Biography of Nikola Tesla - Annotated Bibliography Example

Nikola Tesla was a scientist whose legendary passion for electri had made him one of the pioneers in the evolution of commercial electri He was born in Smiljan, a village of Croatia, in 1856 and chance had it that the night of his birth witnessed a raging thunderstorm and a sky flashed up with lightning, in his native village (Dommermuth-Costa, 11). The midwife had remarked to his mother that he was “a child of the storm” and the mother had corrected her by saying that “he was a child of the light” (Dommermuth-Costa, 11-12). When one studies the life and works of Nikola Tesla, this incident seems like a beautiful symbolism that nature had incorporated into the story of this scientist. Nikola Tesla’s parents had migrated from Serbia to Croatia. His father was a priest, philosopher and poet. The mental training that Nikola’s father gave him by makind him do mathematical calculations without using a pen or paper was his initiation into the field of science (Dommermuth-Costa, 13). And his mother had “come from a family of inventors” (Dommermuth-Costa, 13). Nikola also made his first invention when he was a child of age five, when he made himself a fishing hook and caught frogs (Burgan, 18). When Nokola was seven years old, his family went back to Serbia. In the new town, he became an instant hero as he repaired a newly modeled fire fighting equipment which had failed to function on its first demonstration before the public (Burgan, 22). After his school years, Tesla decided to become an electrical engineer and joined Graz Polytechnic Institute in Austria. During his studies, one of his professors had demonstrated a dynamo which can produce direct current electricity and which was invented by Thomas Alva Edison, in the class. After watching the functioning of dynamo, when Tesla opined that it might be possible to created an alternate current manufacturing motor, his professor refuted this idea as impossible (Burgan, 30). Tesla’s experiments on electricity began after this incident. As he ran out of money to pursue his study and experiments, he started gambling and lost money further. Eventually he had to leave his study unfinished (Burgan, 31). After a while, with the support of his father he joined University of Prague. But after one term was over, he left this course also and joined the telegraph department (Burgan, 32). While walking in the city park with a friend, the design of the ac motor suddenly came to his mind like a flash of lightening (Burgan, 32). The young scientist thus started his experiments to make an ac motor by using the forces of “magnetism and induction” (Burgan, 35). At that time, Thomas Alva Edison was establishing “companies in Europe to provide electric power for lighting and street cars” (Burgan, 37). Nikola’s boss in the telegraph company secured him a job there, in France (Burgan, 35). In 1884, one of his bosses again came to his help. The head of the Paris operations of the Edison’s company assigned him to New York to work with Edison himself (Burgan, 39). And he soon impressed Edison with his skills. Edison offered fifty thousand dollars to Tesla if he could improve the DC generators used in Edison’s power stations (Burgan, 42). But when he finished his work, he realized that Edison had told him that as a joke and disappointed by this, Tesla quit the job (Burgan, 43). Soon Tesla started his company, ‘Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing’, producing ac motors, transformers and distribution systems (Rajvanshi, 6). Ac motor was built by him, based on the rotating magnetic field (Seifer, 56). But his investors had some disagreement with his ideas of ac motor and he was thrown out (Rajvanshi, 6). After this, he had work as a laborer for almost one year to make a living. In 1887, Tesla designed and made the brushless alternating current induction motor and demonstrated it before the engineers of American Institute of Electrical Engineers (Rajvanshi, 6). Soon he joined the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company in its Pittsburgh labs (Rajvanshi, 6). In 1891, Tesla established his own laboratory, the South Fifth Avenue laboratory and in the same year proved that wireless transmission of electric energy was possible (Seifer, 57-58). In 1890, when Nikola Tesla showed for the first time that high frequency current can heat up meat and this became the basic theory behing the invention of micro wave oven (Rajvanshi, 7). He created the Tesla generator in 1895. In 1894, Tesla had also publicized a model of wireless communication through radio. Slowly, Tesla became one of the most popular scientists of his time. At the same time, “a war of currents” raged between Edison’s company and Westinghouse (Rajvanshi, 8). Westinghouse had bought Tesla’s patents in 1889. Before Tesla invented the rotating magnetic field, all the electricity generating factories had to stay close to rivers (Seifer, 56). But Tesla’s invention got rid of the need to have commutators and all the coal-operated power stations also could be got rid of (Seifer, 56). The new generation of power generators devised by Tesla made the generators of Edison’s company obsolete. In 1899, Tesla set up his laboratory in Colarado and started experiments on earth’s conductivity and wire less telegraphy (Rajvanshi, 9). He even thought that his transmissions could reach up to the other planets and life forms there and open up a new channel of communication with such possible organisms (Seifer, 58). In 1900, this versatile scientist began his next ambitious venture, a trans-Atlantic wireless telecommunications facility (Seifer, 58). But the project failed and Tesla also lost the patent for radio and this was awarded to Marconi. The beleaguered scientist fought a legal battle against this but failed. In 1909, Tesla missed the Nobel Prize on a narrow margin to Marconi. The prize announcement and the accompanying press note suggesting Edison and Tesla as potential Nobel laureates in the future, caused a controversy. In the post-World War 1 period, Tesla was finding it very difficult to raise funds for his new experiments and meanwhile he also started to show signs of mental disturbances like obsessive compulsive disorder. His reputation was greatly damaged by this. But he went ahead with his works. And he already had around 700 patents in United States and Europe for his different electrical equipments. He was also toying with ideas like a flying machine and star war type weapons (Seifer, 58). Tesla had photographic memory and he could visualize the complicated models of machines completely in his mind (Rajvanshi, 4). His scientific skills had always surpassed his eccentricities and failures. During his long scientific career, Nikola Tesla invented, “alternating current, generators and motors to run on it, high voltage Tesla coils, radio, X-rays, highly efficient bladeless steam turbines, radio controlled boats and robots, and fluorescent tubes among others” (Rajvanshi, 4). He gave his own unique contributions to fields of science as diverse as, “robotics, ballistics, computer science, nuclear physics and theoretical physics” (Rajvanshi, 4). In 1917, he was awarded the Edison medal (Seifer, 58). He was also awarded with honorary doctorates from “Columbia University and universities in Zagreb, Vienna, Bucharest, Prague and Paris” (Seifer, 58). Tesla did not marry and he attributed the credit of his successes to his celibate life. He died in 1943, of heart failure, in the New York hotel room in which he was living alone. He was aged 87 when he died. Soon after his death, FBI took charge of his personal and research documents and they were sealed and marked as “top secret” (Rajvanshi, 12). The name Tesla, was given to one unit of magnetic flux density, after Nikola Tesla, by the Institute Electro technical Committee (Seifer, 58). The scientist was forgotten for a while in the history of science because of the dominating presence of Edison and Marconi. But his life and works were later rediscovered with a new enthusiasm. The father of alternating current will always remain a model of scientific passion and spirited experimentation for generations to come. Works Cited Burgan, Michael, “Nikola Tesla: Physicist, Inventor, Electrical Engineer”, Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2009. Dommermuth-Costa , Carol, “Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius”, Kent: Twenty First Century Books, 1994. Rajvanshi, Anil.K., “Nikola Tesla: The Creator of the Electric Age”, Resonance, March 2007. web. November 19, 2010, http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/March2007/p4-12.pdf Seifer, Mark J., “Nikola Tesla: Electrical Savant”, Engineering Dimensions, January/February 2006, pp.56-58. Read More