Nikola Tesla was a great inventor whose inventions changed the course of human society and changed the way we live and live.
But his life was full of controversy and mystery, and was once forgotten by the scientific community. He was the first person in the world to win the Nobel Prize in Physics and the first scientist to use nuclear fusion to generate electricity. He was one of the greatest inventors in the United States and the world, and a legendary figure. Obviously, when we were kids, we read about Edison in textbooks, and everyone knew about the king of invention, but we rarely heard of Tesla.
People vaguely knew that he was connected to alternating current, and then learned more about him through the Internet and rumors. He is one of the greatest physicists in the world, but he is also the most misunderstood man. His name is Musk. He was a legendary figure. Curiously, Tesla, which is rarely mentioned in the scientific community, is revered as a myth.
See him as the closest person to God because he was so far ahead of his time that no one understood Tesla at the time, and even now, Some of Tesla's ideas are ahead of its time.
Let's take a look at the legendary great inventors who are somewhere between madmen, people, and gods.
Tesla was born in Croatia on July 10, 1856, and like the blood of dogs we see on television, the birth of a great man is always accompanied by an extraordinary celestial event, and Tesla is naturally no exception.
Rumor has it that he was born in a thunderstorm, and the midwives at the time were superstitious and thought that thunder and lightning were ominous omens, but Tesla's mother was not, she said that her son was the son of light, and maybe lightning was the father of human air conditioning.
As a child, Tesla, like the average child, showed no signs of excellence, but he was interested in mathematics and physics, and like all successful scientists, he was curious about nature in the unknown.
But his parents didn't have much hope for their young son because they thought Tesla wasn't as smart as his brother Dane.
When Tesla was 5 years old, his brother fell off his horse and died, which made his parents very sad, but he also worried about Tesla because he was weak and often sick.
So his father decided to let Tesla go to school near the village and grow up to be a priest. His father said to him, "You should go outside, go to the mountains, and you can learn a lot of knowledge there, such as how to protect our homes and children..." He listened and thought it made a lot of sense. At the age of 17, Tesla graduated from high school and soon contracted cholera and nearly died.
During his illness, Tesla pleaded with his parents to send him to study engineering if he survived. He didn't want to be a priest. He said that if I could pass on to myself what the engineers had learned, I would not be a priest! His father agreed, but Tesla refused, knowing he could no longer be a priest. His mother agreed. Desperate parents fulfilled their son's request.
In 1875, Tesla studied physics, mathematics and mechanics at the Technical University of Graz, Austria. After graduation, he went to Hamburg, Germany, where he worked for more than 10 years before returning to Vienna to pursue his doctorate. His research direction is the magnetoelectric coupling effect in electromagnetic phenomena and has achieved good results. At the time, the university was also choppy due to tuition fees and national turmoil.
It wasn't until 1882, at the age of 26, that Tesla found his first job and began a feud with his old enemy, Edison.
His initial job was as an engineer in Edison's Paris office, where Tesla designed a model of an induction motor.
By this time, Edison was already a successful man with a successful career, not so much an inventor as a shrewd businessman, not only making money, but also managing his reputation. When Edison discovered a new material, he immediately began to study the new material and successfully applied it to the automotive industry. This new type of car is not only fast but also of good quality. That's why Edison's reputation is louder and better than Tesla's.
We now believe that the electric light cannon was created by Edison in 1879, but this is not entirely accurate.
The first electric light was the arc lamp invented by Sir Humphrey David in 1807. It was widely used in homes, offices, and other places, but at the time people did not realize its potential dangers, and it was not until the early 1880s that an engineer began to study its improvements. Over the next 50 years, several inventors worked to perfect electric lamps and increase the service life and safety of lamps.
But lighting requires not only electric lights, but also a whole set of equipment and systems to generate and transmit electricity. In the process, one can see a close connection between one's intelligence and the technology he possesses. It is for this reason that people invent electric lights with different functions. Electric lights, for example, are one of them. This is where Edison came into play, its patents were bought by Edison, but it perfected the design of the electric light so that it could be mass-produced and used.
Most importantly, Edison invented the HVDC transmission system, which enabled people to light lights.
But DC systems are inefficient, and as distance increases, electrical energy begins to drain in the form of heat. Therefore, it is necessary to install energy storage devices in transmission lines to improve the economy and reliability of grid operation, while also reducing environmental pollution. However, at present, the power system of the mainland generally uses high-voltage transmission technology for long-distance transmission. Not being able to transmit electricity over long distances has great disadvantages.
Meanwhile, the young Tesla in Paris already had a different idea, knew the problems with the DC system, which is why he designed the induction motor, which uses alternating current to transmit kinetic energy, while using alternating current to generate higher voltages.
The advantages of ALTERNA are low cost, high efficiency, and the ability to transmit power over long distances, with very low energy losses in the process.
In 1884, Tesla was introduced to Edison's laboratory, which was Tesla's first close encounter with Edison, and it was this unpleasant cooperation that brought the two together.
During his two years at work, Tesla solved many of Edison's design problems and redesigned his DC system, but the money Edison promised to pay Tesla fell short.
Edison had always opposed Tesla's use of alternating current, so Tesla rushed out of Edison's laboratory and set up its own business.
Although Tesla has designed induction motors and complete AC power and transmission systems, it has been beaten to death by Edison.
Edison encouraged supporters to oppose the use of alternating current, published numerous articles denigrating Tesla, orchestrated a series of incidents in which alternating current was used to kill stray cats and dogs, and used alternating current to execute death row inmates.
To make people subconsciously aware of the harm of alternating current to public safety and household electricity safety, Tesla, which was not yet famous at that time, was certainly not up to the task of promoting alternating current under the leadership of Edison.
So he sold his patent to Westinghouse (a rival of Edison) at a high price, which was probably the most money Tesla made in his lifetime.
Malicious smudges can never mask the advantages of alternating current over direct current.
In 1893, Westinghouse Electric Corporation won the Chicago World's Fair lighting contract, and alternating current showed its superiority and reliability for the first time, and eventually became the standard for American electricity.
It was Tesla's most pragmatic, greatest human achievement, and the most exciting part of its first half. From the beginning of his invention of the world's first electric car to today, Tesla's technological development has undergone a long and tortuous process. From the original alternator to later supercapacitors, to today's lithium batteries. After alternating current, Tesla likes to spend its time on ideas that seem to come to mind by feeling, some of which have come to fruition and others that still seem whimsical.
As Tesla pursued these wild ideas, it missed the Nobel Prize twice.
On the basis of high-voltage high-frequency transformers (commonly known as Tesla coils), Tesla pioneered the concept of wireless power transmission and radio transmission of information.
In 1891, he publicly displayed his Tesla coil in a lecture hall at Columbia University in New York. He was wearing a black coat with a black striped band on top and a blue piece of conductive fiber fabric underneath, which is now the Tesla coil. When an electric current passes through these wires, a strange light is generated. The voltage of two hundred and fifty thousand volts surrounded his body with an "electric aura" and ignited the fluorescent tube in his hand in the air.
This phenomenon fascinated Tesla, who spent the rest of his life making wireless lighting and the transmission of wireless power over long distances.
In one experiment, he used a light-emitting tube to illuminate the camera's camera-sensitive film in the box, exposing the film, which Tesla discovered, believing that something had penetrated the box, but without further investigation, concluded that it was caused by unknown particles.
Later, Röntgen discovered the same phenomenon and won the Nobel Prize for discovering highly penetrating X-rays. But in those days, people didn't know that there was a ray that could pass through metal and glass, and not even Röntgen rays. In 1879, Röntgen discovered the first rays that could pass through the shell of matter, X-rays. Tesla's research on X-rays was destroyed in a fire in 1895.
The radio signal transmission he had originally predicted was later abandoned in favor of a focus on wireless power transmission, which was apparently much easier, and eventually in 1899 was first transmitted from England to the other side of the ocean by Marconi. After the birth of radio technology, he invented a series of devices and methods to solve the problems encountered in people's daily lives, such as telephones, television, radios, etc.; at the same time, it also brought great benefits to mankind. He won the Nobel Prize and became the father of radio.
It can be said that it is the Tesla coil that has ruined Tesla's future research, and if the possibility of the wireless power brought by the Tesla coil is not so great, Tesla may come up with something useful.
It was Tesla that made him poor and began to pursue the dream of transmitting electricity over long distances. By 1901, he was already in financial trouble and was looking everywhere for help, hoping someone would fund him. Tesla eventually persuaded Morgan, who was worth billions at the time, to build the Walden Clifford Tower.
The 60-meter-tall tower is actually an enlarged version of Tesla's coils, which does nothing but create amazing artificial lightning and scares people.
As radio signal transmission grew and matured, Morgan abandoned Tesla, which was not only no longer capable of conducting research, but also saddled with a debt burden. In order to bring greater benefits to Tesla, Morgan, with the help of Tesla, built a super antenna with a height of 30 meters and a diameter of 12 meters, and successfully installed it on the car. The tower was eventually demolished.
In his later years, Tesla lived in isolation, struggling to maintain a break even, and of course, unable to pursue his dreams. But Tesla is not fighting alone, but in a team of several people, only one of whom is a doctor and the other three are from different countries: China, the United States and Canada. In such an environment. He said he had basically no friends and didn't associate with anyone. He was thought to be suffering from a serious mental illness and always said things that people did not understand at the time.
He proposed not practical inventions, but things ahead of its time, such as his prediction of the earliest mobile communications, modern mobile phones, which people could put in their pockets for remote communication.
In addition, Tesla claimed that radio waves could detect objects (later known as radar, autopilot, and weapons made with particle accelerators) that could emit death rays and destroy enemy forces in an instant.
You can see that they have gone too far, but now it seems that they have basically achieved this goal. He said his understanding and research of radio waves all started with radio broadcasting, so radio broadcasting is the most promising. But he believed that radio broadcasting was only a fantasy, not a reality. What is the real use of radio broadcasting? The only thing that is impossible is what he says about wireless power transmission.
Later in life, Tesla lived in a hotel in New York, where his former employer, Westinghouse, paid his rent and a monthly "consulting fee" of $125. At that time, Tesla did not realize that he would be abandoned, and he always had a yearning for a better life in his heart, hoping to get help from others. But in that era, he didn't get any help at all. Until Tesla's death, calling it a consulting fee was a kindness.
Tesla died in 1943 at the New Yorker At the age of 86. He is a well-known American physicist, engineer and inventor, known as "one of the greatest inventions in the world", and the founder of modern physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. There was no one around him when he died, because he had never been married in his life, there were rumors that Tesla was not interested in women, and some people said that Tesla had pursued his ideals all his life, thinking that women had disturbed her thoughts.
He was discovered by a maid two days after Tesla's death, and doctors diagnosed him with a heart attack.
There is no doubt that Tesla was a pure inventor who ushered in a new electrical era for mankind, he owned hundreds of patents in his lifetime, he was a lightweight man, he was not a sophisticated businessman like Edison, but a solitary person, so he did not give a very good impression. However, in the eyes of Americans, Tesla is a great figure: he invented batteries and electric vehicles, making important contributions to the world automobile industry; he created a new way of life - Tesla-style life. That's why we always hear about Edison, but rarely hear about Nikola Tesla.
So he left a lot of folklore. Some say it was Nikola Tesla's large electric tower that caused the Tunguska explosion. It is also said that Tesla discovered the resonance frequency of the Earth and was able to destroy it with its large electric tower.
These are hearsay and incorrect rumors. But his invention has written a strong mark in the history of world science and technology! His name was Marie Curie. One of the secrets of Marie Curie's success is her persistent pursuit and unremitting exploration of science. He was an inventor who lived in a relatively indifferent state of fame and fortune.
Apparently, Elon Musk, the most prolific entrepreneur and engineer today, is a big fan of Tesla.