Nikola Tesla 1
LET THE FUTURE TELL THE TRUTH
“Let the Future Tell the Truth”
~Nikola Tesla
Shadrach Roundy
Emily Torres
William Fawcett
Derrik Brown
Breanna Zehnder
Salt Lake Community College
Physics 1010
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Abstract
This manuscript is about the work of Nikola Tesla. Tesla was a great genius and
visionary, whose scientific developments changed the world. Although Tesla was a
pioneer in many fields of science, this manuscript will focus mainly on his work in
alternating current and the current wars that ensued as a result of that work.
Early in his career Tesla worked in Thomas Edison’s New Jersey power plant. It was here
that his divergence of opinion with Edison over direct current versus alternating current
began. This disagreement climaxed in The Current Wars. In order to fully understand the
complexity of the current wars, it is necessary to differentiate between Edison’s Direct
Current and Tesla’s integration of alternating current.
Simply described, a Direct Current runs along the circuit in one direction. The main
deficiency of DC power is its short transmission range. Alternating currents provide an
inexpensive and efficient alternative to Direct Currents. Alternating currents charge the
circuit for a brief moment and then switch the polarity of the system in order to reverse
the direction and charge it again.
Current Wars refers to an intellectual and financial war that happened between Nikola
Tesla and Thomas Edison. Tesla and Edison fought about what type of electricity would
be used in the future. Tesla backed AC whereas Edison backed DC. The tension between
Edison and Tesla became a lifelong rivalry. The war between Edison and Tesla of who
would power the future came to a head at the 1893 World’s Fair, where Tesla proved to
audiences that the power of the future was AC.
Tesla’s work in alternating currents was a pivotal moment in history. Almost all
electricity used today is AC. The world has not seen the end of Tesla’s visions yet. We
are likely to see his dreams expanded as future innovations in this field lead to more
efficient forms of energy. We may even see Tesla’s vision of harnessing energy
wirelessly come to fruition one day.
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Nikola Tesla, seen on figure 3.1 was a great genius and a visionary who was far
beyond his contemporaries in the field of scientific development. He symbolizes a
unifying force and inspiration for every nation of the world in the name of science.
Nikola Tesla holds 113 patents. Among his discoveries are, the florescent light, laser
beams, wireless communications, and wireless transmittal of electric
energy, remote control, and robotics and vertical takeoff aircrafts.
Although Tesla was a pioneer in many fields of science, this
manuscript will focus mainly on his discovery of alternating current
(Figure 3.1)
and the current wars that ensued as a result of the discovery.
Nikola Tesla was born during a lightning storm on July 10, 1856 in Lika,
which was then a part of the Austo-Hungarian Empire of Croatia. His father was an
orthodox priest and his mother invented several laborsaving devices and household
appliances. In his autobiography, Tesla describes his mother as a “woman of genius,
especially gifted with a since of intuition”, and credited her with whatever inventiveness
and destiny in life that he possessed. (The American Srbobran, 2001)
During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He
suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his
eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. The flashes and images caused Tesla great
discomfort, and by the time he reached his teens he had taught himself to repress them
from occurring except in certain times of stress.
Tesla invented a wide array of creations and schemes as a child. The young Tesla
created a remarkable machine powered by another natural energy source: June bugs or, as
Europeans call them, May bugs. He glued sixteen of the live insects to the blades of a
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small windmill-like structure, and they set the rotor spinning vigorously in their vain
attempt to fly away.
Shortly after his graduation from high school, Tesla suffered a devastating bout
with cholera and nearly died. He was bedridden for nine months, and doctors announced
that he would not live much longer. Tesla underwent another debilitating trauma a few
years after recovering from cholera. This time, the nature of the illness and its causes
were a complete mystery. Tesla's physical senses, which had always been remarkably
acute, seemed to go inexplicably into overdrive, paralyzing him with an overabundance
of sensation.
Tesla began his college education at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria and
also studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt in 1873, and the University of Prague. At first,
he intended to specialize in physics and mathematics, but soon he became fascinated with
electricity. (Vujovic, 1998) Tesla was an extraordinary student who frequently enraged
his professors, questioning the technological status quo with an insight that surpassed his
instructors.
He rebelled most strongly against the acceptance of direct current as the sole
means of delivering electrical power. It was plain to him that DC was inefficient of
adequately transmitting power over long distances. There was talk of a theoretical
"alternating current" system, but no one had figured out how to make it work. AC was
dismissed as a dream by the scientific establishment, in much the same way as cold
fusion is regarded today. Tesla's suggestion of AC brought scorn in his lecture halls, but
he was never discouraged enough to abandon the idea.
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Around Tesla’s sophomore year in college his father suffered a stroke, and soon
after died. Fallowing the death, Tesla endured an ordeal with his hypersensitivity that
reduced him to an invalid. Considering the depressing turn his life had just taken, the
bizarre affliction could possibly have been psychosomatic. Whatever its cause, when
Tesla finally emerged from the prolonged state, he was armed with a powerful new
insight on how alternating current could be successfully attained.
His great mental leap was this: two coils positioned at right angles and supplied
with alternating current 90 out of phase could make a magnetic field rotate, with no need
for the cumbersome commutator used in direct current motors. Tesla knew it would work
without even having to build it and test it. Constructing it mentally and letting it run in his
mind was proof enough for him. This was Tesla's method for developing inventions
throughout his career: no journals, no blueprints, and no prototypes. (Corrosion Doctors,
2012) Tesla now possessed the answer, but the problem now, was putting it into practice.
Tesla joined Continental Edison Company in Paris where he designed dynamos.
While in Strassbourg in 1883, he privately built a prototype of the induction motor and
ran it successfully. Tesla decided to move to The United States for a variety of reasons;
the first reason was that he was unable to interest anyone in Europe in promoting this
radical device. Secondly, Tesla wanted to combine Edison’s knowledge and
advancements in electricity and work towards making electricity available for the
everyday citizen. Tesla thus accepted an offer to work for Thomas Edison in New York.
His childhood dream was to come to America to harness the power of Niagara Falls.
(Vujovic, 1998)
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Nikola Tesla came to the United States in 1884 with an introduction letter from
Charles Batchelor to Thomas Edison: “I know two great men,” wrote Batchelor, “one is
you and the other is this young man.” He set about improving Edison’s line of dynamos
while working in Edison’s lab in New Jersey. It was here that his divergence of opinion
with Edison over direct current versus alternating current began. This disagreement
climaxed in The Current Wars. In order to fully understand the complexity of the current
wars, it is necessary to differentiate between Edison’s Direct Current and Tesla’s
integration of Alternating Currents.
Simply described, a Direct Current along the circuit in one direction. The main
deficiencies of DC power are its short transmission range. This has to do with the way the
electricity actually flows, as seen in figure 6.1. With DC the power flows in one direction,
and the longer you make the wires in the circuit the
more current is lost to heat due to resistance.
Edison’s first successful use of Direct Currents was
(Figure 6.1)
in the JP Morgan building on Wall Street in 1882. He chose this location because it was
densely populated, and the DC currents of electricity could only serve one square mile.
Edison’s system may have served large metropolitan cities; it would never be cost
effective to power rural households.
Alternating currents provide an inexpensive and efficient alternative to Direct
Currents. Alternating currents charge the circuit for a brief moment and then switch the
polarity of the system in order to reverse the direction and charge it again. In the power
grid of the United States, this process happens 60 times a second (60 Hz). Other countries
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use a variety of other frequencies such as 50hz, 30hz and 25hz. This rapid alternation of
current is the key to the way an electric transformer works.
Transformers utilize a relationship between electricity and magnetism to change
the voltage and current being sent across transmission lines. The traditional transformer
however breaks down with very high voltages. Tesla developed the Oscillating
transformer (sometimes called the Tesla Coil) to transmit significantly higher voltages
making it possible drop the current even lower. With the decreased current we are able to
avoid significant losses in power due to resistance and heat. When the energy gets close
to the point of delivery, power substations step down the voltage to a matter of hundreds
of volts for a more local transmission. The last transformer that the energy goes through
before it reaches residential areas reduces the voltage to 110 or 220.
Many different people contributed to the development of the system, but Tesla
had the ability to look outside the box and combine generation, transformation, and
transmission of Alternating currents, into one smooth motion. Tesla and Westinghouse
filed for and were granted 7 patents in the late 1880s for their system; this system with
very minimal changes is the system we enjoy today in United States as well as many
other countries.
Current Wars refers to an intellectual and financial war that happened between
Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Tesla and Edison were in a fight about what type of
electricity would be used in the future. Tesla backed AC whereas Edison backed DC.
Edison held most of the patents and the control for the DC system. The tension between
Edison and Tesla became a lifelong rivalry that started with an unsatisfied employee and
an ungrateful boss.
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At this point in time, Tesla had already come up with the idea on the induction
motor that ran on AC power, a system that had less restrictions than the DC had. Edison
did not understand AC current and was not interested in the idea of the induction motor.
However Edison did give him a job.
It soon became clear to both men that they had very little in common. Edison’s
motto is, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Tesla
said this about his style of inventing, “My method is different. I do not rush into actual
work. When I get a new idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination, and make
improvements and operate the device in my mind. When I have gone as far as to embody
everything in my invention, every possible improvement I can think of, and when I see
no fault anywhere, I put into concrete from the final product of my brain... The inventions
I have conceived this way have always worked (Time).”
It did not take long for their disagreements to turn into conflict. Edison offered
Tesla $50,000 if he could create a more stable DC electricity system, a task that Edison
thought was impossible. Tesla accepted the challenge and quickly improved the design,
saving Edison over $100,000. Edison was impressed, but when Tesla asked for the
$50,000 prize, Edison laughed and told him that he “simply didn’t understand American
humor (Burns).”
Tesla was outraged and quit immediately. Tesla was reduced to digging ditches
and his anger grew. Tesla was annoyed with the limitations of DC power and the amount
and size of wires necessary to make DC power a city. In some places there were so many
wires that light from the sun could not shine through them.
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Tesla’s shear genius had gained him a reputation. He used that genius to find financial
backers to stand behind him and his ideas. A man named A. K. Brown offered him
funding on the development of the alternating current motor (Ben), a motor Tesla had
invented in his head years earlier in Budapest, Hungary.
“An adventurous Pittsburgh industrialist named George Westinghouse, inventor
of railroad air brakes, heard about Tesla's invention and thought it could be the missing
link in long-distance power transmission. He came to Tesla's lab and made an offer,
purchasing Tesla’s patents for $60,000, which included $5,000 in cash and 150 shares of
stock in the Westinghouse Corporation. He also agreed to pay royalties of $2.50 per
horsepower of electrical capacity sold. With more inventions in mind, Tesla quickly
spent half of his newfound wealth on a new laboratory (pbs).” Tesla was determined to
develop a commercially viable Alternating Current System for use in an electric motor.
With a new laboratory, financial backing and a great system, Tesla and
Westinghouse were a force to be reckoned with. Edison’s DC motor and system was still
the dominating method of power, however, Tesla’s system was cheaper than Edison’s
Direct Current
technology, more
efficient, and far, far
more powerful. Tesla’s
answer to the challenge
(Figure 9.1)
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came in the shape of an Egg. He took a porcelain bowl, and placed a metal egg in it.
Underneath the bowl he built electromagnets connecting them together in such a way that
when AC Power was connected, one bank of magnets would start up, the second bank of
magnets where designed to be just a little out of phase with the first bank. This way one
set would be positively charged when the second was negatively charged. The egg would
then begin to spin in response to the differing fields gaining speed until it eventually
stood up on its end due to the gyroscopic force of it’s spin.
This demonstration, named the “Egg of Columbus” (figure 9.1) and displayed at
the 1893 World’s fair, was not only very aesthetically appealing, also proved that a motor
could be constructed by carefully controlling banks of magnets and the refresh rate of the
AC Power. This system of Generation and Utilization is known as Poly phase Alternating
Current.
Edison could see that his system, his company and his patents were in trouble. To try to
stay on top as the king of electricity and the one making all of the money, Edison started
a smear campaign against AC power. Westinghouse recalled, “I remember Tom [Edison]
telling them that direct current was like a river flowing peacefully to the sea, while
alternating current was like a torrent rushing violently over a precipice. Imagine that!
Why they even had a professor named Harold Brown who went around talking to
audiences... and electrocuting dogs and old horses right on
stage, to show how dangerous alternating current was (pbs).”
(Figure 10.1)
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Professor Brown went beyond animals to show how dangerous AC could be. He
illegally bought an AC generator and designed the first electric chair, as shown in the
drawing in figure 10.1. “The guinea pig was William Kemmler, a convicted ax-murderer,
who died horribly on August 6, 1890, in an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging. The
technique was later dubbed "Westinghousing.” (PBS)
Tesla countered by saying that “AC was perfectly
safe, as long as proper precautions were taken (Ben).”
This war of who would power the future came to a head
in 1893 when the world’s fair (Figure 11.1) was looking
for a bid to power it. Edison gave a bid of one million dollars.
(Figure 11.1)
“Westinghouse undercut GE's million-dollar bid by half. Much of GE's proposed
expenses were tied to the amount of copper wire necessary to utilize DC power.
Westinghouse's winning bid proposed a more efficient, cost-effective AC system (pbs).”
Edison, upset at the results, refused to let Tesla use his patented light bulb at the
fair. Tesla in a matter of months designed and manufactured a much simpler yet equally
efficient light bulb. “Tesla’s light bulb design was cheaper, lasted longer, and burned
brighter than Edison’s without infringing on a single patent (Burns).”
“The Columbian Exposition opened on May 1, 1893. That evening, President
Grover Cleveland pushed a button and a hundred thousand incandescent lamps
illuminated the fairground's neoclassical buildings. This "City of Light" was the work of
Tesla, Westinghouse and twelve new thousand-horsepower AC generation units located
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in the Hall of Machinery (PBS).”
Tesla used the fair to dazzle the crowds with his new and “Eerie technology”. He
introduced phosphorescent lighting that he is holding in 12.1 , bent tubes of glass into
famous scientists’ names, and shot electricity from Tesla coils
lighting light bulbs by touching them. For the grand finale he
showed just how safe AC power could be as he sent “12 foot purple
and blue lightening bolts from his fingers into the crowd (Burns).”
Tesla and Westinghouse had won the war. For the
(Figure 12.1)
twenty-seven million people who attended the fair, it was
dramatically clear that the power of the future was AC. “From that time forward, more
than 80 percent of all the electrical devices ordered in the United States were for
alternating current (pbs).”
Tesla spent the next 59 years of his productive life living in New York. On his
75th birthday in 1931, the inventor appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. On this
occasion, Tesla received congratulatory letters from more than 70 pioneers in science and
engineering including Albert Einstein (Vujovic, 1998). Like Einstein, Tesla developed
and created inventions that we continue to use in our everyday lives.
Nikola Tesla is one of the greatest inventors of all time and probably one of the
most unappreciated inventors and scientists of all time. Although alternating current first
received its first jumping off point at the Columbian Exposition it had its first big break
with the Niagara Falls project just three years later. Tesla and his partner George
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Westinghouse received the contract in part due to impressing the famous British physicist,
Lord Kelvin, who was very impressed with what he saw at the Columbian Exposition.
Lord Kelvin was part of the Niagara Falls Commission and now a strong convert to
alternating current asked Westinghouse and Tesla to take on the project to harness the
power of Niagara Falls using alternating current. This was a very big step in the history
of alternating current and electricity. The Niagara Falls project was one of the first
modern day conventional power plants.
Alternating current was a revolutionary invention and has had a huge impact on
the world not just scientifically but also is also something that we see in our every day
lives. Alternating current is the type of electricity used in homes and businesses all over
the world. Alternating current won the battle of the "current wars" mainly because it was
a more efficient way to send electricity. A.C. didn't require as many big wires and was
able to send electricity over longer distances than direct current. Alternating current cut
back on the amount of power plants significantly. If we were using direct current to
power our cities it could take hundreds of power plants to power a city. Since we use
alternating current you don't have to worry about being out of range of a power plant to
receive electricity to power your home. Not only is alternating current a more practical
method it has the ability to travel further distances and with less loss of power in this
process. A.C. has created a building block for every other dynamic outlet of electrical
activity. The building blocks of life, so to say, for technology.
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Examples of alternating current can easily be found in everyday life. For example
when you flip on a light you are displaying an example of alternating current. Examples
of alternating current can be found all over your house. If it were not alternating current
many things we have in our lives that we take for granted would not be available. Most
of the electricity running through our houses and businesses is due to alternating current.
This is true about most things unless they have a battery. For example your laptop is ran
on direct current except when you plug it into the wall the charger has a converter to
transfer it from direct current to alternating current. Take a good look around the room
and I bet the majority of electronic devices you see are run by alternating current.
As we develop smarter systems and technology advances alternating current has a
lot to offer towards our future. Electric and hybrid cars are good examples of the future
implications of A.C. As the future progresses and we switch over to different types of
technology for our cars alternating current will be a big help. It will able us to put more
power plug-ins about and thus make it more practical to switch over to an electric car.
Flexible alternating current transmissions could be one of these ideas for the future.
Flexible alternating current transmissions promise to save energy in a big way by making
the smart grid possible.
Utility companies would be in favor of power renovations because they would be
able to maximize profits and minimize losses even more than they already are. This
should also make it possible to smoothly incorporate wind, solar and other intrinsically
Nikola Tesla 15
intermittent sources of energy into the grid. Future inventions and progressions in this
field could lead to cheaper and more efficient forms of energy.
Tesla had a dream of alternating currents when he was in college. Despite
discouragement and ridicule from his fellow peers and teachers, Tesla was determined to
develop something he believed in. Tesla envisioned a world where we could harness
electricity without any wires at all. We live in a world today of wireless telephones and
Internet, electricity is next. “ While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the ones who think they are crazy enough to change the world are the ones that
do.” – Creators at Apple.
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Works Cited
Corrosion Doctors. (2012). Nikola Tesla Biography. Retrieved March 17, 2012, from
corrision doctors.org: http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/biographies/teslabio.htm
The American Srbobran. (2001, March). Nicola Tesla's mother. Retrieved March 17,
2012, from serbnatlfed.org: http://www.serbnatlfed.org/archives/Tesla/tesla-mother.htm
Vujovic, D. L. (1998, July 10). Nikola Tesla, The Genius that Lit the World. Retrieved
March 17, 2012, from Tesla Memorial Society of New York:
http://www.teslasocioty.com/biography.htm
PBS. Wars of currents. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_warcur.html
Burns, Josh. (2011) .Edison vs Tesla: The War of Currents. Retrieved from
http://overcomeeverything.com/2924/edison-tesla-war-currents/#
Ben S. (03-19-2012). The Current War. Retrieved from
http://staff.fcps.net/rroyster/war.htm
Time human. (01-16-2012). Retrieved from
http://timehuman.blogspot.com/2012/01/nikola-tesla-quotes.html
Jones, J (2003). Empires of Light. Random House Digital Inc.
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