Tesla, Nikola (tĕs`lə), 1856–1943, American electrician and inventor, b. Croatia (then an Austrian province). He emigrated to the United States in 1884, worked for a short period for Edison, and became a naturalized American citizen (1891). A pioneer in the field of high-voltage electricity, he made many discoveries and inventions of great value to the development of radio transmission and to the field of electricity. These include a system of arc lighting, the Tesla induction motor and system of alternating-current transmission, the Tesla coil, generators of high-frequency currents, a transformer to increase oscillating currents to high potentials, a system of wireless communication, and a system of transmitting electric power without wires. He produced the first power system at Niagara Falls, N.Y. There is a museum dedicated to his work in Belgrade, Serbia.

Bibliography

See biographies by H. B. Walters (1961), J. J. O'Neill (1968, repr. 1986), I. Hunt and W. W. Draper (1986); J. J. O'Neil (1986), and B. H. Johnston (1989).

Tesla, Nikola

Nikola Tesla.

(credit: Culver Pictures)

(born July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan, Lika, Austria-Hungary [now in Croatia]—died Jan. 7, 1943, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Serbian U.S. inventor and researcher. He studied in Austria and Bohemia and worked in Paris before coming to the U.S. in 1884. He worked for Thomas Alva Edison and George Westinghouse but preferred independent research. His inventions made possible the production and distribution of alternating-current electric power. He invented an induction coil that is still widely used in radio technology, the Tesla coil (1891); his system was used by Westinghouse to light the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Tesla established an electric power station at Niagara Falls that delivered power to Buffalo, N.Y., by 1896. His research also included work on a carbon button lamp and on the power of electrical resonance. He discovered terrestrial stationary waves (1899–1900), proving that the Earth is a conductor. Due to lack of funds, many of his ideas remained only in his notebooks, which are still examined by enthusiasts for inventive clues.

Tesla, Nikola (1856–1943) electrical engineer, inventor; born in Smiljan Lika, Croatia. Educated in Austria and Czechoslovakia, he worked as an electrical engineer in Paris before coming to the U.S.A. (1884) to seek support for one of his inventions. He went to work for Thomas Edison but resigned in 1885 and set up his own laboratory. Never good at personal relations or business, he was forced out of his firm, but he started another in 1887 and finally succeeded with his original invention, an electro-magnetic motor that would be the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He sold the patents to Westinghouse in 1888, but after working with that company for a year, he quit and thereafter worked on his own. He continued to produce some important inventions involving high-frequency electricity—the Tesla coil, a resonant air-core transformer, being one such—and his alternating-current system illuminated the Chicago World's Fair (1893) and led to the construction of the Niagara Falls hydroelectric generating plant (1896). His reputation among both scientists and the public was now at its peak but he became increasingly more reclusive and eccentric. He continued to come up with new inventions, including one for wireless transmission of electricity and one for radio controlled craft; he also anticipated pulsed radar, harnessing solar power, and radio communication with other planets, but his eccentricities prevented him from getting either a fair hearing or profits. Although he could well have used the money, in 1912 he refused the Nobel Prize in physics because he claimed that corecipient Thomas Edison was not a true scientist. He spent his final years feeding and housing pigeons and living mainly off an annual honorarium from his homeland. The tesla, a unit of magnetic flow density, is named after him.