Inventor Nikola Tesla - Essay Example

Nikola Tesla was born in Croatia in 1856 to an orthodox Serbian family. His father was a clergyman. After his initial education at Croatia, he studied at the Polytechnic School in Austria and at the University of Prague. After immigrating to the USA in 1884, he was employed briefly by Thomas Edison at the Edison Machine Works, New Jersey. He left the job to fully devote his time to research works and inventions. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1891 and spent the creative period of his life at Manhattan where he died in 1943.

He suffered bankruptcy and died destitutely. Tesla did most of his experiments at his laboratory in New York City. The patent right of his system of getting electric power from AC was purchased by George Westinghouse, an American inventor. The Inventive GeniusOf this inventive genius, John J. O'Neill says "This spark of intellectual incandescence, in the form of a rare creative genius, shot like a meteor into the midst of human society". A mechanical engineer by training, most of his inventions related to the electrical field.

The world believed that Marconi was the inventor of the radio until the US Supreme Court resolved the dispute in favor of Tesla in 1944 after his death. Marconi got radio patented in 1904 but before that in 1893, Tesla demonstrated at a lecture at the National Electric Light Association a radio transmission and reception apparatus. He, however, lost out at the patent race unable to research further when funding support was withdrawn by his financier in 1903. The present-day induction motors and multiphase electric power system owe their origins to the inventions of Tesla more than a century ago.

Among his other pioneering inventions are bladeless pump and turbine, wireless remote control, fluorescent lighting, and disinfecting of water with ozone. X-rays were conceived by Tesla before their discovery by Roentgen as also the concepts of xerography. The Tesla Coil still finds use in electronic equipment including radio and TV. Tesla continuously imagined processes to make inventions out of science which for him was a tool for the betterment of humanity. By his own admission, he worked out his ideas mentally never putting them on paper.

His greatest inventions have all been made in this way. Margaret Cheney describes him as a "man out of time". He is yet to receive his rightful place in the annals of scientific history and remains an inventive genius least recognized.