Nikola Tesla - remarkable genius

The name Nikola Tesla is famous all over the world. This extraordinary inventor had a remarkable life and few realize how he influences our times today.

The biography of the famous physicist, electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla can serve as an illustrative example of the fact that genius is not automatically associated with wealth and happiness in life. He was not good at monetizing his groundbreaking inventions, he got into debt and sometimes he trusted the wrong people, including Thomas Alva Edison, a proponent of direct current, who later devoted a large part of his life to ridiculing and discrediting Tesla's ideas and discoveries.

When a boy was born in a small Croatian village in 1856, a storm raged in the sky. The midwife claimed it was a bad omen, but little did she know that she had just helped give birth to the "lightning lord" who would usher in the electrification of the world and the birth of mass communication.

From Wikipedia:

Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan in Austrian Empire (autonomous part Croation Kingdom) to an Orthodox Serbian priest Miluti Tesla and his wife Djuca.

Nikola Tesla (Serbian Никола Тесла, July 10, 1856, Smiljan, Austrian Empire - January 7, 1943, New York) was an inventor, physicist and designer of electrical machines, equipment and devices of Serbian nationality, long-term resident in America. Among other things, he invented the asynchronous motor, and his work formed the basis of modern multiphase alternating current systems. After demonstrating wireless telecommunications in 1893 and winning the so-called "War of Currents" against Thomas A. Edison, he was widely respected as America's foremost electrical engineer. His work laid the foundation for modern electrical engineering, and many of his discoveries were of fundamental importance for the future.

Although Tesla was a very prolific inventor, he did not have much entrepreneurial ability or ambition, and often went into debt for his experiments and projects. He also had trouble getting his patents recognized, running into conflicts with other inventors and entrepreneurs, notably Edison and Marconi.

Studies

After graduating from the gymnasium in Karlovac, Tesla went to study physics and mathematics at the Polytechnic in Graz. The father convinced him to study at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended in the summer semester of 1880. Here he was influenced by Ernst Mach. After his father's death, however, he left his studies at the university. In 1880, he moved to Budapest, where he worked for a telegraph company and became intensively involved in electricity research. After two years, he moved to Paris and settled permanently in the United States in June 1884 (he became a US citizen in 1891).

Life in USA

Tesla started working at Edison Machine Works in 1884. He worked  in Edison's laboratories from half past ten in the morning until five in the morning. In just one year, he constructed twenty-four new types of machines. Tesla's designs were simpler, more perfect, cheaper, lighter and had much more power.

   Tesla in the age about 40

After disagreements with Edison in 1886, he founded his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The company primarily produced and patented improvements for arc lamps. However, Tesla wanted to focus on AC machines, which the investors did not agree with and fired him. He did not find work in the field and spent some time as a laborer digging ditches. In 1887 he signed a contract with Edison's great rival, Westinghouse, and continued his research on alternating current in his laboratories and made many other discoveries.

Tesla was tireless. The last patent was granted to him on January 3, 1922. In total, he obtained more than 700 patents, but he did not become rich. He was significantly ahead of his time in his designs. He was concerned with more efficient use of energy and its transformation. He proposed a more economical production of iron and aluminum, considered alternative sources of energy - wind, sun, earth; about the ideal way of obtaining energy. He thoroughly worked out the principle of transmitting electrical energy without wires in the upper layers of the atmosphere. He demonstrated an electric car using what is probably the Earth's magnetic field for propulsion. But he ruined his plans. He came up with a lamp that worked on the principle of a laser and built a button lamp that could vaporize any material.

In 1939, he was seriously injured by a car in New York. He spent the last four years of his life in the New Yorker Hotel, lonely and forgotten, the injury after the accident did not allow him to leave the hotel room. He did not complain, he lived his whole life alone, completely occupied only with his great thoughts and surrounded by his only friends - pigeons. He was engaged in creative work until his death. Nikola Tesla died at the age of 86. After his death, his documents were stored in the warehouse of the Foreign Assets Administration Office. Tesla's claims to primacy in the discovery of radio were awarded to him by a court only in 1943, three months after his death.

Personality

Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest inventors and scientists in history, but at the same time he was a very modest person who dedicated his work first to the well-being of mankind and only then to scientific progress.
When he became famous, a young journalist asked him how it was possible that he, the great inventor, had no monument when others of far less merit were being erected in the wide world. Tesla replied that it was not true, because he had the most monuments. When a surprised journalist asked him where these monuments of his were located, Tesla replied: “...Each pole of a high voltage transmission line is one of the monuments of my work. Now count them!”

Birth house of Nikola Tesla in Smiljan, nowadays his museum

From early youth he had to struggle with psychic hypersensitivity and had to learn to control his exceptionally sensitive psychic constitution. The boy, who was forced to fight the images that uncontrollably gushed into his consciousness, gradually becomes familiar with the remarkable power of his imagination in an effort to maintain his mental health. By force of will, he directs his imagination to scientific research. Just like great artists, he uses his inventive ability in an original way, pointing out its practical adaptation in the research of unknown laws of nature.

"What we need most at present is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and societies throughout the world...Peace can reign only as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and the unification of races, and we are still very far from this blissful realization." Nikola Tesla

Thanks for reading

                                        Margaret

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

https://edu.techmania.cz/cs/encyklopedie/vedec/1343/tesla

https://www.reflex.cz/clanek/historie/111975/nikola-tesla-byl-zamilovany-do-holubice-mel-fobii-z-broskvi-a-zil-v-hotelich-ktere-neplatil.html