Nikola Tesla
History credits Nikola Tesla as one of the most significant inventors that ever lived (Vujovic, 1998). He can be put in the same rank with Edison and faraday because of his brilliance in invention which touched almost all features of electricity. He invented electricity, and, therefore, influenced the modern age. Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan in located in the in the boarder province of Austria-Hungary in today’s Croatia republic. His mother, to whom Tesla attributed hid inventiveness, was an uneducated housewife while his father was a priest. He had three sisters and one brother. Tesla’s older brother died at the age of twelve. Since he was very bright, there was immense pressure for Tesla to be as bright as his brother, and this was another driving force, that resulted in Tesla’s success.
He attended school at Karlovac in Croatia then went ahead to take electrical engineering studied uses of irregular current at the Austrian polytechnic located in Craz (Vujovic, 1998). In 1881, he worked for the American telephone company and went ahead to become the company’s chief electrician. He later on became his country’s engineer for it’s pioneer telephone system. When he migrated to the United States, he found employment at Edison Machine Works’ and ended up helping the corporation resolve its toughest problems (Rajvanshi, 2007). Edison, the owner of the company gave Tesla the responsibility of redesigning the direct current generators owned by the company. His career at Edison machine works’ did not last long, since just a year after joining it, he resigned after Edison refused to give him a pay raise. The following year (1886), he founded his company, called Tesla electric-light & manufacturing.
Things did not go so very well for Tesla, since investors in his company did not agree with his plan for pursuing alternative current motor and, therefore, withdrew their financing and Tesla ended up working as a laborer in the US until 1887, (Rajvanshi, 2007). Luckily, in 1887, he met a rights attorney who assisted Nikola Tesla restart his alternating current motor and aided him financially in the setting up of a laboratory and during the same year, he built his first brushless AC induction motor. Before the end of that year, Tesla also came up with the laws of the Tesla coil and started conducting investigation into the present days X-rays using single node vacuum tubes, even prior to roentgen’s discovery (tesla, . In the present day, the Tesla coil is used in television and radio sets together with other equipment that are electronic.
Tesla conflicted with his Edison, his former employer over alternating versus direct current. Tesla was of the opinion that his former employer’s direct current powerhouses were inefficient. He argued that instead of direct current, alternating current is more effective because all energy is cyclic (Vujovic, 1998). Lamps built by Edison proved to be inefficient and rather weak because he built them using direct current. The most significant undoing of the system built by Edison was that it was not possible for it to be moved more than two miles because it was incapable of adjusting voltage levels needed for transmission over a long distance. As a result, of this weakness a power station was necessary at every two miles (Vujovic, 1998).
While direct current only flows in one direction, AC is capable of altering direction 50-60 times every second, its voltage can be increased, therefore, reducing the loss of power across long distances (Martin, 1997). Tesla was also responsible for developing polyphase AC system of motors, transformers and generators, and he held forty basic United States patents on the system, bought by George Washington in his determination of supplying Americans with that system.
In 1893, at the world Columbian exposition held in Chicago, Tesla shocked everyone when he demonstrated his creation, alternative current electricity and AC