Nikola Tesla and the Taming of Electricity

by Lisa J. Aldrich

Book Overview

Nikola Tesla's youth in Croatia was filled with adventures and inventions. A brilliant student, he took advantage of his uncanny ability to visualize complex machinery in his mind's eye, creating... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Library Binding
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193179846X
• ISBN13: 9781931798464
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Morgan Reynolds Publishing
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.2" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 12 to 15 years
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 10

Customer Reviews

The currency war was over. Alternating Current had won! AC would be taken to the world.

"So I practiced day by day from morning to till night. At first it called fro a vigorous mental effort directed against disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical. They are so today, and in this lies the secret of whatever success I have achieved." In his thirteenth year, Tesla describes visions, "And so I began to travel-of course in my mind. Every night, when alone, I would start on my journeys-see new places, cities and countries-live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations." In 1831, the English physicist Michael Faraday discovered that an electric circuit and a changing magnetic field would induce electricity to run through wiring. Tesla could build prototypes, diagrams, and equations in his mind. He could construct the inventions, make them work, determine what adjustments were necessary and only when all the defects had been perfected in his mind's eye did he build the actual apparatus. Telsa studied at Polytechnic School at Graz, Austria where he planned to become a mathematician. He studied arithmetic, geometry, calculus, theoretical and experimental physics, analytical chemistry, mineralogy, machinery construction, botany, wave theory, optics, French, and English. Telsa studied more than twenty hours a day and soon changed his major to engineering. When Telsa's physic professor Poeschl, demonstrated the dynamo, an electric generator capable of producing direct current, Tesla suspected that alternating current could be changed without using a commuter. Poeschl spent the remainder of the class explaining why the idea of doing away with the commuator was preposterious. Telsa spent the next four years trying to prove his professor wrong. In 1879, Telsa enrolled in the University of Prague, for one summer. Telsa began work at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, where he became aware of the inventions of Thomas Edison. Suffering a mental breakdown and later reciting a poem, a vision hit him and the answer to the alternating current problem: a new system he called a rotating magnetic field in which two or more electric currents are not synchronous but are out of phase, or step with each other. He could recreate a whirling field of energy by powering a motor whose magnetic coils were like the pistons in a car and cause the shaft of the motor to turn like a wheel, all using alternating current. In 1884, Paris, Edison Lighting Company, Charles Batchelor urged Telsa to go to America where the "grass and currency was greener." Telsa arrives in a time of great turmoil for Edison, who has invested heavily in direct current lighting of New York. "Weblike masses of crisscrossed wire were strong from pole erected along the streets. Copper tubing was placed in conduits dug under the streets...

Good Report of a Life that Should Have Been Better

Nikola Tesla was one of the unsung heros of the early days of electricity. A contemporary of and sometimes associate of Edison, he held a great many pivital patents in the area. Largely ignored during his lifetime, many of his inventions were used by other companies (Westinghouse, Edison, GE, Marconi) without acknowledgement or payment to Tesla. As a result Tesla died alone and broke. Eight months after his death the Supreme Court reviewed his earlier radio patents and ruled that he had indeed been the basic inventer of radio, not Marconi as is still commonly believed. Tesla is also remembered as a "way out" thinker. He worked for years on the transmission of power through the air rather than using wires - it didn't work. He was trying to build a death ray, the papers of which are held in a classified library at a U.S. defense research agency and are accessible only to members of the intelligence community - no one knows why they remain so closely guarded sixty years later. Tesla is a person who should be remembered better. This book is a welcome addition to the bookshelf.