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According to legend, the inventor who revolutionized electrical technology came into this world precisely at midnight as the sky was illuminated by a powerful lightning storm. From these prophetic beginnings, Nikola Tesla has since plunged into relative obscurity. Modern society has benefited greatly from the contributions of Tesla. Amongst his 111 patents, Tesla designed the first practical methods for generating alternating current, which has enabled the long distance transmission of electricity. He created the “Tesla coil,” a popular device for demonstrating high frequency and high voltage phenomena. He designed new electric lighting systems and incandescent lamps. Tesla also revolutionized the field of radio communications with his four-circuit transmitter/receiver and novel designs for intensifying and transforming signals.

Yale celebrated Tesla's accomplishments during his lifetime by awarding him an honorary MA degree in 1894. Over a century later, Tesla is again being honored by Yale, with a bronze sculpture that graces the basement entryway of the Becton Engineering and Applied Science Center. The bust was presented to Yale by John W. Wagner, a third-grade teacher from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who initiated and coordinated a letter writing campaign to fund the sculpture. Mr. Wagner's students practiced their penmanship composing over one hundred letters to solicit donations from citizens and corporation leaders throughout the world.

The man and his machines.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was born between July 9 and 10 in the village of Smiljan, near the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Milutin Tesla, the inventor’s father, was sent to an Army officers' school, and later rebelled to become a cleric of the Serbian Orthodox Church. His father spoke several languages fluently, was talented as a mathematician and wrote socially progressive editorials published in the local newspapers. His mother, Djouka Mandic, was an expert needleworker who spent most of her time working around the family farm and caring for her five children. Although she was illiterate, Djouka had a photographic memory and was able to quote entire volumes of European poetry and Biblical passages. She also invented tools around the house and would spin her own thread from plants that she had grown. Nikola Tesla credited his mother for many of his own abilities, believing that he had inherited her industriousness and inventiveness.

At the ripe old age of five, Tesla invented his first motor. This device was powered by sixteen hapless insects who were glued to the propellers. However, a local boy who enjoyed eating live June bugs quickly put a stop to this promising field of research. The June bug power project was abandoned when the young inventor began throwing up.

As a child, Tesla enjoyed writing poetry and getting into trouble around the family farm. In one household misadventure, he was attacked by the gander, a powerful barnyard enemy. Young Tesla was also in the habit of riding the family cow as if it were a pony, and once fell from its back. This incident was not nearly as disastrous as his attempt to glide from the barnyard roof with a parasol. The youthful scientist nearly drowned on several occasions, most notably when he fell headlong into a large vat of milk and was almost boiled alive.

Milutin insisted that Nikola Tesla should join the ministry, despite his son’s interest in engineering. In 1874, Tesla fell ill with cholera and was bedridden for nine months. At this point, Tesla struck an unusual bargain with his father, suggesting that he might regain his health if allowed to pursue engineering. His father ultimately consented and urged Tesla to spend the next year recovering in the mountains so that he could avoid the compulsory military draft before matriculating at a university. Some of Tesla’s lesser cited inventions, such as a method for rapid travel that would necessitate the construction of a stationary elevated ring encircling the earth like a donut, were created during this period of rehabilitation.

When Nikola entered the Polytechnic School in Graz, he studied 20 hours a day, reading and memorizing works by Descartes, Goethe, Spencer, and Shakespeare. Although he deservedly earned straight A+ grades during his first semester and was able to speak nine languages, Tesla never graduated from the Austrian Polytechnic School. By his third year, Tesla was gambling heavily and was not granted an extension when he was unprepared for his final exams. He continued his studies at the University of Prague until forced to support himself financially. In 1881, Tesla was hired by the Hungarian government as a draftsman and designer for the Engineering Department at the Central Telegraph Office and used his own salary to further his experiments. Tesla began working on the problem of how to harness alternating current during his years in college and persisted for many years before conceptualizing a solution.

During these early years of his career, Tesla invented an amplifier to enhance transmission signals in the induction-triggered carbon disk speaker of the telephone, an improvement he designed while working for the American telephone exchange in Budapest. During this period, Tesla also designed reversible clothing, a disastrous experiment conducted when he did not have enough money to purchase a new suit. Tesla did not patent either of these innovative discoveries.

In 1882, Tesla was hired by the Continental Edison Company in Paris to troubleshoot their mechanical and electrical problems. He built the first alternating current motor in the closet of a secret mechanical shop, and was mortified when wealthy investors didn’t immediately share his enthusiasm over this revolutionary device. Tesla became interested by the promise of greater opportunities in the United States and secured a job redesigning dynamos for the Edison Light Company in New York.

Nikola Tesla arrived in America in 1884 carrying four cents in his pocket and a few valued possessions—a packet of poems, articles, and calculations of unsolvable integrals. During his first year, Tesla redesigned twenty-four types of standard machines for Edison’s company, working from 10:30 am until 5 am the next morning for successive days throughout the week His manager had promised a bonus of $50,000 for this work, however this agreement was never put in writing. When Tesla demanded payment upon completion of the tasks, he was told, “You are still a Parisian. When you become a full-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke.”(Seifer, 1996) Tesla was not amused and promptly resigned his position.

During the following year, Tesla began patenting his own innovations and formed the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Company. Despite his success in designing a municipal arc lighting system, investors forced him to leave his own company in 1886 leaving Tesla bankrupt with only a decoratively engraved stock certificate. Tesla was understandably insulted and with no other means of supporting himself was forced to spend the winter digging ditches. Fortunately his engineering prowess impressed the construction foreman, who introduced Tesla to a different enclave of engineers and financiers. With the aid of these new contacts, Tesla secured the monetary backing to build his own laboratory for designing alternating current machinery. He was finally able to build working models and began patents for his motors, generators, transformers and systems for utilizing electric power. George Westinghouse saw great potential in Tesla’s ideas and purchased his alternating current patents, bringing the inventor to Pittsburgh to develop his motors for commercial use.

The war between Edison’s direct current (DC) scheme and Tesla’s alternating current (AC) system became increasingly galvanized during the 1880s, due to the significant capital invested in developing new methods of powering the nation’s growing industrial sector. Edison initially attempted to protect his commercial interests by lobbying the New York state government to limit electrical current to 800 Volts, which would render the competing system of alternating current illegal. When Westinghouse countered this political maneuvering with a threat of direct litigation, Edison switched tactics and began a propaganda war to sway public opinion against alternating current. He initiated mass demonstrations in which animals were electrocuted by alternating current and arranged to power the electric chair in New York’s Auburn State prison with an alternating current generator to brand AC as “the executioner’s current.” (Cheney, 1981; Hall, 1986) Westinghouse responded by publicly citing facts and statistics to promote the safety of alternating current and encouraged other respected scientists to assist in these educational efforts. Westinghouse gained an advantage in this battle for public opinion when he underbid Edison and secured the contract to supply the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the first World’s Fair to be powered by electricity. Introducing alternating current in this international forum was an ingenious means of gaining acceptance for alternating current technology. The success of AC at the Chicago World’s Fair impressed the International Niagara Commission and Westinghouse was awarded a contract to build the first generators at Niagara Falls using Tesla’s polyphase system. The Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant not only provided energy for lighting homes, running trolley cars and replacing steam engines but also fueled the new electrometallurgical and electrochemical industries, ushering in the age of modern electrical power.

During the 1890s, Tesla developed the apparatus and circuits used for the wireless communication. In addition to designing circuitry, he had the foresight to conceptualize how this technology might be applied as a means of communicating world news and other messages. When Guglielmo Marconi, who is often cited as the inventor of radio, publicly demonstrated signal transmission across the Atlantic in 1901 Tesla sarcastically remarked, “Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.” (Hall, 1986) The issue of intellectual priority in the field of radio worked its way through the courts for decades. In 1943, nearly six months after Tesla’s death, the Supreme Court declared Marconi’s patent invalid because the wireless technology it described was predated by the work of Sir Oliver Lodge, John Stone Stone and Nikola Tesla.

Tesla also invented an oscillation transformer with its primary and secondary coils tuned to resonance, which allowed currents of high voltage and high frequency to be produced. This device became known as the “Tesla Coil” and was part of the standard equipment in nearly every college physics laboratory throughout Europe and America. Tesla’s original purpose in designing this apparatus was to develop a more efficient electric light, which he believed would be accomplished by passing high frequency currents through a gas filled tube. Over the next decade he designed over fifty variations of this coil systematically modifying the configuration, insulators, and windings to maximize efficiency. In 1899, Tesla relocated to Colorado Springs and built an enormous coil to experiment with a novel method of transmitting wireless power. The El Paso Electric Company agreed to provide Tesla’s new facility with free electrical power, a promise they likely regretted when his oscillation transformer produced 135 foot bolts of manmade lightning and short-circuited the entire town of Colorado Springs.

Tesla also became interested in the design of automated and remote control devices, a field that he termed “telautomatics.” In 1897, he built two radio-controlled model boats that could be steered and made to fire explosives from a distance. One of the prototype models employed intricate control features such as a system to prevent interference and a loop antenna so the vessel could operate beneath water. Tesla foresaw the utility of these innovations as a powerful weapon that could be of interest to the US Navy.

Tesla was filled with a boundless energy throughout his life and was described by friends as “A vegetarian that doesn’t know how to vegetate.” (Seifer, 1996). He continued working on problems throughout the night and sleeping between the hours 5:30 am and 10:30 am even at the age of 75.

Tesla spent his later years alone living in various New York hotels and feeding the pigeons of New York City. When maids at the St. Regis hotel complained about Tesla’s companions, the four pigeons nesting in the desk of his hotel room, Tesla moved. Although he could have become wealthy from his inventions, Tesla was not interested in financial matters. He once remarked to his close friend and biographer Kenneth Swezey, “I will never have any money unless I get it in amounts so large that I cannot get rid of it except by throwing it out the window!” (Swezey, 1958).

Towards the end of his life, some of Nikola Tesla’s experimental concepts seemed increasingly fantastic. On his seventy-eighth birthday, Tesla described a new “death beam” apparatus that could destroy 10,000 planes from a distance of 250 miles and defeat armies of millions via the transmission of concentrated particle beams. He envisioned using this death beam to create an invisible defensive wall to protect national borders. Tesla stated that this work was based on entirely new principles of physics, but refused to explain any of these theories, insisting that experts would have to trust him.

In 1937, Tesla was hit by a taxi and refused medical treatment, stubbornly maintaining that if he kept moving after the accident, it would prevent his blood from clotting. He never fully recovered from this incident and became increasingly reclusive in his final years, rarely leaving his room in the Hotel New Yorker. Nikola Tesla passed away in his sleep at the age of 86, bequeathing a legacy of innovation that has immeasurably advanced the progress of humankind. After his death, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Office of Alien Property and the War Department impounded Tesla’s papers on advanced weapons systems, and much of this information has yet to be released.

The Man and the Mystery.

Considering the profound influence of Nikola Tesla’s inventions on modern society, it is indeed mysterious that he is not as recognized as some of his contemporaries. John Wagner, the school teacher from Ann Arbor, Michigan who mobilized his third grade classes to raise thousands of dollars in funds to create the commemorative bronze bust of Tesla, attributes this to "a deliberate assault on factual history” propagated by institutions such as the Smithsonian museum (Wagner, 2002). This observation was corroborated by the testimony of Senator Carl Levin who remarked in a congressional address to then-president George H.W. Bush:

Nikola Tesla has not been granted his proper place in history. In the Smithsonian Institution, for example, Mr. Edison's inventions are justifiably well represented. However, although the museum has included Mr. Tesla's alternating current generators in their exhibit, no mention is made of Mr. Tesla. In fact the generator is included as part of the Edison exhibit (The Congressional Record, 1990)

Mr. Wagner notes that Edison's bust is not only situated near Tesla's first AC motor/generator, but also "Tesla's U.S. patent number appeared on the motor/generator, [and] ... the display was arranged in such a way as to give credit to Edison" (Wagner, 2002). He writes that the Tesla exhibit, a small glass show-case containing some of his personal artifacts in a darkened hallway near the men's room, was only created due to recent congressional pressure. According to Mr. Wagner, Nikola Tesla has also been omitted from the Smithsonian museum’s educational texts, despite his numerous contributions to modern electrical technology. The Smithsonian Book of Invention describes innovators such as Charles Goodyear and Thomas Edison in addition to popular culture figures such as Archie Bunker and Colonel Sanders, but fails to even mention Nikola Tesla. Smithsonian’s Visual Timeline of Inventions is not significantly better, detailing inventions such as the Rubik's cube, the electric toothbrush, and the pop-up toaster, but fails to list the AC motor. Further, this book credits the invention of radio to Guglielmo Marconi, despite the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Tesla’s patents. In his writings, Wagner accuses the Smithsonian of presenting "distorted history" suggesting that the electrical innovations of Edison are held above those of Tesla due to contributions from the Edison foundation to the Smithsonian (Wagner, 1996; 2002).

The curator of the Smithsonian’s electrical collections, Bernard S. Finn, denies the charge that the museum has any prejudice against Nikola Tesla, maintaining that the Smithsonian does not accept busts unless the statues were made from life. He feels that the museum does not currently have a sufficient number of Tesla artifacts for a larger exhibit, but is looking to collaborate with the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, where many of the relevant historical materials are preserved. At the same time, Mr. Finn substantiates Mr. Wagner’s perspective in admitting that the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation has donated money to the Smithsonian museum for the Edison exhibit, but denies that this sponsorship had any impact on the content of the “Lighting a Revolution” project.

It is not inconceivable that a national institution like the Smithsonian Museum could be subject to such corporate pressures. Private sector groups are now allowed to display their logos at exhibit entrances and are occasionally granted floor space for exhibitions. The renovation of the Smithsonian's Insect Zoo at the National Museum of Natural History was partially subsidized by a $500,000 gift from Orkin Pest Control, which will result in a permanent display of the company's logo. The National Air and Space Museum also launched a recent "Star Trek" display with funding from the company that produced the series.

The degree to which this financial support influences exhibit content is a matter of debate. Michael Jacobson from The Center for the Study of Commercialism, a public interest group, fears that such corporate sponsorship may influence exhibit content: "For instance, an insect zoo could easily have an adjunct about the dangers of pesticides. You aren't likely to see that if Orkin is a sponsor." (Masters, 1992). Representatives of the museum including the Smithsonian secretary, the director of the National Museum of Natural History, and a curator responsible for the “Lighting a Revolution” exhibit, have denied that sponsors can dictate the content of exhibits. However there are some reports by other project curators that this is not always the case. Some of the curatorial staff for the “Spirit of America” exhibition have complained off the record that project content was imposed on them. According to another report, corporate sponsors were directly involved in the planning, execution and marketing of the Ocean Planet exhibit that was opened in 1995. Further research would be necessary to determine whether similar factors influence how the museum has historically presented the work of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

Mr. Wagner initiated the letter writing campaign to restore Nikola Tesla to his rightful place in the historical record. When his class attempted to donate the statue of Tesla to the Smithsonian Museum, their offer was rejected. This bust recently found a home at Yale University, one of the first institutions to honor Tesla for his work. Nikola Tesla was born into the world during an electrical storm, and left our generation with the scientific legacy of an electrical revolution.

© 2002, A. Zara Herskovits.

Literature Cited.

Cheney M. Tesla: Man Out of Time. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981.
The Congressional Record. Tuesday July 10, 1990; 136(86): H4455-H4456 and S9311-S9312.
Efforts of Schoolchildren Bring Honor to Inventor who Helped 'Power Our World' Yale Bulletin and
Calendar. April 1997; 25(33). Available at: http://www.yale.edu/opa/ybc/v25.n33.news.05.html
Accessed April 25, 2002.
Glenn J (editor). The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1994.
Finn BS. “The Smithsonian Answers” 73 Amateur Radio Today. August 1996. p6-7.
Hall SS. Tesla: a scientific saint, wizard or carnival sideman? Smithsonian. June 1986; 71: 120-131
Available at: Biography Resource Center, New York Public Library.
Hansen L. Profile: Ethical debate surrounding museums receiving gifts and donations from corporations
and sponsors. All Things Considered (NPR) February 5, 2002. Available at: Newspaper Source
Database, New York Public Library.
Jackson RL. Smithsonian Flows With Corporate Tide.” Los Angeles Times. June 6, 1995; col. A1, p5.
Martin TC. Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla. Hollywood, CA: Angriff Press: 1981.
Masters K. "Exterminator Funds Rehab of Bug Zoo at Smithsonian." Chicago Sun Times. February 29,
1992; col 1, p10.
Seifer MJ. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla Biography of a Genius. New Jersey: Carol
Publishing Group, 1996.
Swezey KM. Nikola Tesla. Science. May 16, 1958; 128(3307):1147-1159.
Tesla at 75. Time Magazine. July 20, 1931;18(3): 27-30.
Tesla, at 78, Bares New ‘Death-Beam’ The New York Times. July 11, 1934; col. 1, p18.
Tesla N (edited by Ben Johnston). My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Williston,
Vermont: Hart Brothers, 1982.
Nikola Tesla Dies; Prolific Inventor.” The New York Times. January 8, 1943; col. 1, p19.
Wagner J. Nikola Tesla 1856-1943 Forgotten American Scientist. Available at:
http://www.concentric.net/~Jwwagner/ Accessed: April 25, 2002.
Wagner J. “Tesla: Bust the Smithsonian” 73 Amateur Radio Today. January 1996; p24-29
Waters HB. Nikola Tesla, Giant of Electricity. New York: Crowell, 1961.
Zengerle J. The New Republic. October 20, 1997; 217(16):18-19.

In memoriam Nikola Tesla: The inscription underneath his bust reads: "In a single burst of invention he created the polyphase alternating current system of motors and generators that powers our world. He gave us every essential of radio, and laid the foundation for much of today’s technology."

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