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He basically was the creator of the AC current. It is the way
that electricity is transmitted around the world and all our
lights are working on this basic principle.
... and this way you can transmit power over much greater
distances than what you could with the direct current, which is
what Edison is possibly better known for. So with a DC current
you start off with a relatively high voltage in one place but
along the wire, very soon it diminishes to not being very
useful, so there's a much bigger loss of electrical energy in DC
current.
...the energy comes from the movement, so it doesn't matter that
the movement is not in one direction. His cleverness was to
combine this with a moving magnetic field and this way you could
extract the energy from these electrons. In fact, Edison argued
that you will never create a motor based on an AC current, but
Edison was wrong and Tesla was right and now you have electrical
motors based on AC currents
He died alone and poor, but he was a man who played by his own
rules. He was interested in invention and providing a legacy for
mankind. He was not really interested in making money for
himself. He would do things like measure the volume of food
before he would eat it. Very strange. He had a preoccupation
with the number three, and the physicists around the world are
familiar with some of his eccentricities. We know with
characters like that we have to be careful not to judge them by
our own standards. He worked on a different level to the rest of
us. Many people saw him as a cash cow. They used up his ideas to
make money for themselves. He said, 'The present is for others,
the future is for myself.' A remarkable approach. Was he a
tragic character or is that our projection on him?
... he was an extraordinarily creative man and we owe him a
great deal. There's a quote from him dated at 1900 where he
talked about basically what we now call the cell phone. He could
see that such communication of information wirelessly was one
day going to be possible using such small phones.
In school I never heard of Tesla at all.
And when I did hear about him, I was intrigued by the mystery
about him. There are several reasons why Tesla is not well
known. One was that he was a man who never married and had
children. He never worked for universities or for corporations.
He was very independent. And he was so far ahead of his time, so
much a visionary, that his contemporary scientists really didn't
understand what he was doing. The Smithsonian Institution has
never adequately credited Tesla for his invention of radio. They
have tended to call Marconi the "father of radio," and they have
tended to give Edison credit for Tesla's work in alternating
current, although Edison didn't work in that area at all. So,
there are many reasons why we have not learned as much as we
should about Tesla.
Tesla was a visionary genius. There aren't
many of them. And he was willing to give his life to his
visions. And for that reason he probed deeply into the secrets
of nature and gave us the contributions that he did.
Tesla was a genius because
way before anybody knew or even understood the
earth and what we call today the ionosphere, which
is a layer of ionized particles about 80
kilometres above the earth, he conceived it, and
he tried to use it to produce a variety of new
concepts.
Tesla is extremely underrated. I mean, there
are a lot of people that don't know Tesla today.
And that includes physicists, I would say.
Although the Tesla unit is extensively used, and
the Tesla coil which is one of his most ingenious
inventions, it's also extensively used.
>>> Dr. Dennis Papadopoulos Professor of
Physics, University of Maryland
To me, as a historian, I find Tesla
interesting because it was Tesla and five or six other people
who, if you like, created the electrical age, the power age, and
then lived on within it. ...In the mid to late 1870's, all of a
sudden, high power became available, the self-excited dynamo was
invented, and now we had something that could give us lots of
electricity and therefore the opportunity to use this in some
way. The way you used, it, primarily, was motors, and then
lighting, and this is what happened at the beginning of the
'80's... So now you had an electric power industry, and there
was Edison and there was Elihu Thompson and there was Nikola
Tesla, and a couple of other people... who through their efforts
created this new industry.
>>> Bernard Finn - Curator, Division of
Electricity and Modern Physics, National Museum of American
History
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