In 2003, Elon Musk, together with a group of talented engineers, founded a startup to develop and manufacture electric cars. They named their brainchild Tesla Motors (now Tesla Inc.) in honor of the great scientist Nikola Tesla. It was he who, more than 100 years ago, invented the engine circuit that is used in modern electric vehicles - it still remains a mystery how he managed to do this at the dawn of the development of modern physics. However, this is far from the only mystery associated with the inventions and biography of the scientist.

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in the Serbian village of Smiliany, then part of the Austrian Empire. From childhood, he was destined for the path of a servant of God, since his father and maternal grandfather were priests. From an early age, Nikola showed a great interest in the exact sciences and dreamed of becoming an engineer, but he was going to enter seminary, because he was afraid to sadden his parents with his choice. The chance to make your dream come true fell during the cholera epidemic. Seeing his son's face exhausted from illness, his father not only allowed him to follow his heart, but also promised to help him enter the best educational institution in Europe.

In 1875, Tesla entered the Higher Technical School in Graz. It is this date that he considers the beginning of his life. Nikola was delighted with the educational process and studied like a man possessed. He became one of the best on the course. Teachers began to set Tesla as an example to other students, which caused strong hostility among fellow students, which subsequently grew into persecution. Desperate, Tesla decided to try to lead the same life as most students: going to pubs and gambling. It all started with billiards and ended with cards. Naturally, every day there was less and less time for study. As a result, in December 1878, he was expelled from school for poor performance and bad behavior. However, such a sharp turn of events did not stop the Serb for a second from falling into the abyss.

It is not known how it would have ended if in March 1879 he, like a tramp, had not been sent home under police protocol. Tesla recalls this time in his diaries with bitterness and shame, because he not only abandoned his beloved business for some unknown reason, but also drove his family into debt. After a serious conversation, first with his father, and then with his mother, the dissolute gambler and drunkard died in him forever. “My aversion to gambling became so strong that when I saw cards, a billiard table or dice, I felt the same feeling that I get when I see impurities,” the scientist wrote.

Life in Europe and the first inventions

Having put an end to his former riotous life, Tesla, again possessed by a thirst for knowledge, went to Prague to continue his education. A year later, one of his maternal relatives offered him a job building a telephone exchange in Budapest, which required knowledgeable and energetic engineers. The young man gladly accepted the offer, as he was dissatisfied with the conditions of study at the University of Prague. Nicola found his service in the company rather easy: due to the low pace of work, he had time to walk around Budapest and reflect on scientific topics.

Here Tesla made his first full-fledged invention - the telephone amplifier. The news of him quickly spread throughout Europe and created a good reputation for the aspiring scientist, so after the completion of the construction of the telephone exchange in 1882, Tesla quite easily got a job at Edison's Continental Company in Paris. In the French capital, he held the position of an engineer for the installation and repair of electrical installations.

In 1883, Nikola Tesla was entrusted with the work on the launch of a new power plant at the railway station in Strasbourg, promising, if successful, a huge reward for those times in the amount of $ 25,000. The fact is that during the first attempt to open the station in the presence of high-ranking officials, a fire broke out due to a short circuit at the station substation and a wall collapsed, so the new power plant had to be launched as soon as possible. Tesla coped with this difficult task brilliantly, but the head of the local branch of the Continental Company of Edison refused to pay the promised bonus. The offended novice inventor, despite practically no savings, decided to quit.

Thoughts about Russia and moving to America

Unemployed Nikola Tesla faced a difficult choice of what to do next. He was seriously thinking about moving to Russia. He was attracted by the high level of training and the inquisitive mind of the Russian engineers, with whom he met in Paris. One of his acquaintances, Alexei Zharkevich, even prepared a letter of recommendation to Moscow University professor Nikolai Lyubimov. However, an employee of Edison's Continental Company dissuaded Tesla from this venture, offering to work in America for Thomas Edison, who at that moment was an idol for the young inventor. The conditions that were offered seemed to Nicola quite acceptable. As a result, on July 6, 1884, Tesla set foot on American soil.

Working at Edison's company

Once in America, Tesla did not believe in his happiness. Somewhere far behind, there were Parisian disappointment and a long painful voyage on a ship, and ahead of him was a job as an engineer for the repair of electric motors and DC generators for one of the best inventors of the time, Thomas Edison. Tesla enthusiastically took up his duties. He quite easily and quickly eliminated all conceivable and inconceivable problems in the existing inventions of the company.

Seeing the talent and burning eyes of the young engineer, Edison began to give more and more complex tasks to the employee. Once he even promised Nicola $ 50,000 if he could constructively improve the DC electric machines patented by the company - they often broke down. Tesla successfully coped with this task and presented 24 new versions of devices, after which he asked about the promised bonus. Edison laughed in response and said that the Serb does not understand American humor well - there will be no bonus, the maximum that Nikola can count on is to increase his salary by $ 10 a week. The newly deceived Tesla refused such a humiliating offer and resigned.

Through hardships to your own laboratory

While working for Edison's company, Tesla gained fame in certain circles. Quite quickly, people were found who offered to create a new company of their own related to the issues of electric lighting. Tesla's idea was to his liking. He began research in a new direction, which resulted in the invention of the arc lamp for street lighting.

In addition to lamps, Nikola suggested that his partners study alternating current, but they refused, however, as well as to pay the scientist due for the work done, or rather, they offered worthless shares of the company as compensation. Realizing that it would not be possible to agree, the pseudo-comrades got rid of Tesla, while slandering and defaming him. Nikola again lost his job and money, but this time, in addition, with a damaged reputation, so that no one wanted to hire him.

Tesla rented a space for his office on Fifth Avenue, near Edison's office, thereby trying to show his former employer and abuser that, in spite of everything, he is alive and well. The reputation of the inventor began to recover. The president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers became interested in him. In May 1888, at his invitation, Tesla gave a lecture to a group of scientists about his system of AC motors and transformers.

This lecture contributed to Nikola's acquaintance with the famous industrialist George Westinghouse, who bought more than 40 patents from Tesla, and also invited the inventor to the position of a consultant at his factories in Pittsburgh, where industrial designs of AC machines were developed. Nikola happily accepted this offer, because after several years of unsuccessful attempts to convince everyone of the promise of alternating current machines, he finally met a like-minded person. The industrialist was ready not only to invest money in his development, but also to provide the scientist with everything necessary for his work. The collaboration lasted about a year, after which Tesla returned to his laboratory in New York, because due to problems with the team, work at Westinghouse did not bring him pleasure and took a lot of time, making it impossible to think about new inventions.

War of currents

There are two types of current: alternating current and direct current. Alternating current has two main advantages over direct current: the ability to transmit electrical energy over long distances with minimal losses, and the simplicity and reliability of machines - generators and motors. However, even at the end of the 19th century, few believed in this, since the main authority in science of that time, the industrialist, Thomas Edison, argued the opposite. In 1890, more than a hundred direct current power plants were operating in the United States. Edison was going to significantly increase this figure and cover the entire country from Alaska to Florida with a network of his power plants.

However, Westinghouse and Tesla stood in his way, betting not on direct, but on alternating current. There was a great confrontation between physicists, which was called the "war of currents". According to Nikola Tesla's memoirs, in order to win this difficult battle, Edison began to use "black" PR, for example, he began to spread rumors about the danger of alternating current for life, as opposed to constant. He even promoted the passage of the electric chair law, which used alternating current to turn society against alternating current. However, in 1893 Tesla and Westinghouse were victorious and received a huge order for 200,000 lamps for the World's Fair in Chicago.

Tesla finally got the opportunity to work quietly. He was actively involved in the study of high-frequency currents and the possibility of obtaining light through high-frequency oscillations in incandescent lamps. According to the scientist, the first half of the 1890s was the most productive period, but on March 13, 1895, a disaster struck: a fire broke out in the laboratory on Fifth Avenue. The inventor's most recent achievements - a mechanical oscillator, a test bench for new lamps for electric lighting, a prototype device for wireless long-distance messaging, and an installation for investigating the nature of electricity - burned to the ground, as did the building. Many accused Edison of being involved in what happened, but Tesla himself denied this statement.

Wireless signal transmission

During the fire, the first three samples of remotely controlled vehicles burned down, but Tesla was able to recreate them pretty quickly from memory. For the demonstration at the New York Electric Show, he chose a radio-controlled boat. Unfortunately, the public accepted the novelty coldly. Only the military were interested in it, since they could use it as a means of shelling enemy ships with torpedoes, but the high cost of the project immediately discouraged them. The glory of the discoverer in the field of transmission of electrical communications over distances undeservedly went to the inventor Gulelmo Marconi, who at the same exhibition demonstrated mines exploding by radio signal.

In 1900, the Italian planned to patent his discovery in the United States for transmitting radio signals over a distance, but the patent office refused him, since earlier this patent had been obtained by Tesla. This did not stop Marconi, and in 1905 he made sure that the patent office canceled the certificates issued to Tesla and gave the palm in this direction to the Italian.

Rumor has it that this did not happen without the help of Edison. Truth triumphed only after Tesla's death. In 1943, the US Supreme Court ruled that after all, Nikola Tesla was the first to discover that electrical communication could be carried out without wires. Although it is fair to say that in different countries different scientists are considered the inventor of radio, for example, in Russia - physicist Alexander Popov.

World system

In addition to wireless transmission of communications and radio signals, Tesla was studying wireless transmission of energy. He called his project "World System". To implement it, it was required to build 30 resonator towers in different parts of the world. Emitters installed on the towers would cause vibrations of a certain frequency in the atmosphere; oil-filled channels should be located under the towers in the ground, in which, with the help of pumps, vibrations were created that would be transmitted to the ground. Thus, a closed system was obtained in which energy and radio communications could be sent over long distances. In search of an investor, Nikola Tesla turned to John Morgan, but told only about one of the future functions of the World System - the transmission of radio signals overseas.

The industrial magnate agreed, but rather quickly cut off funding for the project when, looking at the powerful foundation, he discovered that the tower was primarily intended for something else, and not for transmitting radio signals. Morgan stated that he was deceived. A violent scandal erupted in the press. After that, Tesla could not find other investors. The inventor invested all his savings into the project, but this amount was not enough to complete what he started. The unfinished tower stood until 1917, after which it was blown up by the authorities, who feared it would be used for espionage purposes.

Despite a strong mental shock after the failure with the World System, Tesla continued to actively work and patent his inventions. In the last years of his life, he was engaged in the development of bladeless turbines, devices for radio detection of submarines, as well as studying the possibilities of obtaining ultra-high voltages. Nikola Tesla died in New York on the night of January 7-8, 1943. The urn with the ashes was first installed at the local cemetery in New York, and later moved to the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

Nikola Tesla is the man who illuminated the world.

The exhibition is dedicated to the world famous inventor, author of brilliant discoveries, wizard of light and electricity, Nikola Tesla, who was born in Croatia. The first time she was shown at the UNESCO Palace in Paris in September 2006, then she visited Bratislava, Madrid, Kosice and Helsinki.

The exposition tells about the life path of Nikola Tesla, which began in the Croatian Smiljan and ended in the USA, about his research in the field of energy transmission, electromagnetic radiation, as well as about his famous inventions that have changed the world and are today the basis of the latest technologies.

Quotes from Nikola Tesla's autobiographical book "My Inventions" will allow visitors to learn about the most important moments in the life and work of the inventor, about his originality, versatility, eccentricity, as well as awareness of his own mission.

First of all, the exhibition has an educational character and it presents the working devices of Tesla's inventions - the transformer and the Columbus egg.

From July 14 to September 10, a multimedia exhibition created with the assistance of the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum and the Croatian History Museum - Nikola Tesla - the man who illuminated the world - will be open in the Peter and Paul Fortress, in the exhibition hall "Poterna and casemate of the Tsar Bastion"

Nikola Tesla is one of the greatest people who owns a large number of inventions that have changed our world forever. Tesla's life and biography is as unusual as he is.

Nikola Tesla was born in the village of Smilyany on July 10, 1856 in the family of a Serbian Orthodox priest (at that time the Smilians were in the territory of Austria-Hungary, now in Croatia).

A curious episode belongs to the childhood years of Nikola Tesla, which probably determined his craving for electricity.

At the age of ten, he stroked a fluffy black cat on the front porch. Nicola noticed that sparks slipped between his fingers and the cat's fur, clearly visible in the evening. His father told him that sparks are most likely “relatives” of lightning. This really sunk into Nicola's soul, clearly showing that electricity (which he did not yet know anything about) can be both "tame" like a pet, and "wild" like a thunderstorm.

N. Tesla graduated from primary school and a three-year real grammar school in the town of Gospić, in 1970 he entered the higher real school in Karlovac, where he mainly studied mathematics and physics. He was especially impressed by Professor Martin Sekulich, who demonstrated his own invention - a tin-foil-covered light bulb that rotated quickly when connected to a static machine:

“It is impossible to convey the feeling that I experienced while looking at the demonstration of this amazing phenomenon. Every show echoed in my mind ... "

Nikola decided not to follow in his father's footsteps, but to study to be an engineer.

In 1875 he entered the Higher Technical School in Graz (now - Graz Technical University). In his second year, Tesla gets acquainted with the Gramme dynamo using direct current. The collector of the machine consisted of several wire brushes that transmit current from the generator to the motor in one direction. The car sparked a lot, but was considered the latest technology. Tesla has the idea to abandon the collector and apply alternating current, and at that moment he sets himself the goal - to create an electric motor operating on alternating current.

After graduating from college, Tesla taught briefly at Gospic, studied for a semester at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Prague, but due to financial difficulties, he left his studies and first worked as an electrical engineer in the government telegraph company in Budapest, then got a job at Edison's Continental Company in Paris. In 1884 he moved to the USA, where he met Thomas Edison himself and Tesla was hired by his company as an engineer for the repair of electric motors and DC generators. Edison promised Tesla $ 50,000 if he could constructively improve Edison's DC electric machines. Tesla soon introduced 24 variations of the Edison machine, a new commutator and regulator that significantly improved performance. Having approved all the improvements, in response to a question about the remuneration, Edison refused Tesla, noting that he still did not understand American humor well, after which Tesla resigned.

Unlike Edison, Tesla had an unusual gift - in his mind he could imagine any device or device, mentally test it, in order to then translate it into reality, already completely ready for use. Edison spent a lot of time experimenting, refining inventions. After the death of Edison, Tesla said about him:

"If he had to find a needle in a haystack, he would not think about where to look for it, but with the feverish conscientiousness of a bee, he would start exploring straw after straw until he found what he was looking for ..."

Tesla said about his method:

“When an idea appears, I immediately begin to refine it in my imagination: I change the design, improve and“ turn on ”the device so that it heals in my head ... Similarly, I am able to develop an idea to perfection without touching anything."

Edison was cold about Tesla's new ideas, he had long relied on DC equipment and rejected ideas about AC motors.

After his dismissal, Tesla was left without a livelihood, in 1886 he survived by doing ancillary work - he dug ditches for $ 2 a day.

“My higher education in various fields of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me a mockery,” he writes with bitterness in his diary.

During this period, he became friends with the engineer Brown, who was able to persuade several of his acquaintances to provide a small financial support to Tesla. In April 1887, the Tesla Arc Light Company, created with this money, began to equip street lighting with new arc lamps, as well as to implement previously invented projects. For an office in New York, Tesla rented a house on Fifth Avenue not far from the building occupied by Edison's company. A fierce competition ensued between the two companies, known in America as the "War of currents".

In 1888, Tesla still managed to create a reliable and fairly simple AC electric motor. He is invited to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to give a lecture, which he called "A New System of AC Motors and Transformers." Everything went great, the famous American designer B.A. Berend said in the debate after the lecture:

“Since the days of Faraday and his experiments with electricity, no experimental truth has ever been presented as simply and clearly as Tesla's description of his method of producing multiphase alternating currents. He left nothing to his followers for revision ... "

In the same year, the famous American industrialist George Westinghouse bought more than 40 patents from Tesla, paying an average of $ 25,000 each.

Tesla is becoming more and more famous, they write about him in newspapers and magazines, he gives lectures, demonstrates incredible experiments.

In 1892, while giving a lecture on the high-frequency electromagnetic field to scientists at the Royal Academy of Great Britain, Tesla lit electric bulbs in his hands. The electric motor was not connected to them with wires. Some lamps did not even have a spiral - high-frequency current passed through the inventor's body. The admiration of scientists knew no bounds, and after the lecture physicist John Rayleigh solemnly sat Tesla in the chair of Faraday himself, accompanying it with the words: "This is the chair of the great Faraday. After his death, no one sat in it."

In 1893, Nikola Tesla designed the world's first wave radio transmitter, seven years ahead of Marconi. Using radio control, Tesla created "teleautomatics" - self-propelled mechanisms controlled from a distance. At Madison Square Garden, a scientist showed small remote-controlled boats. And in 1895, the Niagara hydroelectric power station (the largest in the world) was put into operation, and it worked with the help of Tesla generators.

In March 1895, a fire broke out in the Fifth Avenue laboratory. It was rumored that the fire was the work of ill-wishers, thus hinting at Thomas Edison. The building burned down to the ground, destroying the very latest achievements, but Tesla said that he could restore them from memory. The Niagara Falls Company provided financial assistance in the amount of $ 100,000 to equip the new laboratory. In the fall, research resumed, at the end of 1896 Tesla achieved the transmission of a radio signal over a distance of 48 km.

In May 1899, at the invitation of the local electrical company, Tesla moved to the resort town of Colorado Springs, located on a plateau 2000 meters above sea level and characterized by severe thunderstorms. Tesla created a laboratory here, and especially for the study of thunderstorms, he developed a transformer, in which one end of the primary winding was grounded, and the other end was connected to a metal ball with a rod extending upward. A sensitive self-adjusting device was connected to the secondary winding, which, in turn, was connected to a recording device. This device made it possible to study changes in the Earth's potential, including the effect of standing electromagnetic waves caused by lightning discharges in the earth's atmosphere (later this effect became known as the "Schumann Resonance"). Observations led the inventor to the idea of \u200b\u200bthe possibility of transmitting electricity without wires over long distances.

Tesla directed his next experiment to investigate the possibility of self-creation of a standing electromagnetic wave. In addition to a variety of induction coils and other equipment, he designed a "booster transmitter". On the huge base of the transformer, the turns of the primary winding were wound. The secondary winding was connected to a 60-meter mast and ended with a copper ball of a meter diameter. When an alternating current with a voltage of several thousand volts was passed through the primary coil, a voltage of several million volts and a frequency of up to 150 thousand hertz arose in the secondary coil. During the experiment, lightning-like discharges were recorded emanating from a metal ball, the length of some reached almost 4.5 meters, and thunder was heard at a distance of up to 24 km. Tesla concluded that the device allowed him to generate standing waves that propagated spherically from the transmitter, and then converged with increasing intensity at a diametrically opposite point of the globe, somewhere near the islands of Amsterdam and Saint-Paul in the Indian Ocean.

In the fall of 1899, Tesla returned to New York. 60 km north of New York on Long Island, he acquired a piece of land with an area of \u200b\u200b0.8 km², which was located at a considerable distance from the settlements. Here Tesla planned to build a laboratory and a science town. By his order, a radio station project was developed - a 47-meter wooden frame tower with a copper hemisphere at the top. The implementation went with enormous difficulties, since the center of gravity of the building shifted upward due to the massive hemisphere, depriving the structure of stability. Completed in 1902, the tower was named Wardencliff. The production of the necessary equipment was delayed because the industrialist John Pierpont Morgan, who funded it, canceled the contract after learning that instead of practical goals for the development of electric lighting, Tesla planned to research wireless transmission of electricity around the world. Paying off the creditors, Tesla had to sell the land. The tower turned out to be abandoned and stood until 1917, then it was blown up and dismantled.

After 1900, Tesla received many other patents for inventions in various fields of technology (electric meter, frequency meter, a number of improvements in radio equipment, steam turbines, etc.), in 1917 Tesla proposed the principle of operation of a device for radio detection of submarines.

During his life, he made about a thousand different inventions and discoveries. The most significant of them:

High-frequency electrical engineering (high-frequency transformer, HF electromechanical generator (including inductor type).

Multiphase electric current.

Radio communication and mast antenna for radio communication.

Tesla coils. To this day, they are used to produce artificial lightning.

The use of electrical devices for medical purposes

Rotating magnetic field phenomenon

Asynchronous motor

Description of X-rays and ultraviolet radiation.

Fluorescent lamp

Radio-controlled boat.

The unit for measuring the density of magnetic flux (magnetic induction) is named after Tesla.

His awards: Knight of the Montenegrin Order of Prince Danilo I, 2nd degree (1895), Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion (Czechoslovakia), Elliot Cresson's Gold Medal (1894), Edison's Medal (1916), John Scott's Medal (1934).

Nikola Tesla was a bright and unusual person, someone considered him an eccentric, someone a genius. He had a phenomenal memory and could memorize whole books word for word. He spent no more than 4 hours a day sleeping. He never had his own house and lived in hotels, while the number of apartments had to be a multiple of 3. When walking, he always counted steps, and at the table he counted the volume of soup in plates, the number of pieces eaten and the number of cups of coffee drunk. His friends assumed that he had the gift of foresight. Another oddity - Tesla was very fond of pigeons. In hotel rooms, he kept 3-4 baskets of pigeons, the windows were always open and pigeons flocked to his call, he fed them at any time of the day on city streets and squares. One dove was especially dear to him, for which he especially looked after and sat for whole days during her illness. Tesla confessed to his friend and biographer John O'Neill: “When the dove died, something left my life. Until that time, I knew that I would certainly finish my work, no matter what ambitious tasks I set myself, but when something left my life, I realized that my life's work was over ... "