Jonathan Claridge-P2

Nikola Tesla Essay

Nikola revolutionized the world in many ways. Whether through his amazing inventions, creating systems that would rock the world, and many books which inspired (and continue to inspire) many people that came after him, he will always be a true role model and has set the base for many inventors to come. Nikola was born on the same year that Gregor Mendel started researching genetics. He was born in a city near Gospic in Croatia. That small town had a population of 446 in 2001. It is now most well known for being his birthplace. He was baptized in the same town he was born in. He was one of five children and he had 1 brother and 3 sisters. His family moved to Gospic in 1862. He went to school in the year 1875 and studied electrical engineering in secondary school in Karlovac. In 1881 he went to work in a telegraph company. He then quickly became the chief electrician for the company and then the engineer of Yugoslavias first telephone system. He then made a telephone repeater which could act as audio speaker. Soon after he made the repeater he moved to Maribor to be an assistant engineer. He moved to Paris in 1882 to work as an engineer for one of Edisons many companies. Nikola designed improvements to many of the electrical equipment used there. Soon after he conceived the induction motor and began designing devices to make it happen. He left Paris quickly after to meet his dying mother on her deathbed. He got there only a few hours before she passed. He fell ill shortly afterwards and was recuperating in Gospic and Tomingaj for more than 3 weeks. His father dies sometime shortly after 1878. In 1884 he moved to the United States to work in in a different branch of Edisons Company. He started off with electrical engineering then moved up to work on Edisons DC dynamos and decided to completely redo them. He then described the upsides of his modifications and Edison offered $50,000 if they worked. It took him nearly a year but he completed them and the Edison Company made an extremely large profit off of the patent. Mr.

Edison then restated his proposition to a $10 dollar increase of the measly salary Tesla already had. Tesla quit on the spot and went off to make a company on his own. In 1888, two years after Nikola formed his own company to fight against the stolen patents by Edison he began his designing of the famous Tesla Coil. AC (alternating current) was now the idea he and his manufacturer Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing company were going to use. The years following would be called The War of the Currents. Tesla and Edison would then become direct adversaries for Electric Distribution. Thomas was all for DC currents and Tesla was all for AC currents in this war. When Nikola finished the induction motor the only downside to AC went away. The inability for motors to run AC was gone and Tesla got the upper hand. DC still had vast problems that put Nikola ahead like it couldnt travel more than mile without voltage loss and the fact it could not change voltage strength easily. When Tesla set up a system where you could use AC generators it was clear AC was the future. George Westinghouse the manufacturer for Tesla was hired to come up with an AC system to run from Niagara Falls after Nikola implemented a three stage system for people to use. A year before he started working on his induction furnace he began look at waves that would later be called X-Rays with his single node vacuum tubes. This device differed from others because it didnt have an electrode to target in it. This in modern terms is called braking radiation and worked by sending electron to form the one electrode it had to a combination of field emissions and thermionic emissions. Once freed these electrons are greatly repelled by the electric field near the single electrode. This creates negative voltage that forms X-Rays that when they collide with glass at the end. He later also used Geissler Tubes. When he discovered the harmful effects of X-rays he pondered if they came from another source. He soon after observed the burns one of assistants got when they were playing with X-Rays and performed experiments but didnt make the findings known and they got burned up in a street fire. In 1891 Tesla gave demonstrations about coils and some of his machines before and American institute. After learning some of the propositions by William Crooks he created a series of coils that had a high voltage and high frequency. The earlier models Tesla concocted had a disruptive action of a spark gap. He described this coil in one his patents.

He became a citizen of the United States in 1891. He then founded a laboratory at 35th South Fifty Avenue later on and established another one at 46th Street East. Both of them were in New York. At this point in time he was being influenced by the work of Swami Vivekananda. At the 1893s World Fair Tesla and his friend Westinghouse powered the event by their AC power and introduced it to many people. Edison protested after Tesla got chosen and didnt let him use his signature light bulbs. It didnt matter though because Westinghouse came up with a double-stopper lamp to compensate for this. Tesla had several lights and bulbs of his own on display there. To make an even bigger statement he explained several principles behind his product there. The facility was very large and Edison offered to light the event for 1 million dollars at that time. Westinghouse using Teslas AC current offered 500,000 to light it. The AC was more efficient and put off less heat. In the convention Nikola showed off a device that he called the Egg of Columbus. The device explains the device of Teslas the Induction furnace and the rotating magnetic field. This put him in good position and led him to then replace most DC current that were in place at the time. Westinghouse and Edison were almost bankrupt at the time so Tesla released from the contracts Westinghouse to give him a break from Teslas patent royalties. These are the (slightly) abridged accomplishments of Nikola Tesla to make it easier to read and more original.