nikola tesla
... springs, hydraulics and pulleys, but they did not work. Edison wanted to use direct current which we know today is not very efficient. Lord Kelvin liked direct current, but he went to the Chicago Exposition and saw that alternating current is more efficient than direct current. Kelvin’s commission wanted Westinghouse and Tesla to harness the power of Niagara Falls with alternating current. The construction time was traumatic for engineers, mechanics and workers. But, it put most pressure on the inventors. Project “baker” included some of the richest men in the U.S. and Europe including: mogen, aster,rothcild and vanderbelt. After 5 nervous years it was almost done and very expensive. When the switch was thrown, the power reached buffalo at midnight November 16, 1896. The Niagara Falls newspaper reported “the turning or a switch in the big power house at Niagara complete. Circuit caused Niagara river to flow up hill.” The first 1,000 horsepower went to the street railway company. By that time 5,000 more residents homes where powered. With in a few years they had 1,000’s of lines. New York city, the whole city was really, really bright. Broadway turned into today’s Broadway. The trains where rumbling by. It was so good Edison turned to an alternating current guy. Both Westinghouse and general electric company wet down hill because of the war between them. They where drained because of lawyers in the court. Lawyers where really making money J.P. Morgan was buying all teslas patents and making big bucks off of them with his own inventions witch have teslas first ones in them. Morgan tried to mess with the stocks but it did not work because Tesla did not let it happen. Westinghouse made a very generous offer to tesla and he wanted to escape from it. Then tesla tore up the contract in the direction of helping Westinghouse. Tesla was after all grateful to the man who believed in all his inventions and predictions and supported them. Tesla tore up the contract because he believed that greater accomplishments lie ahead of him. Tesla’s decision really helped his friend Westinghouse. Westinghouse Company was saved for future triumph. Tesla, although sharing the glory, was left in financial difficulties. After the success of Niagara Falls, Tesla rejoined his favorite work, experimentation back at his lab. Tesla interested himself in the exploration of high frequency electricity. Tesla expanded from other people’s mathematical formulas and from what other people had proved. Tesla began searching for a device, which could transport him to unexplored territory. He knew higher frequencies would have more technical advantages; lamps could glow brighter, energy could be transmitted more efficiently and it would be safer because direct current passes inside the body and alternating goes over the body. When it goes in the body, it can harm you. Tesla’s goals were to approximate the frequency of sunlight and created revolutionary brightness. This, he hoped, would eliminate Edison’s incandescent lamps, which utilized only 5% of available energy. Telsa began his high frequency investigation by building rotary AC generators, which could run at higher speeds; but as he approached 20,000 cycles per second, the machine started to fly apart, leaving him far short of his goals. He took 60 cycles per second, household current, and stepped it up to extremely high frequencies into the hundreds of thousands of cycles per second. The Tesla Coil can also make high very high voltage. With the high frequency, he developed some of the first neon and fluorescent lights. He also took the first X-ray photo. Then he illuminated a vacuum tube wirelessly. He transmitted power through the air! 5 “This was the beginning of a life-long obsession, the wireless transmission of energy.” This newly created Tesla Coil, he soon found out, that he could receive and transmit with radio signals when he made them the same frequency. 6“It literally magnified the incoming electrical energy.” By 1896 he was ready to transmit a signal 50 miles to West Point New York. But the same year a disaster struck. A fire consumed the building which Tesla’s lab was in. His lab was destroyed and all his work along with it. That was the worse time. In England, there had been a man named Guglielmo Marconi. He was working hard to build a wireless telegraph. Marconi had already made a telegraph patent that only had two circuits. Someone said it could not transmit across a pond. Later, he demonstrated a long-distance transmitter using a Telsa Oscillator and transmitted over the English Channel. Marconi tried his first patent in the U.S., but it didn’t work. Marconi denied using the Tesla Oscillator. Tesla’s Oscillator was a common household word in the U.S. and Europe. No patent is truly safe as Tesla’s career demonstrated in 1900. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company began thriving in the stock market due to his family connections with English Aristocrats. In 1901 Marconi transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean. That year, Tesla saw Marconi was using 17 of his patents. Then the patent office changed their mind and said Marconi invented the radio because the U.S. Government was being sued by Marconi. That is the only selfish reason that they gave for doing that. Tesla wanted an ordinary way to show his remote control, so he built a little remote controlled boat. The exhibition was at Madison Square Garden and everyone was expecting something big, but it was only a small iron hulled boat that was driven in a small indoor pond. Everyone wanted something big. He specially built it for that display. It was said by Tesla, it had a borrowed mind. It amazed him that the boat worked so well. He encouraged questions. The boat also had flashing lights on it. His control was a box with little levers on the side. Patent number for the boat is 613, 809; it described the first wireless device that was powered by internal batteries. It was the first in the whole world. Tesla did not limit himself to only boats. He made any kind of vehicle or anything that could use wireless technology. 7 “When a news reporter from the New York Times suggested that Tesla made a boat submerge and carry dynamite as a weapon of war, the inventor himself exploded. Tesla quickly corrected the reporter: You do not see there a wireless torpedo, you see there the first race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.” That was Tesla’s very straight opinion of the reporter. In the late 1890’s, he came to a conclusion that he could transmit power at a higher altitude, where there is thinner air and conduction would be better. He got a lot of money from John Jacob Astor and Leonardo E. Curtis, who gave Tesla power and a place to build an experimental station near Pike’s Peak, Colorado. He told a reporter that he would send a radio signal to Paris, France, but he gave no details on how he would do it. He had a hypothesis that the earth was an excellent electric conductor. Before he proved that he had to create the electrical effect on a lighting scale. He laboratory rolled back to prevent it from catching on fire. It had a big tower, at the top it had a copper ball and a Tesla coil, specially designed to send powerful signal into the earth. In the day of the experiment, he checked every par...