Nikola Tesla,The Great Visionary Of Electrical Engineering

Nikola Tesla,The Great Visionary Of Electrical Engineering

It is difficult to imagine today's world without the impulse of electricity. The networks that provide it to the subscribers owe much to Nikola Tesla, one of the pioneers of electrical engineering who, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, changed the way in which humanity had mostly used energy. However, Tesla's visionary and restless character propelled him to many other unexplored frontiers of science, which caused that instead of focusing on collecting benefits of practical inventions as his rival Thomas Edison did, he ended up losing himself in the darkness of his dreams. unattainable, located far beyond the technological horizon of its time.


That facet of Tesla, whose death was 75 years old in 2018, made him a kind of cursed genius, caused his economic decline from which he never managed to recover, marginalized him from the industry and even from many pages of history and enveloped him with a dense aura of mystery, which has inspired not a few urban legends and has even served as a raw material for science fiction novelists and screenwriters.


Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, a town in present-day Croatia that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is said that his birth occurred during a prodigal storm in lightning, which led the midwife to express her superstitious fear about the personality that the creature would have, calling it a “child of darkness”, a definition discarded in the act by the mother, who He described him to the midwife as a "child of the light." In a way, he was right because of the important role his son would have in perfecting electric light. Far from foreshadowing something bad, lightning, as a manifestation of electricity, coincidentally fit the professional link Nikola would have with it.

From brilliant student to technician with initiative:

Growing up, the child soon demonstrated his great intelligence. The family plans to guide him towards a professional future within the clerical estate, in which his father, or the military, was integrated, were discarded, in the face of Nikola's keen interest in science and technology. Your mother probably contributed decisively to that passion. Although she lacked formal scientific training, she possessed a remarkable talent for inventing and building artifacts designed to facilitate household chores at home. Nikola grew up watching her create those little technical wonders at home.


Nikola's childhood was overshadowed by the accidental death, at 12 years of age, of his older brother. The event affected him a lot psychologically and it seems that he left a mark on his personality as an adult.


After having been a brilliant student, who was not content with only what he was taught in each course but also acquired additional knowledge in a self-taught way, he went on to develop his professional activity as an employee in the telegraphy and telephony sector. On numerous occasions, he contributed innovative ideas to improve the technologies used and at the same time began to forge his own and ambitious projects to create new electrical technologies. Not achieving the necessary financial collaboration to complete his inventions, he settled in the United States in 1884, hoping to find better opportunities there. He had already been, because of studies or work, in various nations. His facility for languages ​​(he spoke up to eight) allowed him to move freely through them and was also very useful in his American stage, the longest and most productive.


In the United States he certainly found opportunities, but he also had to face setbacks, like the one that took him to work for a while digging trenches to survive.

The war of the currents:

Tesla's first opportunity in the United States was to be hired by Thomas Edison. He had already worked in France for one of his branches, and the excellent level he showed there opened the doors to collaborate with the famous American inventor.


However, the relationship between them soon became tense. Although they looked alike in quite a few things, even in details such as that both needed to sleep very few hours, they differed markedly in the way they approached the designs. Edison relied heavily on very long and tedious series of experiments, in order to directly verify all possibilities. Tesla preferred first to develop theoretical approaches that allowed him to select the most promising experiments to perform and discard the others.


The final collision between the two occurred at the dawn of the distribution of electricity to homes and establishments. Edison defended the sending of electricity in the form of direct current (in which the flow of electrons moves in the same direction, as in the case of electric batteries). Tesla defended the shipment in the form of alternating current (in which the flow of electrons changes between the two directions, typically tens of times per second). Edison's rejection of Tesla's method motivated him to stop working for him and become his competitor, thanks to the support of George Westinghouse, an entrepreneur and also an inventor from whom he obtained significant sums of money.

The competition between both electricity distribution systems reached very high levels of aggressiveness and in a way we can see it as a combat between Tesla and Edison. Each modality had its advantages and disadvantages, but the fact that the alternating current allowed an effective shipment of electricity from the generating plant at distances far greater than the possible ones with the continuous finally decanted the market in favor of the alternating one, which is what Today it arrives at our homes and workplaces.

From achievements to legends

In addition to its induction motor, Tesla invented and patented many other fundamental devices for alternating current. Among its more than one hundred main patents, there are innovations in many different fields, including that of electric lighting, where he made important contributions.


Some of their inventions were too advanced for their time and they were only able to profit later. For example, the remote control, which he demonstrated with a boat in 1898. The reaction of the public was a profound surprise. There were people who believed that a trained monkey was driving the vehicle from the inside, since the concept of radio control seemed impossible. Some people went further, attributing the wonder to an alleged telepathic power of Tesla, or even considering it the fruit of magic. However, the undoubted strategic value of the system was not taken advantage of even by the military establishment.


A small delay, sometimes even more motivated by bureaucracy than by the development of the technology from which to apply for a patent, can make a difference between who will go down in history for having invented something important and who will never be remembered for such a thing. The degree of improvement of the invention, and even factors such as the applicant's fame or contacts, can also contribute to that priority of one inventor over another. For his achievements with the radio, Tesla could have taken the place of Guillermo Marconi. Thanks to his work with X-rays and radiographs, he was also very close to occupying Wilhelm Röntgen's.


Some of Tesla's ideas were simply unworkable at the time and will still be for years, such as his system for transmitting energy wirelessly using radio waves, thus supplying electricity to all those buildings with the appropriate receiver. He spent a lot of money on it, but without getting promising results promising enough to attract the investors he needed. Other of his ideas were even more ambitious and did not reach much beyond mere theory. These projects, the spectacularness of his previous public demonstrations, the atmosphere of mystery that was created around him, his charisma as a genius of technology, his eccentric behavior and the solitude of his last years of life contributed to forge numerous legends about strange machines secretly built by him, that would be capable of formidable wonders; legends that, after passing away in 1943, could never be denied.