With all due respect to Thomas A. Edison, Nikola Tesla was an equal if not a greater American inventor. Edison is highly praised. Tesla is almost forgotten.

Generally speaking, Edison could be described as an innovator. He improved existing technology. He didn’t invent the incandescent light bulb, for example.

That was patented and publicly demonstrated by Britain’s Joseph Swam in 1878, a year before Edison. Later, Swam and Edison formed a brief partnership and Edison bought it out.

Tesla, originally from Serbia, also started out as an innovator. He wanted to be an electrical engineer. At that time, “direct current” electricity was produced by chemical batteries charged by a steam generator.

Direct current is affected by the resistance in the wire that carries it. Within a mile or so, electricity is consumed in the form of heat. At the University of Prague, Tesla was challenged to solve the distribution problem.

Tesla had a phenomenal memory. He memorized the complete works of Goethe and Voltaire. While walking in a park, reciting poetry about the sun, Tesla suddenly became aware of the direct current solution.

An electrical current that alternated from negative to positive could be sent on separate wires. At the receiving end, the two currents would be “induced” to flow into separate magnets, one stationary and the other rotating like the sun.

Tesla patented his idea. “Alternating current” and “induction motors” is the main system we use today for our homes and factories.

After graduating in 1882, Tesla worked for the Continental Edison Company in Paris. He came to the United States a year later to work directly with Edison. When he arrived he had four cents in his pocket and a wad of his poems.

Edison held several patents on direct current improvements, which he leased from General Electric. His installation of a complete DC lighting system in lower New York City was widely acclaimed.

Inevitably, the two men argued over the merits of their two systems. Tesla resigned, opened his own laboratory, and became a naturalized citizen in 1891. He sold his alternating current patents to George Westinghouse. A battle of the titans ensued.

Edison tried to convince the public that the Edison-General Electric low-voltage system could be operated safely, while the Tesla-Westinghouse high-voltage system was dangerous.

Someone in the Edison camp toured state fairs and shocked stray cats and dogs with direct current, then killed them with alternating current. The proposal was that Tesla/Westinghouse’s high-voltage alternating current was fatal if accidentally touched.

first human electrocution

During this public relations war, the state of New York committed several gruesome hangings. Condemned prisoners were sometimes strangled or slowly beheaded.

For Dr. Brown, a dentist and spokesman for the New York Medical-Legal Society, he sought a “more humane and scientific way” to apply capital punishment.

He convinced the state authorities that alternating current electricity was the fastest and safest.

The warden of the Albany Penitentiary asked Westinghouse to install an AC generator with which to execute an ax murder named William Kemmler.

Both Westinghouse and Tesla strongly opposed capital punishment and refused.

Through subterfuge, someone, historian Theo Benson says it was Edison, obtained a Tesla generator for the world’s first human execution with electricity.

The voltage was too low. Kemmler was literally cooked after repeated jolts of current. A disgusted Westinghouse later said, “They would have done better with an axe.”

Over the years since, people who died accidentally from electrical accidents were said to have been “housed at Westing”.

Tesla system victories

Westinghouse and Tesla beat General Electric and Edison by winning a contract to light the Chicago Exposition of 1893 with 200,000 bulbs. It was a sensation.

Three years later they installed the first AC hydroelectric system in Niagara Falls for the city of Buffalo. Edison and General Electric later manufactured light bulbs and other devices compatible with alternating current.

With royalties pouring in, Tesla could focus on the nature of electricity and its potential.

His approach to exploring the nature of energy was science, in contrast to inventing things for specific purposes. Over the next few years, he filed 830 patents.

Tesla’s breakthrough invention was a unique coil of wire that ushered in hundreds of uses we take for granted today. However, they were too futuristic for the time.

He achieved illumination with “filamentless” bulbs filled with various gases. Today we recognize them as fluorescent lights and neon billboards.

He experimented with “shadow graphics” of human bones across clothing years before Roentgen published his work.

His “Tesla coil” created high-voltage “energy waves” by which he projected radio signals to “telautomaton” model ships. They maneuvered in response to levers on a control box.

Tesla said he could replace the lever box with a telephone to transmit voices, music, and ultimately images. No commercial sponsor was interested because there were no instruments to receive ethereal waves.

This was two years before Marconi managed to transmit a single telegraph click. After a legal challenge, Tesla’s primacy was confirmed.

The Navy was mildly interested in a small unmanned submarine that could be controlled by Tesla waves. However, the admirals did not foresee today’s smart bombs and torpedoes.

The ‘high power oscillator’, which Tesla invented to control ships at sea, is the power supply for our television cathode ray picture tube.
man made lightning

The US War Department in 1893 asked Tesla to expand their wireless communications systems. The request came at an awkward time. Tesla’s patents expired. His New York lab and his papers had been burned.

The manager of the Colorado Springs municipal lighting system offered Tesla free electricity for his project. He moved to Colorado Springs and built an experimental radio station 10 miles from the city.

He determined that the Earth is a large magnet with energy flowing between the positive and negative poles. In addition, he calculated the frequency needed to project an electric jet completely across the planet and recover the jet when it bounced back.

It was his intention, by means of a huge Tesla coil, to add extra jets to successive bounces. When a massive voltage built up, he would release it from a tall antenna to circle the world.

When everything was ready, Tesla, wearing two-inch-thick rubber-soled shoes for insulation, flicked the switch for a second “to see what it would do.” The plateau was momentarily covered in blue St. Elmo’s fire, but there was no explosion.

Tesla flipped the switch again and went out to measure the expected lightning strike. Amid deafening thunder, lightning leaped from the antenna, lengthening as the ground charges built up.

The townspeople were alarmed. Sparks crackled from the fire hydrants. People in leather shoes, or barefoot, were jumping from the heat.

At 130 feet, the bolt collapsed. Everything was in silence.

Tesla ran to the phone and called the Colorado Springs Municipal Power Plant. “Have you ruined my experiment?”

“To hell with you,” was the reply. You have burned our generators. They sent you a bill for damages and light. .

However, Tesla had learned a lot about terrestrial resonance and airborne propagation of radio waves. He became obsessed with the possibility of capturing the energy of the earth and transmitting it freely to the whole world.
free energy search

Tesla returned to New York City to build a radio transmitter capable of reaching Europe. He got the backing of JP Morgan, a leading financier of promising projects.

A massive Tesla coil and 85 foot transmission tower was built at Wardenclyffe on Long Island. It soon became apparent to Morgan that Tesla was more interested in broadcasting free energy than commercial radio shows.

Morgan wanted to know, “Where will you put the meter?” He refused to advance any more money. The work stopped. The massive broadcast tower fell into disrepair and was eventually demolished as a hazard.

The laboratory and land were purchased by the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in payment of a $20,000 room bill.

In the years that followed, Tesla experimented with a “particle beam accelerator” that could destroy invading aircraft. The newspapers called it the “death ray.” Today we call it a microwave for kitchen ovens.

He invented a small “power turbine” consisting of closely spaced discs on a shaft that rotates on any energy-bearing gas or liquid (gasoline, hydrogen, propane, or methane) without burning the fuel.

Unfortunately, the disks are deformed or melted by the molecular action of the energetic atoms. The energy and pollution problems would be solved if we could invent a suitable disc material.

Tesla postulated that sunlight could be converted directly into electricity (solar panels), energy could be extracted from atoms (pumps), hundreds of messages could be transmitted simultaneously through a circuit (fiberglass cable), remote-controlled airplanes they could be powered by electricity (NASA has one powered by solar cells circling indefinitely at high altitude).

During World War I he proposed to bounce radio waves off enemy planes to learn their approach. The War Department ignored his proposal. It was not until World War II that RADAR was introduced.

He detected radio waves from outer space and thought they might be signals from aliens. We now know that the radio waves in space are static leftovers from the creation of the universe.

Talk of free energy, death rays, and aliens led people to consider him a “mad scientist.”

Tesla died in 1943, still single, and next to no money, in a cheap hotel. Gone and forgotten.

Or maybe not. On the day of his death, government agents went to his hotel room and confiscated his papers. They are classified as “Top Secret”.