NIKOLA
Gabriel Huei Long Lim
Nikola Tesla was born on the 10th of July in 1856 in Smiljan in modern-day Croatia.
His mother came from a line of inventors with an incredible memory and has been able to memorize an entirety of Serbian epic poems. As a result, she trained Nikola with exercises to perfect his memorization.
Nikola was known to have a photographic memory and could accurately recollect memories. Photographic memory is the ability to
remember information vividly and recall it in fine detail in just a brief amount of time.
Nikola spoke eight different languages, and he credited his mother’s efforts in his youth. Those languages include Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.
When he was 5, he witnessed his brother’s death in an accident with riding a horse. That event traumatized him.
As a result, Nikola experienced flashes of bright light and images, making it difficult to separate his imagination from his reality.
Nikola claimed that his inventions would come to him in flashes of light, creating their entire design in his head and correcting their flaws without writing them down.
Nikola dropped out of Graz University of Technology in Austria because of his gambling addiction and personal problems.
As a result, He cut off all relations with his family to hide his academic situation. At age 22, without contacting anyone, Nikola moved to Slovenia in search of work. At the same time, his parents thought he had committed suicide.
In 1882, Nikola found a job with the Paris branch of the Continental Edison Company as he was inspired by electrical demonstrations by his physics professor during his university days. He installed indoor lightning around the city.
Nikola’s employer soon realized that his talents were wasted on such a trivial job and tasked him with constructing and improving dynamos and motors. A dynamo is a machine that converts movement from gears into electrical energy.
Nikola was so brilliant in his innovations that the company eventually had him traveling around Europe fixing problems at other Edison branches.
In 1884 at 28, Nikola’s manager offered him a job at Edison Machine Works in New York City, an offer he accepted which made him move to America.
He became a naturalized citizen 7 years later, in 1891.
Nikola met Thomas Edison and initially described him as an inspirational figure
Edison also applauds Nikola as he is recorded, saying, “I have had many hard-working assistants, but you take the cake.”
However, their relationship soured when the two disagreed about the type of current each man preferred. Edison’s company owned the patents for direct current or DC, a system where electric charge only flows in one direction.
Nikola, however, was for alternating current or AC (a system where the electric charge changes direction from time to time which allows AC current to maintain power over longer distances). It is also possible to use devices called transformers to change the magnitude/power of AC voltage, allowing a current at a high voltage and be reduced to a lower voltage for safe use at home.
Glossary:
Current – the flow/movement of electricity.
Patent – An official document that secures the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a term of years
Direct current (DC) – A system where electricity flows in one direction (direct).
Alternating current (AC) – A system where electricity changes (alternates) which allows current to maintain its power when it travels from place to place. It is also a more effective way to get electricity to your device (the right amount, not too much or too little).
Character Profile:
Name: Thomas Alva Edison
Born: February 11, 1847 Milan, Ohio
Died: October 1931 (Aged 84)
Best known as the person who was credited in inventing the lightbulb.
Tesla tried convincing Edison, but he wouldn’t listen as it could ruin the sales for direct current to which he owned all the patents.
*Reasoning:
Edison controls all the distribution for direct current. So, if he were to switch to alternating current, he would need to buy all the distribution rights for AC.
Instead, Edison offered Nikola an enormous $50 000 bonus if he redesigned 24 of his old-fashioned and outdated machines. ($50, 000 is about $1,652,967.03 in today’s money)
Would you make that deal if you had the ability to fulfill the request?
Nikola gladly fulfilled the request. Once Nikola updated the machines, Edison said he was only kidding and did not pay him for his work. In addition, Edison teased him, saying he didn’t understand American humor.
How would you feel if you were treated like Nikola?
Nikola quit after working 6 months in the company because of Edison’s mistreatment.
Nikola wanted to change the world and knew he could do it. He spent the next year setting up his own company and developing his ideas on alternating current.
His investors showed little interest and decided to take the company, including all the patents he created.
*Reasoning:
When a person does not have enough money to do what they want, like starting a business, they will look for people who have money to help them: investors. But if you do accept their help, they own part of the things you created because you have used their money.
How would you feel if you worked very hard on something and people just took it away?
To survive, Nikola was left digging drainage alongside the street.
His ideas eventually interested a new investor, especially of an alternating current motor.
The investor helped Nikola establish the Tesla Electric Company in 1887.
Nikola then designed a motor that was much cheaper and easier to maintain than one using a direct current (DC).
The following year, he revealed his motor at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This display caught the attention of a businessman named George Westinghouse.
Character Profile:
Name: George Westinghouse Jr.
Born: October 6, 1846 Central Bridge, New York
Died: March 12, 1914 (67)
Best known as a pioneer of the electrical industry and creator of the railway airbrake.
Westinghouse was a big name in the electric market and needed Nikola’s motor to complete an alternating current system that would compete with Thomas Edison.
Westinghouse bought the motor and hired Nikola as a consultant for the equivalent of $55 000 dollars a month and royalties for each horsepower produced by his motors.
Glossary:
Royalty – A sum of money paid to a person for the use of a patent or to an author or composer for each copy of a book sold or for each public performance of a work.
Horsepower – A unit of power equal to 550 foot pounds per second.
Upon knowing what happened, Edison started going to extreme lengths to damage Nikola’s alternating current reputation. Edison began paying schoolchildren like yourself 25 cents (about $8 in today’s money) to bring him household pets. He would then set up a public stage and electrocute the animals to demonstrate to the people that Nikola’s AC system was unsafe. Would you do that to your pet for money?
Over time, electrocutions increased so bad that a horse was eventually killed in public.
Despite Edison’s attempts, Nikola and Westinghouse continued to develop their alternating current system. The opportunity to show that alternating current was both safe and viable for large-scale use came at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago’s World Fair) hosted in Chicago in 1893.
Edison had put in an offer to light the fair. But, Westinghouse offered a lower price for lighting and won the decision. It also gave him a chance to outshine Edison. Providing lighting at a lower cost had suggested that Westinghouse and Tesla successfully showed the world the strength of the alternating current.
*Reasoning:
The fair needs to have light for it to work. Since Edison is well-known for his electric company, he offered to provide electricity for the lights of the fair. However, Westinghouse was instead given the task of providing the electricity because he offered his services for a lower price than Edison.
Their success continued with Westinghouse Electric being chosen over Edison’s company General Electric to construct a hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls.
Nikola drew up designs for the plant, which was a massive success, eventually powering a part of New York City.
Alternating power grew in popularity and became the system we all use to power our homes today, with direct current fizzling out over the next decade.
Though Westinghouse became more popular, his company was left on the verge of bankruptcy with ten million dollars of debt (about 33 million dollars in today’s money!)
He turned to Nikola for help asking him to temporarily reduce his royalties to help his company survive.
Compelled by his compassion for his friend Nikola instead tore up his contract, eliminating them entirely.
*Reasoning:
The contract is a legal document that holds the parties involved in their promise to each other. When Nikola tore his contract, it meant that they were no longer legally required to fulfill their promises.
The money he gave up would be 300 million dollars in today’s cash, but this was little concern to Nikola, who was more interested in pursuing science over money.
Would you do the same thing for your friend? If yes, what is your reason for doing so?
Nikola’s decision saved Westinghouse, who eventually bought his AC patent for 216 thousand dollars in 1897 (which is about 6 million dollars today). Nikola used the money to set up new laboratories in New York and fully dedicated himself to inventing.
Nikola soon became an international figure, with his laboratories frequently visited by the rich and powerful, including his close friend and father of American literature, Mark Twain.
Nikola invented a lot of machines, adding up to almost 300.
He was one of the first to develop X-ray technology and one of the first to warn of its dangers to humans.
The most famous of Nikola’s inventions is known as the Tesla coil, a device capable of producing large amounts of high-voltage electricity.
A famous invention was a remote-controlled boat displayed at Madison Square Garden in 1898.
This boat was a fantastic development in wireless technology. It was so ahead of its time that the audience initially thought Nikola was using magic to make it move.
There were even claims that there was a monkey hidden inside the boat, which was trained to operate it.
As you can see, no monkeys here, everything is just wireless technology!
Though Nikola was a brilliant inventor, he struggled to sell his creation. He was always looking toward the next invention rather than working on how to sell what he had already made.
Many of his ideas were not written down, and the ones that were noted down often went without legal patents.
His method of operating had caused him serious problems when he began working on the radio at the end of the 1890s. He came up with the idea of radio in 1892 and was soon ready to transmit a signal to a location 50 miles away, but his work was destroyed in a lab fire in 1895.
Article from the New York Herald, March 14, 1895
Result of the lab fire
Nikola had not submitted a patent application and only did so after two years of rebuilding his research
Character profile:
Name: Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi
Born: April 25, 1874 Bologna, Kingdom of Italy
Died: July 20, 1937 (Aged 63)
Known for creating a practical radio wave-based wireless telegraph system.
At the same time, an Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi had also been working on radio establishing patent rights in England. But when he tried to acquire them in the United States, he was turned down as his ideas were deemed too similar to Nikola’s
As a response, Edison then supported Marconi by using his financial abilities to help him as the US Patent Office suddenly changed its mind about its previous ruling/decision
Marconi now had rights in the United States, with Edison able to take a cut of the profits.
Unfortunately for Nikola, Marconi made the world’s first radio message that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1901 by using 17 of Nikola’s patents.
What do you think about Edison’s decision?
Nikola initially let the issue slide, but the last straw came when Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1911 for his development of radio (something which was only possible due to Nikola’s unrecognized work!)
Nikola tried to sue Marconi, but the case dragged on for years and was only resolved in Nikola’s favor eight months after his death.
*Reasoning:
The Nobel Prize is one of the most prestigious awards a person can get. It is not easy to receive such an award as it is only given to those who make an outstanding contribution to human development/society.
Nikola’s most ambitious idea came about at the turn of the 1900s. He aimed to create a world wireless system that would be capable of dispersing energy anywhere in the world.
Nikola received funding in 1901 and soon purchased land on Long Island, New York, where he would construct his device.
Over the next year, a giant wooden tower was constructed. It stood at 187 feet tall, with a metal dome 68 feet in diameter
Nikola named the facility Wardenclyffe Tower and believed it would greatly advance wireless technology with what he called communication devices, the likes of which would not be seen for another 100 years that you now have access to today!
Nikola said:
“A telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Globe. 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”
“In the same manner, any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind.”
The tower also had other uses, including universal and accurate timekeeping, global music distribution, and a marine system that would allow ships to determine their exact location at sea and steer perfectly without the need for a compass
Despite his amazing ideas, Nikola soon suffered many setbacks…
Marconi’s 1901 radio broadcast had drawn attention away from Wardenclyffe Tower, as the media began to think of the project as a prank.
The investors Nikola had been able to gather soon realized that there was no way to regulate such a service and, therefore, no way to profit from the energy produced by the tower.
As a result, many investors backed out and left Nikola, who was in his 50s and in financial ruin.
Nikola struggled for over ten years trying to complete his plans.
But with no money, any progress is difficult.
He had a nervous breakdown, and his debt reached so high that he lost Wardenclyffe Tower to the government in 1915, as he was unable to maintain.
The land soon passed to another owner who destroyed the tower to make space for housing.
Nikola was now bankrupt, and his mental health worsened significantly.
He began living in a number of hotels and started caring for pigeons, taking time every day to feed and care for them.
In his late 70s, he ended up at the New Yorker Hotel, where he would stay for the rest of his life. This was largely thanks to the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, who saw Nikola in his unfortunate situation. The company decided to pay his rent as a way to thank him for saving them all those years ago.
Nikola passed at age 86, dying in his hotel room on the 7th of January 1943.
Nikola was a man ahead of his time. His advancement in electricity was seen as crazy in his time, which helped welcome the modern age. His contributions can be found in anything from X-rays to remote control. His world wireless system had the ability to advance technology by nearly a hundred years while also providing free energy to the people on Earth.
Unlike so many in his time, Nikola did not work for money but instead worked to advance human society. Maybe it is not surprising that a man so ahead of his time has only found where he belongs in the 2000s (the 21st century: the Digital Age), a time frame formed by his technological brilliance.
In case you are still wondering, A little car company you might have heard of, Tesla, got its name from Nikola because of the AC system they use in their car!
Work for what you love your hard work WILL be recognize, money is not everything!
“Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine”
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok8JDXSYw1U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeUA-0G1p5k
https://www.wondersofphysics.com/2019/07/nikola-teslabiography.html#:~:text=He%20severed%20all%20relations%20with% 20family%20to%20hide,Nikola%20moved%20to%20Slovenia%20in%2 0search%20of%20work.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikola-Tesla
https://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/nikola-tesla-a-soho-story/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/278.Nikola_Tesla
Picture sourced:
Cover Photo:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.artstat ion.com%2Fartwork%2FGa2kva&psig=AOvVaw2PAYlJvAxy1LoyOg
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Nikola Tesla:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedi a.org%2Fwiki%2FNikola_Tesla&psig=AOvVaw1PWV8JbFaBk8GSN Bmza9Zi&ust=1680648621562000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0C A8QjRxqFwoTCKiovJ3mjv4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
Young Cartoon Nikola:
https://images-wixmp-
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Traditional indoor lights:
https://www.traditionalbuilding.com/.image/t_share/MTY4MTQ2OTQ 2MDk0MDE1NzYx/20090109curtclayton0004.jpg
Dynamo:
https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833010536d060 fa970b-pi
Naturalized American
https://assetswp.boundless.com/uploads/2022/06/AdobeStock_208300368scaled.jpeg
Thorsla:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsHk6QiVgAAo7C5.jpg
Thomas Edison:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/Thomas _Edison2.jpg/800px-Thomas_Edison2.jpg
Transformer from the 1800s:
https://nationalmaglab.org/media/fsonsxlb/teslacoil_b.png
Optimus Prime:
https://c4.wallpaperflare.com/wallpaper/164/43/689/tf2-wallpaperpreview.jpg
Tesla certificate:
https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s40c42312 7565d23a/image/iee3eacb889f5bd19/version/1388958591/image.jpg
AC motor:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284183464/figure/fig2/AS:2 97828275507206@1448019202808/Nikola-Teslas-ac-induction-motordemonstrated-in-1887-Courtesy-20.png
George Westinghouse:
http://t2.gstatic.com/licensedimage?q=tbn:ANd9GcQocn9aHwB1x4SJW6IlKwcUkJsy4jE694Tuqe Kzh8fMvs-UvtpGLsTJVVmPvYPwkn-K
Horse:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcommons.wi kimedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFile%3AHarold_Pitney_Brown_edison_elect rocute_horse_1888_New_York_MedicoLegal_Journal_vol_6_issue_4.png&psig=AOvVaw1rIlP0LQF0JYcZ7DiTAC6&ust=1680817136611000&source=images&cd= vfe&ved=0CA8QjRxqFwoTCJiq-Ofjk_4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
World Columbian Exposition:
http://tile.loc.gov/imageservices/iiif/service:gmd:gmd410:g4104:g4104c:pm001522/full/pct:25/ 0/default.jpg
Hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls:
https://www.newyorkglobalmarketingsolutions.com/wpcontent/uploads/2020/11/908E8F60-1C03-4711-82084C2DDD651DCA.jpeg
Nikola’s feet:
https://pubs.rsna.org/cms/10.1148/rg.284075206/asset/images/mediu m/g08jl17g03x.jpeg
Steam turbine:
https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s40c42312 7565d23a/image/i9051e44ca3054632/version/1380058860/image.jpg
Neon:
https://img.atlasobscura.com/g2oDpoqauYSvD-ybQwmil870xptBaU6_YqnjmSqWdI/rs:fill:12000:12000/q:81/sm:1/scp:1/ar:1/aHR0c HM6Ly9hdGxh/cy1kZXYuczMuYW1h/em9uYXdzLmNvbS91/cGxvY WRzL2Fzc2V0/cy8wYTUwYTE0YzRj/NjA3ZDU5YzRfVGVz/bGFfdH ViZV9saWdo/dHNfYXRfQ29sdW1i/aWFuX0V4cG9zaXRp/b25fMTg5 My5qcGc.jpg
Tesla coil:
https://www.fi.edu/sites/default/files/2020-01/Nikola-Tesla-with-hisequipment.jpg
Cartoon Tesla:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/d02275a1a2ec09c8cb326e1be3198fa6/tu mblr_p1qms0Mnj01r37wr2o1_640.jpg
https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/vbGC_5xIxBWqc_oBqkypBQ
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Nikola and his radio:
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/191017164918nikola-tesla-file-restricted.jpg?q=w_3421,h_2687,x_0,y_0,c_fill
Article from the NY Herald:
https://nikolatesla-drakeboltnhd2016.weebly.com/uploads/6/9/6/0/69601073/1461090542.png
Lab fire:
https://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/02/13ed13ac604e0d90222748bf15625006.jpg
Marconi:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/Gugliel mo_Marconi.jpg/330px-Guglielmo_Marconi.jpg
Comic strips:
https://externalpreview.redd.it/gnE_l2VscyEr2_1PVzqkI3hgaIMuaFHorgyW_4HR7C
A.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=9bd34a5e14ac9e414b e25bc91dfb76ea3bb728f2
http://cdn.sheldoncomics.com/strips/main/180430_1525119570.png
Wardenclyffe tower:
https://img.atlasobscura.com/hHCVcYQqhjhodQ8toxb7PV8ni9VS2G3
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Pigeons:
https://historybyday.com/wpcontent/uploads/2021/03/NikolaTesla26.jpg