856 – c. January 7, 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. Tesla is recognized among the most accomplished scientists of the late 19th and early 20th century. His patents and theoretical work form the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution system and AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, which was in Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a citizen of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, after 1918, Kingdom of Yugoslavia. While conducting his work in the United States of America, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1891. The surname "Tesla" is a Serbian word that means adze.

In the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or in popular culture. After his demonstration of wireless communication in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. Never skilled at handling his finances, Tesla died impoverished and forgotten at the age of 86. In his later years, Tesla was regarded as a mad scientist and became noted for making bizarre claims about possible scientific developments[2][3].

Tesla's legacy can be seen across modern civilization wherever electricity is used. Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed rudimentarily to the fields of robotics, ballistics, computer science, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. Tesla considered his exploration of various questions raised by science as ultimately a means to improve the human condition with the principles of science and industrial progress, and one that was compatible with nature.[4] However, many of his achievements have been used, sometimes inappropriately and with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and New Age occultism.

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Contents

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Early years

Tesla was born in Smiljan near Gospic in the Lika, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Tesla was baptised in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (Julian calendar; July 10 in the Gregorian calendar) 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest, Toma Oklobd--ija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serb Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of <a title="Sremski Karlovci" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sremski_Karlovci">Sremski Karlovci. His mother was Ðuka Mandic, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She was talented in making home craft tools. His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Tesla was one of five children, having one brother and three sisters. In Tesla's youth, he had a pet cat (named Macak, which simply means male cat in Serbian language, but has a more endearing connotation). His family moved to Gospic in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac, then studied electrical engineering at the Austria Politechnic in Graz, Austria (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books.

Nikola Tesla in his early adolescence.
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Nikola Tesla in his early adolescence.

Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. From an early age Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage. (This is sometimes known as picture thinking). [5]

In 1881 he moved to Budapest to work for a telegraph company, the American Telephone Company. There, he met Neboj--a Petrovic, then a young inventor from Australia. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer to the Yugoslav government and the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. [6] For a while he stayed in Maribor, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time.

In 1882 he moved to Paris, France to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived of the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888).

Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in 1882. Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nid--o, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospic and the village of Tomingaj near Gracac, the birthplace of his mother.

In 1884, when Tesla first arrived in the US, he had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered to undertake a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators.

After Tesla described the nature of the benefits from his proposed modifications, Edison offered him US$50,000 if they were successfully completed. Tesla worked nearly a year to redesign them and gave the Edison company several enormously profitable new patents in the process. When Tesla inquired about the $50,000, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Edison reportedly offered to raise Tesla's salary by $10 per week as a compromise - at which rate it would have taken almost 100 years to earn the money Edison had originally promised. Tesla resigned on the spot.

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Electromechanical devices and principles developed by Nikola Tesla:
[edit]

Middle years

In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternate-current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances.

In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his 514170). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomena produced from this device is termed the bremsstrahlung process. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays.

Tesla commented on the hazards of working with single node X-ray producing devices, attributing the skin damage to ozone rather than the radiation: "As to the hurtful actions on the skin... I note that they have been misinterpreted... They are not due to the Röntgen rays, but merely to the ozone generated in contact with the skin. Nitrous acid may also be responsible, but to a small extent". (Tesla, in Electrical Review, 30 November 1895). This is incorrect concerning cathodic X-ray tubes. Tesla later observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Röntgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 1895 Houston Street lab fire.

On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35 and established his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston St. He lit vacuum tubes wirelessly in it, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Around this time, Tesla developed a close and lasting friendship with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in Tesla's lab and elsewhere. [9] Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. [10]

Nikola Tesla's generation system using AC circuits to transport energy across great distances. It is contained in US390721.
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Nikola Tesla's generation system using AC circuits to transport energy across great distances. It is contained in US390721.

When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now part of the IEEE) from 1892 to 1894. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, effectively building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets.

At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lights and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus".

In 1896, according to an interview he gave in 1916, Tesla invented a type of loudspeaker. The sounds were of about the same quality as telephones of that time. The invention was never patented nor released publicly until years later by Tesla himself.

Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse were almost bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. [11]

When Tesla was 41 years old, he filed the first basic radio patent (U.S. Patent 645576). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics. [12] In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained U.S. Patent 609250, "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system.

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Colorado Springs

Main article: Magnifying Transmitter
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Publicity photo of Tesla sitting in his laboratory in Colorado Springs with his "Magnifying Transmitter" generating millions of volts of electricity. The arcs are about 7 meters (22 ft) long. (Tesla's notes identify this as a double exposure.)

In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he could have room for his high-voltage high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. [13]

Tesla, at his lab, proved that the earth was a conductor and produced artificial lightning (with the discharges consisting of millions of volts and up to 135 feet long). [14]. Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). [15] Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. [16]

In the Colorado Springs lab, he "recorded" signals of what he believed were extraterrestrial radio signals, though these announcements and his data were rejected by the scientific community. He noted measurements of repetitive signals from his receiver which are substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla spent the latter part of his life trying to signal Mars. In 1996 Corum and Corum published an analysis of Jovian plasma torus signals which indicate that there was a correspondence between the setting of Mars at Colorado Springs, and the cessation of signals from Jupiter in the summer of 1899 when Tesla was there. [17][18]

Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted U.S. Patent 685012 for the means for increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus").

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Later years

In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from ), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during wartime. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm Bladeless Turbine. During 1910-1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100-5000 hp. Later in 1907, Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize for radio. Tesla was deeply resentful. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. Around 1916, Tesla filed for bankruptcy because he owed so much in back taxes. He was living in poverty.

Tesla's portrait in Paris, sporting the pose he is often immortalized in today.
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Tesla's portrait in Paris, sporting the pose he is often immortalized in today.

After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917 the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies.

Prior to the World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three. He often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation.

At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. The irony of this honor was surely not lost on Tesla.

Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive radar units. [19] In 1934, Emile Girardeau, working with the first French radar systems, stated he was building radar systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". The Chamberlain government was removed, though, before any final negotiations occurred. The incoming Baldwin government found no use for Tesla's suggestions and ended negotiations.

On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. [20] The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Jankovic of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching.

When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a unified field theory. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and hoped to give to the world the theory soon. [21] The theory was never published, and at the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific community to exceed the bounds of reason. Most believe that Tesla never fully developed a unified field theory; his theory is of interest to some historical researchers but is disregarded in the field of physics.

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Death and afterwards

Bust of Tesla by Ivan Mestrovic, 1939.
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Bust of Tesla by Ivan Mestrovic, 1939.

Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was essentially destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number 645,576 in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio.

Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the Office of Alien Property to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. At the time of his death, Tesla had been working on what he claimed was a teleforce weapon, or death ray. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. All of his personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisors, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. [22]

Tesla's Serbian-Orthodox family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanovich, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia[23]. Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After his funeral, Tesla's body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla museum, where it resides to this day. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in Tesla's hometown of Gospic in 1981, but was later destroyed by Croatian forces, as well as his museum and the house in which he was born.

Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York.
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Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York.

In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Many contemporary admirers of Dr. Tesla have affectionately deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century". Tesla's house in Smiljan is currently open for visitors as a memorial museum.

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Personal views

Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general.[24] He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. [25]

"One day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheelwork of the universe... and the very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery," he predicted.

Like many of his era, Tesla became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated,

[...] man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct [...]. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal. [26]

In 1926, Tesla in an interview, commenting on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward sex equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. [27]

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Education

Tesla was fluent in eight languages (Serbo-Croatian, English, Czech, Hungarian, French, German, Latin, and Italian).

Primary
Degrees
Graduate studies
Docteur Honoris Causa

For his work Tesla received numerous honorary doctoral degrees from a number of universities to include: Columbia University, Graz Polytechnic Institute, Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, University of Belgrade, University of Brno, University of Grenoble, University of Paris, University de Poitiers, University of Prague, University of Sofia, University of Zagreb, Vienna Polytechnic Institute, and Yale University

Further reading

For a detailed outline of Dr. Tesla's education and certifications, see:

W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, "Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22-25, 2001 (PDF)
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Recognition and honors

Scientific societies

As the result of his achievements in the development of electricity and radio, Nikola Tesla received many awards and accolades. He was selected as a fellow of the IEEE (at the time the AIEE) and was awarded its most prestigious prize, the Edison Medal. He was also made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and accepted invitations to become a member of the American Philosophical Society, and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Because of his research in electrotherapy and his invention of high frequency oscillators, he was also made a fellow of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association.

SI Unit

The scientific compound derived SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B), the tesla, was named in his honor (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960).

IEEE Nikola Tesla Award

In 1975 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) created a Nikola Tesla Award via an agreement between the IEEE Power Engineering Society and the IEEE Board of Directors. It is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power. The Tesla award is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. [28]

Airport

On February 1, the Serbian government approved a plan to officially rename Belgrade International Airport to Nikola Tesla airport. This shall officially occur on July 10, 2006 in honor of his 150th birthday.

Yugoslavian/Serbian currency
100 Serbian dinars front. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia[1].
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100 Serbian dinars front. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia[1].
100 Serbian dinars back. Note the drawing of the electric motor.
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100 Serbian dinars back. Note the drawing of the electric motor.

Nikola Tesla was featured on the currency of the former Yugoslavia. The current 100 Serbian dinar banknotes issued by the National Bank of Serbia have a picture of a handsome young Tesla on the obverse (front side). On the reverse side there is portion of drawing of an induction motor from his patent application and a photograph of Tesla holding a gas filled tube emitting light as a result of electric induction.

Cosmological objects

The Tesla crater on the far side of the moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are named after Tesla.

Electric power stations

Two of the coal fired power stations run by Electric Power Industry of Serbia, TPP Nikola Tesla A and TPP Nikola Tesla B, are named in honor of Tesla[29].

Commerce

The Croatian subsidisary of Ericsson is named Ericsson Nikola Tesla D.D in honor of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication

Science fiction and computer games

Tesla technology is recurring in alternate history works like steampunk, or stories concerning secret pre WWII technology

  • Tesla appears as a character in the 1995 novel The Prestige by Christopher Priest.
  • Tesla also makes a brief appearance as a character in the 1989 novel Moon Palace by Paul Auster.
  • Tesla is a continuing character in a series of novels by Spider Robinson concerned with Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.
  • In the ZBS series of audio plays The Adventures of Ruby, Tesla is considered to be the deity of technicians and engineers and can be summoned with a special chant near a reproduction of a Tesla Coil.
  • The superperson Nikola Tesla is a Japanese comic (manga).
  • Tesla is a character in the DC Elseworlds comic, JLA: Age of Wonder
  • In the White Wolf roleplaying game Mage: the Ascension, Nikola Tesla is mentioned as being one of the most respected members of the Sons of Ether Tradition.
  • The Tesla Gun in the computer game Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a weapon that projects lightning-like electrical arcs.
  • The Tesla Armor of the Fallout series of computer games provides excellent protection against laser and plasma/electrical attack types.
  • Two weapons in the Ratchet & Clank video game series, the Tesla Claw and Tesla Barrier (the upgraded version of the Shield Charger), use electricity to attack enemies
  • In the computer game Red Alert there is a defense weapon which attacks enemy units by electric arc called "Tesla Coil".
  • Many other computer games feature devices with 'Tesla" in the name.
Arts

The rock band Tesla is named after him. They referenced his life and works a number of times, such as in the song "Edison's Medicine" (and accompanying music video) and the album The Great Radio Controversy.

The British pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released a single from their 1984 album Junk Culture called "Tesla Girls". The song included the lyrics: 'Tesla girls tesla girls/Testing out theories/Electric chairs and dynamos/Dressed to kill they're killing me'.

The theatre company, Rude Mechanicals (Rude Mechs) in Austin, Texas, wrote a play about him (2001 & 2003) Requiem for Tesla. The play included an actual Tesla coil made by Pete Whitfill, as well as many other cool effects provided by The Robot Group and a large chunk of Tesla-philes around Austin.

Opera

Australian Composer Constantine Koukias wrote his two-act opera TESLA - Lightning in his Hand about the life and times of Nikola Tesla. It premiered at the 10 Days on the Island Festival in Hobart, Tasmania in 2003.

[edit]

Further readings and films

Movies and Films

There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade --erbed--ija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslavian film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan.

A brand new Christopher Nolan directed film (currently in production) called The Prestige will feature rock star and actor David Bowie playing the part of Nikola Tesla.

Nikola Tesla is also referred to in the sketch "Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil" from Jim Jarmusch's film "Coffee and Cigarettes" Featuring Jack White and Meg White of The White Stripes.

Documentary film

Books

Magazines

  • Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7).
  • Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1)
  • Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11.
  • Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6.
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Reference articles

Tesla's publications
Source information
Personal views
  • ^ Viereck, George Sylvester, and Nikola Tesla, "A Machine to End War - A Famous Inventor, Picturing Life 100 Years from Now, Reveals an Astounding Scientific Venture Which He Believes Will Change the Course of History". Liberty, February 1937.
  • ^ Kennedy, John B., "When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926.

General information
Biographies

Other

  • Nichelson, Oliver, "Nikola Tesla's Energy Generation Designs", Eyring, Inc., Provo, Utah.
  • Nichelson, Oliver, "The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". American Fork, Utah. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63)
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Popular Culture

In the Command & Conquer Red Alert series of video games, "Tesla" is the name of the Soviet's technology for lightning-based weapons.

[edit]

External links

History and family

Patents

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Wikibooks has more about this subject:
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The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla

by Nikola Tesla

Chapter 1: My Early Life

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment; so much, that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture. I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers.

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts. In attempting to give a connected and faithful account of my activities in this story of my life, I must dwell, however reluctantly, on the impressions of my youth and the circumstances and events which have been instrumental in determining my career. Our first endeavors are purely instinctive promptings of an imagination vivid and undisciplined. As we grow older, reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies. Indeed, I feel now that had I understood and cultivated instead of suppressing them, I would have added substantial value to my bequest to the world. But not until I had attained manhood did I realize that I was an inventor.

This was due to a number of causes. In the first place I had a brother who was gifted to an extraordinary degree; one of those rare phenomena of mentality which biological investigation has failed to explain. His premature death left my earth parents disconsolate. (I will explain my remark about my "earth parents" later.) We owned a horse which had been presented to us by a dear friend. It was a magnificent animal of Arabian breed, possessed of almost human intelligence, and was cared for and petted by the whole family, having on one occasion saved my dear father's life under remarkable circumstances.

My father had been called one winter night to perform an urgent duty and while crossing the mountains, infested by wolves, the horse became frightened and ran away, throwing him violently to the ground. It arrived home bleeding and exhausted, but after the alarm was sounded, immediately dashed off again, returning to the spot, and before the searching party were far on the way they were met by my father, who had recovered consciousness and remounted, not realizing that he had been lying in the snow for several hours. This horse was responsible for my brother's injuries from which he died. I witnessed the tragic scene and although so many years have elapsed since, my visual impression of it has lost none of its force. The recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison. Anything I did that was creditable merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself.

But I was far from being considered a stupid boy, if I am to judge from an incident of which I have still a strong remembrance. One day the Aldermen were passing through a street where I was playing with other boys. The oldest of these venerable gentlemen, a wealthy citizen, paused to give a silver piece to each of us. Coming to me, he suddenly stopped and commanded, "Look in my eyes." I met his gaze, my hand outstretched to receive the much valued coin, when to my dismay, he said, "No, not much; you can get nothing from me. You are too smart."

They used to tell a funny story about me. I had two old aunts with wrinkled faces, one of them having two teeth protruding like the tusks of an elephant, which she buried in my cheek every time she kissed me. Nothing would scare me more then the prospects of being kissed by these affectionate, unattractive relatives. It happened that while being carried in my mother's arms, they asked who was the prettier of the two. After examining their faces intently, I answered thoughtfully, pointing to one of them, "This here is not as ugly as the other."

Then again, I was intended from my very birth for the clerical profession and this thought constantly oppressed me. I longed to be an engineer, but my father was inflexible. He was the son of an officer who served in the army of the Great Napoleon and in common with his brother, professor of mathematics in a prominent institution, had received a military education; but, singularly enough, later embraced the clergy in which vocation he achieved eminence. He was a very erudite man, a veritable natural philosopher, poet and writer and his sermons were said to be as eloquent as those of Abraham a-Sancta-Clara. He had a prodigious memory and frequently recited at length from works in several languages. He often remarked playfully that if some of the classics were lost he could restore them. His style of writing was much admired. He penned sentences short and terse and full of wit and satire. The humorous remarks he made were always peculiar and characteristic. Just to illustrate, I may mention one or two instances.

Among the help, there was a cross-eyed man called Mane, employed to do work around the farm. He was chopping wood one day. As he swung the ax, my father, who stood nearby and felt very uncomfortable, cautioned him, "For God's sake, Mane, do not strike at what you are looking but at what you intend to hit."

On another occasion he was taking out for a drive a friend who carelessly permitted his costly fur coat to rub on the carriage wheel. My father reminded him of it saying, "Pull in your coat; you are ruining my tire."

He had the odd habit of talking to himself and would often carry on an animated conversation and indulge in heated argument, changing the tone of his voice. A casual listener might have sworn that several people were in the room.

Although I must trace to my mother's influence whatever inventiveness I possess, the training he gave me must have been helpful. It comprised all sorts of exercises - as, guessing one another's thoughts, discovering the defects of some form of expression, repeating long sentences or performing mental calculations. These daily lessons were intended to strengthen memory and reason, and especially to develop the critical sense, and were undoubtedly very beneficial.

My mother descended from one of the oldest families in the country and a line of inventors. Both her father and grandfather originated numerous implements for household, agricultural and other uses. She was a truly great woman, of rare skill, courage and fortitude, who had braved the storms of life and passed through many a trying experience. When she was sixteen, a virulent pestilence swept the country. Her father was called away to administer the last sacraments to the dying and during his absence she went alone to the assistance of a neighboring family who were stricken by the dread disease. She bathed, clothed and laid out the bodies, decorating them with flowers according to the custom of the country and when her father returned he found everything ready for a Christian burial.

My mother was an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibers herself. She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home were the product of her hands. When she was past sixty, her fingers were still nimble enough to tie three knots in an eyelash.

There was another and still more important reason for my late awakening. In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. None of the students of psychology or physiology whom I have consulted, could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomenon. They seem to have been unique although I was probably predisposed as I know that my brother experienced a similar trouble. The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed. To give an idea of my distress, suppose that I had witnessed a funeral or some such nerve-wracking spectacle. Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all my efforts to banish it. If my explanation is correct, it should be possible to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come. I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem.

I have managed to reflect such a picture, which I have seen in my mind, to the mind of another person, in another room. To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to get it I had to conjure continuously new images. It was not long before I found that I had exhausted all of those at my command; my 'reel' had run out as it were, because I had seen little of the world - only objects in my home and the immediate surroundings. As I performed these mental operations for the second or third time, in order to chase the appearances from my vision, the remedy gradually lost all its force. Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them. They gained in strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision further and further, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel; of course, in my mind. Every night, (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys - see new places, cities and countries; live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.

This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radially opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient.

The moment one constructs a device to carry into practice a crude idea, he finds himself unavoidably engrossed with the details of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results may be obtained, but always at the sacrifice of quality. My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be examined beforehand, from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practice of a crude idea as is being generally done, is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money, and time.

My early affliction had however, another compensation. The incessant mental exertion developed my powers of observation and enabled me to discover a truth of great importance. I had noted that the appearance of images was always preceded by actual vision of scenes under peculiar and generally very exceptional conditions, and I was impelled on each occasion to locate the original impulse. After a while this effort grew to be almost automatic and I gained great facility in connecting cause and effect. Soon I became aware, to my surprise, that every thought I conceived was suggested by an external impression. Not only this but all my actions were prompted in a similar way. In the course of time it became perfectly evident to me that I was merely an automation endowed with power of movement responding to the stimuli of the sense organs and thinking and acting accordingly. The practical result of this was the art of teleautomatics which has been so far carried out only in an imperfect manner. Its latent possibilities will, however be eventually shown. I have been years planning self-controlled automata and believe that mechanisms can be produced which will act as if possessed of reason, to a limited degree, and will create a revolution in many commercial and industrial departments. I was about twelve years of age when I first succeeded in banishing an image from my vision by willful effort, but I never had any control over the flashes of light to which I have referred. They were, perhaps, my strangest and [most] inexplicable experience. They usually occurred when I found myself in a dangerous or distressing situations or when I was greatly exhilarated. In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of living flame. Their intensity, instead of diminishing, increased with time and seemingly attained a maximum when I was about twenty-five years old.

While in Paris in 1883, a prominent French manufacturer sent me an invitation to a shooting expedition which I accepted. I had been long confined to the factory and the fresh air had a wonderfully invigorating effect on me. On my return to the city that night, I felt a positive sensation that my brain had caught fire. I was a light as though a small sun was located in it and I passed the whole night applying cold compressions to my tortured head. Finally the flashes diminished in frequency and force but it took more than three weeks before they wholly subsided. When a second invitation was extended to me, my answer was an emphatic NO!

These luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me, but they are no longer exciting, being of relatively small intensity. When I close my eyes I invariably observe first, a background of very dark and uniform blue, not unlike the sky on a clear but starless night. In a few seconds this field becomes animated with innumerable scintillating flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing towards me. Then there appears, to the right, a beautiful pattern of two systems of parallel and closely spaced lines, at right angles to one another, in all sorts of colors with yellow, green, and gold predominating. Immediately thereafter, the lines grow brighter and the whole is thickly sprinkled with dots of twinkling light. This picture moves slowly across the field of vision and in about ten seconds vanishes on the left, leaving behind a ground of rather unpleasant and inert gray until the second phase is reached. Every time, before falling asleep, images of persons or objects flit before my view. When I see them I know I am about to lose consciousness. If they are absent and refuse to come, it means a sleepless night. To what an extent imagination played in my early life, I may illustrate by another odd experience.

Like most children, I was fond of jumping and developed an intense desire to support myself in the air. Occasionally a strong wind richly charged with oxygen blew from the mountains, rendering my body light as cork and then I would leap and float in space for a long time. It was a delightful sensation and my disappointment was keen when later I undeceived myself. During that period I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits, some of which I can trace to external impressions while others are unaccountable. I had a violent aversion against the earrings of women, but other ornaments, as bracelets, pleased me more or less according to design. The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit, but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals or objects with sharp edges and plane surfaces. I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. Even now I am not insensible to some of these upsetting impulses. When I drop little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, I always sense a peculiar and awful taste in my mouth. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food, otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours. Up to the age of eight years, my character was weak and vacillating. I had neither courage or strength to form a firm resolve. My feelings came in waves and surges and variated unceasingly between extremes. My wishes were of consuming force and like the heads of the hydra, they multiplied. I was oppressed by thoughts of pain in life and death and religious fear. I was swayed by superstitious belief and lived in constant dread of the spirit of evil, of ghosts and ogres and other unholy monsters of the dark. Then all at once, there came a tremendous change which altered the course of my whole existence.

Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading. He did not permit it and would fly in a rage when he caught me in the act. He hid the candles when he found that I was reading in secret. He did not want me to spoil my eyes. But I obtained tallow, made the wicking and cast the sticks into tin forms, and every night I would bush the keyhole and the cracks and read, often till dawn, when all others slept and my mother started on her arduous daily task.

On one occasion I came across a novel entitled Aoafi, (the son of Aba), a Serbian translation of a well known Hungarian writer, Josika. This work somehow awakened my dormant powers of will and I began to practice self-control. At first my resolutions faded like snow in April, but in a little while I conquered my weakness and felt a pleasure I never knew before - that of doing as I willed.

In the course of time this vigorous mental exercise became second to nature. At the outset my wishes had to be subdued but gradually desire and will grew to be identical. After years of such discipline I gained so complete a mastery over myself that I toyed with passions which have meant destruction to some of the strongest men. At a certain age I contracted a mania for gambling which greatly worried my parents. To sit down to a game of cards was for me the quintessence of pleasure. My father led an exemplary life and could not excuse the senseless waste of my time and money in which I indulged. I had a strong resolve, but my philosophy was bad. I would say to him, "I can stop whenever I please, but is it worth while to give up that which I would purchase with the joys of paradise?" On frequent occasions he gave vent to his anger and contempt, but my mother was different. She understood the character of men and knew that one's salvation could only be brought about through his own efforts. One afternoon, I remember, when I had lost all my money and was craving for a game, she came to me with a roll of bills and said, "Go and enjoy yourself. The sooner you lose all we possess, the better it will be. I know that you will get over it." She was right. I conquered my passion then and there and only regretted that it had not been a hundred times as strong. I not only vanquished but tore it from my heart so as not to leave even a trace of desire.

Ever since that time I have been as indifferent to any form of gambling as to picking teeth. During another period I smoked excessively, threatening to ruin my health. Then my will asserted itself and I not only stopped but destroyed all inclination. Long ago I suffered from heart trouble until I discovered that it was due to the innocent cup of coffee I consumed every morning. I discontinued at once, though I confess it was not an easy task. In this way I checked and bridled other habits and passions, and have not only preserved my life but derived an immense amount of satisfaction from what most men would consider privation and sacrifice.

After finishing the studies at the Polytechnic Institute and University, I had a complete nervous breakdown and, while the malady lasted, I observed many phenomena, strange and unbelievable...

The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla

Chapter 2

I shall dwell briefly on these extraordinary experiences, on account of their possible interest to students of psychology and physiology and also because this period of agony was of the greatest consequence on my mental development and subsequent labors. But it is indispensable to first relate the circumstances and conditions which preceded them and in which might be found their partial explanation.

From childhood I was compelled to concentrate attention upon myself. This caused me much suffering, but to my present view, it was a blessing in disguise for it has taught me to appreciate the inestimable value of introspection in the preservation of life, as well as a means of achievement. The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness through all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways. Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves. The premature death of millions is primarily traceable to this cause. Even among those who exercise care, it is a common mistake to avoid imaginary, and ignore the real dangers. And what is true of an individual also applies, more or less, to a people as a whole.

Abstinence was not always to my liking, but I find ample reward in the agreeable experiences I am now making. Just in the hope of converting some to my precepts and convictions I will recall one or two.

A short time ago I was returning to my hotel. It was a bitter cold night, the ground slippery, and no taxi to be had. Half a block behind me followed another man, evidently as anxious as myself to get under cover. Suddenly my legs went up in the air. At the same instant there was a flash in my brain. The nerves responded, the muscles contracted. I swung 180 degrees and landed on my hands. I resumed my walk as though nothing had happened when the stranger caught up with me. "How old are you?" he asked, surveying me critically.

"Oh, about fifty-nine," I replied, "What of it?"

"Well," said he, "I have seen a cat do this but never a man." About a month ago I wanted to order new eye glasses and went to an oculist who put me through the usual tests. He looked at me incredulously as I read off with ease the smallest print at considerable distance. But when I told him I was past sixty he gasped in astonishment. Friends of mine often remark that my suits fit me like gloves but they do not know that all my clothing is made to measurements which were taken nearly fifteen years ago and never changed. During this same period my weight has not varied one pound. In this connection I may tell a funny story.

One evening, in the winter of 1885, Mr. Edison, Edward H. Johnson, the President of the Edison Illuminating Company, Mr. Batchellor, Manager of the works, and myself, entered a little place opposite 65 Firth Avenue, where the offices of the company were located. Someone suggested guessing weights and I was induced to step on a scale. Edison felt me all over and said: "Tesla weighs 152 lbs. to an ounce," and he guessed it exactly. Stripped I weighed 142 pounds, and that is still my weight. I whispered to Mr. Johnson; "How is it possible that Edison could guess my weight so closely?"

"Well," he said, lowering his voice. "I will tell you confidentially, but you must not say anything. He was employed for a long time in a Chicago slaughter-house where he weighed thousands of hogs every day. That's why."

My friend, the Hon. Chauncey M. Dupew, tells of an Englishman on whom he sprung one of his original anecdotes and who listened with a puzzled expression, but a year later, laughed out loud. I will frankly confess it took me longer than that to appreciate Johnson's joke. Now, my well-being is simply the result of a careful and measured mode of living and perhaps the most astonishing thing is that three times in my youth I was rendered by illness a hopeless physical wreck and given up by physicians. More than this, through ignorance and lightheartedness, I got into all sorts of difficulties, dangers and scrapes from which I extricated myself as by enchantment. I was almost drowned, entombed, lost and frozen. I had hair-breadth escapes from mad dogs, hogs, and other wild animals. I passed through dreadful diseases and met with all kinds of odd mishaps and that I am whole and hearty today seems like a miracle. But as I recall these incidents to my mind I feel convinced that my preservation was not altogether accidental, but was indeed the work of divine power. An inventor's endeavor is essentially life saving. Whether he harnesses forces, improves devices, or provides new comforts and conveniences, he is adding to the safety of our existence. He is also better qualified than the average individual to protect himself in peril, for he is observant and resourceful. If I had no other evidence that I was, in a measure, possessed of such qualities, I would find it in these personal experiences. The reader will be able to judge for himself if I mention one or two instances.

On one occasion, when about fourteen years old, I wanted to scare some friends who were bathing with me. My plan was to dive under a long floating structure and slip out quietly at the other end. Swimming and diving came to me as naturally as to a duck and I was confident that I could perform the feat. Accordingly I plunged into the water and, when out of view, turned around and proceeded rapidly towards the opposite side. Thinking that I was safely beyond the structure, I rose to the surface but to my dismay struck a beam. Of course, I quickly dived and forged ahead with rapid strokes until my breath was beginning to give out. Rising for the second time, my head came again in contact with a beam. Now I was becoming desperate. However, summoning all my energy, I made a third frantic attempt but the result was the same. The torture of suppressed breathing was getting unendurable, my brain was reeling and I felt myself sinking. At that moment, when my situation seemed absolutely hopeless, I experienced one of those flashes of light and the structure above me appeared before my vision. I either discerned or guessed that there was a little space between the surface of the water and the boards resting on the beams and, with consciousness nearly gone, I floated up, pressed my mouth close to the planks and managed to inhale a little air, unfortunately mingled with a spray of water which nearly choked me. Several times I repeated this procedure as in a dream until my heart, which was racing at a terrible rate, quieted down, and I gained composure. After that I made a number of unsuccessful dives, having completely lost the sense of direction, but finally succeeded in getting out of the trap when my friends had already given me up and were fishing for my body. That bathing season was spoiled for me through recklessness but I soon forgot the lesson and only two years later I fell into a worse predicament.

There was a large flour mill with a dam across the river near the city where I was studying at the time. As a rule the height of the water was only two or three inches above the dam and to swim to it was a sport not very dangerous in which I often indulged. One day I went alone to the river to enjoy myself as usual. When I was a short distance from the masonry, however, I was horrified to observe that the water had risen and was carrying me along swiftly. I tried to get away but it was too late. Luckily, though, I saved myself from being swept over by taking hold of the wall with both hands. The pressure against my chest was great and I was barely able to keep my head above the surface. Not a soul was in sight and my voice was lost in the roar of the fall. Slowly and gradually I became exhausted and unable to withstand the strain longer. Just as I was about to let go, to be dashed against the rocks below, I saw in a flash of light a familiar diagram illustrating the hydraulic principle that the pressure of a fluid in motion is proportionate to the area exposed and automatically I turned on my left side. As if by magic, the pressure was reduced and I found it comparatively easy in that position to resist the force of the stream. But the danger still confronted me. I knew that sooner or later I would be carried down, as it was not possible for any help to reach me in time, even if I had attracted attention. I am ambidextrous now, but then I was left-handed and had comparatively little strength in my right arm. For this reason I did not dare to turn on the other side to rest and nothing remained but to slowly push my body along the dam. I had to get away from the mill towards which my face was turned, as the current there was much swifter and deeper. It was a long and painful ordeal and I came near to failing at its very end, for I was confronted with a depression in the masonry. I managed to get over with the last ounce of my strength and fell in a swoon when I reached the bank, where I was found. I had torn virtually all the skin from my left side and it took several weeks before the fever had subsided and I was well. These are only two of many instances, but they may be sufficient to show that had it not been for the inventor's instinct, I would not have lived to tell the tale.

Interested people have often asked me how and when I began to invent. This I can only answer from my present recollection in the light of which, the first attempt I recall was rather ambitious for it involved the invention of an apparatus and a method. In the former it was anticipated, but the later was original. It happened in this way. One of my playmates had come into the possession of a hook and fishing tackle which created quite an excitement in the village, and the next morning all started out to catch frogs. I was left alone and deserted owing to a quarrel with this boy. I had never seen a real hook and pictured it as something wonderful, endowed with peculiar qualities, and was despairing not to be one of the party. Urged by necessity, I somehow got hold of a piece of soft iron wire, hammered the end to a sharp point between two stones, bent it into shape, and fastened it to a strong string. I then cut a rod, gathered some bait, and went down to the brook where there were frogs in abundance. But I could not catch any and was almost discouraged when it occurred to me dangle the empty hook in front of a frog sitting on a stump. At first he collapsed but by and by his eyes bulged out and became bloodshot, he swelled to twice his normal size and made a vicious snap at the hook. Immediately I pulled him up. I tried the same thing again and again and the method proved infallible. When my comrades, who in spite of their fine outfit had caught nothing, came to me, they were green with envy. For a long time I kept my secret and enjoyed the monopoly but finally yielded to the spirit of Christmas. Every boy could then do the same and the following summer brought disaster to the frogs.

In my next attempt, I seem to have acted under the first instinctive impulse which later dominated me - to harness the energies of nature to the service of man. I did this through the medium of May bugs, or June bugs as they are called in America, which were a veritable pest in that country and sometimes broke the branches of trees by the sheer weight of their bodies. The bushes were black with them. I would attach as many as four of them to a cross-piece, rotably arranged on a thin spindle, and transmit the motion of the same to a large disc and so derive considerable "power." These creatures were remarkably efficient, for once they were started, they had no sense to stop and continued whirling for hours and hours and the hotter it was, the harder they worked. All went well until a strange boy came to the place. He was the son of a retired officer in the Austrian army. That urchin ate May bugs alive and enjoyed them as though they were the finest blue point oysters. That disgusting sight terminated my endeavors in this promising field and I have never since been able to touch a May bug or any other insect for that matter.

After that, I believe, I undertook to take apart and assemble the clocks of my grandfather. In the former operation I was always successful, but often failed in the latter. So it came that he brought my work to a sudden halt in a manner not too delicate and it took thirty years before I tackled another clockwork again.

Shortly thereafter, I went into the manufacture of a kind of pop-gun which comprised a hollow tube, a piston, and two plugs of hemp. When firing the gun, the piston was pressed against the stomach and the tube was pushed back quickly with both hands. the air between the plugs was compressed and raised to a high temperature and one of them was expelled with a loud report. The art consisted in selecting a tube of the proper taper from the hollow stalks which were found in our garden. I did very well with that gun, but my activities interfered with the window panes in our house and met with painful discouragement.

If I remember rightly, I then took to carving swords from pieces of furniture which I could conveniently obtain. At that time I was under the sway of the Serbian national poetry and full of admiration for the feats of the heroes. I used to spend hours in mowing down my enemies in the form of cornstalks which ruined the crops and netted me several spankings from my mother. Moreover, these were not of the formal kind but the genuine article.

I had all this and more behind me before I was six years old and had passed through one year of elementary school in the village of Smiljan where my family lived. At this juncture we moved to the little city of Gospic nearby. This change of residence was like a calamity to me. It almost broke my heart to part from our pigeons, chickens and sheep, and our magnificent flock of geese which used to rise to the clouds in the morning and return from the feeding grounds at sundown in battle formation, so perfect that it would have put a squadron of the best aviators of the present day to shame. In our new house I was but a prisoner, watching the strange people I saw through my window blinds. My bashfulness was such that I would rather have faced a roaring lion than one of the city dudes who strolled about. But my hardest trial came on Sunday when I had to dress up and attend the service. There I met with an accident, the mere thought of which made my blood curdle like sour milk for years afterwards. It was my second adventure in a church. Not long before, I was entombed for a night in an old chapel on an inaccessible mountain which was visited only once a year. It was an awful experience, but this one was worse.

There was a wealthy lady in town, a good but pompous woman, who used to come to the church gorgeously painted up and attired with an enormous train and attendants. One Sunday I had just finished ringing the bell in the belfry and rushed downstairs, when this grand dame was sweeping out and I jumped on her train. It tore off with a ripping noise which sounded like a salvo of musketry fired by raw recruits. My father was livid with rage. He gave me a gentle slap on the cheek, the only corporal punishment he ever administered to me, but I almost feel it now. The embarrassment and confusion that followed are indescribable. I was practically ostracized until something else happened which redeemed me in the estimation of the community.

An enterprising young merchant had organized a fire department. A new fire engine was purchased, uniforms provided and the men drilled for service and parade. The engine was beautifully painted red and black. One afternoon, the official trial was prepared for and the machine was transported to the river. The entire population turned out to witness the great spectacle. When all the speeches and ceremonies were concluded, the command was given to pump, but not a drop of water came from the nozzle. The professors and experts tried in vain to locate the trouble. The fizzle was complete when I arrived at the scene. My knowledge of the mechanism was nil and I knew next to nothing of air pressure, but instinctively I felt for the suction hose in the water and found that it had collapsed. When I waded in the river and opened it up, the water rushed forth and not a few Sunday clothes were spoiled. Archimedes running naked through the streets of Syracuse and shouting Eureka at the top of his voice did not make a greater impression than myself. I was carried on the shoulders and was hero of the day.

Upon settling in the city I began a four years course in the so-called Normal School preparatory to my studies at the College or Real-Gymnasium. During this period my boyish efforts and exploits as well as troubles, continued.

Among other things, I attained the unique distinction of champion crow catcher in the country. My method of procedure was extremely simple. I would go into the forest, hide in the bushes, and imitate the call of the birds. Usually I would get several answers and in a short while a crow would flutter down into the shrubbery near me. After that, all I needed to do was to throw a piece of cardboard to detract its attention, jump up and grab it before it could extricate itself from the undergrowth. In this way I would capture as many as I desired. But on one occasion something occurred which made me respect them. I had caught a fine pair of birds and was returning home with a friend. When we left the forest, thousands of crows had gathered making a frightful racket. In a few minutes they rose in pursuit and soon enveloped us. The fun lasted until all of a sudden I received a blow on the back of my head which knocked me down. Then they attacked me viciously. I was compelled to release the two birds and was glad to join my friend who had taken refuge in a cave.

In the school room there were a few mechanical models which interested me and turned my attention to water turbines. I constructed many of these and found great pleasure in operating them. How extraordinary was my life an incident may illustrate. My uncle had no use for this kind of pastime and more than once rebuked me. I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I was able to see my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.

I made all kinds of other contrivances and contraptions but among those, the arbalests I produced were the best. My arrows, when short, disappeared from sight and at close range traversed a plank of pine one inch thick. Through the continuous tightening of the bows I developed a skin on my stomach much like that of a crocodile and I am often wondering whether it is due to this exercise that I am able even now to digest cobble-stones! Nor can I pass in silence my performances with the sling which would have enabled me to give a stunning exhibit at the Hippodrome. And now I will tell of one of my feats with this unique implement of war which will strain to the utmost the credulity of the reader.

I was practicing while walking with my uncle along the river. The sun was setting, the trout were playful and from time to time one would shoot up into the air, its glistening body sharply defined against a projecting rock beyond. Of course any boy might have hit a fish under these propitious conditions but I undertook a much more difficult task and I foretold to my uncle, to the minutest detail, what I intended doing. I was to hurl a stone to meet the fish, press its body against the rock, and cut it in two. It was no sooner said than done. My uncle looked at me almost scared out of his wits and exclaimed "Vade retra Satanae!" and it was a few days before he spoke to me again. Other records, however great, will be eclipsed but I feel that I could peacefully rest on my laurels for a thousand years.

The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla

Chapter 3

At the age of ten I entered the Real Gymnasium which was a new and fairly well equipped institution. In the department of physics were various models of classical scientific apparatus, electrical and mechanical. The demonstrations and experiments performed from time to time by the instructors fascinated me and were undoubtedly a powerful incentive to invention. I was also passionately fond of mathematical studies and often won the professor's praise for rapid calculation. This was due to my acquired facility of visualizing the figures and performing the operation, not in the usual intuitive manner, but as in actual life. Up to a certain degree of complexity it was absolutely the same to me whether I wrote the symbols on the board or conjured them before my mental vision. But freehand drawing, to which many hours of the course were devoted, was an annoyance I could not endure. This was rather remarkable as most of the members of the family excelled in it. Perhaps my aversion was simply due to the predilection I found in undisturbed thought. Had it not been for a few exceptionally stupid boys, who could not do anything at all, my record would have been the worst.

It was a serious handicap, as under the then existing educational regime drawing being obligatory, this deficiency threatened to spoil my whole career and my father had considerable trouble in railroading me from one class to another.

In the second year at that institution I became obsessed with the idea of producing continuous motion through steady air pressure. The pump incident, of which I have been told, had set afire my youthful imagination and impressed me with the boundless possibilities of a vacuum. I grew frantic in my desire to harness this inexhaustible energy but for a long time I was groping in the dark. Finally, however, my endeavors crystallized in an invention which was to enable me to achieve what no other mortal ever attempted. Imagine a cylinder freely rotatable on two bearings and partly surrounded by a rectangular trough which fits it perfectly. The open side of the trough is enclosed by a partition so that the cylindrical segment within the enclosure divides the latter into two compartments entirely separated from each other by air-tight sliding joints. One of these compartments being sealed and once for all exhausted, the other remaining open, a perpetual rotation of the cylinder would result. At least, so I thought.

A wooden model was constructed and fitted with infinite care and when I applied the pump on one side and actually observed that there was a tendency to turning, I was delirious with joy. Mechanical flight was the one thing I wanted to accomplish although still under the discouraging recollection of a bad fall I sustained by jumping with an umbrella from the top of a building. Every day I used to transport myself through the air to distant regions but could not understand just how I managed to do it. Now I had something concrete, a flying machine with nothing more than a rotating shaft, flapping wings, and - a vacuum of unlimited power! From that time on I made my daily aerial excursions in a vehicle of comfort and luxury as might have befitted King Solomon. It took years before I understood that the atmospheric pressure acted at right angles to the surface of the cylinder and that the slight rotary effort I observed was due to a leak! Though this knowledge came gradually it gave me a painful shock.

I had hardly completed my course at the Real Gymnasium when I was prostrated with a dangerous illness or rather, a score of them, and my condition became so desperate that I was given up by physicians. During this period I was permitted to read constantly, obtaining books from the public library which had been neglected and entrusted to me for classification of the works and preparation of catalogues.

One day I was handed a few volumes of new literature unlike anything I had ever read before and so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state. They were the earlier works of Mark Twain and to them might have been due the miraculous recovery which followed. Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clements and we formed a friendship between us, I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears...

My studies were continued at the higher Real Gymnasium in Carlstadt, Croatia, where one of my aunts resided. She was a distinguished lady, the wife of a colonel who was an old war-horse having participated in many battles, I can never forget the three years I passed at their home. No fortress in time of war was under a more rigid discipline. I was fed like a canary bird. All the meals were of the highest quality and deliciously prepared, but short in quantity by a thousand percent. The slices of ham cut by my aunt were like tissue paper. When the colonel would put something substantial on my plate she would snatch it away and say excitedly to him; "Be careful. Niko is very delicate."

I had a voracious appetite and suffered like Tantalus.

But I lived in an atmosphere of refinement and artistic taste quite unusual for those times and conditions. The land was low and marshy and malaria fever never left me while there despite the enormous amounts of quinine I consumed. Occasionally the river would rise and drive an army of rats into the buildings, devouring everything, even to the bundles of fierce paprika. These pests were to me a welcome diversion. I thinned their ranks by all sorts of means, which won me the unenviable distinction of rat-catcher in the community. At last, however, my course was completed, the misery ended, and I obtained the certificate of maturity which brought me to the crossroads.

During all those years my parents never wavered in their resolve to make me embrace the clergy, the mere thought of which filled me with dread. I had become intensely interested in electricity under the stimulating influence of my professor of physics, who was an ingenious man and often demonstrated the principles by apparatus of his own invention. Among these I recall a device in the shape of a freely rotatable bulb, with tinfoil coating, which was made to spin rapidly when connected to a static machine. It is impossible for me to convey an adequate idea of the intensity of feeling I experienced in witnessing his exhibitions of these mysterious phenomena. Every impression produced a thousand echoes in my mind. I wanted to know more of this wonderful force; I longed for experiment and investigation and resigned myself to the inevitable with aching heart. Just as I was making ready for the long journey home I received word that my father wished me to go on a shooting expedition. It was a strange request as he had been always strenuously opposed to this kind of sport. But a few days later I learned that the cholera was raging in that district and, taking advantage of an opportunity, I returned to Gospic in disregard to my parent's wishes. It is incredible how absolutely ignorant people were as to the causes of this scourge which visited the country in intervals of fifteen to twenty years. They thought that the deadly agents were transmitted through the air and filled it with pungent odors and smoke. In the meantime they drank infested water and died in heaps. I contracted the dreadful disease on the very day of my arrival and although surviving the crisis, I was confined to bed for nine months with scarcely any ability to move. My energy was completely exhausted and for the second time I found myself at Death's door.

In one of the sinking spells which was thought to be the last, my father rushed into the room. I still see his pallid face as he tried to cheer me in tones belying his assurance. "Perhaps," I said, "I may get well if you will let me study engineering." "You will go to the best technical institution in the world," he solemnly replied, and I knew that he meant it. A heavy weight was lifted from my mind but the relief would have come too late had it not been for a marvelous cure brought through a bitter decoction of a peculiar bean. I came to life like Lazarus to the utter amazement of everybody.

My father insisted that I spend a year in healthful physical outdoor exercise to which I reluctantly consented. For most of this term I roamed in the mountains, loaded with a hunter's outfit and a bundle of books, and this contact with nature made me stronger in body as well as in mind. I thought and planned, and conceived many ideas almost as a rule delusive. The vision was clear enough but the knowledge of principles was very limited.

In one of my inventions, I proposed to convey letters and packages across the seas, through a submarine tube, in spherical containers of sufficient strength to resist the hydraulic pressure. The pumping plant, intended to force the water through the tube, was accurately figured and designed and all other particulars carefully worked out. Only one trifling detail, of no consequence, was lightly dismissed. I assumed an arbitrary velocity of the water and, what is more, took pleasure in making it high, thus arriving at a stupendous performance supported by faultless calculations. Subsequent reflections, however, on the resistance of pipes to fluid flow induced me to make this invention public property.

Another one of my projects was to construct a ring around the equator which would, of course, float freely and could be arrested in its spinning motion by reactionary forces, thus enabling travel at a rate of about one thousand miles an hour, impracticable by rail. The reader will smile. The plan was difficult of execution, I will admit, but not nearly so bad as that of a well known New York professor, who wanted to pump the air from the torrid to temperate zones, entirely forgetful of the fact that the Lord had provided a gigantic machine for this purpose.

Still another scheme, far more important and attractive, was to derive power from the rotational energy of terrestrial bodies. I had discovered that objects on the earth's surface owing to the diurnal rotation of the globe, are carried by the same alternately in and against the direction of translatory movement. From this results a great change in momentum which could be utilized in the simplest imaginable manner to furnish motive effort in any habitable region of the world. I cannot find words to describe my disappointment when later I realized that I was in the predicament of Archimedes, who vainly sought for a fixed point in the universe.

At the termination of my vacation I was sent to the polytechnic school in Gratz, Styria (Austria), which my father had chosen as one of the oldest and best reputed institutions. That was the moment I had eagerly awaited and I began my studies under good auspices and firmly resolved to succeed. My previous training was above average, due to my father's teaching and opportunities afforded. I had acquired the knowledge of a number of languages and waded through the books of several libraries, picking up information more or less useful. Then again, for the first time, I could choose my subjects as I liked, and free-hand drawing was to bother me no more.

I had made up my mind to give my parents a surprise, and during the whole first year I regularly started my work at three o'clock in the morning and continued until eleven at night, no Sundays or holidays excepted. As most of my fellow-students took things easily, naturally I eclipsed all records. In the course of the year I passed through nine exams and the professors thought I deserved more than the highest qualifications. Armed with their flattering certificates, I went home for a short rest, expecting triumph, and was mortified when my father made light of these hard-won honors.

That almost killed my ambition; but later, after he had died, I was pained to find a package of letters which the professors had written to him to the effect that unless he took me away from the institution I would be killed through overwork. Thereafter I devoted myself chiefly to physics, mechanics and mathematical studies, spending the hours of leisure in the libraries.

I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire, when I learned, to my dismay that there were close to one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside that last book I was very glad, and said, "Never more!"

My first year's showing had won me the appreciation and friendship of several professors. Among these, Professor Rogner, who was teaching arithmetical subjects and geometry; Professor Poeschl, who held the chair of theoretical and experimental physics, and Dr. Alle, who taught integral calculus and specialized in differential equations. This scientist was the most brilliant lecturer to whom I ever listened. He took a special interest in my progress and would frequently remain for an hour or two in the lecture room, giving me problems to solve, in which I delighted. To him I explained a flying machine I had conceived, not an illusory invention, but one based on sound, scientific principles, which has become realizable through my turbine and will soon be given to the world. Both Professors Rogner and Poeschl were curious men. The former had peculiar ways of expressing himself and whenever he did so, there was a riot, followed by a long embarrassing pause. Professor Poeschl was a methodical and thoroughly grounded German. He had enormous feet, and hands like the paws of a bear, but all of his experiments were skillfully performed with clock-like precision and without a miss. It was in the second year of my studies that we received a Gramoe Dyname from Paris, having the horseshoe form of a laminated field magnet, and a wire wound armature with a commutator. It was connected up and various effects of the currents were shown. While Professor Poeschl was making demonstrations, running the machine was a motor, the brushes gave trouble, sparking badly, and I observed that it might be possible to operate a motor without these appliances. But he declared that it could not be done and did me the honor of delivering a lecture on the subject, at the conclusion he remarked, "Mr. Tesla may accomplish great things, but he certainly will never do this. It would be equivalent to converting a steadily pulling force, like that of gravity into a rotary effort. It is a perpetual motion scheme, an impossible idea." But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.

For a time I wavered, impressed by the professor's authority, but soon became convinced I was right and undertook the task with all the fire and boundless confidence of my youth. I started by first picturing in my mind a direct-current machine, running it and following the changing flow of the currents in the armature. Then I would imagine an alternator and investigate the progresses taking place in a similar manner. Next I would visualize systems comprising motors and generators and operate them in various ways.

The images I saw were to me perfectly real and tangible. All my remaining term in Gratz was passed in intense but fruitless efforts of this kind, and I almost came to the conclusion that the problem was insolvable.

In 1880 I went to Prague, Bohemia, carrying out my father's wish to complete my education at the University there. It was in that city that I made a decided advance, which consisted in detaching the commutator from the machine and studying the phenomena in this new aspect, but still without result. In the year following there was a sudden change in my views of life.

I realized that my parents had been making too great sacrifices on my account and resolved to relieve them of the burden. The wave of the American telephone had just reached the European continent and the system was to be installed in Budapest, Hungary. It appeared an ideal opportunity, all the more as a friend of our family was at the head of the enterprise.

It was here that I suffered the complete breakdown of the nerves to which I have referred. What I experienced during the period of the illness surpasses all belief. My sight and hearing were always extraordinary. I could clearly discern objects in the distance when others saw no trace of them. Several times in my boyhood I saved the houses of our neighbors from fire by hearing the faint crackling sounds which did not disturb their sleep, and calling for help. In 1899, when I was past forty and carrying on my experiments in Colorado, I could hear very distinctly thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles. My ear was thus over thirteen times more sensitive, yet at that time I was, so to speak, stone deaf in comparison with the acuteness of my hearing while under the nervous strain.

In Budapest I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat, vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable. The ground under my feet trembled continuously. I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all. The roaring noises from near and far often produced the effect of spoken words which would have frightened me had I not been able to resolve them into their accumulated components. The sun rays, when periodically intercepted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me. I had to summon all my will power to pass under a bridge or other structure, as I experienced the crushing pressure on the skull. In the dark I had the sense of a bat, and could detect the presence of an object at a distance of twelve feet by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead. My pulse varied from a few to two hundred and sixty beats and all the tissues of my body with twitchings and tremors, which was perhaps hardest to bear. A renowned physician who have me daily large doses of bromide of potassium, pronounced my malady unique and incurable.

It is my eternal regret that I was not under the observation of experts in physiology and psychology at that time. I clung desperately to life, but never expected to recover. Can anyone believe that so hopeless a physical wreck could ever be transformed into a man of astonishing strength and tenacity; able to work thirty-eight years almost without a day's interruption, and find himself still strong and fresh in body and mind? Such is my case. A powerful desire to live and to continue the work and the assistance of a devoted friend, an athlete, accomplished the wonder. My health returned and with it the vigor of mind.

In attacking the problem again, I almost regretted that the struggle was soon to end. I had so much energy to spare. When I understood the task, it was not with a resolve such as men often make. With me it was a sacred vow, a question of life and death. I knew that I would perish if I failed. Now I felt that the battle was won. Back in the deep recesses of the brain was the solution, but I could net yet give it outward expression.

One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the City Park and reciting poetry. At that age, I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe's Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of the glorious passage, "Sie ruckt und weicht, der Tag ist uberlebt, Dort eilt sie hin und fordert neues Leben. Oh, das kein Flugel mich vom Boden hebt Ihr nach und immer nach zu streben! Ein sch--ner Traum indessen sie entweicht, Ach, au des Geistes Fl--gein wird so leicht Kein korperlicher Flugel sich gesellen!" As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightening and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand, the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, "See my motor here; watch me reverse it." I cannot begin to describe my emotions. Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally, I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence...

Chapter 4: The Discovery of the Tesla Coil and Transformer

For a while I gave myself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of picturing machines and devising new forms. It was a mental state of happiness about as complete as I have ever known in life. Ideas came in an uninterrupted stream and the only difficulty I had was to hold them fast. The pieces of apparatus I conceived were to me absolutely real and tangible in every detail, even to the minutest marks and signs of wear. I delighted in imagining the motors constantly running, for in this way they presented to the mind's eye a fascinating sight. When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots. In less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name, and which are used under many other names all over the world. It was, perhaps, providential that the necessities of existence commanded a temporary halt to this consuming activity of the mind.

I came to Budapest prompted by a premature report concerning the telephone enterprise and, as irony of fate willed it, I had to accept a position as draughtsman in the Central Telegraph Office of the Hungarian government at a salary which I deem it my privilege not to disclose. Fortunately, I soon won the interest of the inspector-in-chief and was thereafter employed on calculations, designs and estimates in connection with new installations, until the telephone exchange started, when I took charge of the same. The knowledge and practical experience I gained in the course of this work, was most valuable and the employment gave me ample opportunities for the exercise of my inventive faculties. I made several improvements in the central station apparatus and perfected a telephone repeater or amplifier which was never patented or publicly described but would be creditable to me even today. In recognition of my efficient assistance the organizer of the undertaking, Mr. Puskas, upon disposing of his business in Budapest, offered me a position in Paris which I gladly accepted.

I never can forget the deep impression that magic city produced on my mind. For several days after my arrival, I roamed through the streets in utter bewilderment of the new spectacle. The attractions were many and irresistible, but, alas, the income was spent as soon as received. When Mr. Puskas asked me how I was getting along in the new sphere, I described the situation accurately in the statement that "The last twenty-nine days of the month are the toughest." I led a rather strenuous life in what would now be termed "Rooseveltian fashion." Every morning, regardless of the weather, I would go from the boulevard St-Marcel, where I resided, to a bathing house on the Seine; plunge into the water, loop the circuit twenty-seven times and then walk an hour to reach Ivry, where the company's factory was located. There I would have a wood-chopper's breakfast at half-past seven o'clock and then eagerly await the lunch hour, in the meanwhile cracking hard nuts for the manager-of-the-works, Mr. Charles Batchellor, who was an intimate friend and assistant of Edison. Here I was thrown in contact with a few Americans who fairly fell in love with my because of my proficiency in Billiards! To these men I explained my invention and one of them, Mr. D. Cunningham, foreman of the mechanical department, offered to form a stock company. The proposal seemed to me comical in the extreme. I did not have the faintest conception of what he meant, except that it was an American way of doing things. Nothing came of it, however, and during the next few months I had to travel from one place to another in France and Germany to cure the ills of the power plants.

On my return to Paris, I submitted to one of the administrators of the company, Mr. Rau, a plan for improving their dynamos and was given an opportunity. My success was complete and the delighted directors accorded me the privilege of developing automatic regulators which were much desired. Shortly after, there was some trouble with the lighting plant which had been installed at the new railroad station in Strasbourg, Alsace. The wiring was defective and on the occasion of the opening ceremonies, a large part of a wall was blown out through a short-circuit, right in the presence of old Emperor William I. The German government refused to take the plant and the French company was facing a serious loss. On account of my knowledge of the German language and past experience, I was entrusted with the difficult task of straightening out matters and early in 1883, I went to Strasbourg on that mission.

Some of the incidents in that city have left an indelible record on my memory. By a curious coincidence, a number of the men who subsequently achieved fame, lived there about that time. In later life I used to say, "There were bacteria of greatness in that old town." Others caught the disease, but I escaped!" The practical work, correspondence, and conferences with officials kept me preoccupied day and night, but as soon as I was able to manage, I undertook the construction of a simple motor in a mechanical shop opposite the railroad station, having brought with me from Paris some material for that purpose. The consummation of the experiment was, however, delayed until the summer of that year, when I finally had the satisfaction of seeing the rotation effected by alternating currents of different phase, and without sliding contacts or commutator, as I had conceived a year before. It was an exquisite pleasure but not to compare with the delirium of joy following the first revelation.

Among my new friends was the former mayor of the city, Mr. Sauzin, whom I had already, in a measure, acquainted with this and other inventions of mine and whose support I endeavored to enlist. He was sincerely devoted to me and put my project before several wealthy persons, but to my mortification, found no response. He wanted to help me in every possible way and the approach of the first of July, 1917, happens to remind me of a form of "assistance" I received from that charming man, which was not financial, but none the less appreciated. In 1870, when the Germans invaded the country, Mr. Sauzin had buried a good sized allotment of St. Estephe of 1801 and he came to the conclusion that he knew no worthier person than myself to consume that precious beverage. This, I may say, is one of the unforgettable incidents to which I have referred. My friend urged me to return to Paris as soon as possible and seek support there. This I was anxious to do, but my work and negotiations were protracted, owing to all sorts of petty obstacles I encountered, so that at times the situation seemed hopeless. Just to give an idea of German thoroughness and "efficiency," I may mention here a rather funny experience.

An incandescent lamp of 16 c.p. was to be placed in a hallway, and upon selecting the proper location, I ordered the "monteur" to run the wires. After working for a while, he concluded that the engineer had to be consulted and this was done. The latter made several objections but ultimately agreed that the lamp should be placed two inches from the spot I had assigned, whereupon the work proceeded. Then the engineer became worried and told me that Inspector Averdeck should be notified. That important person was called, he investigated, debated, and decided that the lamp should be shifted back two inches, which was the place I had marked! It was not long, however, before Averdeck got cold feet himself and advised me that he had informed Ober-Inspector Hieronimus of the matter and that I should await his decision. It was several days before the ober-inspector was able to free himself of other pressing duties, but at last he arrived and a two hour debate followed, when he decided to move the lamp two inches further. My hopes that this was the final act, were shattered when the ober-inspector returned and said to me, "Regierungsrath Funke is particular that I would not dare to give an order for placing this lamp without his explicit approval." Accordingly, arrangements for a visit from that great man were made. We started cleaning up and polishing early in the morning, and when Funke came with his retinue he was ceremoniously received. After two hours of deliberation, he suddenly exclaimed, "I must be going!," and pointing to a place on the ceiling, he ordered me to put the lamp there. It was the exact spot which I had originally chosen! So it went day after day with variations, but I was determined to achieve, at whatever cost, and in the end my efforts were rewarded.

By the spring of 1884, all the differences were adjusted, the plant formally accepted, and I returned to Paris with pleasing anticipation. One of the administrators had promised me a liberal compensation in case I succeeded, as well as a fair consideration of the improvements I had made to their dynamos and I hoped to realize a substantial sum. There were three administrators, whom I shall designate as A, B, and C for convenience. When I called on A, he told me what B had the say. This gentleman thought that only C could decide, and the latter was quite sure that A alone had the power to act. After several laps of this circulus viciousus, it dawned upon me that my reward was a castle in Spain.

The utter failure of my attempts to raise capital for development was another disappointment, and when Mr. Bachelor pressed me to go to America with a view of redesigning the Edison machines, I determined to try my fortunes in the Land of Golden Promise. But the chance was nearly missed. I liquefied my modest assets, secured accommodations and found myself at the railroad station as the train was pulling out. At that moment, I discovered that my money and tickets were gone. What to do was the question. Hercules had plenty of time to deliberate, but I had to decide while running alongside the train with opposite feeling surging in my brain like condenser oscillations. Resolve, helped by dexterity, won out in the nick of time and upon passing through the usual experience, as trivial and unpleasant, I managed to embark for New York with the remnants of my belongings, some poems and articles I had written, and a package of calculations relating to solutions of an unsolvable integral and my flying machine. During the voyage I sat most of the time at the stern of the ship watching for an opportunity to save somebody from a watery grave, without the slightest thought of danger. Later, when I had absorbed some of the practical American sense, I shivered at the recollection and marveled at my former folly. The meeting with Edison was a memorable event in my life. I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries reading all sorts of stuff that fell into my hands, from Newton's Principia to the novels of Paul de Kock, and felt that most of my life had been squandered. But it did not take long before I recognized that it was the best thing I could have done. Within a few weeks I had won Edison's confidence, and it came about in this way.

The S.S. Oregon, the fastest passenger steamer at that time, had both of its lighting machines disabled and its sailing was delayed. As the superstructure had been built after their installation, it was impossible to remove them from the hold. The predicament was a serious one and Edison was much annoyed. In the evening I took the necessary instruments with me and went aboard the vessel where I stayed for the night. The dynamos were in bad condition, having several short-circuits and breaks, but with the assistance of the crew, I succeeded in putting them in good shape. At five o'clock in the morning, when passing along Fifth Avenue on my way to the shop, I met Edison with Bachelor and a few others, as they were returning home to retire. "Here is our Parisian running around at night," he said. When I told him that I was coming from the Oregon and had repaired both machines, he looked at me in silence and walked away without another word. But when he had gone some distance I heard him remark, "Bachelor, this is a good man." And from that time on I had full freedom in directing the work. For nearly a year my regular hours were from 10:30 A.M. until 5 o'clock the next morning without a day's exception. Edison said to me, "I have had many hard working assistants, but you take the cake." During this period I designed twenty-four different types of standard machines with short cores and uniform pattern, which replaced the old ones. The manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task, but it turned out to be a practical joke. This gave me a painful shock and I resigned my position.

Immediately thereafter, some people approached me with the proposal of forming an arc light company under my name, to which I agreed. Here finally, was an opportunity to develop the motor, but when I broached the subject to my new associates they said, "No, we want the arc lamp. We don't care for this alternating current of yours." In 1886, my system of arc lighting was perfected and adopted for factory and municipal lighting, and I was free, but with no other possession than a beautifully engraved certificate of stock of hypothetical value. Then followed a period of struggle in the new medium for which I was not fitted, but the reward came in the end, and in April, 1887, the Tesla Electric Co. was organized, providing a laboratory and facilities. The motors I built there were exactly as I had 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.

In the early part of 1888, an arrangement was made with the Westinghouse Company for the manufacture of the motors on a large scale. But great difficulties had still to be overcome. My system was based on the use of low frequency currents and the Westinghouse experts had adopted 133 cycles with the objects of securing advantages in transformation. They did not want to depart with their standard forms of apparatus and my efforts had to be concentrated upon adapting the motor to these conditions. Another necessity was to produce a motor capable of running efficiently at this frequency on two wires, which was not an easy accomplishment.

At the close of 1889, however, my services in Pittsburgh being no longer essential, I returned to New York and resumed experimental work in a Laboratory on Grand Street, where I began immediately the design of high-frequency machines. The problems of construction in this unexplored field were novel and quite peculiar, and I encountered many difficulties. I rejected the inductor type, fearing that it might not yield perfect sine waves, which were so important to resonant action. Had it not been for this, I could have saved myself a great deal of labor. Another discouraging feature of the high-frequency alternator seemed to be the inconstancy of speed which threatened to impose serious limitations to its use. I had already noted in my demonstrations before the American Institution of Electrical Engineers, that several times the tune was lost, necessitating readjustment, and did not yet foresee what I discovered long afterwards, a means of operating a machine of this kind at a speed constant to such a degree as not to vary more than a small fraction of one revolution between the extremes of load. From many other considerations, it appeared desirable to invent a simpler device for the production of electric oscillations.

In 1856, Lord Kelvin had exposed the theory of the condenser discharge, but no practical application of that important knowledge was made. I saw the possibilities and undertook the development of induction apparatus on this principle. My progress was so rapid as to enable me to exhibit at my lecture in 1891 a coil giving sparks of five inches. On that occasion I frankly told the engineers of a defect involved in the transformation by the new method, namely, the loss in the spark gap. Subsequent investigation showed that no matter what medium is employed, be it air, hydrogen, mercury vapor, oil, or a stream of electrons, the efficiency is the same. It is a law very much like the governing of the conversion of mechanical energy. We may drop a weight from a certain height vertically down, or carry it to the lower level along any devious path; it is immaterial insofar as the amount of work is concerned. Fortunately however, this drawback is not fatal, as by proper proportioning of the resonant, circuits of an efficiency of 85 percent is attainable. Since my early announcement of the invention, it has come into universal use and wrought a revolution in many departments, but a still greater future awaits it.

When in 1900 I obtained powerful discharges of 1,000 feet and flashed a current around the globe, I was reminded of the first tiny spark I observed in my Grand Street laboratory and was thrilled by sensations akin to those I felt when I discovered the rotating magnetic field.

The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla

Chapter 5

As I review the events of my past life I realize how subtle are the influences that shape our destinies. An incident of my youth may serve to illustrate. One winter's day I managed to climb a steep mountain, in company with other boys. The snow was quite deep and a warm southerly wind made it just suitable for our purpose. We amused ourselves by throwing balls which would roll down a certain distance, gathering more or less snow, and we tried to out-do one another in this sport. Suddenly a ball was seen to go beyond the limit, swelling to enormous proportions until it became as big as a house and plunged thundering into the valley below with a force that made the ground tremble. I looked on spellbound incapable of understanding what had happened. For weeks afterward the picture of the avalanche was before my eyes and I wondered how anything so small could grow to such an immense size.

Ever since that time the magnification of feeble actions fascinated me, and when, years later, I took up the experimental study of mechanical and electrical resonance, I was keenly interested from the very start. Possibly, had it not been for that early powerful impression I might not have followed up the little spark I obtained with my coil and never developed my best invention, the true history of which I will tell.

Many technical men, very able in their special departments, but dominated by a pedantic spirit and nearsighted, have asserted that excepting the induction motor, I have given the world little of practical use. This is a grievous mistake. A new idea must not be judged by its immediate results. My alternating system of power transmission came at a psychological moment, as a long sought answer to pressing industrial questions, and although considerable resistance had to be overcome and opposing interests reconciled, as usual, the commercial introduction could not be long delayed. Now, compare this situation with that confronting my turbines, for example. One should think that so simple and beautiful an invention, possessing many features of an ideal motor, should be adopted at once and, undoubtedly, it would under similar conditions. But the prospective effect of the rotating field was not to render worthless existing machinery; on the contrary, it was to give it additional value. The system lent itself to new enterprise as well as to improvement of the old. My turbine is an advance of a character entirely different. It is a radical departure in the sense that its success would mean the abandonment of the antiquated types of prime movers on which billions of dollars have been spent. Under such circumstances, the progress must need be slow and perhaps the greatest impediment is encountered in the prejudicial opinions created in the minds of experts by organized opposition.

Only the other day, I had a disheartening experience when I met my friend and former assistant, Charles F. Scott, now professor of Electric Engineering at Yale. I had not seen him for a long time and was glad to have an opportunity for a little chat at my office. Our conversation, naturally enough, drifted onto my turbine and I became heated to a high degree. "Scott," I exclaimed, carried away by the vision of a glorious future, "My turbine will scrap all the heat engines in the world." Scott stroked his chin and looked away thoughtfully, as though making a mental calculation. "That will make quite a pile of scrap," he said, and left without another word!

These and other inventions of mine, however, were nothing more than steps forward in a certain directions. In evolving them, I simply followed the inborn instinct to improve the present devices without any special thought of our far more imperative necessities. The "Magnifying Transmitter" was the product of labors extending through years, having for their chief object, the solution of problems which are infinitely more important to mankind than mere industrial development.

If my memory serves me right, it was in November, 1890, that I performed a laboratory experiment which was one of the most extraordinary and spectacular ever recorded in the annal of Science. In investigating the behavior of high frequency currents, I had satisfied myself that an electric field of sufficient intensity could be produced in a room to light up electrodeless vacuum tubes. Accordingly, a transformer was built to test the theory and the first trial proved a marvelous success. It is difficult to appreciate what those strange phenomena meant at the time. We crave for new sensations, but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences. When my tubes were first publicly exhibited, they were viewed with amazement impossible to describe. From all parts of the world, I received urgent invitations and numerous honors and other flattering inducements were offered to me, which I declined. But in 1892 the demand became irresistible and I went to London where I delivered a lecture before the Institution of Electrical Engineers.

It has been my intention to leave immediately for Paris in compliance with a similar obligation, but Sir James Dewar insisted on my appearing before the Royal Institution. I was a man of firm resolve, but succumbed easily to the forceful arguments of the great Scotchman. He pushed me into a chair and poured out half a glass of a wonderful brown fluid which sparkled in all sorts of iridescent colors and tasted like nectar. "Now," said he, "you are sitting in Faraday's chair and you are enjoying whiskey he used to drink." (Which did not interest me very much, as I had altered my opinion concerning strong drink). The next evening I have a demonstration before the Royal Institution, at the termination of which, Lord Rayleigh addressed the audience and his generous words gave me the first start in these endeavors. I fled from London and later from Paris, to escape favors showered upon me, and journeyed to my home, where I passed through a most painful ordeal and illness.

Upon regaining my health, I began to formulate plans for the resumption of work in America. Up to that time I never realized that I possessed any particular gift of discovery, but Lord Rayleigh, whom I always considered as an ideal man of science, had said so and if that was the case, I felt that I should concentrate on some big idea.

At this time, as at many other times in the past, my thoughts turned towards my Mother's teaching. The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power. My Mother had taught me to seek all truth in the Bible; therefore I devoted the next few months to the study of this work.

One day, as I was roaming the mountains, I sought shelter from an approaching storm. The sky became overhung with heavy clouds, but somehow the rain was delayed until, all of a sudden, there was a lightening flash and a few moments after, a deluge. This observation set me thinking. It was manifest that the two phenomena were closely related, as cause and effect, and a little reflection led me to the conclusion that the electrical energy involved in the precipitation of the water was inconsiderable, the function of the lightening being much like that of a sensitive trigger. Here was a stupendous possibility of achievement. If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this mighty life sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers, and provide motive power in unlimited amounts. This would be the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of man. The consummation depended on our ability to develop electric forces of the order of those in nature.

It seemed a hopeless undertaking, but I made up my mind to try it and immediately on my return to the United States in the summer of 1892, after a short visit to my friends in Watford, England; work was begun which was to me all the more attractive, because a means of the same kind was necessary for the successful transmission of energy without wires.

At this time I made a further careful study of the Bible, and discovered the key in Revelation. The first gratifying result was obtained in the spring of the succeeding year, when I reaching a tension of about 100,000,000 volts - one hundred million volts - with my conical coil, which I figured was the voltage of a flash of lightening. Steady progress was made until the destruction of my laboratory by fire, in 1895, as may be judged from an article by T.C. Martin which appeared in the April number of the Century Magazine. This calamity set me back in many ways and most of that year had to be devoted to planning and reconstruction. However, as soon as circumstances permitted, I returned to the task.

Although I knew that higher electric-motive forces were attainable with apparatus of larger dimensions, I had an instinctive perception that the object could be accomplished by the proper design of a comparatively small and compact transformer. In carrying on tests with a secondary in the form of flat spiral, as illustrated in my patents, the absence of streamers surprised me, and it was not long before I discovered that this was due to the position of the turns and their mutual action. Profiting from this observation, I resorted to the use of a high tension conductor with turns of considerable diameter, sufficiently separated to keep down the distributed capacity, while at the same time preventing undue accumulation of the charge at any point. The application of this principle enabled me to produce pressures of over 100,000,000 volts, which was about the limit obtainable without risk of accident. A photograph of my transmitter built in my laboratory at Houston Street, was published in the Electrical Review of November, 1898.

In order to advance further along this line, I had to go into the open, and in the spring of 1899, having completed preparations for the erection of a wireless plant, I went to Colorado where I remained for more than one year. Here I introduced other improvements and refinements which made it possible to generate currents of any tension that may be desired. Those who are interested will find some information in regard to the experiments I conducted there in my article, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," in the Century Magazine of June 1900, to which I have referred on a previous occasion.

I will be quite explicit on the subject of my magnifying transformer so that it will be clearly understood. In the first place, it is a resonant transformer, with a secondary in which the parts, charged to a high potential, are of considerable area and arranged in space along ideal enveloping surfaces of very large radii of curvature, and at proper distances from one another, thereby insuring a small electric surface density everywhere, so that no leak can occur even if the conductor is bare. It is suitable for any frequency, from a few to many thousands of cycles per second, and can be used in the production of currents of tremendous volume and moderate pressure, or of smaller amperage and immense electromotive force. The maximum electric tension is merely dependent on the curvature of the surfaces on which the charged elements are situated and the area of the latter. Judging from my past experience there is no limit to the possible voltage developed; any amount is practicable. On the other hand, currents of many thousands of amperes may be obtained in the antenna. A plant of but very moderate dimensions is required for such performances. Theoretically, a terminal of less than 90 feet in diameter is sufficient to develop an electromotive force of that magnitude, while for antenna currents of from 2,000-4,000 amperes at the usual frequencies, it need not be larger than 30 feet in diameter. In a more restricted meaning, this wireless transmitter is one in which the Hertzwave radiation is an entirely negligible quantity as compared with the whole energy, under which condition the damping factor is extremely small and an enormous charge is stored in the elevated capacity. Such a circuit may then be excited with impulses of any kind, even of low frequency and it will yield sinusoidal and continuous oscillations like those of an alternator. Taken in the narrowest significance of the term, however, it is a resonant transformer which, besides possessing these qualities, is accurately proportioned to fit the globe and its electrical constants and properties, by virtue of which design it becomes highly efficient and effective in the wireless transmission of energy. Distance is then absolutely eliminated, there being no diminuation in the intensity of the transmitted impulses. It is even possible to make the actions increase with the distance from the plane, according to an exact mathematical law. This invention was one of a number comprised in my "World System" of wireless transmission which I undertook to commercialize on my return to New York in 1900.

As to the immediate purposes of my enterprise, they were clearly outlined in a technical statement of that period from which I quote, "The world system has resulted from a combination of several original discoveries made by the inventor in the course of long continued research and experimentation. It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the inter-connection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment. By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Earth. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant."

These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientific advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line-wire. One far-reaching result of this is that any device capable of being operated through one or more wires (at a distance obviously restricted) can likewise be actuated, without artificial conductors and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to which there are no limits other than those imposed by the physical dimensions of the earth. Thus, not only will entirely new fields for commercial exploitation be opened up by this ideal method of transmission, but the old ones vastly extended. The World System is based on the application of the following import and inventions and discoveries: 


       1.The Tesla Transformer: This apparatus is in the production of electrical vibrations as revolutionary as
              gunpowder was in warfare. Currents many times stronger than any ever generated in the usual ways and
              sparks over one hundred feet long, have been produced by the inventor with an instrument of this kind. 


       2.The Magnifying Transmitter: This is Tesla's best invention, a peculiar transformer specially adapted to
              excite the earth, which is in the transmission of electrical energy when the telescope is in astronomical
              observation. By the use of this marvelous device, he has already set up electrical movements of greater
              intensity than those of lightening and passed a current, sufficient to light more than two hundred
              incandescent lamps, around the Earth. 


       3.The Tesla Wireless System: This system comprises a number of improvements and is the only means known
              for transmitting economically electrical energy to a distance without wires. Careful tests and
              measurements in connection with an experimental station of great activity, erected by the inventor in
              Colorado, have demonstrated that power in any desired amount can be conveyed, clear across the globe if
              necessary, with a loss not exceeding a few per cent. 


       4.The Art of Individualization: This invention of Tesla is to primitive tuning, what refined language is to
              unarticulated expression. It makes possible the transmission of signals or messages absolutely secret and
              exclusive both in the active and passive aspect, that is, non-interfering as well as non-interferable. Each
              signal is like an individual of unmistakable identity and there is virtually no limit to the number of stations or
              instruments which can be simultaneously operated without the slightest mutual disturbance. 


       5.The Terrestrial Stationary Waves: This wonderful discovery, popularly explained, means that the Earth is
              responsive to electrical vibrations of definite pitch, just as a tuning fork to certain waves of sound. These
              particular electrical vibrations, capable of powerfully exciting the globe, lend themselves to innumerable uses
              of great importance commercially and in many other respects. The first "World System" power plant can be
              put in operation in nine months. With this power plant, it will be practicable to attain electrical activities up
              to ten million horse-power and it is designed to serve for as many technical achievements as are possible
              without due expense. Among these are the following: 


             1.The inter-connection of existing telegraph exchanges or offices all over the world; 
             2.The establishment of a secret and non-interferable government telegraph service; 
             3.The inter-connection of all present telephone exchanges or offices around the globe; 
             4.The universal distribution of general news by telegraph or telephone, in conjunction with the press; 
             5.The establishment of such a "World System" of intelligence transmission for exclusive private use; 
             6.The inter-connection and operation of all stock tickers of the world; 
             7.The establishment of a "World System" - of musical distribution, etc.; 
             8.The universal registration of time by cheap clocks indicating the hour with astronomical precision and
                   requiring no attention whatever; 
             9.The world transmission of typed or handwritten characters, letters, checks, etc.; 
          10.The establishment of a universal marine service enabling the navigators of all ships to steer perfectly
                   without compass, to determine the exact location, hour and speak; to prevent collisions and
                   disasters, etc.; 
          11.The inauguration of a system of world printing on land and sea; 
          12.The world reproduction of photographic pictures and all kinds of drawings or records..."
I also proposed to make demonstration in the wireless transmission of power on a small scale, but sufficient to carry conviction. Besides these, I referred to other and incomparably more important applications of my discoveries which will be disclosed at some future date. A plant was built on Long Island with a tower 187 feet high, having a spherical terminal about 68 feet in diameter. These dimensions were adequate for the transmission of virtually any amount of energy. Originally, only from 200 to 300 K.W. were provided, but I intended to employ later several thousand horsepower. The transmitter was to emit a wave-complex of special characteristics and I had devised a unique method of telephonic control of any amount of energy. The tower was destroyed two years ago (1917) but my projects are being developed and another one, improved in some features, will be constructed.

On this occasion I would contradict the widely circulated report that the structure was demolished by the government, which owing to war conditions, might have created prejudice in the minds of those who may not know that the papers, which thirty years ago conferred upon me the honor of American citizenship, are always kept in a safe, while my orders, diplomas, degrees, gold medals and other distinctions are packed away in old trunks. If this report had a foundation, I would have been refunded a large sum of money which I expended in the construction of the tower. On the contrary, it was in the interest of the government to preserve it, particularly as it would have made possible, to mention just one valuable result, the location of a submarine in any part of the world. My plant, services, and all my improvements have always been at the disposal of the officials and ever since the outbreak of the European conflict, I have been working at a sacrifice on several inventions of mine relating to aerial navigation, ship propulsion and wireless transmission, which are of the greatest importance to the country. Those who are well informed know that my ideas have revolutionized the industries of the United States and I am not aware that there lives an inventor who has been, in this respect, as fortunate as myself - especially as regards the use of his improvements in the war.

I have refrained from publicly expressing myself on this subject before, as it seemed improper to dwell on personal matters while all the world was in dire trouble. I would add further, in view of various rumors which have reached me, that Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan did not interest himself with me in a business way, but in the same large spirit in which he has assisted many other pioneers. He carried out his generous promise to the letter and it would have been most unreasonable to expect from him anything more. He had the highest regard for my attainments and gave me every evidence of his complete faith in my ability to ultimately achieve what I had set out to do. I am unwilling to accord to some small-minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time, but the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.

The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla

Chapter 6

No subject to which I have ever devoted myself has called for such concentration of mind, and strained to so dangerous a degree the finest fibers of my brain, as the systems of which the "Magnifying Transmitter" is the foundation. I put all the intensity and vigor of youth in the development of the rotating field discoveries, but those early labors were of a different character. Although strenuous in the extreme, they did not involve that keen and exhausting discernment which had to be exercised in attacking the many problems of the wireless.

Despite my rare physical endurance at that period, the abused nerves finally rebelled and I suffered a complete collapse, just as the consummation of the long and difficult task was almost in sight. Without doubt I would have paid a greater penalty later, and very likely my career would have been prematurely terminated, had not providence equipped me with a safety device, which seemed to improve with advancing years and unfailingly comes to play when my forces are at an end. So long as it operates I am safe from danger, due to overwork, which threatens other inventors, and incidentally, I need no vacations which are indispensable to most people. When I am all but used up, I simply do as the darkies who "naturally fall asleep while white folks worry."

To venture a theory out of my sphere, the body probably accumulates little by little a definite quantity of some toxic agent and I sink into a nearly lethargic state which lasts half an hour to the minute. Upon awakening I have the sensation as though the events immediately preceding had occurred very long ago, and if I attempt to continue the interrupted train of thought I feel veritable nausea. Involuntarily, I then turn to other tasks and am surprised at the freshness of the mind and ease with which I overcome obstacles that had baffled me before. After weeks or months, my passion for the temporarily abandoned invention returns and I invariably find answers to all the vexing questions, with scarcely any effort. In this connection, I will tell of an extraordinary experience which may be of interest to students of psychology.

I had produced a striking phenomenon with my grounded transmitter and was endeavoring to ascertain its true significance in relation to the currents propagated through the earth. It seemed a hopeless undertaking, and for more than a year I worked unremittingly, but in vain. This profound study so entirely absorbed me, that I became forgetful of everything else, even of my undermined health. At last, as I was at the point of breaking down, nature applied the preservative inducing lethal sleep. Regaining my senses, I realized with consternation that I was unable to visualize scenes from my life except those of infancy, the very first ones that had entered my consciousness. Curiously enough, these appeared before my vision with startling distinctness and afforded me welcome relief. Night after night, when retiring, I would think of them, and more and more of my previous existence was revealed. The image of my mother was always the principal figure in the spectacle that slowly unfolded, and a consuming desire to see her again gradually took possession of me. This feeling grew so strong that I resolved to drop all work and satisfy my longing, but I found it too hard to break away from the laboratory, and several months elapsed during which I had succeeded in reviving all the impressions of my past life, up to the spring of 1892. In the next picture that came out of the mist of oblivion, I saw myself at the Hotel de la Paix in Paris, just coming to from one of my peculiar sleeping spells, which had been caused by prolonged exertion of the brain. Imagine the pain and distress I felt, when it flashed upon my mind that a dispatch was handed to me at that very moment, bearing the sad news that my mother was dying. I remembered how I made the long journey home without an hour of rest and how she passed away after weeks of agony.

It was especially remarkable that during all this period of partially obliterated memory, I was fully alive to everything touching on the subject of my research. I could recall the smallest detail and the least insignificant observations in my experiments and even recite pages of text and complex mathematical formulae.

My belief is firm in a law of compensation. The true rewards are ever in proportion to the labor and sacrifices made. This is one of the reasons why I feel certain that of all my inventions, the magnifying transmitter will prove most important and valuable to future generations. I am prompted to this prediction, not so much by thoughts of the commercial and industrial revolution which it will surely bring about, but of the humanitarian consequences of the many achievements it makes possible. Considerations of mere utility weigh little in the balance against the higher benefits of civilization. We are confronted with portentous problems which can not be solved just by providing for our material existence, however abundantly. On the contrary, progress in this direction is fraught with hazards and perils not less menacing than those born from want and suffering. If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point on the globe, this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy, which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force. The greatest good will come from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means, the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere, and factories driven from thousands of miles away by waterfalls furnishing power. Aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun's energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land. Its introduction for telegraphic, telephonic and similar uses will automatically cut out the static and all other interferences which at present, impose narrow limits to the application of the wireless. This is a timely topic on which a few words might not be amiss.

During the past decade a number of people have arrogantly claimed that they had succeeded in doing away with this impediment. I have carefully examined all of the arrangements described and tested most of them long before they were publicly disclosed, but the finding was uniformly negative. Recent official statement from the U.S. Navy may, perhaps, have taught some beguilable news editors how to appraise these announcements at their real worth. As a rule, the attempts are based on theories so fallacious, that whenever they come to my notice, I can not help thinking in a light vein. Quite recently a new discovery was heralded, with a deafening flourish of trumpets, but it proved another case of a mountain bringing forth a mouse. This reminds me of an exciting incident which took place a year ago, when I was conducting my experiments with currents of high frequency.

Steve Brodie had just jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. The feat has been vulgarized since by imitators, but the first report electrified New York. I was very impressionable then and frequently spoke of the daring printer. On a hot afternoon I felt the necessity of refreshing myself and stepped into one of the popular thirty thousand institutions of this great city, where a delicious twelve per cent beverage was served, which can now be had only by making a trip to the poor and devastated countries of Europe. The attendance was large and not over-distinguished and a matter was discussed which gave me an admirable opening for the careless remark, "This is what I said when I jumped off the bridge." No sooner had I uttered these words, than I felt like the companion of Timothens in the poem of Schiller. In an instant there was pandemonium and a dozen voices cried, "It is Brodie!" I threw a quarter on the counter and bolted for the door, but the crowd was at my heels with yells, "Stop, Steeve!", which must have been misunderstood, for many persons tried to hold me up as I ran frantically for my haven of refuge. By darting around corners, I fortunately managed, through the medium of a fire escape, to reach the laboratory, where I threw off my coat, camouflaged myself as a hard-working blacksmith and started the forge. But these precautions proved unnecessary, as I had eluded my pursuers. For many years afterward, at night, when imagination turns into specters the trifling troubles of the day, I often thought, as I tossed on the bed, what my fate would have been, had the mob caught me and found out that I was not Steve Brodie!

Now the engineer who lately gave an account before a technical body of a novel remedy against static based on a "heretofore unknown law of nature," seems to have been as reckless as myself when he contended that these disturbances propagate up and down, while those of a transmitter proceed along the earth. It would mean that a condenser as this globe, with its gaseous envelope, could be charged and discharged in a manner quite contrary to the fundamental teachings propounded in every elemental text book of physics. Such a supposition would have been condemned as erroneous, even in Franklin's time, for the facts bearing on this were then well known and the identity between atmospheric electricity and that developed by machines was fully established. Obviously, natural and artificial disturbances propagate through the earth and the air in exactly the same way, and both set up electromotive forces in the horizontal as well as vertical sense. Interference can not be overcome by any such methods as were proposed. The truth is this: In the air, the potential increases at the rate of about fifty volts per foot of elevation, owing to which there may be a difference of pressure amounting to twenty, or even forty thousand volts between the upper and lower ends of the antenna. The masses of the charged atmosphere are constantly in motion and give up electricity to the conductor, not continuously, but rather disruptively, this producing a grinding noise in a sensitive telephonic receiver. The higher the terminal and the greater the space encompassed by the wires, the more pronounced is the effect, but it must be understood that it is purely local and has little to do with the real trouble.

In 1900, while perfecting my wireless system, one form of apparatus compressed four antennae. These were carefully calibrated in the same frequency and connected in multiple with the object of magnifying the action in receiving from any direction. When I desired to ascertain the origin of the transmitted impulse, each diagonally situated pair was put in series with a primary coil energizing the detector circuit. In the former case, the sound was loud in the telephone; in the latter it ceased, as expected, the two antennae neutralizing each other, but the true statics manifested themselves in both instances and I had to devise special preventives embodying different principles. By employing receivers connected to two points of the ground, as suggested by me long ago, this trouble caused by the charged air, which is very serious in the structures as now built, is nullified and besides, the liability of all kinds of interference is reduced to about one-half because of the directional character of the circuit. This was perfectly self-evident, but came as a revelation to some simple-minded wireless folks whose experience was confined to forms of apparatus that could have been improved with an ax, and they have been disposing of the bear's skin before killing him. If it were true that strays performed such antics, it would be easy to get rid of them by receiving without aerials. But, as a matter of fact, a wire buried in the ground which, conforming to this view, should be absolutely immune, is more susceptible to certain extraneous impulses than one placed vertically in the air. To state it fairly, a slight progress has been made, but not by virtue of any particular method or device. It was achieved simply by discerning the enormous structures, which are bad enough for transmission but wholly unsuitable for reception and adopting a more appropriate type of receiver. As I have said before, to dispose of this difficulty for good, a radical change must be made in the system and the sooner this is done the better.

It would be calamitous, indeed, if at this time when the art is in its infancy and the vast majority, not excepting even experts, have no conception of its ultimate possibilities, a measure would be rushed through the legislature making it a government monopoly. This was proposed a few weeks ago by Secretary Daniels and no doubt that distinguished official has made his appeal to the Senate and House of Representatives with sincere conviction. But universal evidence unmistakably shows that the best results are always obtained in healthful commercial competition. There are, however, exceptional reasons why wireless should be given the fullest freedom of development. In the first place, it offers prospects immeasurably greater and more vital to betterment of human life than any other invention or discovery in the history of man. Then again, it must be understood that this wonderful art has been, in its entirety, evolved here and can be called "American" with more right and propriety than the telephone, the incandescent lamp or the aeroplane.

Enterprising press agents and stock jobbers have been so successful in spreading misinformation, that even so excellent a periodical as the Scientific American, accords the chief credit to a foreign country. The Germans, of course, gave us the Hertz waves and the Russian, English, French and Italian experts were quick in using them for signaling purposes. It was an obvious application of the new agent and accomplished with the old classical and unimproved induction coil, scarcely anything more than another kind of heliography. The radius of transmission was very limited, the result attained of little value, and the Hertz oscillations, as a means for conveying intelligence, could have been advantageously replaced by sound waves, which I advocated in 1891. Moreover, all of these attempts were made three years after the basic principles of the wireless system, which is universally employed today, and its potent instrumentalities had been clearly described and developed in America.

No trace of those Hertzian appliances and methods remains today. We have proceeded in the very opposite direction and what has been done is the product of the brains and efforts of citizens of this country. The fundamental patents have expired and the opportunities are open to all. The chief argument of the secretary is based on interference. According to his statement, reported in the New York Herald of July 29th, signals from a powerful station can be intercepted in every village in the world. In view of this fact, which was demonstrated in my experiments in 1900, it would be of little use to impose restrictions in the United States.

As throwing light on this point, I may mention that only recently an odd looking gentleman called on me with the object of enlisting my services in the construction of world transmitters in some distant land. "We have no money," he said, "but carloads of solid gold, and we will give you a liberal amount." I told him that I wanted to see first what will be done with my inventions in America, and this ended the interview. But I am satisfied that some dark forces are at work, and as time goes on the maintenance of continuous communication will be rendered more difficult. The only remedy is a system immune against interruption. It has been perfected, it exists, and all that is necessary is to put it in operation.

The terrible conflict is still uppermost in the minds and perhaps the greatest importance will be attached to the magnifying transmitter as a machine for attack and defense, more particularly in connection with telautamatics. This invention is a logical outcome of observations begun in my boyhood and continued throughout my life. When the first results were published, the Electrical Review stated editorially that it would become one of the "most potent factors in the advance of civilization of mankind." The time is not distant when this prediction will be fulfilled. In 1898 and 1900, it was offered by me to the government and might have been adopted, were I one of those who would go to Alexander's shepherd when they want a favor from Alexander!

At that time I really thought that it would abolish war, because of its unlimited destructiveness and exclusion of the personal element of combat. But while I have not lost faith in its potentialities, my views have changed since. War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only though annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong.

I have expressed myself in this regard fourteen years ago, when a combination of a few leading governments, a sort of Holy alliance, was advocated by the late Andrew Carnegie, who may be fairly considered as the father of this idea, having given to it more publicity and impetus than anybody else prior to the efforts of the President. While it can not be denied that such aspects might be of material advantage to some less fortunate peoples, it can not attain the chief objective sought. Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization, because few indeed, will admit the reality < that God made man in His image < in which case all earth men are alike. There is in fact but one race, of many colors. Christ is but one person, yet he is of all people, so why do some people think themselves better than some other people?

As I view the world of today, in the light of the gigantic struggle we have witnessed, I am filled with conviction that the interests of humanity would be best served if the United States remained true to its traditions, true to God whom it pretends to believe, and kept out of "entangling alliances." Situated as it is, geographically remote from the theaters of impending conflicts, without incentive to territorial aggrandizement, with inexhaustible resources and immense population thoroughly imbued with the spirit of liberty and right, this country is placed in a unique and privileged position. It is thus able to exert, independently, its colossal strength and moral force to the benefit of all, more judiciously and effectively, than as a member of a league.

I have dwelt on the circumstances of my early life and told of an affliction which compelled me to unremitting exercise of imagination and self-observation. This mental activity, at first involuntary under the pressure of illness and suffering, gradually became second nature and led me finally to recognize that I was but an automaton devoid of free will in thought and action and merely responsible to the forces of the environment. Our bodies are of such complexity of structure, the motions we perform are so numerous and involved and the external impressions on our sense organs to such a degree delicate and elusive, that it is hard for the average person to grasp this fact. Yet nothing is more convincing to the trained investigator than the mechanistic theory of life which had been, in a measure, understood and propounded by Descartes three hundred years ago. In his time many important functions of our organisms were unknown and especially with respect to the nature of light and the construction and operation of the eye, philosophers were in the dark.

In recent years the progress of scientific research in these fields has been such as to leave no room for a doubt in regard to this view on which many works have been published. One of its ablest and most eloquent exponents is, perhaps, Felix le Dantec, formerly assistant of Pasteur. Professor Jacques Loeb has performed remarkable experiments in heliotropism, clearly establishing the controlling power of light in lower forms of organisms and his latest book, Forced Movements, is revelatory. But while men of science accept this theory simply as any other that is recognized, to me it is a truth which I hourly demonstrate by every act and thought of mine. The consciousness of the external impression prompting me to any kind of exertion, < physical or mental, is ever present in my mind. Only on very rare occasions, when I was in a state of exceptional concentration, have I found difficulty in locating the original impulse. The by far greater number of human beings are never aware of what is passing around and within them and millions fall victims of disease and die prematurely just on this account. The commonest, every-day occurrences appear to them mysterious and inexplicable. One may feel a sudden wave of sadness and rack his brain for an explanation, when he might have noticed that it was caused by a cloud cutting off the rays of the sun. He may see the image of a friend dear to him under conditions which he construes as very peculiar, when only shortly before he has passed him in the street or seen his photograph somewhere. When he loses a collar button, he fusses and swears for an hour, being unable to visualize his previous actions and locate the object directly. Deficient observation is merely a form of ignorance and responsible for the many morbid notions and foolish ideas prevailing. There is not more than one out of every ten persons who does not believe in telepathy and other psychic manifestations, spiritualism and communion with the dead, and who would refuse to listen to willing or unwilling deceivers?

Just to illustrate how deeply rooted this tendency has become even among the clear-headed American population, I may mention a comical incident. Shortly before the war, when the exhibition of my turbines in this city elicited widespread comment in the technical papers, I anticipated that there would be a scramble among manufacturers to get hold of the invention and I had particular designs on that man from Detroit who has an uncanny faculty for accumulating millions. So confident was I, that he would turn up some day, that I declared this as certain to my secretary and assistants. Sure enough, one fine morning a body of engineers from the Ford Motor Company presented themselves with the request of discussing with me an important project. "Didn't I tell you?," I remarked triumphantly to my employees, and one of them said, "You are amazing, Mr. Tesla. Everything comes out exactly as you predict."

As soon as these hard-headed men were seated, I of course, immediately began to extol the wonderful features of my turbine, when the spokesman interrupted me and said, "We know all about this, but we are on a special errand. We have formed a psychological society for the investigation of psychic phenomena and we want you to join us in this undertaking." I suppose these engineers never knew how near they came to being fired out of my office.

Ever since I was told by some of the greatest men of the time, leaders in science whose names are immortal, that I am possessed of an unusual mind, I bent all my thinking faculties on the solution of great problems regardless of sacrifice. For many years I endeavored to solve the enigma of death, and watched eagerly for every kind of spiritual indication. But only once in the course of my existence have I had an experience which momentarily impressed me as supernatural. It was at the time of my mother's death.

I had become completely exhausted by pain and long vigilance, and one night was carried to a building about two blocks from our home. As I lay helpless there, I thought that if my mother died while I was away from her bedside, she would surely give me a sign. Two or three months before, I was in London in company with my late friend, Sir William Crookes, when spiritualism was discussed and I was under the full sway of these thoughts. I might not have paid attention to other men, but was susceptible to his arguments as it was his epochal work on radiant matter, which I had read as a student, that made me embrace the electrical career. I reflected that the conditions for a look into the beyond were most favorable, for my mother was a woman of genius and particularly excelling in the powers of intuition. During the whole night every fiber in my brain was strained in expectancy, but nothing happened until early in the morning, when I fell in a sleep, or perhaps a swoon, and saw a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother. The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices. In that instant a certitude, which no words can express, came upon me that my mother had just died. And that was true. I was unable to understand the tremendous weight of the painful knowledge I received in advance, and wrote a letter to Sir William Crookes while still under the domination of these impressions and in poor bodily health. When I recovered, I sought for a long time the external cause of this strange manifestation and, to my great relief, I succeeded after many months of fruitless effort.

I had seen the painting of a celebrated artist, representing allegorically one of the seasons in the form of a cloud with a group of angels which seemed to actually float in the air, and this had struck me forcefully. It was exactly the same that appeared in my dream, with the exception of my mother's likeness. The music came from the choir in the church nearby at the early mass of Easter morning, explaining everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts.

This occurred long ago, and I have never had the faintest reason since to change my views on psychical and spiritual phenomena, for which there is no foundation. The belief in these is the natural outgrowth of intellectual development. Religious dogmas are no longer accepted in their orthodox meaning, but every individual clings to faith in a supreme power of some kind.

We all must have an ideal to govern our conduct and insure contentment, but it is immaterial whether it be one of creed, art, science, or anything else, so long as it fulfills the function of a dematerializing force. It is essential to the peaceful existence of humanity as a whole that one common conception should prevail. While I have failed to obtain any evidence in support of the contentions of psychologists and spiritualists, I have proved to my complete satisfaction the automatism of life, not only through continuous observations of individual actions, but even more conclusively through certain generalizations. these amount to a discovery which I consider of the greatest moment to human society, and on which I shall briefly dwell.

I got the first inkling of this astonishing truth when I was still a very young man, but for many years I interpreted what I noted simply as coincidences. Namely, whenever either myself or a person to whom I was attached, or a cause to which I was devoted, was hurt by others in a particular way, which might be best popularly characterized as the most unfair imaginable, I experienced a singular and undefinable pain which, for the want of a better term, I have qualified as "cosmic" and shortly thereafter, and invariably, those who had inflicted it came to grief. After many such cases I confided this to a number of friends, who had the opportunity to convince themselves of the theory of which I have gradually formulated and which may be stated in the following few words: Our bodies are of similar construction and exposed to the same external forces. This results in likeness of response and concordance of the general activities on which all our social and other rules and laws are based. We are automata entirely controlled by the forces of the medium, being tossed about like corks on the surface of the water, but mistaking the resultant of the impulses from the outside for the free will. The movements and other actions we perform are always life preservative and though seemingly quite independent from one another, we are connected by invisible links. So long as the organism is in perfect order, it responds accurately to the agents that prompt it, but the moment that there is some derangement in any individual, his self-preservative power is impaired.

Everybody understands, of course, that if one becomes deaf, has his eyes weakened, or his limbs injured, the chances for his continued existence are lessened. But this is also true, and perhaps more so, of certain defects in the brain which drive the automaton, more or less, of that vital quality and cause it to rush into destruction. A very sensitive and observant being, with his highly developed mechanism all intact, and acting with precision in obedience to the changing conditions of the environment, is endowed with a transcending mechanical sense, enabling him to evade perils too subtle to be directly perceived. When he comes in contact with others whose controlling organs are radically faulty, that sense asserts itself and he feels the "cosmic" pain.

The truth of this has been borne out in hundreds of instances and I am inviting other students of nature to devote attention to this subject, believing that through combined systematic effort, results of incalculable value to the world will be attained. The idea of constructing an automaton, to bear out my theory, presented itself to me early, but I did not begin active work until 1895, when I started my wireless investigations. During the succeeding two or three years, a number of automatic mechanisms, to be actuated from a distance, were constructed by me and exhibited to visitors in my laboratory.

In 1896, however, I designed a complete machine capable of a multitude of operations, but the consummation of my labors was delayed until late in 1897.

This machine was illustrated and described in my article in the Century Magazine of June, 1900; and other periodicals of that time and when first shown in the beginning of 1898, it created a sensation such as no other invention of mine has ever produced. In November, 1898, a basic patent on the novel art was granted to me, but only after the examiner-in-chief had come to New York and witnessed the performance, for what I claimed seemed unbelievable. I remember that when later I called on an official in Washington, with a view of offering the invention to the Government, he burst out in laughter upon my telling him what I had accomplished. Nobody thought then that there was the faintest prospect of perfecting such a device. It is unfortunate that in this patent, following the advice of my attorneys, I indicated the control as being affected through the medium of a single circuit and a well-known form of detector, for the reason that I had not yet secured protection on my methods and apparatus for individualization. As a matter of fact, my boats were controlled through the joint action of several circuits and interference of every kind was excluded.

Most generally, I employed receiving circuits in the form of loops, including condensers, because the discharges of my high-tension transmitter ionized the air in the (laboratory) so that even a very small aerial would draw electricity from the surrounding atmosphere for hours.

Just to give an idea, I found, for instance, that a bulb twelve inches in diameter, highly exhausted, and with one single terminal to which a short wire was attached, would deliver well on to one thousand successive flashes before all charge of the air in the laboratory was neutralized. The loop form of receiver was not sensitive to such a disturbance and it is curious to note that it is becoming popular at this late date. In reality, it collects much less energy than the aerials or a long grounded wire, but it so happens that it does away with a number of defects inherent to the present wireless devices.

In demonstrating my invention before audiences, the visitors were requested to ask questions, however involved, and the automaton would answer them by signs. This was considered magic at the time, but was extremely simple, for it was myself who gave the replies by means of the device.

At the same period, another larger telautomatic boat was constructed, a photograph of which was shown in the October 1919 number of the Electrical Experimenter. It was controlled by loops, having several turns placed in the hull, which was made entirely water-tight and capable of submergence. The apparatus was similar to that used in the first with the exception of certain special features I introduced as, for example, incandescent lamps which afforded a visible evidence of the proper functioning of the machine. These automata, controlled within the range of vision of the operator, were, however, the first and rather crude steps in the evolution of the art of Telautomatics as I had conceived it.

The next logical improvement was its application to automatic mechanisms beyond the limits of vision and at great distances from the center of control, and I have ever since advocated their employment as instruments of warfare in preference to guns. The importance of this now seems to be recognized, if I am to judge from casual announcements through the press, of achievements which are said to be extraordinary but contain no merit of novelty, whatever. In an imperfect manner it is practicable, with the existing wireless plants, to launch an aeroplane, have it follow a certain approximate course, and perform some operation at a distance of many hundreds of miles. A machine of this kind can also be mechanically controlled in several ways and I have no doubt that it may prove of some usefulness in war. But there are to my best knowledge, no instrumentalities in existence today with which such an object could be accomplished in a precise manner. I have devoted years of study to this matter and have evolved means, making such and greater wonders easily realizable.

As stated on a previous occasion, when I was a student at college I conceived a flying machine quite unlike the present ones. The underlying principle was sound, but could not be carried into practice for want of a prime-mover of sufficiently great activity. In recent years, I have successfully solved this problem and am now planning aerial machines *devoid of sustaining planes, ailerons, propellers, and other external* attachments, which will be capable of immense speeds and are very likely to furnish powerful arguments for peace in the near future. Such a machine, sustained and propelled *entirely by reaction*, is shown on one of the pages of my lectures, and is supposed to be controlled either mechanically, or by wireless energy. By installing proper plants, it will be practicable to *project a missile of this kind into the air and drop it* almost on the very spot designated, which may be thousands of miles away.

But we are not going to stop at this. Telautomats will be ultimately produced, capable of acting as if possessed of their own intelligence, and their advent will create a revolution. As early as 1898, I proposed to representatives of a large manufacturing concern the construction and public exhibition of an automobile carriage which, left to itself, would perform a great variety of operations involving something akin to judgment. But my proposal was deemed chimerical at the time and nothing came of it.

At present, many of the ablest minds are trying to devise expedients for preventing a repetition of the awful conflict which is only theoretically ended and the duration and main issues of which I have correctly predicted in an article printed in the Sun of December 20, 1914. The proposed League is not a remedy but, on the contrary, in the opinion of a number of competent men, may bring about results just the opposite.

It is particularly regrettable that a punitive policy was adopted in framing the terms of peace, because a few years hence, it will be possible for nations to fight without armies, ships or guns, by weapons far more terrible, to the destructive action and range of which there is virtually no limit. Any city, at a distance, whatsoever, from the enemy, can be destroyed by him and no power on earth can stop him from doing so. If we want to avert an impending calamity and a state of things which may transform the globe into an inferno, we should push the development of flying machines and wireless transmission of energy without an instant's delay and with all the power and resources of the nation.


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Wednesday, May 23, 2007 



NIKOLA TESLA  AND  SWAMI VIVEKANANDA





In the early 1890s, one of the greatest scientists of the western world worked on a challenge thrown at him by one of greatest Indian philosophers. Nikola Tesla, the extraordinary inventor and father of electricity as we know it today, met with Swami Vivekananda - one of the greatest spiritualists of Hinduism. The Indian Swami offered him a treasure trove of Vedic wisdom about the matters of energy and matter, about how the vedic science considered the universe to be charged. Tesla promised the Swami that he would mathematically demonstrate that force and matter could be equated to potential energy in some fashion.

It was at a party given by Sarah Bernhardt that Nikola Tesla first met with Swami Vivekananda.
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Sarah Bernhardt was playing the part of 'Iziel' in a play of the same name. It was a French version about the life of Buddha. The actress upon seeing Swami Vivekananda in the audience, arranged a meeting which was also attended by Nikola Tesla. In a letter to a friend, dated February 13th, 1896, Swami Vivekananda noted the following:



... Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic Prana and Akasha and the Kalpas, which according to him are the only theories modern science can entertain.....Mr. Tesla thinks he can demonstrate that mathematically that internal linkforce and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go see him next week to get this mathematical demonstration.


....

NIKOLA TESLA   &   SWAMI VIVEKANANDA





Peerless men in their respective fields, Swami Vivekananda and Nikola Tesla frequented the same social circles while the Swami was in America from 1893 on and had several opportunities to discuss science and religion at length.

Tesla met Swami Vivekananda in 1893 at the Chicago World Fair held in connection with the World's Parliament of Religions. He could have also first met him in 1896, after Tesla attended the swami's lectures in New York. Tesla was moved by these lectures .

About a year after their meeting, Vivekananda was undoubtedly referring to Tesla when he told an audience in India: ....

"I have myself been told by some of the best scientific minds of the day how wonderfully rational the conclusions of Vedanta are. I know one of them personally, who scarcely has time to eat his meal or go out of his laboratory, but who yet would stand by the hour to attend my lectures on the Vedanta; for, as he expresses it, they are so scientific, they so exactly harmonize with the aspirations of the age and with the conclusions to which modern science is coming at the present time."



 and inspired with work of Nikola Tesla , Swami Vivekananda wrote about electricity in his book "Raja Yoga" :

"To give another example; we can transmit electric energy to any part of the world, but we have to send it through wires. The nature, however, can send enormous quantities of electricity without any wire. Why wouldn't we be able to do the same? We can send mental electricity anywhere."

Swami Vivekananda's Speech in Chicago

The World's Parliament of Religions

WELCOME ADDRESS - Chicago, Sept 11, 1893
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The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy
An Article by Toby GrotzWeb Publication by Mountain Man Graphics, Australia - Southern Autumn of 1997

Nikola Tesla used ancient Sanskrit terminology in his descriptions of natural phenomena. As early as 1891 Tesla described the universe as a kinetic system filled with energy which could be harnessed at any location. His concepts during the following years were greatly influenced by the teachings of Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda was the first of a succession of eastern yogi's who brought Vedic philosophy and religion to the west. After meeting the Swami and after continued study of the Eastern view of the mechanisms driving the material world, Tesla began using the Sanskrit words Akasha, Prana, and the concept of a luminiferous ether to describe the source, existence and construction of matter. This paper will trace the development of Tesla's understanding of Vedic Science, his correspondence with Lord Kelvin concerning these matters, and the relation between Tesla and Walter Russell and other turn of the century scientists concerning advanced understanding of physics. Finally, after being obscured for many years, the author will give a description of what he believes is the the pre-requisite for the free energy systems envisioned by Tesla.Tesla's Earler Description of the Physical Universe By the year 1891, Nikola Tesla had invented many useful devices. These included a system of arc lighting (1886), the alternating current motor, power generation and transmission systems (1888), systems of electrical conversion and distribution by oscillatory discharges (1889), and a generator of high frequency currents (1890), to name a few. The most well known patent centers around an inspiration that occurred while walking with a friend in a park in Budapest, Hungry. It was while observing the sunset that Tesla had a vision of how rotating electromagnetic fields could be used in a new form of electric motor. his led to the well known system of alternating current power distribution. In 1891 however, Tesla patented what one day may become his most famous invention. It is the basis for the wireless transmission of electrical power and is know as the Tesla Coil Transformer. It was during this year that Tesla made the following comments during a speech before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers: "Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe. This idea is not novel... We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians... Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic.? If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic - and this we know it is, for certain - then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature." [1] This description of the physical mechanisms of the universe was given before Tesla became familiar with the Vedic science of the eastern Nations of India, Tibet, and Nepal. This science was first popualized in the United States and the west during the three year visit of Swami Vivekananda.Vedic Science and Swami Vivekananda The Vedas are a collection of writings consisting of hymns, prayers, myths, historical accounting, dissertations on science, and the nature of reality, which date back at least 5,000 years. The nature of matter, antimatter, and the make up of atomic structure are described in the Vedas. The language of the Vedas is known as Sanskrit. The origin of Sanskrit is not fully understood. Western scholars suggest that it was brought into the Himalayas and thence south into India by the southward migrations of the Aryan culture. Paramahansa Yogananda and other historians however do not subscribe to that theory, pointing out that there is no evidence within India to substantiate such claims. [2] There are words in Sanskrit that describe concepts totally foreign to the western mind. Single words may require a full paragraph for translation into english. Having studied Sanskrit for a brief period during the late 70's, it finally occurred to this writer that Tesla's use of Vedic terminology could provide a key to understanding his view of electromagnetism and the nature of the universe. But where did Tesla learn Vedic concepts and Sanskrit terminology? A review of the well known biographies by Cheney, Hunt and Draper, and O'Neil , reveal no mention of Tesla's knowledge of Sanskrit. O'Neal however includes the following excerpt from an unpublished article called Man's Greatest Achievement: "There manifests itself in the fully developed being , Man, a desire mysterious, inscrutable and irresistible: to imitate nature, to create, to work himself the wonders he perceives.... Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance." According to Leland Anderson the article was written May 13th, 1907. Anderson also suggested that it was through association with Swami Vivekananda that Tesla may have come into contact with Sanskrit terminology and that John Dobson of the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers Association had researched that association. Swami Vivekananda was born in Calcutta, India in 1863. He was inspired by his teacher, Ramakrishna to serve men as visible manifestations of God. In 1893 Swami Vivekananda began a tour of the west by attending the Parliament of Religions held in Chicago. During the three years that he toured the United States and Europe, Vivekananda met with many of the well known scientists of the time including Lord Kelvin and Nikola Tesla. According to Swami Nikhilananda: Nikola Tesla, the great scientist who specialized in the field of electricity, was much impressed to hear from the Swami his explanation of the Samkhya cosmogony and the theory of cycles given by the Hindus. He was particularly struck by the resemblance between the Samkhya theory of matter and energy and that of modern physics. The Swami also met in New York Sir William Thompson, afterwards Lord Kelvin, and Professor Helmholtz, two leading representatives of western science. Sarah Bernhardt, the famous French actress had an interview with the Swami and greatly admired his teachings. It was at a party given by Sarah Bernhardt that Nikola Tesla probably first met Swami Vivekananda. Sarah Bernhardt was playing the part of 'Iziel' in a play of the same name. It was a French version about the life of Bhudda. The actress upon seeing Swami Vivekananda in the audience, arranged a meeting which was also attended by Nikola Tesla. In a letter to a friend, dated February 13th, 1896, Swami Vivekananda noted the following: ...Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic Prana and Akasha and the Kalpas, which according to him are the only theories modern science can entertain.....Mr Tesla thinks he can demonstrate that mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go see him next week to get this mathematical demonstration. Swami Vivekananda was hopeful that Tesla would be able to show that what we call matter is simply potential energy because that would reconcile the teachings of the Vedas with modern science. The Swami realized that "In that case, the Vedantic cosmology [would] be placed on the surest of foundations". The harmony between Vedantic theories and and western science was explained by the following diagram:
BRAHMAN = THE ABSOLUTE || MAHAT OR ISHVARA = PRIMAL CREATIVE ENERGY - PRANA and AKASHA = ENERGY and MATTER
Tesla understood the Sanskrit terminology and philosophy and found that it was a good means to describe the physical mechanisms of the universe as seen through his eyes. It would behoove those who would attempt to understand the science behind the inventions of Nikola Tesla to study Sanskrit and Vedic philosophy. Tesla apparently failed to show the identity of energy and matter. If he had, certainly Swami Vivekananda would have recorded that occasion. The mathematical proof of the principle did come until about ten years later when Albert Einstein published his paper on relativity. What had been known in the East for the last 5,000 years was then known to the West. Brahman is defined as the one self existent impersonal spirit; the Divine Essence, from which all things emanate, by which they are sustained, and to which they return. Notice that this is very similar to the concept of the Great Spirit as understood by Native American cultures. Ishvara is the Supreme Ruler; the highest possible conception of the Absolute, which is beyond all thought. Mahat means literally the Great One, and is also interpreted as meaning universal mind or cosmic intelligence. Prana means energy (usually translated as life force) and Akasha means matter (usually translated as ether). Dobson points out that the more common translations for Akasha and Prana are not quite correct, but that Tesla did understand their true meanings. The meeting with Swami Vivekananda greatly stimulated Nikola Tesla's interest in Eastern Science. The Swami later remarked during a lecture in India, "I myself have been told by some of the best scientific minds of the day, how wonderfully rational the conclusions of the Vedanta are. I know of one of them personally, who scarcely has time to eat his meal, or go out of his laboratory, but who would stand by the hour to attend my lectures on the Vedanta; for, as he expresses it, they are so scientific, they so exactly harmonize with the aspirations of the age and with the conclusions to which modern science is coming at the present time". Tesla and Lord Kelvin William S. Thompson was one of the prominent scientists and engineers of the 1800s. He developed analogies between heat and electricity and his work influenced the theories developed by James Clerk Maxwell, one of the founders of electromagnetic theory. Thompson supervised the successful laying of the Trans Atlantic Cable and for that work was knighted Lord Kelvin. Kelvin had endorsed Tesla's theories and proposed system for the wireless transmission of electrical power. FootNOTE- Grotz PACE Tesla continued to study Hindu and Vedic philosophy for a number of years as indicated by the following letter written to him by Lord Kelvin. 15, Eaton Place London, S.W. May 20, 1902 Dear Mr. Tesla, I do not know how I can ever thank you enough for the most kind letter of May, 10, which I found in my cabin in the Lucania, with the beautiful books which you most kindly sent me along with it: -"The Buried Temple", "The Gospel of Bhudda", Les Grands Inities", the exquisite edition of Rossetti's "House of Life", and last but not least the Century Magazine for June, 1900 with the splendid and marvelous photographs , full of electrical lessons. We had a most beautiful passage across the Atlantic, much the finest I have ever had. I was trying hard nearly all the way, but quite unsuccessfully, to find something definite as to the functions of ether in respect to plain, old fashioned magnetism. A propos of this, I have instructed the publishers, Messrs. Macmillan, to send you at the Waldorf a copy of my book (Collection of Separate Papers) on Electrostatics and Magnetism. I shall be glad if you will accept it from me as a very small mark of my gratitude to you for your kindness. You may possibly find something interesting in the articles on Atmospheric Electricity which it contains. Lady Kelvin joins me in kind regards, and I remain, Yours always truly, Kelvin Thank you also warmly for the beautiful flowers Tesla and Russell Walter Russell was one of the most accomplished artists, sculptors, writers and scientists of this century. His periodic chart of the elements accurately predicted the location and characteristics of four elements years before they were discovered in laboratories. These are now known as Deuterium, Tritium, Neptunium, and Plutonium. Russell apparently entered into a heightened state of awareness after being struck by lightning. He began several weeks of drawing and writing about the basic nature and make up of the physical universe. Russells' family finally called the family doctor to determine if Russell should be committed to an mental institution. The doctor, upon seeing the results of Russells weeks of work, said that he did not know what Russell was doing, but that he definitely was not mad. Although the exact time and occasion of their meeting has not yet been determined, Nikola Tesla and Walter Russell did meet and discuss their respective cosmologies. 14 Tesla recognized the wisdom and power of Russells' teaching and urged Russell to lock up his knowledge in a safe for 1,000 years until man was ready for it. The Appearance of Free Energy Or Why Free Energy has not yet Happened Comments, Possibilities and Socio Economic Implications Although Tesla did not accept many of the tenants of relativity and quantum theory and never made the connection between matter and energy, he did recognize the possibility of free and unlimited energy as demonstrated by the following statement. Can Man control [the ] grandest, most awe inspiring of all processes in nature?...If he could do this, he would have powers almost unlimited and supernatural... He could cause planes to collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light. He could originate and develop life in all its infinite forms....[Such powers] would place him beside his creator, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny. We see that Tesla is asking a question, speculating, searching for an answer. If Tesla had developed free energy sources or learned how to manipulate space time and gravity, during the time of his most public and productive years, (up until about 1920), he would have had answers to those questions. Tesla's most misunderstood invention is popularly known as the "Death Ray". It was simply a particle beam weapon which he proposed in 1937 and was fabricated under contracts with Alcoa Aluminum and the English and Italian governments. It used electrostatic propulsion techniques and similar devices are being developed today by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) and the US Army Strategic Defense Command. So we see that mankind has not yet harnessed the infinite power of the universe as envisioned by Nikola Tesla. The question remains, why not? Free energy devices, if they are feasible, are not about smaller faster microcircuits or a bigger better mouse traps. This is a technology which may revolutionize the socio-economic status quo on planet Earth. At this moment the big pie is unevenly divided. One quarter of the population on this rock, the third stone from the sun, consumes three quarters of the yearly resource output. As one can easily deduce, from a brief study of world affairs, there are about three billion people who have just about had it with this scenario. There are wars starvation and strife in every nook and cranny of the planet. So what do we do about it? Spaceship Earth Needs A Flight Plan Either we divide the pie more evenly or we make the pie larger. The first option requires that our standard of living must fall so that the standard of living in the third world may rise. The second option allows us to maintain our standard of living while we help raise the standard of living of under privileged nations. This we must do. It is our destiny. It is our responsibility. It is our final test. Thirty thousand people starve to death every day on this planet, most of them are children. Nations fight nations, war is part of our lives. What drives our economy in the western world, allows us to enjoy a high standard of living, a life of leisure compared to our neighbors south of the imaginary line called a border? Many answers both economic, social, political, and spiritual can be given. We do know that the standard of living that a nation enjoys is directly related energy consumption. Energy drives the economies of nations and Tesla's life long goal was to make electric power equally available to all people any where on this planet. He continued to promote his plan for the wireless transmission of power in the yearly interviews he gave on his birthday as late as 1940. Electrical power allows on site processing of raw materials. Electrical power can run pumps from water wells in areas affected by drought. Electrical power delivered to the poverty stricken areas of the world can make the pie larger, can help bring about the needed economic equality which is our birth right. Why hasn't power been made equally available to all people and nations? Why haven't the much touted free energy devices described by Tom Bearden, John Bedini, Bruce DePalma, and others ever materialized? Perhaps because "easy things are seldom done for the same reason that impossible things are rarely done: no one will pay for anything believed to be easy or impossible". Perhaps because when we talk about power there is more there than one would initially visualize. What we are talking about is personal power, national power, planetary power, karmic power and the power of love. The sages tell us that in order to enjoy power we have to let go of power, to overcome ourselves. As an example this author can describe one of his recent experiences. After a very successful symposium celebrating the 100th year after Nikola Tesla arrived in the United States 21, a non profit corporation, was formed specifically to encourage and pursue research into the inventions and discoveries of Nikola Tesla. Two years later, after a second symposium, several of the founding members approached the board of directors with a proposal to validate Tesla's claim that wireless transmission of power was possible. Board members suggested that permission be obtained from the FCC, an environmental impact statement be filed with the EPA, and we should go form "our own non profit corporation". It was also decided that since there was no procedure to cover research, the organization could not be involved. Another goal of the organization had been to establish a museum to be named the Nikola Tesla Museum of Science and Technology. We proposed that since 60 -70 billion dollars are given away to non profit organizations annually, we had as good a chance as any other organization for obtaining funding, for a museum or research. We reasoned that: "Since only 16 the museums in this country are science museums, this museum in honor of Nikola Tesla will help educate the public in technological areas. With the need for economic revitalization of industry in Colorado, 1986is the time to begin supporting the scientific education of our region. With the current statistics showing that the United States is falling behind the world technologically, the effort to educate the public is becoming more important, and the surge of public awareness of Nikola Tesla's inventions makes him an appropriate namesake for a science and technology museum." [23] The board moved to table our proposal indefinitely. What had happened? Of the 15 - 20 people that had started the organization only four remained as part of the governing body. Three of those members were opposed to research. The collective mind of the board of directors had become the antithesis of the momentum Tesla had gained in his lifetime. Unlike the independent inventor and businessman, the board was now composed of members who were bureaucrats and paper pushers for Fortune 500 companies. Tesla was a vegetarian, the board members all ate meat. Tesla did not ask for permission to be inventive and strike out on bold new adventures, the board needed approval from higher sources. The dichotomies were endless. Tesla's visions have been delayed for 89 years. The squabbling started with Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan and Nikola Tesla himself. It continues to this day. Perhaps the reason for the delay of wireless power transmission or free energy devices lies even deeper within the human psyche. Is it possible that we could compare the Tesla story to a biblical story? Bruce Gordan thinks so. In Gordan's analysis Tesla's attempt at building a prototype magnifying transmitter parallels Genesis 11:1-9. "The message; human curiosity and technological derring-do makes God nervous; God demolishes project, confounds language". Gordan further outlines the the scenario as follows: "When everything is perfect, the right time shows up." This is equivalent to saying, "Absolute knowledge in the hands of one whose heart is not yet tender, would be a terrible weapon. We might postulate that technological developments do not occur until the planet is ready. The recent examination of the theory of Gaia credits the Earth with an intelligence. "Thousands of years ago, by means of seeing, sorcerers became aware that the Earth was sentinent and that its awareness could affect the awareness of humans." By implication of reciprocity the reverse could be true. The group or collective unconscious is still struggling with the result of quantum and relativity theory. We as a race were ready for nuclear power, every thing was perfect and the right time showed up. Soon we will have put the technology to good use or abandon it to insure our survival as a species. SO WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT IT FREE ENERGY: CREATING AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME Wireless transmission of power and free energy have not happened yet, perhaps we aren't ready, perhaps the Earth isn't ready. Pogo said it best, " we have met the enemy and it is us." In the Jungian view of collective unconscious, things happen when the time is right, we get what we agree to. We need a flight plan. And that plan must realize that:
WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE OVERCOMES THE LOVE OF POWER THERE WILL BE PEACE

[Source; Girls Lavatory, Boulder High School, Boulder, Colorado] Described as "Post Industrial, neo-technical, teen-age graffiti." "So astounding are the facts in this connection, that it would seem as though the Creator, himself had electrically designed this planet...."Nikola Tesla describing what is now known as Schumann Resonance (7.8 Hz) in "The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires As A Means Of Furthering World Peace", 2. Yogananda, Paramahansa, Autobiography of a Yogi, Self Realization Fellowship,3. Cheney, Margaret, Man Out of Time, Prentice Hall, 1981. 4. Hunt, Inez and Draper. Wanetta, W., Lightning In His Hand, The Life Story Of Nikola Tesla, Omni Publications, Hawthorne, CA, 1981. 5. O'Neal, John, J., Prodigal Genius, The Life Of Nikola Tesla, Ives Washington, Inc., 1944. 6. Anderson, Leland, personal communication. See also Anderson, L.I., and Ratzlaff, J.T., Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography, Ragusan Press, 936 Industrial Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94303, 1979. 7. Nikhilananda, Swami, Vivekananda, The Yogas and Other Works, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York, 1973. 8. Nikhilananda, Swami. 9. Dobson, John, personal communication. 7. Dobson, John, Advaita Vedanta and Modern Science, Vedanta Book Center, 5423 S. Hyde Park, Chicago, IL 60615, 1979. 10. Nikhilananda, Swami. 11. Burke, Marie Louise, Swami Vivekananda in the West, New Discoveries, The World Teacher, Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati, India, 1985, p. 500 12. Grotz, T., "Artificially Stimulated Resonance of the Earth's Schumann Cavity Waveguide", Proceedings of the Third International New Energy Technology Symposium/Exhibition, June 25th-28th, 1988, Hull, Quebec, Planetary Association for Clean Energy, 191 Promenade du Portage/600, Hull, Quebec J8X 2K6 Canada 13. From the personal collection of L. Anderson. 14. Russell, Lao. personal communication. 15. The University of Science and Philosophy, Swannanoa, Waynesboro, VA 22980, (703) 942-5161. 16. First written by Tesla on May 13, 1907, for the "Actors Fair Fund", text transcribed from an A.L.S. in the collections of the Bakken Library of Electricity in Life. The article later appeared in the "New York American", July 6, 1930, pg. 10. 17. Tesla, Nikola, The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media, Proceedings of the Tesla Centennial Symposium, Grotz, T. & Rauscher, E., Editors, 1984. 18. Turchi, P.J.,Conte, D.,Seiler, S., Electrostatic Acceleration of Microprojectiles to Ultrahypervelocities, "Proceedings of the Seventh Pulsed Power Conference", June 12th-14th, Monterey, California, Jointly Sponsored by the DOD, DOE, and the IEEE Electron Devices Society. 19. "Death Ray for Planes", New York Times, September 20, 1940. 20. Pawlicki, T.B., Exploring Hyperspace, 848 Fort Street, Victoria, B.C., Canada, electronic book on floppy disk, 1988, (Log onto the TESLA BBS at (719) 486-2775 for copy of ASCII text files) 21. Broad, William J., "Tesla a Bizarre Genius, Regains Aura of Greatness", New York Times, Aug. 28th, 1984 22. Deleted 23. Grotz, T., & Sheppard, J., The Nikola Tesla Museum of Science and Technology submitted to the Board of Directors December 12th, 1986. [Available as an ASCII text file on the TESLA BBS (719) 486-2775] 24. Cheney, Margaret, Tesla, Man Out of Time, Prentice Hall Inc, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1981. 25. Gordan, Bruce, private communication, 1988. 26. Arguelles, Jose & Lloydine, personal communication. 27. Hercules, Michael, The Circle of Love, published by the author. 28. Castenada, Carlos, The Power of Silence, Further Lessons of don Jaun, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1987, Pg. 120. FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT TESLA TESLA BBS: This is a full featured computer Bulletin Board Service for access to information about current research and the life and times of Nikola Tesla. A subsection of the Colorado Mountain College BBS, it may be contacted using a computer and 300/1200/2400 baud modems at (719) 486-2775. The Tesla Memorial Society The Tesla Coil Builders Association Nicholas Kosanovich Garry Goldman 453 Martin Road RD #6 Box 181 Lackawanna, NY 14218 Glenns Falls, NY 12801 (716) 822-0281 (518) 792-1003 The Tesla Book Company High Voltage Press PO Box 1649 PO Box 532 Greenville, TX 75401 Claremont, CA 91711 (214) 454-6819About the Author... Mr. Toby Grotz, President, Wireless Engineering is an electrical engineer and has 16 years experience in the field of geophysics, aerospace and industrial research and design. While working for the Geophysical Services Division of Texas Instruments and at the University of Texas at Dallas, Mr. Grotz was introduced to and worked with the geophysical concepts which are of importance to the wireless transmission of power. As a Senior Engineer at Martin Marietta, Mr. Grotz designed and supervised the construction of industrial process control systems and designed and built devices and equipment for use in research and development and for testing space flight hardware. Mr. Grotz also worked for the public utility industry installing mini computer based pollutant measuring data acquisition systems in fossil fuel power plants and as a results engineer in a nuclear power plant. Mr. Grotz organized and chaired the 1984 Tesla Centennial Symposium and the 1986 International Tesla Symposium and was president of the International Tesla Society, a not for profit corporation formed as a result the first symposium. As Project Manager for Project Tesla, Mr. Grotz aided in the design and construction of a recreation of the equipment Nikola Tesla used for wireless transmission of power experiments in 1899 in Colorado Springs. Mr. Grotz received his B.S.E.E. from the University of Connecticut in 1973. E-Mail: wireless@rmi.net





"Yes, I sleep only two hours a day,
but when I sleep,
I sleep well, artistically,

because sleeping is an art,

just like deep breathing....

which must be learned.

That is one of the secrets of the East ....

which, for me is not a secret.


After the sleep, however short, ....

I have to do some mind exercise

in the order to balance ....

the newly received life energy. "....


( N.Tesla )







" To give another example; we can transmit electric energy to any part of the world, but we have to send it through wires. The nature, however, can send enormous quantities of electricity without any wire. Why wouldn't we be able to do the same? We can send mental electricity anywhere. What we call spirit, in a great measure is the same as electricity. It is clear that the nerves fluid contains a certain quantity of electricity, as it is polarized and has all qualities of electricity. Now we can send our mental electricity only through these nerves channels. Why wouldn't we be able to send it without this aid? Yogis say that this is quite possible and realizable, and that when you succeed in doing it, you will be able to do it throughout the whole Universe. You will be able to act anywhere, with any body, without any aid of nervous system. "....



Swami Vivekananda : " Raja Yoga"


5:44 PM 
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Sunday, May 13, 2007 

 Event Program for the unveiling of the Nikola Tesla Memorial Monument at Niagara Falls, Canada on Sunday, July 9, 2006.
 





Unveiling of the Nikola Tesla Memorial Monument will take place on Sunday 9 July, at noon, in Queen Victoria Park directly across from the Horseshoe (Canadian) Falls.
The monument is in honour of the celebration of Nikola Tesla's 150th birthday.  To learn more about Nikola Tesla please visit: http://www.teslasociety.com/


Program

12 noon - Unveiling of the Tesla Monument in Queen Victoria Park

(Directly across from Canadian Falls)

 

2:00 pm - Cultural Program in Oakes Garden Theatre

(Queen Victoria Park & Clifton Hill)

6:00 pm - Evening Program with Music, Food & Refreshments

"Under the Pavilion St. George Serbian Orthodox Church, 6085 Montrose Road, Niagara Falls

 

 

Any assistance and contributions are most welcome and can be sent to:

The Tesla Memorial Committee

(Pay to The Tesla Memorial Fund)

6085 Montrose Rd.

Niagara Falls, ON

L2H 1L4

 

Nikola Tesla Year in 2006
Celebrations are underway in United States, Serbia, Croatia, Republica Srbska, , Australia  and others


..>..>
From fishing rods to death rays: the man who invented the 20th Century


An eccentric Balkan scientist whose inventions changed the world is finally being recognised in his homeland. Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade tells the extraordinary story of Nikola Tesla

Published: 10 July 2006

Brow furrowed in deep concentration and eyes fixed on the crystal-clear waters in front of him, a small boy with dishevelled tufts of hair crouched on the river bank and waited to catch a frog. He wasn't exactly an expert, being less than 10 and having never seen a fishing rod before; but somehow Nikola Tesla knew he would succeed. With little knowledge but an instinctive sense of what was needed, he had set about fashioning one of his own, using little more than a hammer, two stones, wire and a strong piece of string.

Stretching his arm as far as he could without tumbling into the brook, thrusting his strange, makeshift contraption out into the distance, he watched and waited for a tug on the line. And, sure enough, one came within minutes. A fat, comfortable-looking frog on a tree stump succumbed to his homemade prowess, and the young fisherman marched home proudly to his parents, quarry in hand.

It may have been nothing more than a ramshackle fishing rod, and the childhood achievement may have been forgotten almost as quickly as it was fulfilled, but in one respect it was crucial. For the solitary boy who worked so hard on his first creation by the banks of the river was so inspired by his ability to dream up and create things that he carried on studying and inventing for the rest of his life - and ended up becoming one of the world's greatest scientists and inventors.

Born of Serbian parents in the Croatian hamlet of Smiljan in the 1850s, Nikola Tesla was the shy, eccentric scientist whose electronic inventions are reflected ubiquitously in the modern world. His legacy to the western world is all around us, from neon lighting to X-rays to the radio, and, though towards the end of his life his achievements went largely unnoticed, posthumously they have been hailed as some of the most important break-throughs in scientific understanding. Tesla was, his admirers insist, the man who contributed more than anyone else to the high-speed, hi-tech world in which we live. He was, put simply, the man who invented the 20th century.

Now, more than 60 years after he died an impoverished loner and a virtual unknown in his adopted country, the United States, one of the most famous children of the Balkans is gaining the recognition he deserves. Today, Serbia and Croatia begin celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth with the Croatian President Stipe Mesic and Serbian President Boris Tadic in attendance.

Not only are the ceremonies heralded as a fitting way to remember a great and long underappreciated countryman; they are also being greeted as the first occasion for both nations to draw a line under their bloodstained shared history and to rejoice in their common heritage.

"I am proud of my Croatian homeland and my Serb origin", Tesla wrote in his book My Inventions in 1919. Now, finally, it seems, his feelings will be reflected in the way in which he is remembered.

It was from the small and remote village of Smiljan that Tesla, son of an Orthodox priest, started down the road of invention, creation and discovery. It was also there, on the banks of the river, that he first realised his remarkable gift - and made his first fishing rod. "Whenever someone told me a word, I had a vision of it, a vivid picture of an object the word stood for," he wrote later. "I did not feel easy about it, but later found out that I should follow my visions and turn them into something real."

These were only the first hints, experts say, of the unusual gift of a boy who would go on to register more than 700 inventions and 100 patents. Tesla was the master of visualising his ideas first and only later on turning them into models and practice. Recalling his first invention, he wrote in his autobiography that, although he had never seen a fish hook, he "pictured it as something wonderful, endowed with peculiar qualities".

The long list of Tesla's research includes work that enabled Wilhelm Roentgen to discover X-rays in 1895. It also led to the invention of neon light and the modern-day radio, and eventually provided the electronic basis needed for mobile phones, radar and, some say, the internet. His most remarkable discovery was the development of alternating current (AC); Tesla showed that AC produced bigger amounts of electricity and transmitted it over greater distances, thus superseding direct current.

His groundbreaking work means that nowadays he is often referred to as a genius and a visionary by fellow scientists. But during his lifetime his research, too tantalising for others to ignore, was often pounced upon by fellow electronics engineers to forward their own inventions. The radio is a prime example. Officially invented by Guglielmo Marconi at the turn of the 20th century, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1943 - the year of Tesla's death - that it had been the work of the Croatian-born scientist, and that he should be credited with its invention.

Such posterity would have been unimaginable for Tesla's humble parents, who wanted him to be a priest and never once imagined he would make a living out of something as abstract as science. Despite their warnings, the young Tesla left Croatia for Graz in 1877 to study engineering; he moved to Prague afterwards, and then Budapest, where he worked briefly as an engineer for a telephone company. He soon found out the job was limiting and non-creative. As usual, his friends said, his head was buzzing with ideas and a constant craving for creativity, which, to his frustration, he was unable to share with others.

The US, with its relatively progressive scientific culture, seemed the right place to go, and Tesla went to New York in 1884. Five years later he became a US citizen and began working with the inventor Thomas Edison and, later, the American industrialist George Westinghouse. The latter bought and successfully developed Tesla's patents, the most prominent being the introduction of alternating current for power transmission.

While in the US, Tesla became known by many as the quintessential "mad scientist." He had few close friends, among them the writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain and Francis Marion Crawford, and worked alone in his Colorado laboratory for hours on end, often through the night and with little or no sleep. Most people were driven away from the eccentric genius by his obsessive streak and intense, often disturbing, outbursts. Although tall and strikingly handsome, he never married; some claimed he was afraid of women, others that his inventions were his loves and that he could never have given himself so devotedly to a wife as he did to his ideas. "There is no bigger joy or pleasure of soul than the one when an inventor sees the creation of his brain turn to life," he wrote.

Or maybe it was just that he was repulsed by modern women, reacting with horror at their pearls and, in particular, earrings. An ascetic man, afraid of germs and handshakes, he had a special hatred of peaches, whose skin caused him to recoil in disgust. Instead of appreciating his genius, many who met him dismissed him as a madman whose eccentricities betrayed a deeply troubled mind.

The Serb psychiatrist Zarko Trebjesanin believes that despite his seeming modesty, Tesla had a narcissistic streak which revelled in publicity. "He tended to present his discoveries in a shocking and sensational manner that fascinated the public," Trebjesanin says. "He loved to be photographed like a great magician, in his lab, illuminated by artificially induced lightning."

Tesla was described as "a godsend to reporters who sought sensational copy", but a problem to editors who were uncertain how seriously his prophecies should be regarded.

As he grew older, Tesla's ideas became more and more outlandish. Caustic criticism, perhaps understandably, greeted his theories of interplanetary communication; even more so his belief in the invention of so-called "death rays" which could destroy airplanes at the flick of a switch.

Tesla died aged 87 in a New York hotel, a lonely man who had none of the riches normally heaped on scientists of his calibre. He spent the mornings of his later years feeding pigeons in his local park, an anonymous face among many others in a country which had come to deride his work and dismiss him, ironically for a man so crucial to the creation of the modern world, as a relic of the past.

Now, however, the world has been forced to reappraise the man and his work. Unesco has declared 2006 the "year of Nikola Tesla" and his homeland, peaceful after so many years of war, is determined to give proper thanks to its greatest son.

Hundreds of performances, ceremonies and workshops dedicated to Tesla will be held in Serbia, while the Croatian parliament made an official apology last month for having failed to recognise his talent earlier. Hundreds of people are now flocking to the Belgrade museum devoted to his life's work, and the international scientific community has at last paid tribute to this unconventional man who always said he was working "for the benefit of mankind as a whole".

Perhaps the ultimate accolade came with the naming of a crater on the Moon after Tesla, as well as a small planet far away in the solar system. You can't help thinking that the little boy working so hard to make his first rod out of stones and string would have been rather proud.

Brow furrowed in deep concentration and eyes fixed on the crystal-clear waters in front of him, a small boy with dishevelled tufts of hair crouched on the river bank and waited to catch a frog. He wasn't exactly an expert, being less than 10 and having never seen a fishing rod before; but somehow Nikola Tesla knew he would succeed. With little knowledge but an instinctive sense of what was needed, he had set about fashioning one of his own, using little more than a hammer, two stones, wire and a strong piece of string.

Stretching his arm as far as he could without tumbling into the brook, thrusting his strange, makeshift contraption out into the distance, he watched and waited for a tug on the line. And, sure enough, one came within minutes. A fat, comfortable-looking frog on a tree stump succumbed to his homemade prowess, and the young fisherman marched home proudly to his parents, quarry in hand.

It may have been nothing more than a ramshackle fishing rod, and the childhood achievement may have been forgotten almost as quickly as it was fulfilled, but in one respect it was crucial. For the solitary boy who worked so hard on his first creation by the banks of the river was so inspired by his ability to dream up and create things that he carried on studying and inventing for the rest of his life - and ended up becoming one of the world's greatest scientists and inventors.

Born of Serbian parents in the Croatian hamlet of Smiljan in the 1850s, Nikola Tesla was the shy, eccentric scientist whose electronic inventions are reflected ubiquitously in the modern world. His legacy to the western world is all around us, from neon lighting to X-rays to the radio, and, though towards the end of his life his achievements went largely unnoticed, posthumously they have been hailed as some of the most important break-throughs in scientific understanding. Tesla was, his admirers insist, the man who contributed more than anyone else to the high-speed, hi-tech world in which we live. He was, put simply, the man who invented the 20th century.

Now, more than 60 years after he died an impoverished loner and a virtual unknown in his adopted country, the United States, one of the most famous children of the Balkans is gaining the recognition he deserves. Today, Serbia and Croatia begin celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth with the Croatian President Stipe Mesic and Serbian President Boris Tadic in attendance.

Not only are the ceremonies heralded as a fitting way to remember a great and long underappreciated countryman; they are also being greeted as the first occasion for both nations to draw a line under their bloodstained shared history and to rejoice in their common heritage.

"I am proud of my Croatian homeland and my Serb origin", Tesla wrote in his book My Inventions in 1919. Now, finally, it seems, his feelings will be reflected in the way in which he is remembered.

It was from the small and remote village of Smiljan that Tesla, son of an Orthodox priest, started down the road of invention, creation and discovery. It was also there, on the banks of the river, that he first realised his remarkable gift - and made his first fishing rod. "Whenever someone told me a word, I had a vision of it, a vivid picture of an object the word stood for," he wrote later. "I did not feel easy about it, but later found out that I should follow my visions and turn them into something real."

These were only the first hints, experts say, of the unusual gift of a boy who would go on to register more than 700 inventions and 100 patents. Tesla was the master of visualising his ideas first and only later on turning them into models and practice. Recalling his first invention, he wrote in his autobiography that, although he had never seen a fish hook, he "pictured it as something wonderful, endowed with peculiar qualities".

The long list of Tesla's research includes work that enabled Wilhelm Roentgen to discover X-rays in 1895. It also led to the invention of neon light and the modern-day radio, and eventually provided the electronic basis needed for mobile phones, radar and, some say, the internet. His most remarkable discovery was the development of alternating current (AC); Tesla showed that AC produced bigger amounts of electricity and transmitted it over greater distances, thus superseding direct current.

His groundbreaking work means that nowadays he is often referred to as a genius and a visionary by fellow scientists. But during his lifetime his research, too tantalising for others to ignore, was often pounced upon by fellow electronics engineers to forward their own inventions. The radio is a prime example. Officially invented by Guglielmo Marconi at the turn of the 20th century, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1943 - the year of Tesla's death - that it had been the work of the Croatian-born scientist, and that he should be credited with its invention.
Such posterity would have been unimaginable for Tesla's humble parents, who wanted him to be a priest and never once imagined he would make a living out of something as abstract as science. Despite their warnings, the young Tesla left Croatia for Graz in 1877 to study engineering; he moved to Prague afterwards, and then Budapest, where he worked briefly as an engineer for a telephone company. He soon found out the job was limiting and non-creative. As usual, his friends said, his head was buzzing with ideas and a constant craving for creativity, which, to his frustration, he was unable to share with others.

The US, with its relatively progressive scientific culture, seemed the right place to go, and Tesla went to New York in 1884. Five years later he became a US citizen and began working with the inventor Thomas Edison and, later, the American industrialist George Westinghouse. The latter bought and successfully developed Tesla's patents, the most prominent being the introduction of alternating current for power transmission.

While in the US, Tesla became known by many as the quintessential "mad scientist." He had few close friends, among them the writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain and Francis Marion Crawford, and worked alone in his Colorado laboratory for hours on end, often through the night and with little or no sleep. Most people were driven away from the eccentric genius by his obsessive streak and intense, often disturbing, outbursts. Although tall and strikingly handsome, he never married; some claimed he was afraid of women, others that his inventions were his loves and that he could never have given himself so devotedly to a wife as he did to his ideas. "There is no bigger joy or pleasure of soul than the one when an inventor sees the creation of his brain turn to life," he wrote.

Or maybe it was just that he was repulsed by modern women, reacting with horror at their pearls and, in particular, earrings. An ascetic man, afraid of germs and handshakes, he had a special hatred of peaches, whose skin caused him to recoil in disgust. Instead of appreciating his genius, many who met him dismissed him as a madman whose eccentricities betrayed a deeply troubled mind.

The Serb psychiatrist Zarko Trebjesanin believes that despite his seeming modesty, Tesla had a narcissistic streak which revelled in publicity. "He tended to present his discoveries in a shocking and sensational manner that fascinated the public," Trebjesanin says. "He loved to be photographed like a great magician, in his lab, illuminated by artificially induced lightning."

Tesla was described as "a godsend to reporters who sought sensational copy", but a problem to editors who were uncertain how seriously his prophecies should be regarded.

As he grew older, Tesla's ideas became more and more outlandish. Caustic criticism, perhaps understandably, greeted his theories of interplanetary communication; even more so his belief in the invention of so-called "death rays" which could destroy airplanes at the flick of a switch.

Tesla died aged 87 in a New York hotel, a lonely man who had none of the riches normally heaped on scientists of his calibre. He spent the mornings of his later years feeding pigeons in his local park, an anonymous face among many others in a country which had come to deride his work and dismiss him, ironically for a man so crucial to the creation of the modern world, as a relic of the past.

Now, however, the world has been forced to reappraise the man and his work. Unesco has declared 2006 the "year of Nikola Tesla" and his homeland, peaceful after so many years of war, is determined to give proper thanks to its greatest son.

Hundreds of performances, ceremonies and workshops dedicated to Tesla will be held in Serbia, while the Croatian parliament made an official apology last month for having failed to recognise his talent earlier. Hundreds of people are now flocking to the Belgrade museum devoted to his life's work, and the international scientific community has at last paid tribute to this unconventional man who always said he was working "for the benefit of mankind as a whole".

Perhaps the ultimate accolade came with the naming of a crater on the Moon after Tesla, as well as a small planet far away in the solar system. You can't help thinking that the little boy working so hard to make his first rod out of stones and string would have been rather proud.


http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1169705.ece
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Tesla, electricity pioneer, is symbol of division and reconciliation in his native land



SMILJAN, Croatia The world knows Nikola Tesla as a pioneer of electrical power. But in his native Balkans, he is a symbol of ethnic strife. Now the 150th anniversary of his birth is serving as a force for healing.
As an ethnic Serb born in Croatia, Tesla's memory became a subject of bitter contention in the 1990s when the breakup of Yugoslavia triggered a war between Serbs and Croats that killed thousands.


A naturalized U.S. citizen, his statue stands at Niagara Falls in tribute to his role in bringing electricity to America. But his statue in Croatia was blown up and the house where he grew up fell into ruin. His portrait, which had graced a Yugoslav bank note, was left off the new Croatian currency.
The crowning irony for war-battered Croatia is that hundreds of villages around Smiljan, his native town have no electricity.

If Tesla rose from the dead, he wouldn't believe it, said Marija Batinic, 50, who lives near Smiljan and believes the heavily Serb region of central Croatia is being deprived of electricity because of ethnic discrimination.

One reason for Tesla's transformation from non-person to national hero in Croatia is the European Union, which wants the country to show gestures of reconciliation toward its Serbs as a condition for joining the prosperous club of democracies.

The government has spent $8.75 million turning his house into a museum, and the presidents of Croatia and Serbia will come together to dedicate it Monday on the anniverary of his birth.

On Friday a new statue of Tesla was unveiled in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, and two more are planned.

Parliament has declared 2006 to be Tesla's year, and his motto equally proud of my Serb origin and my Croatian homeland has become a mantra. A recent poll chose him as Croatia's greatest son.

There's also some cynicism. An art exhibit in Zagreb reminds Croatians that only recently they were trampling Tesla's memory, and pokes fun at their new political correctness. One exhibit is a design for a Tesla monument made from the rubble of the real one.

Some Serbs decry the Croats' embrace of the scientist. Author Mirko Rapaic says that Croatia, which he calls a criminal state, has no right to claim Tesla as one of its own, and that if it builds a monument to him it should be destroyed.

Nikola Tesla has nothing to do with Croatia, he wrote on his Web site.

Croatia's Serbian minority, about 12 percent of the population of 4.5 million before the war, is down to 3 percent, many of them in the villages around Smiljan in central Croatia.

The government denies discrimination, blaming the power shortage on a lack of funds. It has promised to restore electricity to some 300 villages when it can get the money.

Meanwhile, Batinic's refrigerator serves as a closet, she charges her cell phone on a tractor battery, and a gas lamp hangs from the ceiling.

Tesla was born on the midnight of July 9-10, 1856. He studied and worked across Europe, and lived in New York from 1885 until his death at 86.

He was awarded patents on every aspect of the modern system for generating and distributing electricity including in radio and the modern concept of radar. He installed Niagara Falls' first hydroelectric power system and invented the Tesla coil, a key component of radio and television.

Yet his last years were troubled. He fell out with Thomas Edison because the latter ignored his inventions in alternating-current electricity. He sued Guglielmo Marconi to gain recognition for his inventions in radio.

Today his name lives on not just in the scientific pantheon but in pop culture. He is a superhero in a Japanese comic strip, and David Bowie portrays him in The Prestige, the forthcoming movie by Christopher Nolan, who directed Batman Begins.


By Snjezana Vukic
ASSOCIATED PRESS

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20060708-0834-croatia-teslashealing.html


Tesla's theories remain current
He was the genius behind AC power

Serb born 150 years ago today

Jul. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM


He died alone, poor and a little nutty the Croatian-born ethnic Serb genius whose innovations had a profound impact on development of the modern-day electrical grid.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, who grew famous in the late 1800s for his public battles with inventor Thomas Edison during the "War of Currents."

Tesla, at 28, emigrated to the United States in 1884, a time when Edison was aggressively promoting the concept of direct-current power generation. But Edison's invention had major limitations. The "DC" power stations he was building had to be located in the centre of industry, since the direct current Edison was producing could only travel a kilometre in any direction.

Only 18 central power stations based on DC existed in the United States at that time, and about 370 smaller stations were located within factories. Tesla's vision was to liberate this electricity through the use of alternating current, or AC, systems, which make it possible to efficiently transmit power over hundreds of kilometres at high voltages.

"He knew down the road, when industry develops, that there would be large amounts of power required to be transferred from one place to another," says Mike Radan, a Serbian-born Canadian and electrical engineer who worked 35 years at the former Ontario Hydro. "Edison felt threatened."

But Tesla, on his own an inept businessman, was no match for Edison. It took the support and foresight of American entrepreneur George Westinghouse and his Westinghouse Electric Corp. to push the "AC" concept forward and to ultimately defeat Edison's active fight against the AC movement and his aggressive public relations campaign promoting the deadly nature of alternating current.

In the end, Tesla and his AC inventions won the currents war after the Niagara Falls Power Co. and the Canadian Niagara Power Co. embraced the technology for an unprecedented power project at Niagara Falls, which was dependent on Tesla's "polyphase" AC systems and patents. Westinghouse was chosen to lead construction of the massive hydro stations.

It was a dream come true for Tesla who, having seen a picture of the great falls as an 11-year-old boy, had vowed to harness its power.

"I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme," Tesla recalled in one of his biographies.

When the project commenced operation in 1895, the electricity was used locally and perhaps most important transmitted and distributed to the neighbouring city of Buffalo. It was a major feat, ultimately convincing a battle-worn Edison to abandon the electricity business altogether.

Yesterday, the Niagara Parks Commission unveiled a Tesla monument in recognition of his contributions to the region and the world of electricity. The Professional Engineers of Ontario have also declared 2006 to be the year of Tesla.

"In 1906, Sir Adam Beck founded Ontario Hydro to ensure that every Ontarian would have equal access to affordable electricity, while helping build a foundation for the province's economic future," according to a statement from the engineers' association. "That would not have been possible without Tesla's polyphase generators, which became a standard by that time."

Tesla didn't make much money from his inventions. Westinghouse, which had run into financial difficulties fighting Edison and a number of patent pirates, told Tesla that he had to give up his royalties or his AC systems would never make it to market.

"Tesla said `Please don't cancel this program' and ripped up the contract," says Radan, whose own decision to become an electrical engineer was inspired by his boyhood fascination with the famous Serb.

"His purpose was to make sure this technology made it to the people and the world. It wasn't about money."

Still, Tesla needed money to continue his path of innovation. After the Niagara project, he became fixated on his "world system" of power transmission a grand vision of wirelessly transmitting electricity through a layer of the Earth's atmosphere from one continent to the other, not unlike modern-day wireless telecommunications.

New York financier J.P. Morgan provided Tesla with research money for a while, but eventually pulled funding after Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the first cross-Atlantic wireless telegraph transmission.

It wasn't wireless power transmission, and Marconi's invention was later found by the U.S. Supreme Court to violate Tesla's own patents, but investors such as Morgan didn't know the difference. Convinced that Marconi had outwitted Tesla, Morgan pulled funding.

The final decades of Tesla's life were not good ones. By 1916 he had filed for bankruptcy. Already an odd fellow, he had fallen victim to obsessive-compulsive disorder. He'd count every step he made, calculate the volume of food and drink before consuming it, developed a germ phobia and became obsessed with the number three.

His sanity was further questioned after claiming that Martians had tried to contact him through radio signals. Near the end of his life, he became strangely attached to pigeons and grew particularly fond of one white pigeon. After that pigeon died, he told one of his few friends, "I knew my life's work was over."

Tesla, who never married, died alone in 1943 of heart failure at 86. But his name lives on. This fall rock idol David Bowie will play Tesla in a movie called The Prestige, which will also star Michael Caine and Hugh Jackman.

Tesla's ideas also live on, including his quest for the wireless transmission of electricity. It wasn't until after his death that scientists began realizing the full potential of microwaves.

"What Tesla was proposing was an inductive field (in the Earth's ionosphere). You send out a pulse from a central tower then try to tap whatever energy comes to you from a great distance," says David Criswell, an expert in space physics and director of the Institute for Space Systems Operation at the University of Houston.

"At the time he was doing that there was only beginning to be an understanding that microwaves could be manipulated in the same way that a light could through a lens."

Only since the 1970s has it been shown that power can be transmitted through microwave frequencies, with experiments demonstrating up to 30 kilowatts sent over more than a kilometre. In the 1980s, Canada powered its Stationary High Altitude Relay Platform, or SHARP aircraft using microwaves beamed from the ground.

Criswell believes Tesla's idea of a "world system" of power could be achieved, but with a dramatic twist and using different principles. He envisions covering the sunlit surface of the moon with solar panels that collect energy from the sun and beam it back 24 hours a day through microwaves to receiving stations on Earth, where the baseload power is redistributed accordingly.

The solar panels would be built on the moon using silicon and metals from its surface. Massive fields would be set up strategically around the globe to collect the energy-carrying microwaves and convert them into power. Criswell believes his $500 billion moon-based solar project could provide enough emission-free electricity for the entire planet about 20 terrawatts by 2050, when it would be possible to replace all fossil fuel and nuclear plants.

He laments that the United States abandoned its space activities on the moon. "If we had stayed on the moon, the U.S. would be powered by this by now," he asserts. "We just did not look at the moon as something we could use. We looked at it as an adventure.

"There hasn't been a day in the last 30 years I haven't worked on this. I think the day is going to come."

Radan, who's not so sure Tesla's grand vision can be realized, understands the drive to pursue it.

"For someone to come along and pick up on Tesla's ideas so we can do away with all these transmission lines and transmit power wirelessly, it's the remaining dream for humanity."


TYLER HAMILTON
ENERGY REPORTER
Toronto Star



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Croats, Serbs unite to hail Tesla's genius
Body:


SMILJAN, Croatia (Reuters) - Croats and Serbs united on Monday in celebrating late scientist Nikola Tesla, hailing him as a symbol of ethnic tolerance badly needed in the Balkans.

Tesla was born 150 years ago this day in this small village at the foot of Mt Velebit in a Serb area of Croatia. He made most of his discoveries on electricity in the United States.

His birthplace saw some of the fiercest fighting in Croatia's 1991-95 independence war with local ethnic Serb rebels. Tesla's monument was blown up during the war, his house neglected by the nationalist regime that ruled until 2000.


"Tesla, a Serb, had been nearly forgotten," Croatia's reformist President Stjepan Mesic told the gathering at the opening of the renovated house, now turned into a scientific theme park. "I am happy that those times are over".

Serbia is hosting a separate series of events to honor Tesla and recently renamed Belgrade's airport in his honor. Serbia's President Boris Tadic said at the ceremony that the man and his legacy belonged to both countries.

"He is our common heritage, a Serb born in Croatia who did not want ethnic conflicts," Tadic said. "But our past was not always glorious. Today we have a common responsibility to offer our citizens a new vision".

Black-clad Orthodox priests prayed in the village church, rebuilt at its original place near Tesla's house, while visitors, mostly elderly Serbs, lit candles.

But reminders of the war persist in the area, with signs warning visitors of landmines and shelled houses gaping open, overgrown by bushes. Several villages in the area are still waiting to have electricity restored after the war. Continued...

"Thank God for Tesla. This area was swamp and forest only a few months ago. Now they have repaired the roads and everything," one of the workers at the site said.

According to anecdotal evidence, Telsa was a young boy when he created a prototype hydropower plant in a brook near his house. He later recreated it at Niagara Falls.

His discoveries and inventions formed the basis in many scientific fields and are used today in applications such as the radio, robotics, computer science, nuclear physics and x-rays.

Tesla emigrated to the U.S. in 1884, reportedly with four cents and plans for a flying machine in his pockets. He quickly established himself as a leading scientist, earning a reputation for his eccentricity and far-reaching imagination. He died penniless in New York in 1943.


http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-07-10T134916Z_01_L06748915_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-TESLA.xml
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Tesla was equally proud of his Serb origins and Croatian homeland


Serbian and Croatian officials have joined together to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of electricity pioneer and inventor Nikola Tesla.
Tesla, an ethnic Serb, was one of the pioneers of modern electrical engineering, and is recognised as one of the world's greatest inventors.

Several hundred officials attended the ceremony in Smiljan village in Croatia.

Among them were the Croatian President Stjepan Mesic and his Serbian counterpart, Boris Tadic.

The Croatian premier, Ivo Sanader, also attended the ceremony along with the US ambassador to Croatia, Robert Anthony Bradke.

"I am happy that we are here today to celebrate Tesla, a Serb, a son of Croatia and a citizen of the world," President Mesic said at a ceremony close to the house where the inventor was born.

A pioneer in the days when electricity was changing everyday life, Nikola Tesla patented more than 700 inventions including wireless communication, remote control and fluorescent lighting.

" Both Serbia and Croatia had many great moments in history, as well as great men who marked our joint past "Serbian President Boris Tadic said.

His most famous work formed the basis of the modern alternating current (AC) electrical power system, which is used across the world.

'Joint treasure'

Most of the speeches emphasised the fact that Tesla symbolized Croatia's and Serbia's shared past before the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

"There were not many individuals from this region who reached the top by their vision and ideas, but those who did are our joint treasure," the Serbian president said in his address.

"Both Serbia and Croatia had many great moments in history, as well as great men who marked our joint past."

The scientist once famously stated that he was equally proud of his Serb origin and Croatian homeland.

Officials opened a Tesla memorial complex, including a museum inside his restored childhood home.

Tesla moved to the United States at the age of 28 where he carried out the majority of his inventions. Despite his success, he died penniless in New York at the age of 86.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5167054.stm


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Monitor editorial
July 10. 2006 8:00AM



Remembering 'the man who lit the world'


Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, a once-famous man who changed the way humans live and work. Though every schoolchild knows Thomas Edison's name, Tesla did as much or more for science.

A Serbian genius who became an American citizen in 1891 at age 35, Tesla is the inventor of the alternating current motor, the modern electrical transmission system, the spark plug, radio, the fluorescent light, the laser beam, vertical takeoff aircraft, robotics, remote-controlled boats and hundreds of other inventions. He held 700 patents.

In 1917, when he was awarded the Edison Medal, a prize named for his former employer and archrival, Tesla's impact was summed up this way: "Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the result of Mr. Tesla's work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark and our mills would be idle and dead."

Hyperbole? Perhaps, but it was Tesla who first harnessed the power of Niagara Falls to make electricity, and it's thanks to him that power lines are able to transmit electricity over vast distances.

Tesla fought for decades to be recognized as the true inventor of radio - Guglielmo Marconi was given the Nobel Prize for doing so -and in 1943 the U.S. Supreme Court awarded him the patent that proved Tesla right. Unfortunately, he had died earlier that year.


Tesla was the son of a minister in the Serbian Orthodox Church and a mother skilled at making her own household tools. He was precocious and in his 20s became the chief engineer for Hungary's first telephone system.
At the suggestion of an American friend, Tesla emigrated to the United States to work for Edison. He quickly took his boss's challenge to completely redesign the company's direct current turbines in exchange for a $50,000 bonus. Tesla succeeded, but when he tried to claim his bonus, Edison said that he had only been kidding.

Frustrated that Edison failed to agree that the future of electricity lay with AC not DC power, and angry over the denial of a raise, Tesla quit and founded a rival electric company.

He soon convinced the nation that alternating current was the way to go and Edison and Tesla remained enemies until their deaths.

It seems as if, to compensate for their intellectual gifts, fate decrees that great geniuses be tortured, and Tesla was. It also makes for a better story if they die in poverty, and Tesla did. Though a fast friend of Mark Twain and one of the most famous people in the world in his day, Tesla was considered crazy in his old age.

A lifelong bachelor, he suffered from what psychiatrists now believe was an obsessive-compulsive disorder that made his behavior odd.

Tesla was convinced that he was receiving signals from life on other planets and mocked for it. He also believed that he could build a "death ray" powerful enough to knock hundreds of planes out of the sky and kill legions of enemies on far-off battlefields. The possibility that he might actually be able to do it led the government to impound all his papers upon his death.

Nikola Tesla died in the New Yorker Hotel in 1943 at age 86, broke, deeply in debt and forgotten by a public that once adored him. But for what he accomplished in life, we remember him today.


Remembering 'the man who lit the world'
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PRODIGAL GENIUS
The Life of Nikola Tesla

by John J. O'Neill (1944)
Complete On-Line Volume

Table of Contents

First Part: LIGHT AND POWER

Second Part: FAME AND FORTUNE

Third Part: INTERNAL VIBRATION

Fourth Part: SELF-MADE SUPERMAN

Fifth Part: AFTERGLOW

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PARTIAL LIST OF TESLA U.S. PATENTS

For Further Information


First Part
LIGHT AND POWER

ONE

"SPECTACULAR'' is a mild word for describing the strange experiment with life that comprises the story of Nikola Tesla, and "amazing'' fails to do adequate justice to the results that burst from his experiences like an exploding rocket. It is the story of the dazzling scintillations of a superman who created a new world; it is a story that condemns woman as an anchor of the flesh which retards the development of man and limits his accomplishment-and, paradoxically, proves that even the most successful life, if it does not include a woman, is a dismal failure.

Even the gods of old, in the wildest imaginings of their worshipers, never undertook such gigantic tasks of world-wide dimension as those which Tesla attempted and accomplished. On the basis of his hopes, his dreams, and his achievements he rated the status of the Olympian gods, and the Greeks would have so enshrined him. Little is the wonder that so-called practical men, with their noses stuck in profit-and-loss statements, did not understand him and thought him strange.

The light of human progress is not a dim glow that gradually becomes more luminous with time. The panorama of human evolution is illumined by sudden bursts of dazzling brilliance in intellectual accomplishments that throw their beams far ahead to give us a glimpse of the distant future, that we may more correctly guide our wavering steps today. Tesla, by virtue of the amazing discoveries and inventions which he showered on the world, becomes one of the most resplendent flashes that has ever brightened the scroll of human advancement.

Tesla created the modern era; he was unquestionably one of the world's greatest geniuses, but he leaves no offspring, no legatees of his brilliant mind, who might aid in administering that world; he created fortunes for multitudes of others but himself died penniless, spurning wealth that might be gained from his discoveries. Even as he walked among the teeming millions of New York he became a fabled individual who seemed to belong to the far-distant future or to have come to us from the mystical realm of the gods, for he seemed to be an admixture of a Jupiter or a Thor who hurled the shafts of lightning; an Ajax who defied the Jovian bolts; a Prometheus who transmuted energy into electricity to spread over the earth; an Aurora who would light the skies as a terrestrial electric lamp; a Mazda who created a sun in a tube; a Hercules who shook the earth with his mechanical vibrators; a Mercury who bridged the ambient realms of space with his wireless waves-and a Hermes who gave birth to an electrical soul in the earth that set it pulsating from pole to pole.

This spark of intellectual incandescence, in the form of a rare creative genius, shot like a meteor into the midst of human society in the latter decades of the past century; and he lived almost until today. His name became synonymous with magic in the intellectual, scientific, engineering and social worlds, and he was recognized as an inventor and discoverer of unrivaled greatness. He made the electric current his slave. At a time when electricity was considered almost an occult force, and was looked upon with terror-stricken awe and respect, Tesla penetrated deeply into its mysteries and performed so many marvelous feats with it that, to the world, he became a master magician with an unlimited repertoire of scientific legerdemain so spectacular that it made the accomplishments of most of the inventors of his day seem like the work of toy-tinkers.

Tesla was an inventor, but he was much more than a producer of new devices: he was a discoverer of new principles, opening many new empires of knowledge which even today have been only partly explored. In a single mighty burst of invention he created the world of power of today; he brought into being our electrical power era, the rock-bottom foundation on which the industrial system of the entire world is builded; he gave us our mass-production system, for without his motors and currents it could not exist; he created the race of robots, the electrical mechanical men that are replacing human labor; he gave us every essential of modern radio; he invented the radar forty years before its use in World War II; he gave us our modern neon and other forms of gaseous-tube lighting; he gave us our fluorescent lighting; he gave us the high-frequency currents which are performing their electronic wonders throughout the industrial and medical worlds; he gave us remote control by wireless; he helped give us World War II, much against his will-for the misuse of his superpower system and his robot controls in industry made it possible for politicians to have available a tremendous surplus of power, production facilities, labor and materials, with which to indulge in the most frightful devastating war that the maniacal mind could conceive. And these discoveries are merely the inventions made by the master mind of Tesla which have thus far been utilized-scores of others remain still unused.

Yet Tesla lived and labored to bring peace to the world. He dedicated his life to lifting the burdens from the shoulders of mankind; to bringing a new era of peace, plenty and happiness to the human race. Seeing the coming of World War II, implemented and powered by his discoveries, he sought to prevent it; offered the world a device which he maintained would make any country, no matter how small, safe within its borders-and his offer was rejected.

More important by far, however, than all his stupendously significant electrical discoveries is that supreme invention-Nikola Tesla the Superman-the human instrument which shoved the world forward with an accelerating lunge like an airplane cast into the sky from a catapult. Tesla, the scientist and inventor, was himself an invention, just as much as was his alternating-current system that put the world on a superpower basis.

Tesla was a superman, a self-made superman, invented and designed specifically to perform wonders; and he achieved them in a volume far beyond the capacity of the world to absorb. His life he designed on engineering principles to enable him to serve as an automaton, with utmost efficiency, for the discovery and application of the forces of Nature to human welfare. To this end he sacrificed love and pleasure, seeking satisfaction only in his accomplishments, and limiting his body solely to serving as a tool of his technically creative mind.

With our modern craze for division of labor and specialization of effort to gain efficiency of production in our industrial machine, one hesitates to think of a future in which Tesla's invention of the superman might be applied to the entire human race, with specialization designed for every individual from birth.

The superman that Tesla designed was a scientific saint. The inventions that this scientific martyr produced were designed for the peace, happiness and security of the human race, but they have been applied to create scarcity, depressions and devastating war. Suppose the superman invention were also developed and prostituted to the purposes of war-mongering politicians? Tesla glimpsed the possibilities and suggested the community life of the bee as a threat to our social structure unless the elements of individual and community lives are properly directed and personal freedom protected.

Tesla's superman was a marvelously successful invention-for Tesla-which seemed, as far as the world could observe, to function satisfactorily. He eliminated love from his life; eliminated women even from his thoughts. He went beyond Plato, who conceived of a spiritual companionship between man and woman free from sexual desires; he eliminated even the spiritual companionship. He designed the isolated life into which no woman and no man could enter; the self-sufficient individuality from which all sex considerations were completely eliminated; the genius who would live entirely as a thinking and a working machine.

Tesla's superman invention was a producer of marvels, and he thought that he had, by scientific methods, succeeded in eliminating love from his life. That abnormal life makes a fascinating experiment for the consideration of the philosopher and psychologist, for he did not succeed in eliminating love. It manifested itself despite his conscientious efforts at suppression; and when it did so it came in the most fantastic form, providing a romance the like of which is not recorded in the annals of human history.

Tesla's whole life seems unreal, as if he were a fabled creature of some Olympian world. A reporter, after writing a story of his discoveries and inventions, concluded, "His accomplishments seem like the dream of an intoxicated god.'' It was Tesla's invention of the polyphase alternating-current system that was directly responsible for harnessing Niagara Falls and opened the modern electrical superpower era in which electricity is transported for hundred of miles, to operate the tens of thousands of mass-production factories of industrial systems. Every one of the tall Martian-like towers of the electrical transmission lines that stalk across the earth, and whose wires carry electricity to distant cities, is a monument to Tesla; every powerhouse, every dynamo and every motor that drives every machine in the country is a monument to him.

Superseding himself, he discovered the secret of transmitting electrical power to the utmost ends of the earth without wires, and demonstrated his system by which useful amounts of power could be drawn from the earth anywhere merely by making a connection to the ground; he set the entire earth in electrical vibration with a generator which spouted lightning that rivaled the fiery artillery of the heavens. It was as a minor portion of this discovery that he created the modern radio system; he planned our broadcasting methods of today, forty years ago when others saw in wireless only the dot-dash messages that might save ships in distress.

He produced lamps of greater brilliance and economy than those in common use today; he invented the tube, fluorescent and wireless lamps which we now consider such up-to-the-minute developments; and he essayed to set the entire atmosphere of the earth aglow with his electric currents, to change our world into a single terrestrial lamp and to make the skies at night shine as does the sun by day.

If other first-magnitude inventors and discoverers may be considered torches of progress, Tesla was a conflagration. He was the vehicle through which the blazing suns of a brighter tomorrow focused their incandescent beams on a world that was not prepared to receive their light. Nor is it remarkable that this radiant personality should have led a strange and isolated life. The value of his contributions to society cannot be overrated. We can now analyze, to some extent, the personality that produced them. He stands as a synthetic genius, a self-made superman, the greatest invention of the greatest inventor of all times. But when we consider Tesla as a human being, apart from his charming and captivating social manners, it is hard to imagine a worse nightmare than a world inhabited entirely by geniuses.

When Nature makes an experiment and achieves an improvement it is necessary that it be accomplished in such a way that the progress will not be lost with the individual but will be passed on to future generations. In man, this requires a utilization of the social values of the race, cooperation of the individual with his kind, that the improved status may be propagated and become a legacy of all. Tesla intentionally engineered love and women out of his life, and while he achieved gigantic intellectual stature, he failed to achieve its perpetuation either through his own progeny or through disciples. The superman he constructed was not great enough to embrace a wife and continue to exist as such. The love he sought to suppress in his life, and which he thought was associated only with women, is a force which, in its various aspects, links together all members of the human race.

In seeking to suppress this force entirely Tesla severed the bonds which might have brought to him the disciples who would, through other channels, have perpetuated the force of his prodigal genius. As a result, he succeeded in imparting to the world only the smallest fraction of the creative products of his synthetic superman.

The creation of a superman as demonstrated by Tesla was a grand experiment in human evolution, well worthy of the giant intellect that grew out of it, but it did not come up to Nature's standards; and the experiment will have to be made many times more before we learn how to create a super race with the minds of Teslas that can tap the hidden treasury of Nature's store of knowledge, yet endowed too with the vital power of love that will unlock forces, more powerful than any which we now glimpse, for advancing the status of the human race.

There was no evidence whatever that a superman was being born

when the stroke of midnight between July 9 and 10, in the year 1856, brought a son, Nikola, to the home of the Rev. Milutin Tesla and Djouka, his wife, in the hamlet of Smiljan, in the Austro-Hungarian border province of Lika, now a part of Yugoslavia. The father of the new arrival, pastor of the village church, was a former student in an officers' training school who had rebelled against the restrictions of Army life and turned to the ministry as the field in which he could more satisfactorily express himself. The mother, although totally unable to read or write, was nevertheless an intellectually brilliant woman, who without the help of literal aids became really well educated.

Both father and mother contributed to the child a valuable heritage of culture developed and passed on by ancestral families that had been community leaders for many generations. The father came from a family that contributed sons in equal numbers to the Church and to the Army. The mother was a member of the Mandich family whose sons, for generations without number, had, with very few exceptions, become ministers of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and whose daughters were chosen as wives by ministers.

Djouka, the mother of Nikola Tesla (her given name in English translation would be Georgina), was the eldest daughter in a family of seven children. Her father, like her husband, was a minister of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Her mother, after a period of failing eyesight, had become blind shortly after the seventh child was born; so Djouka, the eldest daughter, at a tender age was compelled to take over the major share of her mother's duties. This not alone prevented her from attending school: her work at home so completely consumed her time that she was unable to acquire even the rudiments of reading and writing through home study. This was a strange situation in the cultured family of which she was a member. Tesla, however, always credited his unlettered mother rather than his erudite father with being the source from which he inherited his inventive ability. She devised many household labor-saving instruments. She was, in addition, a very practical individual, and her well-educated husband wisely left in her hands all business matters involving both the church and his household.

An unusually retentive memory served this remarkable woman as a good substitute for literacy. As the family moved in cultured circles she absorbed by ear much of the cultural riches of the community. She could repeat, without error or omission, thousands of verses of the national poetry of her country-the sagas of the Serbs-and could recite long passages from the Bible. She could narrate from memory the entire poetical- philosophical work Gorski Vijenac (Mountain Wreath), written by Bishop Petrovich Njegosh. She also possessed artistic talent and a versatile dexterity in her fingers for expressing it. She earned wide fame throughout the countryside for her beautiful needlework. According to Tesla, so great were her dexterity and her patience that she could, when over sixty, using only her Fingers, tie three knots in an eyelash.

The remarkable abilities of this clever woman who had no formal education were transmitted to her five children. The elder son, Dane Tesla, born seven years before Nikola, was the family favorite because of the promise of an outstanding career which his youthful cleverness indicated was in store for him. He foreshadowed in his early years the strange manifestations which in his surviving brother were a prelude to greatness.

Tesla's father started his career in the military service, a likely choice for the son of an officer; but he apparently did not inherit his father's liking for Army life. So slight an incident as criticism for failure to keep his brass buttons brightly polished caused him to leave military school. He was probably more of a poet and philosopher than a soldier. He wrote poetry which was published in contemporary papers. He also wrote articles on current problems which he signed with a pseudonym, "Srbin Pravicich.'' This, in Serb, means "Man of Justice.'' He spoke, read and wrote Serbo-Croat, German and Italian. It was probably his interest in poetry and philosophy that caused him to be attracted to Djouka Mandich. She was twenty-five and Milutin was two years older. He married her in 1847. His attraction to the daughter of a pastor probably influenced his next choice of a career, for he then entered the ministry and was soon ordained a priest.

He was made pastor of the church at Senj, an important seaport with facilities for a cultural life. He gave satisfaction, but apparently he achieved success among his parishioners on the basis of a pleasing personality and an understanding of problems rather than by using any great erudition in theological and ecclesiastical matters.

A few years after he was placed in charge of this parish, a new archbishop, elevated to head of the diocese, wished to survey the capabilities of the priests in his charge and offered a prize for the best sermon preached on his official visit. The Rev. Milutin Tesla was bubbling over, at the time, with interest in labor as a major factor in social and economic problems. To preach a sermon on this topic was, from the viewpoint of expediency, a totally impractical thing to do. Nobody, however, had ever accused the Rev. Mr. Tesla of being practical, so doing the impractical thing was quite in harmony with his nature. He chose the subject which held his greatest interest; and when the archbishop arrived, he listened to a sermon on "Labor.''

Months later Senj was surprised by an unanticipated visit from the archbishop, who announced that the Rev. Mr. Tesla had preached the best sermon, and awarded him a red sash which he was privileged to wear on all occasions. Shortly afterward he was made pastor at Smiljan, where his parish then embraced forty homes. He was later placed in charge of the much larger parish in the nearby city of Gospic. His First three children, Milka, Dane and Angelina, were born at Senj. Nikola and his younger sister, Marica, were born at Smiljan.

Tesla's early environment, then, was that of an agricultural community in a high plateau region near the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea in the Velebit Mountains, a part of the Alps, a mountain chain stretching from Switzerland to Greece. He did not see his First steam locomotive until he was in his `teens, so his aptitude for mechanical matters did not grow out of his environment.

Tesla's homeland is today called Yugoslavia, a country whose name means "Land of the Southern Slavs.'' It embraces several former separate countries, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Dalmatia and also Slovenia. The Tesla and Mandich families originally came from the western part of Serbia near Montenegro. Smiljan, the village where Tesla was born, is in the province of Lika, and at the time of his birth this was a dependent province held by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as part of Croatia and Slovenia.

Tesla's surname dates back more than two and a half centuries. Before that time the family name was Draganic (pronounced as if spelled Drag'-a-nitch). The name Tesla (pronounced as spelled, with equal emphasis on both syllables), in a purely literal sense, is a trade name like Smith, Wright or Carpenter. As a common noun it describes a woodworking tool which, in English, is called an adz. This is an axe with a broad cutting blade at right angles to the handle, instead of parallel as in the more familiar form. It is used in cutting large tree trunks into squared timbers. In the Serbo-Croat language, the name of the tool is tesla. There is a tradition in the Draganic family that the members of one branch were given the nickname "Tesla'' because of an inherited trait which caused practically all of them to have very large, broad and protruding front teeth which greatly resembled the triangular blade of the adz.

The name Draganic and derivatives of it appear frequently in other branches of the Tesla family as a given name. When used as a given name it is frequently translated "Charlotte,'' but as a generic term it holds the meaning "dear'' and as a surname is translated "Darling.''

The majority of Tesla's ancestors for whom age records are available lived well beyond the average span of life for their times, but no definite record has been found of the ancestor who, Tesla claimed, lived to be one hundred and forty years of age. (His father died at the age of fifty-nine, and his mother at seventy-one.)

Although many of Tesla's ancestors were dark eyed, his eyes were a gray-blue. He claimed his eyes were originally darker, but that as a result of the excessive use of his brain their color changed. His mother's eyes, however, were gray and so are those of some of his nephews. It is probable, therefore, that his gray eyes were inherited, rather than faded by excessive use of the brain.

Tesla grew to be very tall and very slender-tallness was a family and a national trait. When he attained full growth he was exactly two meters, or six feet two and one-quarter inches tall. While his body was slender, it was built within normal proportions. His hands, however, and particularly his thumbs, seemed unusually long.

Nikola's older brother Dane was a brilliant boy and his parents gloried in their good fortune in being blessed with such a fine son. There was, however, a difference of seven years in the two boys' ages, and since the elder brother died as the result of an accident at the age of twelve, when Nikola was but five years old, a fair comparison of the two seems hardly possible. The loss of their First-born son was a great blow to his mother and father; the grief and regrets of the family were manifest in idealizing his talents and predicting possibilities of greatness he might have realized, and this situation was a challenge to Nikola in his youth.

The superman Tesla developed out of the superboy Nikola. Forced to rise above the normal level by an urge to carry on for his dearly beloved departed brother, and also on his own account to exceed the great accomplishment his brother might have attained had he lived, he unconsciously drew upon strange resources within. The existence of these resources might have remained unsuspected for a lifetime, as happens with the run of individuals, if Nikola had not felt the necessity for creating a larger sphere of life for himself.

He was aware as a boy that he was not like other boys in his thoughts, in his amusements and in his hobbies. He could do the things that other lads his age usually do, and many things that they could not do. It was these latter things that interested him most, and he could find no companions who would share his enthusiasms for them. This situation caused him to isolate himself from contemporaries, and made him aware that he was destined for an unusual place if not great accomplishments in life. His boyish mind was continually exploring realms which his years had not reached, and his boyhood attainments frequently were worthy of men of mature age.

He had, of course, the usual experience of unusual incidents that fall to the lot of a small boy. One of the earliest events which Tesla recalled was a fall into a tank of hot milk that was being scalded in the process used by the natives of that region as a hygienic measure, anticipating the modern process of pasteurizing.

Shortly afterward he was accidentally locked in a remote mountain chapel which was visited only at widely separated intervals. He spent the night in the small building before his absence was discovered and his possible hiding place determined.

Living close to Nature, with ample opportunity for observing the flight of birds, which has ever filled men with envy, he did what many another boy has done with the same results. An umbrella, plus imagination, offered to him a certain solution of the problem of free flight through the air. The roof of a barn was his launching platform. The umbrella was large, but its condition was much the worse for many years of service; it turned inside out before the flight was well started. No bones were broken, but he was badly shaken up and spent the next six weeks in bed. Probably, though, he had better reason for making this experiment than most of the others who have tried it. He revealed that practically all his life he experienced a peculiar reaction when breathing deeply. When he breathed deeply he was overcome by a feeling of lightness, as if his body had lost all weight; and he should, he concluded, be able to fly through the air merely by his will to do so. He did not learn, in boyhood, that he was unusual in this respect.

One day when he was in his fifth year, one of his chums received a gift of a fishing line, and all the boys in the group planned a fishing trip. On that day he was on the outs with his chums for some unremembered reason. As a result, he was informed he could not join them. He was not permitted even to see the fishing line at close range. He had glimpsed, however, the general idea of a hook on the end of a string. In a short time he had fashioned his own interpretation of a hook. The refinement of a barb had not occurred to him and he also failed to evolve the theory of using bait when he went off on his own fishing expedition. The baitless hook failed to attract any fish but, while dangling in the air, much to Tesla's surprise and satisfaction it snared a frog that leaped at it. He came home with a bag of nearly two dozen frogs. It may have been a day on which the fish were not biting, but at any rate his chums came home from the use of their new hook and line without any fish. His triumph was complete. When he later revealed his technique, all the boys in the neighborhood copied his hook and method, and in a short time the frog population of the region was greatly depleted.

The contents of birds' nests always excited Tesla's curiosity. He rarely disturbed their contents or occupants. On one occasion, however, he climbed a rocky crag to investigate an eagle's nest and took from it a baby eagle which he kept locked in a barn. A bird on the wing he considered fair prey for his sling shot, with which he was a star performer.

About this time he became intrigued with a piece of hollow tube cut from a cane growing in the neighborhood. This he played with until he had evolved a blow gun and later, by making a plunger and plugging one end of the tube with a wad of wet hemp, a pop gun. He then undertook the making of larger pop guns, and contrived one in which the end of the plunger was held against the chest and the tube pulled energetically toward the body. He engaged in the manufacture of this article for his chums, as a Five-year-old businessman. When a number of window panes happened to get broken accidentally by getting in the way of his hemp wad, his inventive proclivities in this field were quickly curbed by the destruction of the pop guns and the administration of the parental rod.

Tesla started his formal education by attending the village school in Smiljan before he reached his fifth birthday. A few years later his father received his appointment as pastor of a church in the nearby city of Gospic, so the family moved there. This was a sad day for young Tesla. He had lived close to Nature, and loved the open country and the high mountains among which he had thus far spent all of his life. The sudden transition to the artificialities of the city was a very definite shock to him. He was out of harmony with his new surroundings.

His advent into the city life of Gospic, at the age of seven, got off to an unfortunate start. As the new minister in town, his father was anxious to have everything move smoothly. Tesla was required to dress in his best clothes and attend the Sunday services. Naturally, he dreaded this ordeal and was very happy when assigned the task of ringing the bell summoning the worshipers to the service and announcing the close of the ceremonies. This gave him an opportunity to remain unseen in the belfry while the parishioners, their daughters and dude sons were arriving and departing.

Thinking he had waited long enough after the close of the service for the church to be cleared on this First Sunday, he came downstairs three steps at a time. A wealthy woman parishioner wearing a skirt with a long train that fashionably dragged along the ground, and who had come to the service with a retinue of servants, remained after the other parishioners to have a talk with the new pastor. She was just making an impressive exit when Tesla's final jump down the stairs landed him on the train, ripping this dignity-preserving appendage from the woman's dress. Her mortification and rage and his father's anger came upon him simultaneously. Parishioners loitering outside rushed back to revel in the spectacle. Thereafter no one dared be pleasant to this youngster who had enraged the wealthy dowager who domineered it over the social community. He was practically ostracized by the parishioners, and continued so until he redeemed himself in a spectacular manner.

Tesla felt strange and defeated in his ignorance of city ways. He met the situation First by avoidance. He did not care to leave his home. The boys of his age were neatly dressed every day. They were dudes and he did not belong. Even as a child Tesla was meticulously careful in dress. At the earliest moment, however, he would slip work clothes over his dress clothes and go wandering in the woods or engage in mechanical work. He could not enjoy life if limited to the activities in which he could engage while dressed up. Tesla, however, possessed ingenuity, and there was rarely a situation in which he was not able to use it. He also possessed knowledge of the ways of Nature. These gave him a distinct superiority over the city boys.

About a year after the family moved to Gospic a new fire company was organized. It was to be supplied with a pump which would replace the useful but inadequate bucket brigade. The members of the new organization obtained brightly colored uniforms and practiced marching for parades. Eventually the new pump arrived. It was a man-power pump to be operated by sixteen men. A parade and demonstration of the new apparatus was arranged. Almost everyone in Gospic turned out for the event and followed to the river front for the pump demonstration. Tesla was among them. He paid no attention to the speeches but was all eyes for the brightly painted apparatus. He did not know how it worked but would have loved to take it apart and investigate the insides.

The time for the demonstration came when the last speaker, finishing his dedicatory address, gave the order to start the pumping operation that would send a stream of water shooting skyward from the nozzle. The eight men regimented on either side of the pump bowed and rose in alternate unison as they raised and lowered the bars that operated the pistons of the pump. But nothing else happened, not a drop of water came from the nozzle!

Officials of the fire company started feverishly to make adjustments and, after each attempt, set the sixteen men oscillating up and down at the pump handles, but each time without results. The lines of hose between the pump and the nozzle were straightened out, they were disconnected from the pump and connected again. But no water came from the far end of the hose to reward the efforts of the perspiring firemen.

Tesla was among the usual group of urchins that always manages to get inside the lines on such occasions. He tried to see everything that was going on from the closest possible vantage point and undoubtedly got on the nerves of the vexed officials when their repeated efforts were frustrated by continuous failures. As one of the officials turned for the tenth time to vent his frustration on the urchins and order them away from his range of action, Tesla grabbed him by the arm.

"I know what to do, Mister,'' said Tesla. "You keep pumping.''

Dashing for the river, Tesla peeled his clothes off quickly and dove into the water. He swam to the suction hose that was supposed to draw the water supply from the river. He found it kinked, so that no water could flow into it, and flattened by the vacuum created by the pumping. When he straightened out the kink, the water rushed into the line. The nozzlemen had stood at their post for a long time, receiving a continuous repetition of warnings to be prepared each time an adjustment was made, but, as nothing happened on these successive occasions, they had gradually relaxed their attention and were giving little thought to the direction in which the nozzle was pointed. When the stream of water did shoot skyward, down it came on the assembled officials and townspeople. This item of unexpected drama excited the crowd at the other end of the line near the pump, and to give vent to their joy they seized the scantily dressed Tesla, boosted him to the shoulders of a couple of the firemen, and led a procession around the town. The seven-year-old Tesla was the hero of the day.

Later on Tesla, in explaining the incident, said that he had had not the faintest idea of how the pump worked; but as he watched the men struggle with it, he got an intuitive flash of knowledge that told him to go to the hose in the river. On looking back to that event, he said, he knew how Archimedes must have felt when, after discovering the law of the displacement of water by floating objects, he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka!

At the age of seven Tesla had tasted the pleasures of public acclaim

for his ingenuity. And further, he had done something which the dudes, the boys of his age in the city, could not do and which even their fathers could not do. He had found himself. He was now a hero, and it could be forgotten that he had jumped on a woman's skirt and ripped the train off.

Tesla never lost an opportunity to hike through the nearby mountains where he could again enjoy the pleasures of his earlier years spent so close to Nature. On these occasions he would often wonder if there was still operating a crude water wheel which he made and installed, when he was less than Five years old, across the mountain brook near his home in Smiljan.

The wheel consisted of a not too well-smoothed disk cut from a tree trunk in some lumbering operations. Through its center he was able to cut a hole and force into it a somewhat straight branch of a tree, the ends of which he rested in two sticks with crotches which he forced into the rock on either bank of the brook. This arrangement permitted the lower part of the disk to dip in the water and the current caused it to rotate. To the lad there was a great deal of originality employed in making this ancient device. The wheel wobbled a bit but to him it was a marvelous piece of construction, and he got no end of pleasure out of watching his water wheel obtain power from the brook.

This experiment undoubtedly made a life-long impression on his young plastic mind and endowed him with the desire, ever afterward manifested in his work, of obtaining power from Nature's sources which are always being dissipated and always being replenished.

In this smooth-disk water wheel we find an early clue to his later invention of the smooth-disk turbine. In his later experience he discovered that all water wheels have paddles-but his little water wheel had operated without paddles.

Tesla's First experiment in original methods of power production was made when he was nine years old. It demonstrated his ingenuity and originality, if nothing else. It was a sixteen-bug-power engine. He took two thin slivers of wood, as thick as a toothpick and several times as long, and glued them together in the form of a cross, so they looked like the arms of a windmill. At the point of intersection they were glued to a spindle made of another thin sliver of wood. On this he slipped a very small pulley with about the diameter of a pea. A piece of thread acting as a driving belt was slipped over this and also around the circumference of a much larger but light pulley which was also mounted on a thin spindle. The power for this machine was furnished by sixteen May bugs (June bugs in the United States). He had collected a jar full of the insects, which were very much of a pest in the neighborhood. With a little dab of glue four bugs were affixed, heading in the same direction, to each of the four arms of the windmill arrangement. The bugs beat their wings, and if they had been free would have flown away at high speed. They were, however, attached to the cross arms, so instead they pulled them around at high speed. These, being connected by the thread belt to the large pulley, caused the latter to turn at low speed; but it developed, Tesla reports, a surprisingly large torque, or turning power.

Proud of his bug-power motor and its continuous operation-the bugs did not cease flying for hours-he called in one of the boys in the neighborhood to admire it. The lad was a son of an Army officer. The visitor was amused for a short time by the bug motor, until he spied the jar of still unused May bugs. Without hesitation he opened the jar, fished out the bugs-and ate them. This so nauseated Tesla that he chased the boy out of the house and destroyed the bug motor. For years he could not tolerate the sight of May bugs without a return of this unpleasant reaction.

This event greatly annoyed Tesla because he had planned to add more spindles to the shaft and stick on more fliers until he had more than a one-hundred-bug-power motor.

TWO

TESLA'S years in school were more important for the activities in which he engaged in after-school hours than for what he learned in the classroom. At the age of ten, having finished his elementary studies in the Normal School, Tesla entered the college, called the Real Gymnasium, at Gospic. This was not an unusually early age to enter the Real Gymnasium, as that school corresponds more to our grammar school and junior high school than to our college.

One of the requirements, and one to which an unusually large percentage of the class time was devoted throughout the four years, was freehand drawing. Tesla detested the subject almost to the point of open rebellion, and his marks were accordingly very low, but not entirely owing to a lack of ability.

Tesla was left-handed as a boy, but later became ambidextrous. Left-handedness was a definite handicap in the freehand-drawing studies, but he could have done much better work than he actually produced and would have gotten higher marks if it were not for a piece of altruism in which he engaged. A student whom he could excel in drawing was striving hard for a scholarship. Were he to receive the lowest marks in freehand drawing, he would be unable to obtain the scholarship. Tesla sought to help his fellow student by intentionally getting the lowest rating in the small class.

Mathematics was his favorite subject and he distinguished himself in that study. His unusual proficiency in this field was not considered a counterbalancing virtue to make amends for his lack of enthusiasm for freehand drawing. A strange power permitted him to perform unusual feats in mathematics. He possessed it from early boyhood, but had considered it a nuisance and tried to be rid of it because it seemed beyond his control.

If he thought of an object it would appear before him exhibiting the appearance of solidity and massiveness. So greatly did these visions possess the attributes of actual objects that it was usually difficult for him to distinguish between vision and reality. This abnormal faculty functioned in a very useful fashion in his school work with mathematics.

If he was given a problem in arithmetic or algebra, it was immaterial to him whether he went to the blackboard to work it out or whether he remained in his seat. His strange faculty permitted him to see a visioned blackboard on which the problem was written, and there appeared on this blackboard all of the operations and symbols required in working out the solution. Each step appeared much more rapidly than he could work it out by hand on the actual slate. As a result, he could give the solution almost as quickly as the whole problem was stated.

His teachers, at First, had some doubts about his honesty, thinking he had worked out some clever deceit for getting the right answers. In due time their skepticism was dispelled and they accepted him as a student who was unusually apt at mental arithmetic. He would not reveal this power to anyone and would discuss it only with his mother, who in the past had encouraged him in his efforts to banish it. Now that the power had demonstrated some definite usefulness, though, he was not so anxious to be completely rid of it, but desired to bring it under his complete control.

Work that Tesla did outside school hours interested him much more than his school work. He was a rapid reader and had a memory that was retentive to the point, almost, of infallibility. He found it easy to acquire foreign languages. In addition to his native Serbo-Croat language he became proficient in the use of German, French and Italian. This opened to him great stores of knowledge to which other students did not have access, yet this knowledge, apparently, was of little use to him in his school work. He was interested in things mechanical but the school provided no manual training course. Nevertheless, he became proficient in the working of wood and metals with tools and methods of his own contriving.

In the classroom of one of the upper grades of the Real Gymnasium models of water wheels were on exhibition. They were not working models but nevertheless they aroused Tesla's enthusiasm. They recalled to him the crude wheel he had constructed in the hills of Smiljan. He had seen pictures of the magnificent Niagara Falls. Coupling the power possibilities presented by the majestic waterfalls and the intriguing possibilities he saw in the models of the water wheels, he aroused in himself a passion to accomplish a grand achievement. Waxing eloquent on the subject, he told his father, "Some day I am going to America and harness Niagara Falls to produce power.'' Thirty years later he was to see this prediction fulfilled.

There were many books in his father's library. The knowledge in those books interested him more than that which he received in school and he wished to spend his evenings reading them. As in other matters, he carried this to an extreme, so his father forbade him to read them, fearing that he would ruin his eyes in the poor light of tallow candles then used for illumination. Nikola sought to circumvent this ruling by taking candles to his room and reading after he was sent to bed, but his violation of orders was soon discovered and the family candle supply was hidden. Next he fashioned a candle mould out of a piece of tin and made his own candles. Then, by plugging the keyhole and the chinks around the door, he was able to spend the night hours reading volumes purloined from his father's bookshelves. Frequently, he said, he would read through the entire night and feel none the worse for the loss of sleep. Eventual discovery, however, brought paternal discipline of a vigorous nature. He was about eleven years old at this time.

Like other boys of his age he played with bows and arrows. He made bigger bows, and better, straighter shooting arrows, and his marksmanship was excellent. He was not willing to stop at that point. He started building arbalists. These could be described as bow-and-arrow guns. The bow is mounted on a frame and the string pulled back and caught on a peg from which it is released by a trigger. The arrow is laid on the midpoint of the bow, its end against the taut string. The bow lies horizontal on the frame whereas in ordinary manual shooting the bow is held in vertical position. For this reason the device is sometimes called the crossbow. In setting an arbalist the beam is placed against the abdomen and the string pulled back with all possible force. Tesla did this so often, he said, that his skin at the point of pressure became calloused until it was more like a crocodile's hide. When shot into the air the arrows from his arbalist were never recovered, for they went far out of sight. At close range they would pass through a pine board an inch thick.

Tesla got a thrill out of archery not experienced by other boys. He was, in imagination, riding those arrows which he shot out of sight into the blue vault of the heavens. That sense of exhilaration he experienced when breathing deeply gave him such a feeling of lightness he convinced himself that in this state it would be relatively easy for him to fly through the air if he only could devise some mechanical aid tha