Nikola Tesla Essay -- essays research papers

Nikola Tesla Few people recognize his name today, and even among those who do, the words Nikola Tesla are likly to summon up the image of a crackpot rather than an authentic scientist. Nikola Tesla was possibly the greatest inventor the world has ever known. He was, without doubt, a genius who is not only credited with many devices we use today, but is also credited with astonishing, sometimes world-transforming, devices that are even simply amazing by todays scientific standards. Tesla was born at precisely midnight between July 9th and 10th, 1856, in a small Hungarien village. He was born to his father, a priest, and his mother, an unschooled but extremely intelligent women. Training for an engineering career, he attendedthe Technical University of Graz, Austria and was shortly employed in a government telegraph engineering office in Budapest, where he made his first invention, a telephone repeater. Tesla sailed to America in 1884, arriving in New York City with four cents in his pocket, and many great ideas in his head. He first found employment with a young Thomas Edison in New Jersey, but the two inventors, were far apart in background and methods. But, because of there differences, Tesla soon left the employment of Edison, and in May 1885, George Westinghouse, head of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh, bought the patent rights to many of Tesla's inventions. After a difficult period, during which Tesla invented but lost his rights to many inventions, he established his own laboratory in New York City in 1887, where his inventive mind could be free. In 1895, Tesla discovered X-rays after hours upon hours of experimentation. Tesla's countless experiments included work on different power sources and various types of lightning. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is widely used today in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment for wireless communication. That year also marked the date of Tesla's United States citizenship. Brilliant and eccentric, Tesla was then at the peak of his inventive powers. He managed to produce new forms of generators, transformers, he invented the fluorescent light, and he became extremely involved with the wireless transmission of power. During the 1880a and 1890's Tesla and Edison became rivals, fighting to develop there inventions as quickly as possible. In 1915 he was severely disappoin... ...ever existed and declared others as "lost". Was he working on particle weapons and cloaking devices for the United States Government when he died? Was Reagan's Strategic Defense program known as "starwars" the result of secret research based on Tesla's discoveries half a century before? Nikola Tesla allowed himself only a few close friends. Among them were the writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, and Francis Marion Crawford. In his later years, Tesla was alone with only his inventions and calculations, although he did bred pigeons later in life, who he gave all the affection to that he was unable to give human beings. Telsa's name holds over 700 patents. Tesla died privately and peacefully at 87 on January 7, 1943 New York hotel room from no apparent cause in particular. Hundreds filed into New York City's Cathedral of St.John for his funeral services, and a flood of messages acknowledged the loss of a great genius. Three Nobel Prize winners in physics (Millikan, Compton, and W.H. Barton) addressed their tributes. One of the outstanding intellects of the world who paved the way for many of the technological developments of modern times, Nikola Tesla.