Nikola Tesla
"The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power."
He was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, futurist and some say "Alien" .
Yes, Alien as in from another planet.
He is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system.(AC/DC, not the band)
If it wasn't for some of his inventions, we probably wouldn't have electricity, lights, x-rays, anything that uses remotes, or anything robotic, for starters.
Before Imigration
He was born on July 10, 1856 in an ethnic Serb in the village Smiljan, in the Austrian Empire ( what now is Croatia.)
His father was Milutin Tesla, Eastern Orthodox priest,
His mother was Đuka Tesla.
Her father was also an Eastern Orthodox priest,
She had a talent for making home craft tools and mechanical appliances and the ability to memorize Serbian epic poems.
She had never recieved a formal education.
Nikola credited his memory and creative abilities to his mother.
Nikola became interested in demonstrations of electricity by his physics professor.
Nikola noted that these demonstrations of this "mysterious phenomena" made him want "to know more of this wonderful force".
Nikola was incredibly smart!
Nikola was able to preform intregal calculas in his head.
No calculator needed... i don't think they had calculators back then.
Some of his teachers thought he was cheating.
He finished a four-year term in three years, graduating in 1873.
In 1873, he contracted Colera.
He was stuckin bed for nine months and almost died multiple times.
Nikola's father wanted him enter the priesthood, but in an act of desperation, promised Nikola that he could go to the best engineering school if he recovered from his illness.
Nikola said that reading Mark Twain's writtings helped him recover from his illness.
In 1874, Nikola evaded service into the Austro-Hungarian Army in Smiljan by running away southeast Tomingaj.
There he explored the mountains wearing hunter's clothing.
Nikola said that this contact with nature made him stronger, both physically and mentally.
In 1875, Nikola enrolled at Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, Austria, on a Military Frontier scholarship.
He received a letter of commendation from the dean of the technical faculty to his father, which stated, "Your son is a star of first rank."
Nikola claimed that he worked from 3 a.m. to 11 p.m. with no days off.
He was "mortified when father made light of hard won honors."
After his father's death in 1879, Nikola found a letters from his professors to his father, warning that unless he were removed from the school, Nikola would die through overwork.
At the end of his second year, Nikola lost his scholarship and became addicted to gambling.
During his third year he gambled away his allowance and his tuition money. Later he gambled back his initial losses and returned the balance to his family.
When examination time came, Nikola was unprepared and asked for an extension, but was denied.
He did not receive grades for the last semester of the third year and he never graduated.
In December 1878, when Nikola left Graz, he severed all relations with his family to hide the fact that he dropped out of school.
His friends thought that he had drowned in the nearby Mur River.
He moved to Maribor, where he worked as a draftsman.
He spent his spare time playing cards with local men on the streets.
In March 1879, Nikola's father went to begged him to come back home, but he refused.
Nikola suffered a nervous breakdown.
On 24 March 1879, Nikola was returned under police guard for not having a residence permit.
On 17 April 1879, Milutin Tesla died at the age of 60 after contracting an unspecified illness.
Some say it was possibly due to a stroke.
In January 1880, he attended lectures in philosophy at Charles-Ferdinand University as an auditor.
In 1881 he worked at the Budapest Telephone exchange.
While there he perfected a telephone repeater or amplifier.
In 1882, Tivadar Puskás got Nikola another job in Paris with the Continental Edison Company.
Nikola gained a great deal of practical experience in electrical engineering.
Management took notice of his advanced knowledge in engineering and physics and soon had him designing and building improved versions of generating dynamos and motors.
They also sent him on to troubleshoot engineering problems at other Edison utilities.
The U.S.
In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States.
He began working almost immediately at the Machine Works on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
He worked on troubleshooting installations and improving generators.
After staying up all night repairing the damaged dynamos on the ocean liner SS Oregon, he ran into Batchelor and Edison.
They made a snide comment about Nikola being out all night.
Nikola told them he had been up all night fixing the Oregon,
Edison said to Batchelor that "this is a damned good man."
One of the projects given to Nikola was to develop an arc lamp-based street lighting system.
Nikola had been working at the Machine Works for a total of six months when he quit, in part because they were paying him what they promised.
In March 1885, he met with patent attorney Lemuel W. Serrell.
Serrell introduced Tesla to Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail, who agreed to finance an arc lighting manufacturing and utility company in Tesla's name, the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing.
Nikola worked for the rest of the year obtaining the patents that included an improved DC generator, and building and installing the system in Rahway, New Jersey.
After the utility was up and running in 1886, the investors decided that the manufacturing side of the business was too competitive and opted to simply run an electric utility.
They formed a new utility company, abandoning Nikola's company and leaving the inventor penniless.
Nikola even lost control of the patents he had generated, since he had assigned them to the company in exchange for stock.
He had to work at various electrical repair jobs and as a ditch digger for $2 per day.
Later in life Nikola would recount that part of 1886 and wrote"My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery".
In late 1886, Nikola met Alfred S. Brown, a Western Union superintendent, and New York attorney Charles F. Peck.
Based on Nikola's new ideas for electrical equipment, including a thermo-magnetic motor idea, they agreed to back him financially and handle his patents.
Together they formed the Tesla Electric Company in April 1887, with an agreement that Nikola would get 1/3, Peck and Brown would together get 1/3 of the profits from generated patents and 1/3 would go to fund development. They set up a laboratory for Nikola at 89 Liberty Street in Manhattan, where he worked on improving and developing new types of electric motors, generators, and other devices.
In 1887, Nikola developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current (AC), a power system format.
The motor used polyphase current, which generated a rotating magnetic field to turn the motor (a principle that Nikola conceived in 1882.
This innovative electric motor, patented in May 1888, was a simple self-starting design that did not need a commutator.
In July 1888, Brown and Peck negotiated a licensing deal with George Westinghouse for Tesla's polyphase induction motor and transformer designs for $60,000 in cash and stock and a royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower produced by each motor.
Westinghouse also hired Nikola for one year for the large fee of $2,000 ($54,500 in today's dollars) per month to be a consultant at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs.
Did you know Thomas Edison, was pushing DC over AC?
Edison began a negative advertising campaign in an effort to discredit both Westinghouse and Tesla.
In fact, Edison went so far as to show how lethal AC was by electrocuting an elephant (this turned out to be disastrous publicity for Edison).
Two years after signing the Nikola contract, Westinghouse Electric was in trouble.
The near collapse of Barings Bank in London triggered the financial panic of 1890, causing investors to call in their loans to W.E.
The sudden cash shortage forced the company to refinance its debts.
At that point, the Nikola induction motor had been unsuccessful and was stuck in development.
Westinghouse was paying a $15,000-a-year guaranteed royalty even though operating examples of the motor were rare and polyphase power systems needed to run it were even rarer.
In early 1891, George Westinghouse explained his financial difficulties to Nikola, saying that, if he did not meet the demands of his lenders, he would no longer be in control of Westinghouse Electric and Tesla would have to "deal with the bankers" to try to collect future royalties.
Nikola agreed to release the company from the royalty payment clause in the contract.
Six years later Westinghouse would purchase Nikola's patent for a lump sum payment of $216,000 as part of a patent-sharing agreement signed with General Electric (a company created from the 1892 merger of Edison and Thompson-Houston).
The money Nikola made from licensing his AC patents made him independently wealthy .
In 1889, Nikola moved out of the Liberty Street shop Peck and Brown had rented and for the next dozen years would work out of a series of workshop/laboratory spaces in Manhattan.
Nickola and his hired staff would conduct some of his most significant work in these workshops.
In the summer of 1889, Nikola traveled to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and learned of Heinrich Hertz' 1886–88 experiments that proved the existence of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves.
Nikola found this new discovery "refreshing" and decided to explore it more fully.
Nikola tried powering a Ruhmkorff coil with a high speed alternator he had been developing as part of an improved arc lighting system but found that the high frequency current overheated the iron core and melted the insulation between the primary and secondary windings in the coil.
To fix this problem Nikola came up with his Tesla coil with an air gap instead of insulating material between the primary and secondary windings and an iron core that could be moved to different positions in or out of the coil.
On 30 July 1891, aged 35, Nikola became a naturalized citizen of the United States and later that year he patented his Tesla coil.
Nikola demonstrated wireless lighting by "electrostatic induction" during an 1891 lecture at Columbia College via two long Geissler tubes (similar to neon tubes) in his hands.
After 1890, Nikola experimented with transmitting power by inductive and capacitive coupling using high AC voltages generated with his Tesla coil.
] He attempted to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field inductive and capacitive coupling and conducted a series of public demonstrations where he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent light bulbs from across a stage.
In 1893 at St. Louis, Missouri, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, Nikola told onlookers that he was sure a system like his could eventually conduct "intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires" by conducting it through the Earth.
Nikola served as a vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers from 1892 to 1894, the forerunner of the modern-day IEEE (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers).
Trying to come up with a better way to generate alternating current, he developed a steam powered reciprocating electricity generator.
He patented it in 1893 and introduced it at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition that year.
At the beginning of 1893, Westinghouse engineer Benjamin Lamme had made great progress developing an efficient version of Tesla's induction motor, and Westinghouse Electric started branding their complete polyphase AC system as the "Tesla Polyphase System".
They believed that Nikola's patents gave them patent priority over other AC systems.
Westinghouse Electric asked Nikola to participate in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago where the company had a large space in a building devoted to electrical exhibits.
Westinghouse Electric won the bid to light the Exposition with alternating current and it was a key event in the history of AC power, as the company demonstrated to the American public the safety, reliability, and efficiency of a fully integrated alternating current system.
In 1893, Edward Dean Adams, who headed up the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company, sought Nikola's opinion on what system would be best to transmit power generated at the falls.
Adams pumped Nikola for information about the current state of all the competing systems.
Nikola advised Adams that a two-phased system would be the most reliable, and that there was a Westinghouse system to light incandescent bulbs using two-phase alternating current.
The company awarded a contract to Westinghouse Electric for building a two-phase AC generating system at the Niagara Falls, based on Nikola's advice and Westinghouse's demonstration at the Columbian Exposition that they could build a complete AC system.
In 1895, Edward Dean Adams, impressed with what he saw when he toured Nikola's lab, agreed to help found the Nikola Tesla.
Company, set up to fund, develop, and market a variety of previous Nikola's patents and inventions as well as new ones.
Alfred Brown signed on, bringing along patents developed under Peck and Brown.
The board was filled out with William Birch Rankine and Charles F. Coaney.
It found few investors; the mid-1890s was a tough time financially, and the wireless lighting and oscillators patents it was set up to market never panned out.
The company would handle Nikola's patents for decades to come.
In the early morning hours of March 13, 1895, the South Fifth Avenue building that housed Nikola's lab caught fire.
The fire not only set back Nikola's ongoing projects, it destroyed a collection of early notes and research material, models, and demonstration pieces, including many that had been exhibited at the 1893 Worlds Colombian Exposition.
Nikola told The New York Times "I am in too much grief to talk. What can I say?"
In 1894, Nikola began investigating what he referred to as radiant energy of "invisible" kinds after he had noticed damaged film in his laboratory in previous experiments (later identified as "Roentgen rays" or "X-Rays").
In 1898, Nikola demonstrated a radio-controlled boat which he hoped to sell as a guided torpedo to navies around the world.
In March 1896, Nikola proceeded to do his own experiments in X-ray imaging, developing a high energy single terminal vacuum tube of his own design that had no target electrode and that worked from the output of the Tesla Coil.
In his research, Nikola devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays.
Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will ... enable one to generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus."
Nikola noted the hazards of working with his circuit and single-node X-ray-producing devices.
In his many notes on the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes.
He believed early on that damage to the skin was not caused by the Roentgen rays, but by the ozone generated in contact with the skin, and to a lesser extent, by nitrogenous acid.
Nikola incorrectly believed that X-rays were longitudinal waves, such as those produced in waves in plasma.
These plasma waves can occur in force-free magnetic fields.
On 11 July 1934, the New York Herald Tribune published an article on Nikola, in which he recalled an event that would occasionally take place while experimenting with his single-electrode vacuum tubes; a minute particle would break off the cathode, pass out of the tube, and physically strike him:
Nikola said he could feel a sharp stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out.
In comparing these particles with the bits of metal projected by his "electric gun," Nikola said, "The particles in the beam of force ... will travel much faster than such particles ... and they will travel in concentrations."
In 1898, Nikola demonstrated a boat that used a coherer-based radio control.
He dubbed it "tel-automaton" to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden.
The crowd thought that it was such as magic, telepathy, and being piloted by a trained monkey hidden inside.
Nikola tried to sell his idea to the U.S. military as a type of radio-controlled torpedo, but they showed little interest.
Nikola took the opportunity to further demonstrate "Teleautomatics" in an address to a meeting of the Commercial Club in Chicago, while he was travelling to Colorado Springs, on 13 May 1899.
From the 1890s through 1906, Nikola spent a great deal of his time and fortune on a series of projects trying to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires.
It was an expansion of his idea of using coils to transmit power that he had been demonstrating in wireless lighting.
He saw this as not only a way to transmit large amounts of power around the world but also a way to transmit worldwide communications.
Tesla had studied radio waves early on, and came to the conclusion that part of existing study on them, by Hertz, was incorrect.
Also, this new form of radiation was widely considered at the time to be a short-distance phenomenon that seemed to die out in less than a mile.
Nikola noted that, even if theories on radio waves were true, they were totally worthless for his intended purposes since this form of "invisible light" would diminish over distance just like any other radiation and would travel in straight lines right out into space, becoming "hopelessly lost".
By the mid 1890s, Tesla was working on the idea that he might be able to conduct electricity long distance through the Earth or the atmosphere, and began working on experiments to test this idea including setting up a large resonance transformer magnifying transmitter.
He proposed a system composed of balloons suspending, transmitting, and receiving, electrodes in the air above 30,000 feet in altitude, where he thought the lower pressure would allow him to send high voltages (millions of volts) long distances.
To further study the conductive nature of low pressure air, Nikola set up an experimental station at high altitude in Colorado Springs during 1899.
To fund his experiments he convinced John Jacob Astor IV to invest $100,000 to become a majority share holder in the Nikola Tesla Company.
Astor thought he was primarily investing in the new wireless lighting system.
Nikola used the money to fund his Colorado Springs experiments.
Upon his arrival, he told reporters that he planned to conduct wireless telegraphy experiments, transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris.
He conducted experiments with a large coil operating in the megavolts range, producing artificial lightning (and thunder) consisting of millions of volts and up to 135 feet long discharges and, at one point, inadvertently burned out the generator in El Paso, causing a power outage.
The observations he made of the electronic noise of lightning strikes, led him to (incorrectly) conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy.
During his time at his laboratory, Nikola observed unusual signals from his receiver which he speculated to be communications from another planet.
He told this to reporters.
Reporters treated it as a sensational story and jumped to the conclusion Nikola was hearing signals from Mars.
In a 9 February 1901 Collier's Weekly article "Talking With Planets" he said it had not been immediately apparent to him that he was hearing "intelligently controlled signals" and that the signals could come from Mars, Venus, or other planets.
The Century Magazine to produced an article on his findings.
The magazine sent a photographer to Colorado to photograph the work being done there.
The article, titled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy", appeared in the June 1900 edition of the magazine.
Nikola made the rounds in New York trying to find investors for what he thought would be a viable system of wireless transmission.
In March 1901, he obtained $150,000 ($4,412,400 in today's dollars) from J. Pierpont Morgan in return for a 51% share of any generated wireless patents, and began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility to be built in Shoreham, New York.
By July 1901, Nikola had expanded his plans to build a more powerful transmitter to leap ahead of Marconi's radio based system, which Nikola thought was a copy of his own system.
He approached Morgan to ask for more money to build the larger system but Morgan refused to supply any further funds.
Nikola tried to get Morgan to back an even larger plan to transmit messages and power by controlling "vibrations throughout the globe".
Over the next five years, Nikola wrote more than 50 letters to Morgan, pleading for and demanding additional funding to complete the construction of Wardenclyffe.
Nikola continued the project for another nine months into 1902.
The tower was erected to its full 187 feet.
He around the world, delivering free power for all.
In June 1902, Tesla moved his lab operations from Houston Street to Wardenclyffe.
Investors on Wall Street were putting their money into Marconi's system, and some in the press began turning against Nikola's project, claiming it was a hoax.
The project came to a halt in 1905, and in 1906, the financial problems and other events may have led to was a nervous breakdown on Nikola's part.
Nikola mortgaged the Wardenclyffe property to cover his debts at the Waldorf-Astoria, which eventually mounted to $20,000 ($488,600 in today's dollars.
He lost the property in foreclosure in 1915, and in 1917 the Tower was demolished by the new owner to make the land a more viable real estate asset.
Later
Nikola continued to write to Morgan; after he died, he wrote to Morgan's son Jack, trying to get further funding for the project. In 1906.
After moving to 8 West 40th Street, he was effectively bankrupt.
Most of his patents had run out and he was having trouble with the new inventions he was trying to develop.
On his 50th birthday, in 1906, Nikola demonstrated a 200 horsepower 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine.
During 1910–1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100–5,000 hp.
Nikola licensed the idea to a precision instrument company and it found use in the form of luxury car speedometers and other instruments.
When World War I broke out, the British cut the transatlantic telegraph cable linking the US to Germany in order to control the flow of information between the two countries.
They also tried to shut off German wireless communication to and from the US by having the US Marconi Company sue the German radio company Telefunken for patent infringement.
Telefunken brought in the physicists Jonathan Zenneck and Karl Ferdinand Braun for their defense, and hired Nikola as a witness for two years for $1,000 a month.
The case stalled and then nothing happened with it when the US entered the war against Germany in 1917.
In 1915, Nikola attempted to sue the Marconi Company for infringement of his wireless tuning patents.
Marconi's initial radio patent had been awarded in the US in 1897, but his 1900 patent submission covering improvements to radio transmission had been rejected several times, before it was finally approved in 1904, on the grounds that it infringed on other existing patents including two 1897 Nikola's wireless power tuning patents.
Nikola's 1915 case went nowhere, but in a related case, where the Marconi Company tried to sue the US government over WWI patent infringements, a Supreme Court of the United States 1943 decision restored the prior patents of Oliver Lodge, John Stone, and Nikola.
Nikola attempted to market several devices based on the production of ozone.
These included his 1900 Tesla Ozone Company selling an 1896 patented device based on his Tesla Coil, used to bubble ozone through different types of oils to make a therapeutic gel.
He also tried to develop a variation of this as a room sanitizer for hospitals.
In 1912, he crafted "a plan to make dull students bright by saturating them unconsciously with electricity," wiring the walls of a schoolroom and, saturating [the schoolroom] with infinitesimal electric waves vibrating at high frequency.
The whole room will thus, Nikola claims, be converted into a health-giving and stimulating electromagnetic field or 'bath.'"
The plan was provisionally, approved by then superintendent of New York City schools, William H. Maxwell.
Before World War I, Tesla sought overseas investors.
After the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his patents in European countries.
Nikola postulated that electricity could be used to locate submarines via using the reflection of an "electric ray" of "tremendous frequency" with the signal being viewed on a fluorescent screen (kind of like the modern day radar.)
In 1928, Nikola received U.S. Patent 1,655,114, for a biplane capable of taking off vertically (VTOL aircraft) and then of being "gradually tilted through manipulation of the elevator devices" in flight until it was flying like a conventional plane.
This would be his last patent .
Poor Nikola
Since 1900, Nikola had been living at the Waldorf Astoria in New York running up a large bill.
In 1922, he moved to St. Regis Hotel and would follow a pattern from then on of moving to a new hotel every few years leaving behind unpaid bills.
Nikola would walk to the park every day to feed the pigeons.
He took to feeding them at the window of his hotel room and bringing the injured ones in to nurse back to health.
He said that he had been visited by a specific injured white pigeon daily. Nikola spent over $2,000, including building a device that comfortably supported her so her bones could heal, to fix her broken wing and leg.
Tesla stated:
"I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life."
In 1934, Tesla moved to the Hotel New Yorker, and Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company began paying him $125 per month as well as paying his rent, expenses the Company would pay for the rest of Tesla's life.
In 1931, Kenneth Swezey, a young writer who had been associated with Nikola for some time, organized a celebration for the inventor's 75th birthday.
Nikola received congratulatory letters from more than 70 pioneers in science and engineering, including Albert Einstein, and he was also featured on the cover of Time magazine.
The cover caption "All the world's his power house" noted his contribution to electrical power generation.
Nikola made it an annual event.
He would invite the press to see his inventions and hear stories about past exploits, views on current events, or sometimes odd or baffling claims.
In 1932 Nikola claimed he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays.
In 1933, at age 77, Nikola told reporters that, after thirty-five years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy.
He claimed it was a theory of energy that was "violently opposed" to Einsteinian physics, and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years.
He also told reporters he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, working on
breakthroughs in metallurgy, and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought.
At the 1934 party, Nikola told reporters he had designed a superweapon he claimed would end all war.
He would call it "teleforce", but was usually referred to as his death ray.
Nikola described it as a defensive weapon that would be put up along the border of a country to be used against attacking ground-based infantry or aircraft.
In1984, his plans surfaced at the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade.
The treatise, The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media, described an open-ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allows particles to exit, a method of charging slugs of tungsten or mercury to millions of volts, and directing them in streams (through electrostatic repulsion).
In 1935, at his 79th birthday party, he claimed to have discovered the cosmic ray in 1896 and invented a way to produce direct current by induction, and made many claims about his mechanical oscillator.
Describing the device (which he expected would earn him $100 million within two years) he told reporters that a version of his oscillator had caused an earthquake in his 46 East Houston Street lab and neighboring streets in downtown New York City in 1898.
He went on to tell reporters his oscillator could destroy the Empire State Building with 5 lbs of air pressure.
He also explained a new technique he developed using his oscillators he called "Telegeodynamics", using it to transmit vibrations into the ground that he claimed would work over any distance to be used for communication or locating underground mineral deposits.
At his 1937 celebration in the Grand Ballroom of Hotel New Yorker, Nikola received the "Order of the White Lion" from the Czechoslovakia ambassador and a medal from the Yugoslavian ambassador.
On questions concerning the death ray, Nikola stated, "But it is not an experiment ...
I have built, demonstrated and used it.
Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world."
In the fall of 1937, after midnight one night, Nikola made his regular commute to the cathedral and the library to feed the pigeons.
While crossing a street a couple of blocks from the hotel, Tesla was unable to dodge a moving taxicab and was thrown to the ground.
His back was severely wrenched and three of his ribs were broken in the accident.
The full extent of his injuries were never known; Tesla refused to consult a doctor, and never fully recovered.
Death and the theft of his work by the government.
On 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, Nikola Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel.
His body was later found by maid Alice Monaghan after she had entered Tesla's room, ignoring the "do not disturb" sign that Tesla had placed on his door two days earlier.
Assistant medical examiner H.W. Wembley examined the body and ruled that the cause of death had been coronary thrombosis.
Two days later the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the Alien Property Custodian to seize Nikola's belongings, even though Nikola was an American citizen.
John G. Trump, a professor at M.I.T. and a well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee, was called in to analyze the Nikola's items.
After a three-day investigation, Trump's report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating:
"Nikola's thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results."
On 10 January 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a eulogy written by Slovene-American author Louis Adamic live over the WNYC radio while violin pieces "Ave Maria" and "Tamo daleko" were played in the background.
On 12 January, two thousand people attended a state funeral for Nikola at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.
After the funeral, Nikola's body was taken to the Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York, where it was later cremated.
The following day, a second service was conducted by prominent priests in the Trinity Chapel (today's Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sava) in New York City.
In 1952, following pressure from Nikola's nephew, Sava Kosanović, Nikola's entire estate was shipped to Belgrade in 80 trunks marked.
In 1957, Kosanović's secretary Charlotte Muzar transported Nikola's ashes from the United States to Belgrade.
The ashes are displayed in a gold-plated sphere on a marble pedestal in the Nikola Tesla Museum.
Nikola obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions.
Some of Tesla's patents are not accounted for, and various sources have discovered some that have lain hidden in patent archives.
There are a minimum of 278 known patents issued to Nikola in 26 countries. Many of Nikola's patents were in the United States, Britain, and Canada, but many other patents were approved in countries around the globe.
Many inventions developed by Nikola were not put into patent protection.
Interesting Facts
Nikola walked between 8 and 10 miles per day.
He curled his toes one hundred times for each foot every night, saying that it stimulated his brain cells.
He became a vegetarian in his later years, living on only milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.
He read many works, memorizing complete books, and supposedly possessed a photographic memory.
He spoke eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.
He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions.
Just by hearing the name of an item, he would be able to envision it in realistic detail.
He claimed to never sleeping more than 2 hours everynight.
It would take naps, however, "recharging his batteries".
He never married, explaining that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities.
He was asocial and prone to seclude himself with his work.
Nikola was describe and sweet and soft spoken.
He could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people.
Alien?
A document from the FBI mentions how Nikola was a Venusian who was brought to Earth as a baby, in 1856 and was left in the care of Mr. and Mrs. Tesla in a mountain province in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, modern-day Croatia.
The document is freely available at the FBI’s online Vault, and is dated to June 14, 1957, and titled “Interplanetary Session Newsletter“ mentions a number of controversial subjects.
"Margaret Storm has been assigned to certain work with the Space Popel, as follows:
She is writing a book ,Return of the Dove , as a story of the life of Nikola Tesla, scientist, and the part his inventions will play in the New Age.
Much of the data for his book has been supplied to Mrs. Storm through transcripts received on the Tesla set, a radio-type machine invented by Tesla in 1938 for Interplanetary Communication.
Tesla died in 1943 and his engineers did not build the Tesla set until after his death.
It was placed in operation in 1950 and since that time the Tesla engineers have been in close touch with the spaceships.
The Space People have visited the Tesla engineers many times, and have told us that Tesla was a Venusian, brought to this planes as a baby, in 1856, and left with Mr. And Mrs. Tesla in a remote mountain province in what is now Yugoslavia."
FBI Files on Nikola Tesla
FBI Files on Nikola Tesla
What do you think?
Was Nikola Tesla a brilliant man
or an alien from outer space?
Whatever he was, he forever changed how we live.
Think of how much more he could have accomplished, if some of this inventions and ideas weren't stolen, lost or told that they were ridiculous at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment