Nikola Tesla Essay

Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Croatia on July 9, 1856. He attended the Polytechnic

School at Graz For 4 years and spent a year at the University of Prague (1879-1880).

His first employment was in a government telegraph engineering office in Budapest, where he made his first invention, a telephone repeater, and conceived the idea of a rotating magnetic field. He subsequently worked in Paris and Strasbourg.

In 1884 Tesla went to the United States. He was associated briefly with Thomas Edison in New Jersey, where he designed new dynamos, but the two had a salary misunderstanding and Tesla withdrew. After a difficult period, during which Tesla invented but lost his rights to an arc- lighting system, he established his own laboratory in New York City in 1887.

A controversy between alternating-current and direct-current advocates raged in the

1880s and 1890’s featuring Tesla and Edison as leaders in the rival camps. The advantages of the Polyphase alternating-current system, as developed by Tesla, soon became apparent, however, particularly for` long-distancepower transmission. Assisted by George

Westinghouse, an early convert to alternating current and Tesla's employer for a year, the system was adopted in the early 1890s for both a major power project Nikola

Brilliant and eccentric, Tesla was then at the peak of his inventive powers. He produced in rapid succession the induction motor (utilizing his rotating magnetic field principle) and other electrical motors, new forms of generators and transformers, and a system for alternating-current power transmission; later he invented the Tesla coil and made basic discoveries concerning wireless communication. Tesla also invented fluorescent lights and ...

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...sla, to create a death mask (now displayed in the Nikola Tesla Museum).

On 9 January, after learning of Tesla's death, the FBI ordered the Alien Property Custodian to seize all

Of Tesla's belongings, even though Tesla was an American citizen.Tesla's entire estate from the

Hotel New Yorker and other New York City hotels was transported to the Manhattan Storage and

Warehouse Company under OAP seal.

Dr. John G. Trump, a professor at M.I.T. and well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide

To the National Defense Research Committee, was called in to analyze the Tesla items in OAP custody, to look for any material that could be sensitive in nature in relationship to the ongoing war at the time. After a three-day investigation, Trump concluded in his report that there was nothing that would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating: