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Nikola Tesla

Overview

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American engineer, futurist, and inventor. He is known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

Born and raised in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tesla first studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without receiving a degree. He then gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884, he migrated to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His AC induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system, which Westinghouse marketed.

Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging among other things, in an attempt to develop inventions he could patent and market. He built a wirelessly controlled boat, one of the first wirelessly controlled vehicles ever produced. Tesla became well known as an inventor and demonstrated his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab. He was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.

After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943. Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the International System of Units (SI) measurement of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s. In 2013, Time named Tesla one of the 100 most significant figures of all time.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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The ether was continuous, the waves in it were continuous, and it was hoped that matter would be found to consist of some continuous structure in the ether. Then came the discovery of the electron, a small finite unit of negative electricity, and the proton, a small finite unit of positive electricity. The most modern view is that electricity is never found except in the form of electrons and protons; all electrons…
Bertrand Russell, The A B C of Relativity
Close in meaning to Nikola Tesla; the term itself is not named.
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The recognition that natural energy can be systematically applied, through experimental observation, to the satisfaction and multiplication of concrete wants is doubtless the greatest single discovery ever imported into the life of man--save perhaps the discovery of language. Science, borrowing from industry, repaid the debt with interest, and has made the control of natural forces for the aims of life so inevitable…
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
Close in meaning to Nikola Tesla; the term itself is not named.
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Especially when to these rulers, it adds the invention of parliamentary cabinet government in England, of federal presidential government in the United States, and of the humanitarian principles of the French Revolution. Also in technology it produced the steam-engine, and thereby ushered in a new era of civilisation. Undoubtedly, as a practical age the eighteenth century was a success. If you had asked one of the…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
Close in meaning to Nikola Tesla; the term itself is not named.
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Nikola Tesla

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