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August 1977 | Volume 28, Issue 5
Nikola Tesla
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
He was a study in contrasts: an inventive genius who discovered the alternating-current system that lit up the world, hut an inept husinessman who died in poverty; an extrovert showman who dazzled audiences hy lighting without wire’s a bulb held in his hand, but a reclusive bachelor whose greatest love, he once confided, was a sickly pigeon he had nursed back to health. He was a pacifist, but dabbled with “death rays,” a writer of poems though he kept no written records of his experiments, a visionary who foresaw interstellar communication but disparaged Einstein’s theories.
His name was Nikola Tesla, and it is surprising, in view of his great contributions to mankind, that he still remains in the shadow of Thomas Edison.
The two men knew—and disliked—each other. Their enmity focused on disagreement over the merits of direct versus alternating current. In the end Tesla triumphed, but it was a victory without laurels. When he was informed that he would share with Edison the Nobel Prize for physics in 1912, he refused to accept the honor. Hc was, he said, a discoverer of new principles, while Edison was only an inventor of useful appliances. As a result, neither man received the award, but today Edison’s name is almost synonymous with electricity, while Tesla’s is perpetuated only as that of a type of a transformer coil.
Raised in a rural Croatian village of modern-day Yugoslavia where he was born in 1856, Tesla, while still a child, was fascinated one day to see a snowball roll down a mountainside, growing in size and speed until it brought on an avalanche. The incident impressed him with the tremendous forces locked up in nature, and he later fashioned toys that harnessed the power of water and even the wing beats of insects. He also showed an uncanny ability to visualize models, drawings, and experiments without writing them out.
While studying electrical engineering in Austria in 1878, Tesla first turned his attention to the problems of generating direct current (which flows in only one direction). Four years later, a solution came to him in typical fashion. He was walking in a park in Budapest, reciting a poem to a companion, when he suddenly stopped, became rigid as if in a trance, and said, “Watch me!” Picking up a twig, he drew in the dirt a complete diagram of a rotating magnetic field. It was the key to unlocking the secret of alternating current (which reverses direction in a circuit at regular intervals) and led to his invention of the rotary motor, the polyphase power system, generators, dynamos, and transformers—all in use today.
An unhappy stint with a company in Paris that used Edison’s direct-current patents prompted Tesla to leave for America, where he hoped to find more willing ears for his ideas. In 1884 he arrived in New York with four cents in his pocket, some poems and technical articles he had written, pRins