Nikola Tesla Vs Thomas Alva Edison
The nineteenth century was a time of great inventors and great inventions. Also, Thomas Edison became one of the best-known and most admired inventors in history.
Nikola Tesla is arguably less famous. Recently he has gained renewed attention for the electric car company that bears his name. In 1884, when Tesla was 28, he left for New York with only four cents in his pocket.
On the way, their money and some of their belongings were stolen. Like other immigrants, Tesla also came to America in connection with work. He was hired as an engineer at the Edison Machine Works in Manhattan.
Tesla praised Edison, saying: “One of the great events of my life was my first meeting with Edison. This wonderful man, who had received no scientific training, yet had achieved so much, surprised me. filled with.”
Edison was also impressed by the young engineer, telling an assistant: “… this is a very nice man!” However, it didn’t take long for things to turn sour, as the two men disagreed on how electricity should be delivered to the masses.
In 1879, Edison created the first practical incandescent lightbulb and then built a system to carry electricity so that people could use his new invention. He opened his first power plant in New York in 1882, supported by a direct current electrical system known as DC.
A network of underground cables will deliver electricity from generators to homes and businesses. But his DC generator kept failing. So he hired a young Serbian engineer to repair them.
Tesla saw the weaknesses of direct current that travels through a power line in one direction at a constant voltage. But there is a significant drawback: it can only go a mile before losing power. Tesla thought he had come up with a better solution: alternating current.
AC changes direction from time to time and can also change its voltage. The significant advantage is that it can travel hundreds of miles without losing power.
Yet when Tesla tried to convince Edison about the benefits of AC, his boss didn’t have it. Edison did not want to lose the royalties he earned from his DC patent.
Tesla claimed that Edison had promised him $50,000 if he could improve his DC generator and when he did, Edison refused to pay and is said to have replied: “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor”.
So Tesla wrote in his diary after just a few months on the job: “Good-by Edison Machine Works”. Tesla set out on his hope of finding investors interested in his concept for an AC motor, which he patented. Still, he fought.
Alternating current was a completely new technology. Nothing that no one had ever seen before. He even had to resort to digging a ditch for some time to survive. But there was one person who gave him a chance.
Entrepreneur George Westinghouse saw the potential of its. He believed that AC was the missing link in long-distance power transmission. So he bought Tesla’s AC patent for $60,000 and offered him a royalty of $2.50 for each horsepower of Tesla stock and electricity sold.
The cost of all these today is in lakhs. Edison did everything possible to discredit Tesla’s AC system so that DC was the preferred choice for power homes.
He found an ally at JPMorgan, the most powerful banker in America at the time. This would lead to the birth of General Electric. The fight against Tesla and Westinghouse is now known as the War of the Currents.
And in many ways, it was a propaganda war started by Edison to try to convince the public that AC was dangerous. He drew attention to the fact that alternating current operates at a much higher voltage than direct current.
When New York State hired an electrician named Harold Brown to make an electric chair, Edison paid him behind the scenes to use his rival’s AC generator, secured through a second-hand dealer.
Brown also used AC to electrocute dogs in Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey, which Edison recalled in his published articles: “I found myself stabbing a large healthy dog with alternating current. Is.”
The other animals were not untouched by his plans. Edison’s company used AC to current a circus elephant named Topsy and made a film on it. His anti-AC crusade may or may not have come from a genuine concern about security.
He wrote a letter warning the president of his electric light company about the dangers of AC, declaring: “As death is certain, Westinghouse will be able to supply a customer within six months after putting in a system of any size.” will kill.”
Certainly, there were many accidental deaths due to high AC voltages in New York and many other cities in the late 1880s. In one incident, the body of telegraph lineman John Feeks was left hanging in tangled wires in front of a horrific crowd.
His death led to legislation in New York City to make AC lines underground. Tesla realized that the only way to make the AC appear safe was to display it on itself.
In a theatrical performance at Columbia University, he held a brass ball in each hand and touched the terminals of a high-voltage, high-frequency transformer, now known as a Tesla coil. 250,000 volts ran across the surface of his body.
One newspaper reported that he was surrounded by “… a tongue of electric flame”. In 1893, Tesla and Westinghouse won a major victory when they defeated Edison to light the Chicago World’s Fair using alternating current. The first all-electric fair in history.
Three years later, Tesla illuminated downtown Buffalo using AC motors powered by the waters of Niagara Falls. This was Tesla’s childhood dream. As a child, he saw an image of a waterfall and told his uncle that one day, he would go to America and capture the energy of Niagara.
The first hydroelectric power plant in Niagara Falls will mark the beginning of the electrification of the world. When he gave a speech at the opening ceremony, Tesla said: “It is a monument worthy of our scientific age…” “It is a symbol of the submission of natural forces to the service of man, the cessation of barbaric methods, the relief of Millions of people want to give and with pain.”
Today, almost every home in the world is powered by AC while DC powers small objects, anything that uses batteries: from your electric toothbrush to the clock on the wall.
Despite AC’s success, Tesla never reaped the fame and fortune that Edison had. Because Edison was not the only inventor.
He was a businessman, honed his craft at the age of 13 when he began selling candy, newspapers, and vegetables on trains, and made an amazing profit of $50 a week in his day – about $1,600 today.
Edison may have made a different choice when faced with the challenging situation facing Tesla. The War of the Currents took a financial toll on Westinghouse, whose company took on millions of dollars in debt.
When Westinghouse begged Tesla to lower its royalty rate to save the company, Tesla did more than just that. He broke his contract – giving up his royalties altogether.
It’s estimated that Tesla voluntarily walked away with $12 million in royalties back in its day, which would have been worth more than $300 million today. Those royalties were so valuable that they would have earned them over time to turn Tesla into the world’s first billionaire.
In return, Westinghouse paid him a lump sum of $216,000 for the right to use his AC patent forever, which is about $5 million today. Tesla’s decision would hurt him greatly because he lacked the cash to fund his other grand ideas.
He had found that his powerful coil made it possible to send and receive radio signals. But in 1895, his New York laboratory building caught fire as he was about to transmit a signal 50 miles to West Point, New York.
The fire destroyed everything: its models, designs, notes, and equipment. The timing was dire because Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi was also developing radios in England, sending Morse-code-based signals.
Tesla still managed to defeat Marconi in 1897 by filing the first US patent for the radio. When Marconi tried to do the same a few years later, the US Patent Office turned him down because he was too similar to Tesla. Repeated applications were rejected.
But Marconi attracted the attention of none other than Edison, who invested in him and became a consulting engineer at Marconi’s company. The Italian’s greatest achievement came in 1901 when he received the first radio signal sent across the Atlantic from a transmitter in southwest England to St John’s in Newfoundland, eastern Canada.
This brought Marconi international fame. And he had to use Tesla’s patent to achieve it. But Tesla didn’t mind. When one of his engineers said: “Looks like Marconi jumped on you.” Tesla replied: “Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue.
He’s using seventeen of my patents.” Unfortunately, none of the patents are really protected. In 1904, the Patent Office inexplicably decided to rewrite history by granting Marconi a patent for the invention of the radio, its reversed earlier decisions.
It did not give any reason. But it didn’t hurt that Marconi had the financial backing of Edison and other influential people. In 1909, Marconi won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the radio. Tesla was furious.
and sued the Marconi Company for infringement. The radio incident caused Tesla to lose business opportunities. For example, Tesla had a grand vision for wireless electricity. His proposal initially caught the attention of JPMorgan who invested $150,000 in 1901 to build a giant transmission tower.
Tesla believed that the 187-foot, 57-meter-tall Wardencliffe Tower in Long Island, New York was the beginning of a system that could deliver electricity without wires around the world. And anyone with the right equipment can tap into it.
He envisioned a scenario where “…it would be possible for a businessman in New York to dictate instructions, and he would have to immediately type them into his office in London or elsewhere.”
It was incredibly retrospective to imagine a telecommunications infrastructure like the Internet of today more than a century ago. But Tesla’s vision will never bear fruit. Electricity can indeed be transmitted through the air but this is impractical due to the amount of power needed to do so.
Therefore, Tesla appealed to Morgan for more money. It was all zero. Morgan was throwing money in the other direction towards Marconi. Wardencliffe Tower was never completed and would eventually be demolished, with Tesla’s vision.
Tesla was devastated and broken, lamenting: “This is not a dream. This is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only a costly-blind, faint-hearted, doubting world!” Tesla began to withdraw from that world.
She showed signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which forced her to commit to three, including living in a hotel room that was divisible by the number three. He spent the last decade of his life living out of a hotel paid for by the Westinghouse Corporation, which hired him as a consultant.
He was broken. And made friends with pigeons. Edison on the other hand continued to receive immense rewards. Businesses and partnerships filled his life. By the time he died in 1931, he had patented a record 1,093 inventions.
The lightbulb, sure, but so was the motion picture camera, and the early record player called the phonograph. Today – he is considered one of the greatest inventors in the world. It was only after Tesla’s death that he received a modest degree of justice for all he had lost.
When Tesla sued Marconi, the case went to court for years. Six months after his death in 1943, the US Supreme Court invalidated Marconi’s radio patent and awarded the radio patent to Tesla. But there was a selfish reason to do so.
During World War I, Marconi’s company sued the US government for patent infringement. So to avoid trial altogether, the Supreme Court recognized Tesla as the inventor of the radio.
Today, on the spot where Tesla’s Wardencliffe Tower once stood, there’s a science museum dedicated to the man who didn’t dream it was meant to be. The Tesla Science Center was made possible thanks to the financial backing of thousands of Tesla fans, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Tesla’s prediction of transmitting data without wires in the early nineties came true.
0 Comments