The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in 1857 at Smiljan, Lika, a borderland region of Austro-Hungary, of the Serbian race, which has maintained against Turkey and all comers so unceasing a struggle for freedom. His family is an old and representative one among these Switzers of Eastern Europe, and his father was an eloquent clergyman in the Greek Church. An uncle is to-day Metropolitan in Bosnia. His mother was a woman of inherited ingenuity, and delighted not only in skilful work of the ordinary household character, but in the construction of such mechanical appliances as looms and churns and other machinery required in a rural community. Nikola was educated at Gospich in the public school for four years, and then spent three years in the Real Schule. He was then sent to Carstatt, Croatia, where he continued his studies for three years in the Higher Real Schule. There for the first time he saw a steam locomotive. He graduated in 1873, and, surviving an attack of cholera, devoted himself to experimentation, especially in electricity and magnetism. His father would have had him maintain the family tradition by entering the Church, but native genius was too strong, and he was allowed to enter the Polytechnic School at Gratz, to finish his studies, and with the object of becoming a professor of mathematics and physics. One of the machines there experimented with was a Gramme dynamo, used as a motor. Despite his instructor's perfect demonstration of the fact that it was impossible to operate a dynamo without commutator or brushes, Mr. Tesla could not be convinced that such accessories were necessary or desirable.

It was during this period, and as early as 1882, that he began serious and continued efforts to embody the rotating field principle in operative apparatus. He was enthusiastic about it; believed it to mark a new departure in the electrical arts, and could think of nothing else. In fact, but for the solicitations of a few friends in commercial circles who urged him to form a company to exploit the invention, Mr. Tesla, then a youth of little worldly experience, would have sought an immediate opportunity to publish his ideas, believing them to be worthy of note as a novel and radical advance in electrical theory as well as destined to have a profound influence on all dynamo electric machinery.

At last he determined that it would be best to try his fortunes in America. In France he had met many Americans, and in contact with them learned the desirability of turning every new idea in electricity to practical use. He learned also of the ready encouragement given in the United States to any inventor who could attain some new and valuable result. The resolution was formed with characteristic quickness, and abandoning all his prospects in Europe, he at once set his face westward.

Arrived in the United States, Mr. Tesla took off his coat the day he arrived, in the Edison Works. That place had been a goal of his ambition, and one can readily imagine the benefit and stimulus derived from association with Mr. Edison, for whom Mr. Tesla has always had the strongest admiration. It was impossible, however, that, with his own ideas to carry out, and his own inventions to develop, Mr. Tesla could long remain in even the most delightful employ; and, his work now attracting attention, he left the Edison ranks to join a company intended to make and sell an arc lighting system based on some of his inventions in that branch of the art. With unceasing diligence he brought the system to perfection, and saw it placed on the market. But the thing which most occupied his time and thoughts, however, all through this period, was his old discovery of the rotating field principle for alternating current work, and the application of it in motors that have now become known the world over.

There is still another and more striking peculiarity of such a high frequency streamer, namely, it is hot. The heat is easily perceptible with frequencies of about 10,000, even if the potential is not excessively high. The heating effect is, of course, due to the molecular impacts and collisions. Could the frequency and potential be pushed far enough, then a brush could be produced resembling in every particular a flame and giving light and heat, yet without a chemical process taking place.

The hot brush, when properly produced, resembles a jet of burning gas escaping under great pressure, and it emits an extraordinary strong smell of ozone. The great ozonizing action is ascribed to the fact that the agitation of the molecules of the air is more violent in such a brush than in the ordinary streamer of a static machine. But the most powerful brush discharges were produced by employing currents of much higher frequencies than it was possible to obtain by means of the alternators. These currents were obtained by disruptively discharging a condenser and setting up oscillations. In this manner currents of a frequency of several hundred thousand were obtained.

Here is a simple glass tube from which the air has been partially exhausted. I take hold of it; I bring my body in contact with a wire conveying alternating currents of high potential, and the tube in my hand is brilliantly lighted. In whatever position I may put it, wherever I move it in space, as far as I can reach, its soft, pleasing light persists with undiminished brightness.

Here is an exhausted bulb suspended from a single wire. Standing on an insulated support, I grasp it, and a platinum button mounted in it is brought to vivid incandescence.

Here, attached to a leading wire, is another bulb, which, as I touch its metallic socket, is filled with magnificent colors of phosphorescent light.

Here still another, which by my fingers' touch casts a shadow—the Crookes shadow—of the stem inside of it.