It is no understatement to say that Nikola Tesla is one of the most important inventors of all time. The discoveries made by this European-born innovator during the 86 years of his life permeate our modern world and include important advances in electricity and radio development. Concepts which Tesla first dreamed of more than a century ago are still being pursued today, including wireless energy transmissions and data networking.
We’ve been taking a close look at the contributions of foreign immigrants to the American spirit of innovation in recent days here on IPWatchdog. Nikola Tesla was perhaps the greatest immigrant inventor, earning patents and contributing to major foundational work in many technological fields. Born in 1856 to Serbian parents in the Austia-Hungary village of Smiljan, part of modern-day Croatia, Tesla had a precocious interest in science from a young age according to multiple biographies. His father was a priest and his mother had a knack for inventing home appliances, including a mechanical eggbeater by one account. Tesla attended an engineering school in Graz, Austria, and conceived of the induction motor while living in Budapest, but it wouldn’t be until after he immigrated to America that his sense of invention would truly flourish. Tesla would receive his American citizenship in 1891, a few years after he already started making an impact in the world of innovation.
Tesla’s polyphase induction motor, which he originally designed in 1883, involves a rotor and a stator having multiple windings which create an electromagnetic field. Torque is produced when the polarity of the magnetic field created by the electromagnets constantly switch back and forth. Prior to Tesla, motors utilized direct current, which required components called commutators to ride against the motor’s shaft as it spins, causing energy to be lost through friction. The use of alternating current (AC), a type of electric charge which reverses its flow periodically, in a motor with multiple windings specifically tuned to create a reversing polarity without the mechanical aid of a commutator.
Nikola Tesla would come to America in 1884, arriving in New York City with a letter of introduction from Charles Batchelor to Batchelor’s colleague, famed American inventor Thomas Alva Edison. Tesla worked with Edison, although Edison saw Tesla’s use of alternating current as a direct competitor to the direct current (DC) electrical infrastructure Edison had been working to develop. Edison tasked Tesla with improving Edison’s DC electricity system, which was being drained in New York City and throughout the country by the increased energy demands of Edison’s light bulb. There’s an oft-repeated anecdote in which Edison offered Tesla $50,000 to design an improved DC system. When Tesla returned with the improved design, Edison dismissed it and played off his financial offer as a joke. Shortly thereafter, Tesla stopped working with Edison.
Nikola Tesla supported himself through manual labor after leaving Edison’s employ, digging ditches for $2 per day by one account before his intellect earned him notoriety and financial capital from backers. By the end of 1887, Tesla had filed for a number of patents to protect innovations related to AC electricity transmission. One of these was U.S. Patent No. 382281, which is titled Electrical Transmission of Power, which protected a method of transmitting power by electromagnetic motors which consists of continuously and progressively shifting the poles of one element of the motor by alternating currents and magnetizing the other element by a direct or continuous current.
Edison had good reason to be leery about Tesla’s development of alternating current: direct current has significant limitations when compared to its counterpart, especially when considering implementing electrical grids over long distances. DC electricity can only travel about a mile, imposing a costly limitation on how far a single DC power plant can transmit electricity. AC, on the other hand, can be transmitted over long distances, the voltage easily stepped up or down through a transformer. AC also travels more efficiently at higher voltages, a characteristic not shared by DC electricity. Although Edison was operating 121 DC power stations by 1887, his position was an unsustainable one if AC power generation was to take hold.
Tesla’s patents caught the attention of George Westinghouse, himself the famed inventor of the railroad air brake, who licensed the AC electrical grid technologies and inevitably starting the War of the Currents, a business and publicity skirmish pitting Westinghouse and Tesla against Tesla’s former employer Edison. It’s a war that Edison would lose, but it wouldn’t make Tesla rich. Edison tried to paint alternating current as a force to dangerous to use, even going so far as to electrocute an elephant from a Coney Island zoo in 1903. Tesla responded by shooting 250,000 volts of AC through his body in public to show that AC electricity is not inherently unsafe. AC would continue to dig into DC’s lead as the lead form of electrical transmission by winning the bid to provide electricity to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which took place in 1893.
Another big victory for Tesla’s alternating current technologies came in November 1896, when a five-year project to build an alternating current electricity generation plant on Niagara Falls finally came to fruition. Once completed and turned on, it quickly sent one thousand horsepower of electricity to the nearby city of Buffalo, NY, which was at that time one of the largest metropolitan centers in America. This wasn’t the world’s first hydroelectric power plant, but it was the first using alternating current and it was much more successful than previous attempts. The easy access to electricity, along with the use of electric lighting in the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, helped Buffalo to earn the nickname “City of Light,” although it’s not the only American locale with this designation and the term is most commonly associated with the French capital of Paris. From the 1890s on, more than 80 percent of electrical devices ordered in the U.S. used alternating current.
Yet, despite the success, the legal challenges posed by Edison during the War of the Currents bled Westinghouse’s company of financial resources. When Westinghouse had first licensed Tesla’s technologies, he offered Tesla a royalty of $2.50 per horsepower of electricity transmitted to customers. As AC electricity continued to become the standard, the costs of paying Tesla were becoming onerous. By multiple accounts, Westinghouse wrote to Tesla, pleading with him to rethink the royalty agreement to save the Westinghouse company. Incredibly, Tesla forgave Westinghouse all of the royalties he was owed on the belief that he had more discoveries to make. Even more incredibly, he was right.
After alternating current, Nikola Tesla’s new area of interest involved the phenomena caused by high-frequency electricity generation. By the end of the 19th century, multiple discoveries in this field by Scottish scientist James Clark Maxwell and German physicist Heinrich Hertz led Tesla to believe that the technical advantages of high-frequency electricity, including highly efficient transmissions and brighter lamps, were worth exploration. He tried to investigate the phenomenon with his AC generators but the machines would break down as they reached 20,000 cycles per second.
Enter the Tesla coil. The Serbian inventor had to create a special type of transformer in order to reach the high frequencies necessary for further exploration into that field of electricity. In order to free up the secondary coil found in iron-coil AC generators, Tesla removed the iron core to create an air-core resonating transformer capable of taking a typical household electrical load of sixty cycles per second and stepping it up to hundreds of thousands of cycles per second. The high frequencies and voltages produced by the Tesla coil started the inventor on a path towards exploring wireless electricity generation. By some accounts, Tesla was able to wirelessly transmit electricity generated by a Tesla coil over 26 miles to power devices at a remote site.
In January 1894, Nikola Tesla was issued U.S. Patent No. 512340, titled Coil for Electro Magnets. It protected a coil for electric apparatus, the adjacent convolutions of which form parts of the circuit between which there exists a potential difference sufficient to secure in the coil a capacity capable of neutralizing its self-induction. The patent describes the purpose of the invention as a means to eliminate cumbersome condensers which are difficult to maintain.
The wireless transmission of electric signals became a new focus for Tesla. A fire in Tesla’s lab in 1895, however, proved to be very costly as it provided an opening for a new rival, Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi. In 1896, Marconi filed his first patent in England for a system of wireless telegraphy. Tesla beat him to the punch in America, filing his first patent applications in this country for the precursor to radio technologies in 1897, three years before Marconi attempted to file patent applications in this country.
Perhaps the earliest patent filed by Tesla for radio was U.S. Patent No. 645576, entitled System of Transmission of Electrical Energy. It claimed a method of transmitting electrical energy through the natural media by producing a very high electrical pressure at a generating station, causing a conductive flow of electrical energy through the earth and the air strata, and collecting the electrical energy at a distant point.
Initially, Tesla had a strong position in the developing field of radio broadcast transmissions because of his patents and was supported by the U.S. Patent Office, who at first upheld Tesla’s patents and wouldn’t issue one to Marconi. What Marconi lacked in intellectual property, however, he made up for in powerful connections. An Italian nobleman by birth, he had ties to the English aristocracy and some accounts surmise that backing from English and American financiers led to the U.S. Patent Office’s decision in 1904 to issue a patent to Marconi for the invention of radio; up to that point, Tesla felt that, although Marconi had been developing the telegraph, his intellectual property would eventually shift the market in his favor. Again, issues in licensing would prove to be ruinous to Tesla financially. Tesla was further enraged when Marconi was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for contributions to wireless telegraphy. The Supreme Court would overturn Marconi’s patents in 1943, less than a year after Tesla’s death.
This would not be the final chapter in the story of Nikola Tesla’s inventing career, a tale which had yet to reach its climactic moment of Shakespearean tragedy. There would still be successes, such as the creation of remote control which followed quite naturally from Tesla’s interest in wireless energy transfer. In 1898, Tesla would demonstrate a wirelessly-controlled toy boat at Madison Square Garden. It didn’t take off as a commercial product, but this was an important event for a few reasons. Not only was it the first public demonstration of remote controls, but technically that boat was the world’s first unmanned vehicle, or drone. It’s also heralded as perhaps the earliest discovery in robotics. Tesla’s remote controlled boat is reflected in U.S. Patent No. 613809, entitled Method of and Apparatus for Controlling the Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles. It protected an improvement in the art of controlling the movements and operation of a vessel by producing waves or disturbances which are conveyed to the vessel by the natural media, effecting control of the propelling engine.
Tesla’s next project was to create nothing less than the earliest version of the Internet. He wouldn’t succeed, but he did receive $150,000 in financial capital from famed American capitalist J. P. Morgan to build Tesla’s vision of a global system of wireless communication, broadcasting news, stock quotes, music and more. Construction on Wardenclyffe Tower, the 187-foot tall facility from which wireless transmissions would be broadcast, began in 1901. Morgan would sour on the idea, however, when it became clear that Tesla was more interested in wireless energy transmissions to power homes; there are accounts indicating that Morgan told Tesla that he wouldn’t commercialize something that everybody could draw on without paying, essentially asking the inventor, “Where do we put the meter?” Tesla would soon succumb to a nervous breakdown, not the first of his life, and would live out the remainder of his life in New York City with a growing list of behavioral peculiarities.
Nikola Tesla never amassed personal wealth but he enriched our world in many ways. The mythic parts of his story are at times blown out of proportion; for example, there’s evidence to suggest that Edison developed a respect of Tesla and was not his lifelong competitor, as he is sometimes portrayed. But from electricity to radio broadcasts to wireless transmissions, there was no aspect of the technological world during the late 19th century that weren’t somehow touched by Tesla. During his life, Tesla earned 111 U.S. patents and held about 300 patents from countries across the globe. Drones, robotics and wireless power transmission, things that Nikola Tesla envisioned, are still being developed today. Without the important contributions of this immigrant inventor, there’s no question that American innovation would have lagged significantly in the early 1900s.