What was Nikola Tesla's first patented invention?
Induction motor
The first AC commutator-free three-phase induction motors were independently invented by Galileo Ferraris and Nikola Tesla, a working motor model having been demonstrated by the former in 1885 and by the latter in 1887. Tesla applied for US patents in October and November 1887 and was granted some of these patents in May 1888. In April 1888, the "Royal Academy of Science of Turin" published Ferraris's research on his AC polyphase motor detailing the foundations of motor operation. In May 1888 Tesla presented the technical paper "A New System for Alternating Current Motors and Transformers" to the "American Institute of Electrical Engineers" (AIEE)
Science and technology in Russia
Nikolay Benardos introduced the arc welding, further developed by Nikolay Slavyanov, Konstantin Khrenov and other Russian engineers. Alexander Lodygin and Pavel Yablochkov were pioneers of electric lighting, and Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky invented and introduced the first three-phase electric power systems, widely used today. Oleg Losev is often considered as the inventor of the light-emitting diode (LED). Nikola Tesla was arguably the discover of modern electricity, he wished for electricity to be free.
List of things named after Nikola Tesla
This article is a list of things named after Nikola Tesla, an influential physicist, engineer and inventor.
Nikola Tesla
Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla received an advanced education in engineering and physics in the 1870s and gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. He emigrated to the United States in 1884, where he would become a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His alternating current (AC) induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company would eventually market.
X-ray
In 1894 Nikola Tesla noticed damaged film in his lab that seemed to be associated with Crookes tube experiments and began investigating this "radiant energy of "invisible" kinds". After Röntgen identified the X-ray Tesla began making X-ray images of his own using high voltages and tubes of his own design, as well as Crookes tubes.
Modern history
In the latter part of the second revolution, Thomas Alva Edison developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world and is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. In 1882, Edison switched on the world's first large-scale electrical supply network that provided 110 volts direct current to fifty-nine customers in lower Manhattan. Also toward the end of the second industrial revolution, Nikola Tesla made many contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
History of the Tesla coil
With an appropriate wire antenna, the Tesla coil circuit could function as such a narrow-bandwidth radio transmitter. In his March 1893 St. Louis lecture, Tesla demonstrated a wireless system that was the first use of tuned circuits in radio, although he used it for wireless power transmission, not radio communication. A grounded spark-excited capacitor-tuned Tesla transformer attached to an elevated wire antenna transmitted radio waves, which were received across the room by a wire antenna attached to a receiver consisting of a second grounded resonant transformer tuned to the transmitter's frequency, which lighted a Geissler tube. This system, patented by Tesla on September 2, 1897, was the first use of the "four-circuit" concept later claimed by Guglielmo Marconi. However, Tesla was mainly interested in wireless power and never developed a practical radio "communication" system. He never believed that radio waves could be used for practical communication, instead clinging to an erroneous theory that radio communication was due to currents in the Earth.
Nikola Tesla
In 1928, Tesla received , for a biplane capable of taking off vertically (VTOL aircraft) and then of being ""gradually tilted through manipulation of the elevator devices"" in flight until it was flying like a conventional plane. Tesla thought the plane would sell for less than $1,000, although the aircraft has been described as impractical. This would be his last patent and at this time Tesla closed his last office at 350 Madison Ave., which he had moved into two years earlier.
Nikola Tesla
In 1915, Tesla attempted to sue the Marconi Company for infringement of his wireless tuning patents. Marconi's initial radio patent had been awarded in the US in 1897, but his 1900 patent submission covering improvements to radio transmission had been rejected several times, before it was finally approved in 1904, on the grounds that it infringed on other existing patents including two 1897 Tesla wireless power tuning patents. Tesla's 1915 case went nowhere, but in a related case, where the Marconi Company tried to sue the US government over WWI patent infringements, a Supreme Court of the United States 1943 decision restored the prior patents of Oliver Lodge, John Stone, and Tesla. The court declared that their decision had no bearing on Marconi's claim as the first to achieve radio transmission, just that since Marconi's claim to certain patented improvements were questionable, the company could not claim infringement on those same patents.
Bolometer
The first bolometer used by Langley consisted of two platinum strips covered with lampblack. One strip was shielded from radiation and one exposed to it. The strips formed two branches of a Wheatstone bridge which was fitted with a sensitive galvanometer and connected to a battery. Electromagnetic radiation falling on the exposed strip would heat it and change its resistance. By 1880, Langley's bolometer was refined enough to detect thermal radiation from a cow a quarter of a mile away. This radiant-heat detector is sensitive to differences in temperature of one hundred-thousandth of a degree Celsius (0.00001 C). This instrument enabled him to thermally detect across a broad spectrum, noting all the chief Fraunhofer lines. He also discovered new atomic and molecular absorption lines in the invisible infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Nikola Tesla personally asked Dr. Langley if he could use his bolometer for his power transmission experiments in 1892. Thanks to that first use, he succeeded in making the first demonstration between West Point and his laboratory on Houston Street.
Ball lightning
Nikola Tesla reportedly could artificially produce balls and conducted some demonstrations of his ability, but he was truly interested in higher voltages and powers, and remote transmission of power, so the balls he made were just a curiosity.
Tesla principle
Historically, the term Tesla principle was used to describe (amongst other things) certain reversible processes invented by Nikola Tesla. However, this phrase is no longer in conventional use. It was developed during Tesla's research in alternating currents where the current's magnitude and direction varied cyclically.
Nikola Tesla
To further study the conductive nature of low pressure air, Tesla set up an experimental station at high altitude in Colorado Springs during 1899. There he could safely operate much larger coils than in the cramped confines of his New York lab, and an associate had made an arrangement for the El Paso Power Company to supply alternating current free of charge. To fund his experiments he convinced John Jacob Astor IV to invest $100,000 to become a majority share holder in the Nikola Tesla Company. Astor thought he was primarily investing in the new wireless lighting system. Instead, Tesla used the money to fund his Colorado Springs experiments. Upon his arrival, he told reporters that he planned to conduct wireless telegraphy experiments, transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris.
List of Nikola Tesla writings
Tesla wrote a number of books and articles for magazines and journals.
Among his books are ""; "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla", compiled and edited by David Hatcher Childress; and "The Tesla Papers".
History of radio
After learning of Hertz' demonstrations of wireless transmission, inventor Nikola Tesla began developing his own systems based on Hertz' and Maxwell's ideas, primarily working toward a means of wireless lighting, and power distribution. Tesla, concluding that Hertz had not demonstrated airborne electromagnetic waves (radio transmission), went on to develop a system based on what he thought was the primary conductor, the earth. In 1893 demonstrations of his ideas, in St. Louis, Missouri and at the "Franklin Institute" in Philadelphia, Tesla proposed this wireless power technology could also incorporate a system for the telecommunication of information.
Nikola Tesla
In March 1896, after hearing of Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-ray and X-ray imaging (radiography), Tesla proceeded to do his own experiments in X-ray imaging, developing a high energy single terminal vacuum tube of his own design that had no target electrode and that worked from the output of the Tesla Coil (the modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is "bremsstrahlung" or "braking radiation"). In his research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will ... enable one to generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus."
Check valve
Nikola Tesla invented a deceptively simple one-way valve for fluids in 1916, called a Tesla valve. It was patented in 1920 (U.S. patent 1,329,559).
History of the Tesla coil
Tesla was not the first to invent this circuit. Henry Rowland built a spark-excited resonant transformer circuit "(above)" in 1889 and Elihu Thomson had experimented with similar circuits in 1890, including one which could produce 64 inch (1.6 m) sparks,
Induction motor
George Westinghouse, who was developing an alternating current power system at that time, licensed Tesla’s patents in 1888 and purchased a US patent option on Ferraris' induction motor concept. Tesla was also employed for one year as a consultant. Westinghouse employee C. F. Scott was assigned to assist Tesla and later took over development of the induction motor at Westinghouse. Steadfast in his promotion of three-phase development, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky invented the cage-rotor induction motor in 1889 and the three-limb transformer in 1890. Furthermore, he claimed that Tesla's motor was not practical because of two-phase pulsations, which prompted him to persist in his three-phase work. Although Westinghouse achieved its first practical induction motor in 1892 and developed a line of polyphase 60 hertz induction motors in 1893, these early Westinghouse motors were two-phase motors with wound rotors until B. G. Lamme developed a rotating bar winding rotor.
Fractional-horsepower motor
The earliest commercially-successful electric motors date back to the latter part of the 19th century when Nikola Tesla patented his induction motor in 1888. The development of fractional-horsepower motors, however, would not have taken place without the push toward urban, and later, rural electrification, using alternating current. Electrification began in cities around 1915, and with electrification, so too came the potential market for washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and a host of other commercial appliances. This was recognised by major manufacturers, like Westinghouse and General Electric, who were already in the business of manufacturing large motors for industrial installations. By 1920, over 500,000 fractional-horsepower motors were powering washers and other appliances in America.
Power engineering
One of Westinghouse's engineers, William Stanley, recognised the problem with connecting transformers in series as opposed to parallel and also realised that making the iron core of a transformer a fully enclosed loop would improve the voltage regulation of the secondary winding. Using this knowledge he built the world's first practical transformer based alternating current power system at Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1886. In 1885 the Italian physicist and electrical engineer Galileo Ferraris demonstrated an induction motor and in 1887 and 1888 the Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla filed a range of patents related to power systems including one for a practical two-phase induction motor which Westinghouse licensed for his AC system.
Nikola Tesla
Tesla claimed to have developed his own physical principle regarding matter and energy that he started working on in 1892, and in 1937, at age 81, claimed in a letter to have completed a "dynamic theory of gravity" that ""[would] put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, as that of curved space."" He stated that the theory was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Further elucidation of his theory was never found in his writings.
Nikola Tesla
After 1890, Tesla experimented with transmitting power by inductive and capacitive coupling using high AC voltages generated with his Tesla coil. He attempted to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field inductive and capacitive coupling and conducted a series of public demonstrations where he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent light bulbs from across a stage. He would spend most of the decade working on variations of this new form of lighting with the help of various investors but none of the ventures succeeded in making a commercial product out of his findings.
Boundary layer
This effect was exploited in the Tesla turbine, patented by Nikola Tesla in 1913. It is referred to as a bladeless turbine because it uses the boundary layer effect and not a fluid impinging upon the blades as in a conventional turbine. Boundary layer turbines are also known as cohesion-type turbine, bladeless turbine, and Prandtl layer turbine (after Ludwig Prandtl).
Nikola Tesla
The money Tesla made from licensing his AC patents made him independently wealthy and gave him the time and funds to pursue his own interests. In 1889, Tesla moved out of the Liberty Street shop Peck and Brown had rented and for the next dozen years would work out of a series of workshop/laboratory spaces in Manhattan. These included a lab at 175 Grand Street (1889–1892), the fourth floor of 33–35 South Fifth Avenue (1892–1895), and sixth and seventh floors of 46 & 48 East Houston Street (1895–1902). Tesla and his hired staff would conduct some of his most significant work in these workshops.
Nikola Tesla
Tesla would later write that he became interested in demonstrations of electricity by his physics professor. Tesla noted that these demonstrations of this "mysterious phenomena" made him want "to know more of this wonderful force". Tesla was able to perform integral calculus in his head, which prompted his teachers to believe that he was cheating. He finished a four-year term in three years, graduating in 1873.
Martin Sekulić
The inventor Nikola Tesla noted in his 1919 autobiography "" that when he attended the "Kraljevska Velika Realka" in Rakovac (Karlovac) between 1870 and 1873, demonstrations of electricity by his "professor of physics" sparked his interest in this "mysterious phenomena" and made him want "to know more of this wonderful force". The details of who was teaching physics at that time and the nature of the demonstrations described have led some to conclude this professor was Martin Sekulić.
The Secret of Nikola Tesla
The Secret of Nikola Tesla (), is a 1980 Yugoslav biographical film which details events in the life of the Serbian-American engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), portrayed by Serbian actor Petar Božović. Tesla grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), studied engineering and physics, and moved to New York in 1884. He became an American citizen in 1891 and is known for his contributions to electrical engineering.
The American Side
After a death at Niagara Falls, a seedy Buffalo private detective unravels a secret plot to build a powerful device conceived by inventor Nikola Tesla.
Nikola Tesla
At the beginning of 1893, Westinghouse engineer Benjamin Lamme had made great progress developing an efficient version of Tesla's induction motor, and Westinghouse Electric started branding their complete polyphase AC system as the "Tesla Polyphase System". They believed that Tesla's patents gave them patent priority over other AC systems.
List of Nikola Tesla writings
Many of Tesla's writings are freely available on the web,
including the article, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy", which he wrote for The Century Magazine in 1900,
and the article, "Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency", published in his book, "Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla".
From his childhood on Tesla wrote poetry but considered it too personal to be published. In the late 1920s, Tesla composed a poem—"Fragments of Olympian Gossip"—for his friend, George Sylvester Viereck, an illustrious German poet and mystic. It poked vitriolic fun at the scientific establishment of the day. For example, he derided Albert Einstein for claiming that matter and force are transmutable (Mass–energy equivalence), noting that Archimedes and Isaac Newton had stated that they are not.
Nikola Tesla
From the 1890s through 1906, Tesla spent a great deal of his time and fortune on a series of projects trying to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires. It was an expansion of his idea of using coils to transmit power that he had been demonstrating in wireless lighting. He saw this as not only a way to transmit large amounts of power around the world but also, as he had pointed out in his earlier lectures, a way to transmit worldwide communications.
Tesla (microarchitecture)
Named after the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, Tesla is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2006, as the successor to their prior microarchitectures. As Nvidia's first microarchitecture to implement unified shaders, it was used with GeForce 8 Series, GeForce 9 Series, GeForce 100 Series, GeForce 200 Series, and GeForce 300 Series of GPUs collectively manufactured in 90 nm, 80 nm, 65 nm, 55 nm, and 40 nm. It was also in the GeForce 405 and in the Quadro FX, Quadro x000, Quadro NVS series, and Nvidia Tesla computing modules.
Belgrade
The Nikola Tesla Museum, founded in 1952, preserves the personal items of Nikola Tesla, the inventor after whom the Tesla unit was named. It holds around 160,000 original documents and around 5,700 personal other items including his urne. The last of the major Belgrade museums is the Museum of Vuk and Dositej, which showcases the lives, work and legacy of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Dositej Obradović, the 19th century reformer of the Serbian literary language and the first Serbian Minister of Education, respectively. Belgrade also houses the Museum of African Art, founded in 1977, which has the large collection of art from West Africa.
George Westinghouse
During this period Westinghouse continued to pour money and engineering resources into the goal of building a completely integrated AC system, obtaining the Sawyer–Man lamp by buying Consolidated Electric Light, developing components such as an induction meter, and obtaining the rights to inventor Nikola Tesla's brushless AC induction motor along with patents for a new type of electric power distribution, polyphase alternating current. The acquisition of a feasible AC motor gave Westinghouse a key patent for his system, but the financial strain of buying up patents and hiring the engineers needed to build it meant development of Tesla's motor had to be put on hold for a while.
Timeline of United States inventions (1890–1945)
1891 Tesla coil
History of perpetual motion machines
In 1900, Nikola Tesla claimed to have discovered an abstract principle on which to base a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. No prototype was produced. He wrote:
Spark-gap transmitter
The first person to use resonant circuits in a radio application was Nikola Tesla, who invented the resonant transformer in 1891. At a March 1893 St. Louis lecture he had demonstrated a wireless system that, although it was intended for wireless power transmission, had many of the elements of later radio communication systems. A grounded capacitance-loaded spark-excited resonant transformer (his "Tesla coil") attached to an elevated wire monopole antenna transmitted radio waves, which were received across the room by a similar wire antenna attached to a receiver consisting of a second grounded resonant transformer tuned to the transmitter's frequency, which lighted a Geissler tube. This system, patented by Tesla 2 September 1897, 4 months after Lodge's "syntonic" patent, was in effect an inductively coupled radio transmitter and receiver, the first use of the "four circuit" system claimed by Marconi in his 1900 patent "(below)". However, Tesla was mainly interested in wireless power and never developed a practical radio "communication" system.
Plasma globe
The plasma lamp was invented by Nikola Tesla, during his experimentation with high-frequency currents in an evacuated glass tube for the purpose of studying high voltage phenomena. Tesla called his invention an "inert gas discharge tube". The modern plasma lamp design was subsequently developed by Bill Parker, a student at MIT.
Nikola Tesla
In 1893 at St. Louis, Missouri, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, Tesla told onlookers that he was sure a system like his could eventually conduct "intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires" by conducting it through the Earth.
Violet ray
Their basic construction was invented prior to 1900 by Nikola Tesla, who introduced his first prototypes at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Most of the antique violet rays in the US were produced before the Depression era, and some of the larger US manufacturers of violet rays were Renulife, Fitzgerald, and Fisher. Companies who manufactured violet ray devices made many other types of electrical appliances as well, e.g. Star Electric, which also manufactured stock ticker machines. Many of the companies who were able to continue manufacturing violet rays after the Depression stopped making them due to World War II, when they began manufacturing radio coils and other electrical components for the war instead.
Spark plug
Early patents for spark plugs included those by Nikola Tesla (in for an ignition timing system, 1898), Frederick Richard Simms (GB 24859/1898, 1898) and Robert Bosch (GB 26907/1898). But only the invention of the first commercially-viable high-voltage spark plug as part of a magneto-based ignition system by Robert Bosch's engineer Gottlob Honold in 1902 made possible the development of the spark-ignition engine. Subsequent manufacturing improvements can be credited to Albert Champion, to the Lodge brothers, sons of Sir Oliver Lodge, who developed and manufactured their father's idea and also to Kenelm Lee Guinness, of the Guinness brewing family, who developed the KLG brand.
Helen Blair Bartlett played a vital role in making the insulator in 1930.
Nikola Tesla
On 30 July 1891, aged 35, Tesla became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In the same year, he patented his Tesla coil.
Nikola Tesla electric car hoax
The Nikola Tesla electric car hoax is an anecdote that refers to a supposed Nikola Tesla invention described by Peter Savo, who claimed to be a nephew of Tesla, to Derek Ahers in 1967. Savo said that Tesla took him to Buffalo, New York in 1931 and showed him a modified Pierce-Arrow car.
Cockchafer
Children since antiquity have played with cockchafers. In ancient Greece, boys caught the insect, tied a linen thread to its feet and set it free, amusing themselves to watch it fly in spirals. English boys in Victorian times played a very similar game by sticking a pin through one of its wings. Nikola Tesla recalls that as a child he made one of his first "inventions"—an "engine" made by harnessing four cockchafers in this fashion.
Nikola Tesla
Along with getting the motor patented, Peck and Brown arranged to get the motor publicized, starting with independent testing to verify it was a functional improvement, followed by press releases sent to technical publications for articles to run concurrent with the issue of the patent. Physicist William Arnold Anthony (who tested the motor) and "Electrical World" magazine editor Thomas Commerford Martin arranged for Tesla to demonstrate his AC motor on 16 May 1888 at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Engineers working for the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company reported to George Westinghouse that Tesla had a viable AC motor and related power system—something Westinghouse needed for the alternating current system he was already marketing. Westinghouse looked into getting a patent on a similar commutator-less, rotating magnetic field-based induction motor developed in 1885 and presented in a paper in March 1888 by Italian physicist Galileo Ferraris, but decided that Tesla's patent would probably control the market.
In July 1888, Brown and Peck negotiated a licensing deal with George Westinghouse for Tesla's polyphase induction motor and transformer designs for $60,000 in cash and stock and a royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower produced by each motor. Westinghouse also hired Tesla for one year for the large fee of $2,000 ($ in today's dollars) per month to be a consultant at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs.
Electrodeless lamp
In 1705, the scientist Francis Hauksbee demonstrated that in a rotating glass globe with internal vacuum like in a barometer, filled with mercury, and statical charged by holding a hand against the rotating globe, a light phenomenon occurred, so bright that one could read a paper. 
Nikola Tesla demonstrated wireless transfer of power to electrodeless lamps in his lectures and articles in the 1890s, and subsequently patented a system of light and power distribution on those principles. 
In 1967 and 1968, John Anderson of General Electric applied for patents for electrodeless lamps.
In 1971, Fusion UV Systems installed a 300-watt electrodeless microwave plasma UV lamp on a Coors can production line. 
Philips introduced their "QL" induction lighting systems, operating at 2.65 MHz, in 1990 in Europe and in 1992 in the US. Matsushita had induction light systems available in 1992. Intersource Technologies also announced one in 1992, called the "E-lamp". Operating at 13.6 MHz, it was available on the US market in 1993.
Radial turbine
In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla developed and patented his bladeless Tesla turbine. One of the difficulties with bladed turbines is the complex and highly precise requirements for balancing and manufacturing the bladed rotor which has to be very well balanced. The blades are subject to corrosion and cavitation. Tesla attacked this problem by substituting a series of closely spaced disks for the blades of the rotor. The working fluid flows between the disks and transfers its energy to the rotor by means of the boundary layer effect or adhesion and viscosity rather than by impulse or reaction. Tesla stated his turbine could realize incredibly high efficiencies by steam. There has been no documented evidence of Tesla turbines achieving the efficiencies Tesla claimed. They have been found to have low overall efficiencies in the roll of a turbine or pump. In recent decades there has been further research into bladeless turbine and development of patented designs that work with corrosive/abrasive and hard to pump material such as ethylene glycol, fly ash, blood, rocks, and even live fish.
IEEE Nikola Tesla Award
The award was established in 1975, and its first recipient was Leon T. Rosenberg, who was given the award in 1976 "for his half-century of development and design of large steam turbine driven generators and his important contributions to literature." The actual award is a plaque and honorarium.
St. Elmo's fire
Nikola Tesla created St. Elmo's Fire in 1899 while testing out a Tesla coil at his laboratory in Colorado Springs, USA. St. Elmo's fire was seen around the coil and was said to have lit up the wings of butterflies with blue halos as they flew around.
Nikola Tesla
In 1893, Edward Dean Adams, who headed up the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company, sought Tesla's opinion on what system would be best to transmit power generated at the falls. Over several years, there had been a series of proposals and open competitions on how best to use power generated by the falls. Among the systems proposed by several US and European companies were two-phase and three-phase AC, high-voltage DC, and compressed air. Adams pumped Tesla for information about the current state of all the competing systems. Tesla advised Adams that a two-phased system would be the most reliable, and that there was a Westinghouse system to light incandescent bulbs using two-phase alternating current. The company awarded a contract to Westinghouse Electric for building a two-phase AC generating system at the Niagara Falls, based on Tesla's advice and Westinghouse's demonstration at the Columbian Exposition that they could build a complete AC system. At the same time, a further contract was awarded to General Electric to build the AC distribution system.
Zénobe Gramme
In 1875, Nikola Tesla observed a Gramme machine at the Graz University of Technology. He conceived the idea of using it for alternating current but was unable to develop the idea at this time.
Timeline of United States inventions (1890–1945)
A Tesla coil is a type of resonant transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla around 1891. Nikola Tesla used these coils to conduct innovative experiments in electrical lighting, phosphorescence, x-ray generation, high frequency alternating current phenomena, electrotherapy, and the transmission of electrical energy without wires for point-to-point telecommunications, broadcasting, and the transmission of electrical power.
Gymnasium Karlovac
The inventor, electrical and mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla, who attended the school from 1870 until 1873 (age of 14 to 17), attributes his interest in electricity to what he learned at Karlovac. In his 1919 autobiography he wrote that demonstrations by his "professor of physics" sparked his interest in this "mysterious phenomena" and made him want "to know more of this wonderful force". Stricken with malaria shortly after his arrival in the mosquito-infested swampy lowlands of Karlovac, he was bedridden at times and often took his school books home to read and memorize when he was unable to attend class. He graduated with honours from the four-year course in only three years.
List of Nikola Tesla patents
Devices and projects Tesla proposed and partially designed but did not patent.
Tesla (Czechoslovak company)
This was officially reported by Radioamator in October 1946: Tesla the National Enterprise was set up on 10 August at the Mikrofon Factory in Strašnice with the participation of Yugoslavian Minister Zlataric Branko, Minister of Industry of Macedonia Vasilijev Georgie, Minister of Industry of B. Laušman, representatives of government, institutions and universities. The enterprise was named after a genial Slavic technician and it documents the effort for convergence and cooperation among all Slavic nations. The main task of nationalized industry is to quickly overcome all post-war troubles and woes, and to create a socially healthy and productive work environment. Then the Minister declared Tesla as established.
Economy of the United States
The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's laboratory developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera. Nikola Tesla pioneered the AC induction motor and high frequency power transmission used in radio. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.
Nikola Tesla
Tesla obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions. Some of Tesla's patents are not accounted for, and various sources have discovered some that have lain hidden in patent archives. There are a minimum of 278 known patents issued to Tesla in 26 countries. Many of Tesla's patents were in the United States, Britain, and Canada, but many other patents were approved in countries around the globe. Many inventions developed by Tesla were not put into patent protection.
Hieromonk Makarije
Serbian-American scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla's most prized possession was Božidar Vuković's 1517 "Sluzbenik", an inheritance from his father, a Serbian Orthodox priest. This rare book is now on display in the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum at Independence, Missouri.
World's Columbian Exposition
Part of the space occupied by the Westinghouse Company was devoted to demonstrations of electrical devices developed by Nikola Tesla including a two-phase induction motor, and generators to power the system. Tesla demonstrated a series of electrical effects, some which were in previous lectures performed in America and Europe. These included his "Egg of Columbus", a metal egg that spun on a disk in a demonstraton of an electric motors rotating magnetic field, and a high-voltage, high-frequency alternating current demonstration where a near by coil lit a wireless gas-discharge lamp held in his hand.
Tesla valve
A Tesla valve, called by Tesla a valvular conduit, is a fixed-geometry passive check valve. It allows a fluid to flow preferentially in one direction, without moving parts. The device is named after Nikola Tesla, who was awarded a patent in 1920 for its invention. The patent application describes the invention as follows:
Capacitor discharge ignition
The history of the capacitor discharge ignition system can be traced back to the 1890s when it is believed that Nikola Tesla was the first to propose such an ignition system. In U.S. patent #609250 first filed February 17, 1897, Tesla writes 'Any suitable moving portion of the apparatus is caused to mechanically control the charging of a condenser and its discharge through a circuit in inductive relation to a secondary circuit leading to the terminals between which the discharge is to occur, so that at the desired intervals the condenser may be discharged through its circuit and induce in the other circuit a current of high potential which produces the desired discharge.' The patent also describes very generally with a drawing, a mechanical means to accomplish its purpose.
Nikola Tesla Museum
The Nikola Tesla Museum is housed in a residential villa built in 1927 according to the designs of Dragiša Brašovan, a distinguished Serbian architect. The building was used for various purposes until December 5, 1952, when the Nikola Tesla Museum was founded in accordance with the decision of the Government of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. Certain items for the museum were shipped from New York City to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on September 7, 1951, as a result of efforts by Sava Kosanović, Tesla's nephew and closest relative and his attorney Philip Wittenberg.
Orbital ring
In the 1870s Nikola Tesla, while recovering from malaria, conceived a number of inventions including a ring around the equator, although he did not include detailed calculations. As recounted in his autobiography "My Inventions" (1919):
Arthur C. Clarke's novel "The Fountains of Paradise" (1979) is about space elevators, but an appendix mentions the idea of launching objects off the Earth using a structure based on mass drivers. The idea apparently did not work, but this inspired further research.
Nikola Tesla
The investors showed little interest in Tesla's ideas for new types of alternating current motors and electrical transmission equipment. After the utility was up and running in 1886, they decided that the manufacturing side of the business was too competitive and opted to simply run an electric utility. They formed a new utility company, abandoning Tesla's company and leaving the inventor penniless. Tesla even lost control of the patents he had generated, since he had assigned them to the company in exchange for stock. He had to work at various electrical repair jobs and as a ditch digger for $2 per day. Later in life Tesla would recount that part of 1886 as a time of hardship, writing "My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery".
List of haplogroups of historic people
The Serbian-American scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was first thought to be I2a-L147.2+ based on the results of another (unrelated) Tesla from the same village as his father. However, the testing of actual relatives, published on the Serbian DNA Project at Poreklo, showed that his Y-DNA line was more probably R1a-M458 (L1029 subclade).
Nikola Tesla
On 11 July 1934, the "New York Herald Tribune" published an article on Tesla, in which he recalled an event that would occasionally take place while experimenting with his single-electrode vacuum tubes; a minute particle would break off the cathode, pass out of the tube, and physically strike him:
Nikola Tesla
After Wardencyiffe closed, Tesla continued to write to Morgan; after "the great man" died, Tesla wrote to Morgan's son Jack, trying to get further funding for the project. In 1906, Tesla opened offices at 165 Broadway in Manhattan, trying to raise further funds by developing and marketing his patents. He went on to have offices at the Metropolitan Life Tower from 1910 to 1914; rented for a few months at the Woolworth Building, moving out because he could not afford the rent; and then to office space at 8 West 40th Street from 1915 to 1925. After moving to 8 West 40th Street, he was effectively bankrupt. Most of his patents had run out and he was having trouble with the new inventions he was trying to develop.
Nikola Tesla
There he conducted experiments with a large coil operating in the megavolts range, producing artificial lightning (and thunder) consisting of millions of volts and up to long discharges and, at one point, inadvertently burned out the generator in El Paso, causing a power outage. The observations he made of the electronic noise of lightning strikes, led him to (incorrectly) conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy.
Shadow Fox
Nikola Tesla - Serbian-American electrical engineer and inventor who patented the [AC] induction motor used by George Westinghouse in his AC electrical system. Tesla also experimented with wireless power transmission and communication, x-rays, remote control, and numerous other devices. He built his Colorado Springs laboratory in 1899, and conducted experiments that would seem to leap straight from the pages of a fiction book. One of his experiments, the generation of a large man-made lightning bolt, is used in the Shadow Fox: Sons of Liberty journal entry. This experiment is used in the book as the origin of Shadow Fox. Nikola also envisioned a way to travel through space and time, calling it the Wall of Light. The Wall of Light is used to travel through time in the book.
Nikola Tesla
Starting in 1894, Tesla began investigating what he referred to as radiant energy of "invisible" kinds after he had noticed damaged film in his laboratory in previous experiments (later identified as ""Roentgen rays"" or "X-Rays"). His early experiments were with Crookes tubes, a cold cathode electrical discharge tube. Tesla may have inadvertently captured an X-ray image—predating, by a few weeks, Wilhelm Röntgen's December 1895 announcement of the discovery of X-rays when he tried to photograph Mark Twain illuminated by a Geissler tube, an earlier type of gas discharge tube. The only thing captured in the image was the metal locking screw on the camera lens.
List of Nikola Tesla patents
Nikola Tesla was an inventor who obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions. Some of Tesla's patents are not accounted for, and various sources have discovered some that have lain hidden in patent archives. There are a minimum of 278 patents issued to Tesla in 26 countries that have been accounted for. Many of Tesla's patents were in the United States, Britain, and Canada, but many other patents were approved in countries around the globe. Many inventions developed by Tesla were not put into patent protection.
In the book "", there are references to missing patents. Some patents of his experiments are lost to history, as well as some of the scientific notes and records pertaining to Tesla's patents. These, though, are alluded to in the redacted FBI files. The missing patents may be among effects seized by government agents and military intelligence officers following Tesla's death in 1943. In various patent logs, it is recorded Tesla received for ""Filings Tube"" (such as Charles Henry Sewall's ""Wireless Telegraphy"" (New York, 1904)). This number does not match the U. S. Patent office records (that patent is issued to G. Kelly for an ""Illuminating torch"").The following is a list of other countries that hold known patents by Tesla. The number following the country is the number of known patents in their records. This is not an exhaustive list. The total number may be incomplete and additional countries still may hold patents unknown.
Nikola Tesla
In 1887, Tesla developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current (AC), a power system format that was rapidly expanding in Europe and the United States because of its advantages in long-distance, high-voltage transmission. The motor used polyphase current, which generated a rotating magnetic field to turn the motor (a principle that Tesla claimed to have conceived in 1882). This innovative electric motor, patented in May 1888, was a simple self-starting design that did not need a commutator, thus avoiding sparking and the high maintenance of constantly servicing and replacing mechanical brushes.
Radio control
In 1898, at an exhibition at Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla demonstrated a small unmanned boat that used a coherer based radio control. In a bit of showmanship, Tesla entertained the audience to make it seem that the boat could apparently obey commands from the audience but it, was in fact, controlled by Tesla interpreting the verbal requests and sending appropriate frequencies to tuned circuits in the boat. Tesla was granted a US patent on this invention on July 1, 1898. In 1903, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo presented the ""Telekino"" at the Paris Academy of Science, and was granted a patent in France, Spain, Great Britain and the United States. In 1904, "Bat", a Windermere steam launch, was controlled using experimental radio control by its inventor, [Jack Kitchen].
Secure communication
In 1898, Nikola Tesla demonstrated a radio controlled boat in Madison Square Garden that allowed secure communication between transmitter and receiver.
Remote control
The Brennan torpedo, invented by Louis Brennan in 1877 was powered by two contra-rotating propellers that were spun by rapidly pulling out wires from drums wound inside the torpedo. Differential speed on the wires connected to the shore station allowed the torpedo to be guided to its target, making it "the world's first "practical" guided missile". In 1898 Nikola Tesla publicly demonstrated a "wireless" radio-controlled torpedo that he hoped to sell to the U.S. Navy.
History of the Tesla coil
In 1926, pioneering accelerator physicists Merle Tuve and Gregory Breit built a 5 million volt Tesla coil as a linear particle accelerator. The bipolar coil consisted of a pyrex tube a meter long wound with 8000 turns of fine wire, with round corona caps on each end, and a 5 turn spiral primary coil surrounding it at the center. It was operated in a tank of insulating oil pressurized to 500 psi which allowed it to reach a potential of 5.2 megavolts. Although it was used for a short period in 1929-30 it was not a success because the particles' acceleration had to be completed within the brief period of a half cycle of the RF voltage.
In 1970 Robert K. Golka built a replica of Tesla's huge Colorado Springs magnifying transmitter in a shed at Wendover Air Force Base, Utah, using data he found in Tesla's lab notes archived at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Beograd, Serbia.
Nikola Tesla
In the summer of 1889, Tesla traveled to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and learned of Heinrich Hertz' 1886–88 experiments that proved the existence of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves. Tesla found this new discovery "refreshing" and decided to explore it more fully. In repeating, and then expanding on, these experiments, Tesla tried powering a Ruhmkorff coil with a high speed alternator he had been developing as part of an improved arc lighting system but found that the high frequency current overheated the iron core and melted the insulation between the primary and secondary windings in the coil. To fix this problem Tesla came up with his Tesla coil with an air gap instead of insulating material between the primary and secondary windings and an iron core that could be moved to different positions in or out of the coil.
Nikola Tesla
In 1931, a young science fiction writer whom Tesla befriended, Kenneth Swezey, organized a celebration for the inventor's 75th birthday. Tesla received congratulatory letters from more than 70 pioneers in science and engineering, including Albert Einstein, and he was also featured on the cover of "Time" magazine. The cover caption "All the world's his power house" noted his contribution to electrical power generation.
Science and technology in the United States
American political leaders' enthusiasm for knowledge also helped ensure a warm welcome for scientists from other countries. A notable early immigrant was the British chemist Joseph Priestley, who was driven from his homeland because of his dissenting politics. Priestley, who went to the United States in 1794, was the first of thousands of talented scientists who emigrated in search of a free, creative environment.
Other scientists had come to the United States to take part in the nation's rapid growth. Alexander Graham Bell, who arrived from Scotland by way of Canada in 1872, developed and patented the telephone and related inventions. Charles Steinmetz, who came from Germany in 1889, developed new alternating-current electrical systems at General Electric Company, and Vladimir Zworykin, an immigrant from Russia in 1919 arrived in the States bringing his knowledge of x-rays and cathode ray tubes and later won his first patent on a television system he invented. The Serbian Nikola Tesla went to the United States in 1884, and would later adapted the principle of rotating magnetic field in the development of an alternating current induction motor and polyphase system for the generation, transmission, distribution and use of electrical power.
Radio
In Madison Square Garden, at the Electrical Exhibition of 1898, Nikola Tesla successfully demonstrated a radio-controlled boat. He was awarded U.S. patent No. 613,809 for a "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles."
Nikola Tesla (disambiguation)
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a physicist, electrical engineer, and inventor.
History of the Tesla coil
Tesla employed the Tesla coil in his efforts to achieve wireless power transmission, his lifelong dream. In the period 1891 to 1900 he used it to perform some of the first experiments in wireless power, transmitting radio frequency power across short distances by inductive coupling between coils of wire. In his early 1890s demonstrations such as those before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago he lit light bulbs from across a room. He found he could increase the distance by using a receiving LC circuit tuned to resonance with the Tesla coil's LC circuit, transferring energy by resonant inductive coupling. At his Colorado Springs laboratory during 1899-1900, by using voltages of the order of 10 million volts generated by his enormous magnifying transmitter coil (described below), he was able to light three incandescent lamps at a distance of about . Today the resonant inductive coupling discovered by Tesla is a familiar concept in electronics, widely used in IF transformers and short range wireless power transmission systems such as cellphone charging pads.
Alfred Nobel
As a young man, Nobel studied with chemist Nikolai Zinin; then, in 1850, went to Paris to further the work. There he met Ascanio Sobrero, who had invented nitroglycerin three years before. Sobrero strongly opposed the use of nitroglycerin, as it was unpredictable, exploding when subjected to heat or pressure. But Nobel became interested in finding a way to control and use nitroglycerin as a commercially usable explosive, as it had much more power than gunpowder. At age 18, he went to the United States for one year to study, working for a short period under Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson, who designed the American Civil War ironclad "USS Monitor". Nobel filed his first patent, an English patent for a gas meter, in 1857, while his first Swedish patent, which he received in 1863, was on 'ways to prepare gunpowder'.
Nikola Tesla
Tesla read many works, memorizing complete books, and supposedly possessed a photographic memory. He was a polyglot, speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was repeatedly stricken with illness. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions. Often, the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; at other times they would provide the solution to a particular problem he had encountered. Just by hearing the name of an item, he would be able to envision it in realistic detail. Tesla would visualize an invention in his mind with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before moving to the construction stage, a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. He typically did not make drawings by hand but worked from memory. Beginning in his childhood, Tesla had frequent flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life.
Mutual assured destruction
In 1937, Nikola Tesla published "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media", a treatise concerning charged particle beam weapons. Tesla described his device as a "superweapon that would put an end to all war."
History of superconductivity
Onnes purchased a Linde machine for his research. On March 21, 1900, Nikola Tesla was granted a patent for the means for increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations by lowering the temperature, which was caused by lowered resistance. Within this patent it describes the increased intensity and duration of electric oscillations of a low temperature resonating circuit. It is believed that Tesla had intended that Linde's machine would be used to attain the cooling agents.
Robot
The Brennan torpedo, invented by Louis Brennan in 1877, was powered by two contra-rotating propellors that were spun by rapidly pulling out wires from drums wound inside the torpedo. Differential speed on the wires connected to the shore station allowed the torpedo to be guided to its target, making it "the world's first "practical" guided missile". In 1897 the British inventor Ernest Wilson was granted a patent for a torpedo remotely controlled by "Hertzian" (radio) waves and in 1898 Nikola Tesla publicly demonstrated a wireless-controlled torpedo that he hoped to sell to the US Navy.
Remote control
In 1894, the first example of wirelessly controlling at a distance was during a demonstration by the British physicist Oliver Lodge, in which he made use of a Branly's coherer to make a mirror galvanometer move a beam of light when an electromagnetic wave was artificially generated. This was further refined by radio innovators Guglielmo Marconi and William Preece, at a demonstration that took place on December 12, 1896, at Toynbee Hall in London, in which they made a bell ring by pushing a button in a box that was not connected by any wires. In 1898 Nikola Tesla filed his patent, , named "Method of an Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vehicle or Vehicles", which he publicly demonstrated by radio-controlling a boat during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton".
In 1903, Leonardo Torres Quevedo presented the "Telekino" at the Paris Academy of Science, accompanied by a brief, and making an experimental demonstration. At the same time, he obtained a patent in France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States. The "Telekino" consisted of a robot that executed commands transmitted by electromagnetic waves. With the Telekino, Torres-Quevedo laid down modern wireless remote-control operation principles and was a pioneer in the field of remote control. In 1906, in the presence of the king and before a great crowd, Torres successfully demonstrated the invention in the port of Bilbao, guiding a boat from the shore. Later, he would try to apply the "Telekino" to projectiles and torpedoes but had to abandon the project for lack of financing. The first remote-controlled model airplane flew in 1932, and the use of remote control technology for military purposes was worked intensively during the Second World War, one result of this being the German Wasserfall missile.
World Wireless System
There have been varied claims over the years regarding Tesla's accomplishments with his wireless system. His own notes from Colorado Springs are unclear as to whether he was ever successful at long range transmission. Tesla made a claim in a 1916 statement to attorney Drury W. Cooper that in 1899 he collected quantitative transmission-reception data at a distance of about . Tesla biographer John J. O'Neill made a claim in his 1944 book "Prodigal Genius: The life of Nikola Tesla" that in 1899 at Colorado Springs Tesla lit 200 incandescent lamps at a distance of . The writer Marc Seifer in his book "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" noted opinion amongst Tesla proponents that ranged from the idea not being practicable, to claims that some of Tesla's observations were valid. Other investigators have stated that Tesla over-estimated the conductivity of the Earth and the atmosphere, and vastly underestimated the loss of power over distance.
The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla
Written in 1893, the book is a record of Tesla's pioneering activities, research, and works. Tesla is recognized as one of the foremost electrical researchers and inventors. At the time of publication, the book was the "bible" of every electrical engineer practicing the profession. The book contains Forty-three chapters, most of them on different areas of Tesla's research and inventions by Tesla. The first chapter is a brief biography while three chapters are transcripts of important lectures and one covers his section of Westinghouse's exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair
Nikola Tesla
Westinghouse Electric asked Tesla to participate in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago where the company had a large space in a building devoted to electrical exhibits. Westinghouse Electric won the bid to light the Exposition with alternating current and it was a key event in the history of AC power, as the company demonstrated to the American public the safety, reliability, and efficiency of a fully integrated alternating current system. Tesla showed a series of electrical effects related to alternating current as well as his wireless lighting system, using a demonstration he had previously performed throughout America and Europe; these included using high-voltage, high-frequency alternating current to light a wireless gas-discharge lamp.
Nikola Tesla
In March 1879, Tesla's father went to Maribor to beg his son to return home, but he refused. Nikola suffered a nervous breakdown around the same time. On 24 March 1879, Tesla was returned to Gospić under police guard for not having a residence permit.
Technological and industrial history of the United States
In addition to lighting, electric motors (analogous to generators operating in reverse, or using a current to spin a magnet to perform work) became extremely important to industry. Speed control of early DC motors limited their use. Frank J. Sprague developed the first successful DC motor (ca. 1886) by solving the problem of varying speed with load. Within a few years DC motors were used in electric street railways. In 1888, a Serbian immigrant, Nikola Tesla, a former employee of Edison's, patented an AC induction motor and licensed it to the Westinghouse Corporation. Electric motors eventually replaced steam engines in factories around the nation as they required neither complex mechanical transmissions from a central engine nor water sources for steam boilers in order to operate.
My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla
The original six-part series published in "Electrical Experimenter" Magazine in 1919 has been republished in book form as: "My Inventions, The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla" (Hart Brothers, Williston, 1983).  A nearly unabridged version of "My Inventions" in various file formats is also freely available in electronic form at www.tfcbooks.com/special/mi_link.htm. It supersedes the earlier corrupted text.
Nikola Tesla
At the time Tesla was formulating his ideas, there was no feasible way to wirelessly transmit communication signals over long distances, let alone large amounts of power. Tesla had studied radio waves early on, and came to the conclusion that part of existing study on them, by Hertz, was incorrect. Also, this new form of radiation was widely considered at the time to be a short-distance phenomenon that seemed to die out in less than a mile. Tesla noted that, even if theories on radio waves were true, they were totally worthless for his intended purposes since this form of "invisible light" would diminish over distance just like any other radiation and would travel in straight lines right out into space, becoming "hopelessly lost".
Nikola Tesla
In 1898, Tesla demonstrated a boat that used a coherer-based radio control—which he dubbed "telautomaton"—to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. The crowd that witnessed the demonstration made outrageous claims about the workings of the boat, such as magic, telepathy, and being piloted by a trained monkey hidden inside. Tesla tried to sell his idea to the U.S. military as a type of radio-controlled torpedo, but they showed little interest. Remote radio control remained a novelty until World War I and afterward, when a number of countries used it in military programs. Tesla took the opportunity to further demonstrate "Teleautomatics" in an address to a meeting of the Commercial Club in Chicago, while he was travelling to Colorado Springs, on 13 May 1899.
Death ray
Nikola Tesla claimed to have invented a "death beam" which he called teleforce in the 1930s and continued the claims up until his death. 
Tesla explained that "this invention of mine does not contemplate the use of any so-called 'death rays'. Rays are not applicable because they cannot be produced in requisite quantities and diminish rapidly in intensity with distance. All the energy of New York City (approximately two million horsepower) transformed into rays and projected twenty miles, could not kill a human being, because, according to a well known law of physics, it would disperse to such an extent as to be ineffectual. My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist." Tesla proposed that a nation could "destroy anything approaching within 200 miles ... [and] will provide a wall of power" in order to "make any country, large or small, impregnable against armies, airplanes, and other means for attack". He claimed to have worked on the project since about 1900, and said that it drew power from the ionosphere, which he called "an invisible ball of energy surrounding Earth". He had done this with the help of a 50-foot tesla coil.
Nikola Tesla
On his 50th birthday, in 1906, Tesla demonstrated a 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910–1911 at the "Waterside Power Station" in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100–5,000 hp. Tesla worked with several companies including the period 1919–1922 working in Milwaukee for Allis-Chalmers. He spent most of his time trying to perfect the Tesla turbine with Hans Dahlstrand, the head engineer at the company, but engineering difficulties meant it was never made into a practical device. Tesla did license the idea to a precision instrument company and it found use in the form of luxury car speedometers and other instruments.
Wardenclyffe Tower
Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917), also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early experimental wireless transmission station designed and built by Nikola Tesla in Shoreham, New York in 1901–1902. Tesla intended to transmit messages, telephony and even facsimile images across the Atlantic to England and to ships at sea based on his theories of using the Earth to conduct the signals. His decision to scale up the facility and add his ideas of wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi's radio based telegraph system was met with refusal to fund the changes by the project's primary backer, financier J. P. Morgan. Additional investment could not be found, and the project was abandoned in 1906, never to become operational.
Nikola Tesla
Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless-controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and would demonstrate his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.