TRIBUTE TO TESLA
I have no idea how it could have happened, but I grew up without ever hearing of Nicola Tesla.
Thomas Alva Edison was, I suppose, the epitome of everything electrical to us. There were others, of course - Westinghouse, Marconi. Morse - from time-to-time as our level of interest and concern swerved. But it was many years later when I chanced upon a mention of Tesla as being the pioneer in so many phases of electrically-oriented inventions and applications.
Some of them, it was plain to see, were basis to the development of many things we have today.
When I did start reading about Tesla and his work, I came to feel he had been short-changed by historians,I could not bring myself to believe that other scientists of that day had, in any way, either knowingly or unknowingly, contrived a way of avoiding giving him due credit for his innovative concepts. Now, years later, I am not so sure they treated him fairly. I think I have justified their non-action by remembering that business ethics were not he polished, gentlemanly art some deem them to be today. Business was a rough and tumble arrangement then which stretched the truth at times, if it seemed convenient to do so, Such practices where, then, considered to be “good business”. It happened in oil, banking, textiles and others, so why not in electronics as well?
Nicola Tesla was born, we are told, at the stroke of midnight which accounts for the fact that we often see the date of his birth given as July 9/10, 1856. And, the birth took place in Smiljan, Croatia or Serbia, depending on the political inclination of the biographer you happen to chose. His father was an Orthodox Priest and Orator. His mother was Djuka Mandic, said to have been unschooled but very intelligent and I find her tagged as having been an “inventor”, although with not a hint of what she might have invented. Inventing Nicola was, I'd say, enough because he grew up to actually patent over seven hundred items. The boy got the urge from someone and he started early. As youngster he became obsessed with the idea a flying and went through all the usual phases including jumping from a barn roof with an open umbrella. He landed, unconscious, on the ground but suffered no ill effects otherwise. He then built a sixteen-bug flying machine. He joined light splinters of wood together and glued live June bugs to them. When the bugs buzzed their wings the thing was supposed to fly which it did not. Young Tesla stayed with the project until a younger friend of his came to his work place and ate all of his extra June bugs. We don't know about the bug eater, but Tesla go deathly sick, vomited and discontinued the 16-bug flying machine project.
After graduation from the University of Graz, Austria and University of Prague Engineering and Mathematics schools in 1880 he worked in the government's telegraph engineering office in Budapest and it was there he worked out his first real invention - a telephone repeater. He also developed his ideas concerning rotating magnetic fields and at Continental Edison, in Paris, he built, in his spare time, his first induction motor. But, during all of that time, America –the land of opportunity - was calling louder and more urgently.
He left France in 1884 at the age of twenty-seven. He became a citizen in 1891, the same year in which he invented the Tesla Coil, widely used in our radio and television sets. And, he did well. Young Tesla had only four cents remaining in his pocket when he landed at The Battery, but while was walking along Broadway he came upon three men trying to repair an electric motor. He fixed it for them and they paid him twenty-dollars. His idol, of course, was a Thomas Edison, so he went to him seeking a job. He found it, too, but it became apparent that the two were so has different backgrounds and working methods. They did not agree and soon parted. Tesla has sold his patent rights to his polyphase system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers and motors to George Westinghouse in 1895.
Tesla went on with his busy career. It is far too complex to detail here. Read up on Tesla's achievement. He was an eccentric, in many ways, but he left a fine heritage for all of us in his inventive role.
A.L.M. November 19. 2002 [c758wds]
