Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, electrical

engineer and one of the most important promoters of commercial electricity. He is
considered an important scientist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Tesla's inventions, as well as his theoretical work, laid the foundation for
modern knowledge of alternating current, electric power, alternating current
systems, including polyphase systems, power distribution systems, and alternating
current motors, which led to the Second Industrial Revolution. The great inventor
was born on July 28th , 1856, and he was originally from Serbia, being borned in
the village of Smilijan.
Nikola Tesla was the fourth son in a family with five children, with an older
brother, Dane, and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). His family moved
to Gospić in 1862. Tesla attended the "Gymnasium Karlovac" school in Karlovac,
where he completed the four-year schooling cycle in just three years.
He later began his studies in electrical engineering at the University of Graz
in 1875, during which time he experimented with some AC utilities. In December
1878 he left Graz and went to Maribor where he obtained his first job as a sub-
engineer, a position he held for a year. After a while Tesla was persuaded by his
father to enroll in the courses of the Carolina University in Prague, which he
attended in the summer of 1880. However, after his father's death he dropped out
of college, finishing only one course. In 1880 he moved to Budapest to work for
the National Telegraph Company, which later became the National Telephony
Company. There he met Nebojša Petrovič, a young Serbian inventor living in
Austria. Despite the fact that the meeting was short-lived, they worked together on
a project that used twin turbines to generate continuous energy. By the time the
telephone exchange opened in 1881 in Budapest, Tesla had become the company's
chief electrician and later an engineer for the country's first telephone system. He
also innovated a device that, according to some, was a telephone amplifier, but for
others it would have been the first speaker to amplify the sound.
In 1882 Tesla moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer in the
Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electrical equipment
brought from the other side of the ocean. In the same year, Tesla invented the
induction motor and began working on several devices that used the rotating
magnetic field. In June 1884, Tesla first arrived in the United States, in New York
City, with a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor. Edison hired Tesla
to work in his company as a simple electrical engineer, where he progressed
rapidly, solving many very difficult technical problems that the company's
products had. Tesla immediately resigned when he was denied a $ 25-a-week
salary increase.
In 1887, he built the first brushless, AC-powered induction motor, which he
presented to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. In the same year he
introduced the Tesla coil principle and began working with George Westinghouse
at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's in laboratories in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Westinghouse was captivated by Tesla's ideas about
polyphase systems, which could transmit alternating current over long distances. In
April 1887, Tesla began research on what would later be called X-rays, using its
own vacuum tube. This device was different from other X-ray tubes in that it had
no receiver electrode. It is now known that this device works by emitting electrons
from a single electrode, through the combination of electron emission by field
effect and thermionic emission. Once the electrons are released, they are very
quickly captured by a strong electric field near the electrode during negative
voltage peaks at the high-voltage oscillating output of the Tesla coil, generating X-
rays when they hit the glass shell of the tube. Tesla also used Geissler's tubes. A
“global system for the wireless transmission of electricity” based on the electrical
conductivity of the Earth, was proposed by Tesla, a system that would work
through the transmission of energy through various natural environments and the
secondary use of current transmitted between two points to power electrical
devices. In practice, this principle of energy transmission is possible through high-
power ultraviolet rays that produce an ionized channel in the air between the
transmitting and receiving stations. The same principle is used in lightning rods,
electrolaser and electric shock weapon and has also been proposed to stop vehicles.
At the end of the 19th century, Tesla demonstrated that using a resonant
electrical network and what was then known as the "high frequency current" (now
considered low frequency), only a conductor was needed to power a system.
electrically, without the need for any other metal or Earth conductor. Tesla called
the phenomenon "the transmission of electricity through a single cable without
return." He designed and designed the resonant electrical circuits consisting of a
coil and a capacitor, essential for the emission and reception of radio waves, thanks
to the resonance phenomenon. What he actually created and transmitted were
electromagnetic waves, starting from high frequency alternators, only he did not
apply them to the transmission of radio signals as Marconi did, but only tried to
transmit electricity remotely without cables.
After a life full of revolutionary discoveries that changed the face of the
Earth and the course in which mankind unfolds, Nikola Tesla passed away on
January 7, 1943, at the age of 86.