TESLA
Nikola
Tesla, a man who was both a certifiable genius and just plain
certifiable.
Born in Smiljan,
Croatia, Tesla was
educated at Graz and Prague, worked for the Continental Edison Company
in Paris, and emigrated to the United States in 1884. There
he worked briefly for Thomas Edison until the poetic Tesla and the
pragmatic Edison fell out. Tesla then went on to sell his
patents for a series of alternating current devices to the
Westinghouse Electric Company, making Tesla a relatively wealthy man
able to set himself up in his own laboratory.
So far so good; sounds like the biography of many a
successful Victorian electrical engineer. But Tesla was a first-class ego case with aristocratic pretensions. He
was a tremendous showman who excelled at giving spectacular
demonstrations of what electricity could do. He was an intuitive
genius who could visualize all sorts of revolutionary new devices even
though he didn't fully understand the principles behind them. He
had a remarkable memory, coupled with an intense dislike of writing
things down, so that much of his work has come down to us as a
mystery. He was a man with no money sense who was able to
persuade many an investor into pouring money into his schemes. He was also a visionary who, as time went on and his professional
fortunes ebbed, became prone to wilder and wilder assertions about
what marvels he would perform and how he could single-handedly change
the world.
Tesla's real achievements combined with his
flamboyant dreams made him a regular source for reporters looking for
sensational copy and a lightning rod for nutcases who were
convinced that he was really an emissary from the planet Venus.
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| Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943) |
The thing that makes Tesla such a compelling, yet
sad case is that he was genuinely brilliant and had carved himself a real place in
history with his accomplishments. His contributions to the field
of electrical engineering are on a scale to rival that of Edison and
Steinmetz and we enjoy the fruits of his labours every time we flick
on a light switch. However, his lonely work habits, refusal to
write things down, and flat-out eccentricities have made him one of
those figures that historians cross the street to avoid.
AC Induction Motor
Tesla's first great invention was the AC induction motor. An electric
motor works by flipping the field of an electromagnet, causing the
attraction/repulsion of the magnets to spin the armature around.
Tesla was the first inventor to come up with a practical way of using
AC power to achieve the same reversal of polarity; only this time it's
done with clever wiring. Unlike DC, where the electrical current
always flows in one direction, AC current flows in both directions. By wiring some of the magnetic sections of the motor one way and then their
neighbour sections in reverse, the polarity would reverse
automatically with the current.
The trick was how to supply current to the armature itself
without burning out the contacts with the high voltages that AC power
required. Tesla's answer was to use induction. In
Tesla's motor, the induction field set up by the AC current feeds
power to the armature without any direct wiring needed.
AC Power
But the really neat thing about electrical motors is that if you
get one working you also have a perfectly good electrical generator in
one of technology's rare twofers. An electric motor works by
taking electricity in and turning it into motion. But if you take a
motor and spin it, out comes electricity. All this means that
when Tesla perfected his motor, he was well on his way toward building
a new generation of AC dynamos that form the basis of our modern
electrical grid. When Westinghouse bought up Tesla's patents, it sparked (get it?)
a commercial war between Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, who was a great
backer of DC. There followed years of bitter propaganda battles - Edison invented the electric chair to demonstrate the dangers of AC power -
but in the end the AC system won out.
The
Tesla Coil
Curiously,
despite his achievements, Tesla never had a very good theoretical
grasp of what electricity actually is. He tended to ignore
developments in physics. In fact, he greeted Einstein's theory
of relativity with downright hostility. For Tesla, electricity
wasn't a thing of electrons and energy states, but of fluids,
vibrations, and harmonics in a system which he seemed to understand,
but which made his explanations the thing of which headaches are made.
Whatever his theory, Tesla still managed to get results. He was
fascinated with high frequency electricity, but mechanical generators
could only go so fast before they started to fly apart. So, he
developed devices that could provide higher and higher frequencies
without moving parts. The most famous of these was the Tesla
coil; this high-voltage transformer is
familiar to anyone who has seen an old Frankenstein movie where they
were used to generate the electrical arcs that are apparently
necessary if you're going to be a respected and card-carrying member of the Society of Mad Scientists. They
also produce an electrical field that lights fluorescent tubes and
similar devices at a distance, a spectacular parlour trick that led
Tesla down more than one rabbit hole.
Radio
Tesla's
interest in high frequency electricity had other benefits. A
number of his circuits were basic to radio technology. Because
he didn't understand how electromagnetic radiation worked, Tesla
thought that sending messages through the air required transmitting huge amounts of energy, so he never produced a working
system, but his patents did predate those of Marconi by several years
and Tesla was awarded precedence by US Supreme Court in 1943.
Remote Control
Another
of Tesla's certified firsts was in the field of teleautomation,
or remote control to me and you. In 1898 Tesla demonstrated
a peculiar little tub-shaped boat which he was able to control at a
distance with a small box. That may not seem like much today,
but this first ever exhibition of radio remote
control caused a sensation at the time. Tesla was able to start and stop his
little boat, steer it, and make its lights flash. With his more
advanced model, he could even make is submerge on command. As an
added fillip, Tesla's boats were designed with interlocking circuits
that prevented hijacking of the boat by more powerful transmitters. The circuitry he used is similar to that used by cell phones to prevent signals from crossing over today.
Broadcast Power
In the 1890s, Tesla was playing about with sending
high-voltage currents through evacuated glass tubes and he discovered
that a tube containing rarefied gas could conduct current rather well. But for
Tesla, this wasn't good enough. He leapt from
a simple laboratory observation to declaring that he'd discovered the
secret of transmitting electricity to all the world without wires. He reasoned that since he could send electricity through a tube of
rarefied gas, and that the Earth's ionosphere was also composed of
rarefied gas, then it would be a simple matter to send electricity up
into the outer reaches of the atmosphere and charge the entire planet
like a gigantic Leyden jar that could be tapped on demand. With
such a system, dynamos, batteries, and the like would all be a thing
of the past. Anything from a pocket torch to an aeronef to a
battleship would have literally unlimited power at its disposal
regardless of large it was, how long it ran, or where it was located. Sadly, it just didn't work.
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| Superimposed photo of Tesla in his laboratory. |
VSF
Many of Tesla's claims in the real world were never realized: death rays, earthquake machines, etc. But in the realms of Victorian Science Fiction, well, he's practically a galvanic god. Tesla's inventions led to handheld death rays, aeronefs, broadcast remotes, automatons, and all manner of wonders. In my VSF universe, he is currently working with the United States government to develop military applications of his technology, including wireless telegraphy!
[Editor's note: A great deal of the above was taken from Tales of Future Past. The author there did such a great job of balancing Tesla's genius with his lunacy, I just couldn't resist.]
