Nikola Tesla was one of America’s greatest inventors and carries a mystique unlike any other immigrant to the United States. Before he became the name of a car company and a character in modern science fiction novels, Nikola Tesla immigrated to the United States and turned into an inventor extraordinaire.
Tesla is credited with many important innovations and his ideas are still talked about today. “Among Tesla’s creations were the channeling of alternating current (AC), fluorescent and neon lighting, wireless telegraphy, and the giant turbines that harnessed the power of Niagara Falls,” according to Marc J. Seifer, author of Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla.
Nikola Tesla was born into a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan, Croatia in 1856. His childhood was marred by the death of his older brother, a difficult relationship with his parents and a serious illness at age 12. Despite his own genius, a characteristic Tesla possessed that made him well-liked was his ability to recognize talent and to praise others. He describes in his autobiography how Mark Twain was so touched that he burst into tears when Tesla told him that reading Twain’s books saved his life during his illness as a child.
Tesla showed insight and ambition at an early age. “After seeing a drawing or photograph of Niagara Falls, Tesla announced to his Uncle Josip that one day he would place a gigantic wheel under the falls and thereby harness it,” writes Seifer. Years later, Tesla would, in fact, harness the energy of Niagara Falls.
After completing the equivalent of high school, and avoiding forced enlistment in an ongoing war, Tesla studied physics and other disciplines at the Polytechnic School in Graz, located south of Vienna, although he did not stay to complete his degree. He later enrolled at the University of Prague, where he advanced his knowledge of wave mechanics (and indirectly AC) working with Professor Ernst Mach.
After university, Tesla got a job with duties that included work as a telephone line repairman. Of course, he also fiddled with the equipment and “fashioned an amplifier, which repeated and boosted transmission signals,” notes Seifer. “Tesla had invented a precursor of the loudspeaker. He never bothered to obtain a patent on it.” This lack of attention to business detail would roil Tesla on and off throughout his life.
After working in Paris, Tesla immigrated to America in 1884. For less than a year, Tesla worked at Thomas Edison’s laboratory, often interacting closely with the world famous American inventor. While he improved and designed many new machines for Edison, Nikola left underpaid and unable to achieve his larger ambitions. In one of the great misjudgments in commercial history, Edison business manager Charles Batchelor said after hearing Nikola Tesla wanted a raise from $18 to $25 a week: “No, the woods are full of men like [Tesla], I can get any number of them I want for $18 a week.”
Not long after leaving the job with Edison, Tesla shopped his design for a motor and found a willing investment partner in George Westinghouse. While Edison had championed DC power, Tesla, with Westinghouse’s backing, had a different idea.
“Edison developed direct current – current that runs continually in a single direction, like in a battery or a fuel cell,” explains a U.S. Department of Energy history. “During the early years of electricity, direct current (shorthanded as DC) was the standard in the U.S. But there was one problem. Direct current is not easily converted to higher or lower voltages. Tesla believed that alternating current (or AC) was the solution to this problem. Alternating current reverses direction a certain number of times per second – 60 in the U.S. – and can be converted to different voltages relatively easily using a transformer.”
In the public relations battle between AC and DC, Tesla carried the day at a high-profile venue, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and continued to press his advantage in the years that followed.
Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell all attended the National Electrical Exposition held in Philadelphia in May 1895. While the popular history is of Edison acting like a cutthroat businessman, in fact, Edison provided space to Tesla after a March 1895 fire destroyed Tesla’s laboratory. Moreover, at the Philadelphia exhibition, according to Seifer, Edison graciously stated, “The most amazing thing at this exposition is the demonstration [by Tesla] of the ability to deliver here an electric current generated at Niagara Falls. To my mind it solves one of the most important questions associated with electrical development.”
Alexander Graham Bell said the ability to transmit electric power over long distances “was the most important discovery of electric science that had been made for many years.”
Through the contract with Westinghouse, Tesla realized his dream of harnessing Niagara Falls as a power source on a large scale. “On Nov. 16, 1896, Buffalo was lit up by the alternating current from Niagara Falls,” according to the Department of Energy. “By this time General Electric [which previously supported DC] had decided to jump on the alternating current train, too. It would appear that alternating current had all but obliterated direct current.” (Today, we use primarily AC but DC power is used for computers, solar cells, etc.)
Tesla developed several ideas he could not bring to completion during his lifetime. In 1937, he published an article “describing the actual workings of a particle-beam weapon for destroying tanks and planes,” notes Seifer. In Tesla’s autobiography, My Inventions, he describes a “teleautomatic boat” he developed that could be considered a precursor to guided missiles and other technologies.
The Tesla coil, invented in 1891, had important implications for other technologies. “The first system that could wirelessly transmit electricity, the Tesla coil was a truly revolutionary invention,” notes LiveScience. “Early radio antennas and telegraphy used the invention . . . Radios and televisions still use variations of the Tesla coil today.”
Tesla is credited with more than 700 patents worldwide, with one of his earliest inventions, the Tesla induction motor, “widely accepted as one of the 10 most important discoveries of all time,” according to a documentary on his life.
One of Tesla’s biggest disappointments was Guglielmo Marconi being credited with inventing the radio. Tesla believed Marconi used Tesla’s public lectures and innovations to develop the radio technology that Marconi marketed.
Tesla filed radio patents in 1897, which were granted in 1900. Marconi attempted to overcome Tesla’s patents between 1900 and 1903 but the U.S. Patent Office declared, “Many of the claims are not patentable over Tesla patent numbers 645,576 and 649,621, of record, the amendment to overcome said references as well as Marconi's pretended ignorance of the nature of a ‘Tesla oscillator’ being little short of absurd...the term ‘Tesla oscillator’ has become a household word on both continents [Europe and North America],” according to PBS.
Unfortunately for Tesla, the U.S. Patent Office changed course and granted Marconi a patent in 1904. Even before then, Marconi had attracted investment and transmitted signals successfully across the Atlantic. In a bittersweet footnote to the saga, in 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tesla’s radio patent – but the decision came after Tesla’s death.
Tesla’s immigration journey is in line with those of many other immigrants who at first view America as an alien place – before quickly deciding they could not imagine living anywhere else. “I determined to try my fortunes in the Land of Golden Promise,” wrote Tesla in his autobiography. After enduring rudeness upon arrival in the U.S., he compared the artistic architecture of old Europe with the “machined” America. “It is a century behind Europe in civilization.”
It took only 5 years for Tesla to become a quintessential American. “When I went abroad in 1889 – 5 years having elapsed since my arrival here [in America] – I became convinced that it was more than 100 years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.”
Nikola Tesla died at the age of 86 on January 7, 1943. The service “was held in Serbian in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine,” with 2,000 attendees, notes Marc J. Seifer. His death was major news and prominent Americans eulogized him at the service.
“Nikola Tesla’s achievements in electrical science are monuments that symbolize America as a land of freedom and opportunity,” said Col. David Sarnoff, president of RCA. “Tesla’s mind was a human dynamo that whirled to benefit mankind.”
