Tesla-
Prophet of Modern Lighting

By DR. S. G. Hibben

During this year the electrical fraternity is honoring the 100th anniversary of one of its greatest inventors, pioneers and prophets, Nikola Tesla. Some seventy years have been required to realize, in perspective, how much we owe this prodigal genius for his basic discoveries leading to modern transmission and utilization of power, including, with emphasis, the production of light.

An appreciation of Tesla is long over-due! But because he was a modest retiring bachelor, with no organized interest in publicity or appetite for praise, and because many of his studies and dreams were too far ahead of his time to be understood or commercialized, he has to a strange degree remained the unknown pioneer. Tesla deserves great honor for his work with alternating currents, especially of higher frequencies and voltages, and for unique beginnings in the fields of what today we term electronic or wireless transmission, radio, gaseous conductor lamps, fluorescence and ionization, and the modern fluorescent lamp.

Tall, gaunt, Jugoslav-born immigrant, brilliantly developing after a thorough education in Gratz, Vienna, Budapest, and Paris, Tesla came to New York in 1885 to join Thomas Edison in improving direct current machinery. This he emphatically did. But Tesla envisioned the far-reaching power potentials of alternating current so, leaving Edison, he rapidly patented the fundamentals of the rotating electric fields, the split-phase and polyphase induction motor, the methods of transmitting power to long distances and such related discoveries as, for instance, made the hydro-electric plants at Niagara Falls practical.

Where Edison produced an incandescent lamp, Tesla gave the industry the practical method of bringing power to burn it. When Westinghouse pioneered with alternating current generators at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893 and Niagara Falls in 1895, it was through the use of Tesla's rotating field patents of 1888 and of his voltage transformers that the electric power era really, dawned. After Maxwell and Hertz presented the electromagnetic theory of light, and demonstrated the vast gamut of wavelengths, Tesla some fifteen years latter, and onward for half a century, showed how to produce and apply ultra high frequency energy to signaling, guided rockets, therapeutics and long-distance communication.

When electrostatic and spark-gap phenomena were demonstrated in his Greenwich Village laboratory or at famous lectures before the A.I.E.E. and at noted universities here and in Europe, Tesla dreamed of world-wide radio, and with dramatic experiments he unraveled many mysteries of lightning, static charges and high frequency tuned circuits. The useful “Tesla Coil” is a well-known product of his originality. He had a solar heat furnace before Abbott, and his induction heating ideas were a half-century ahead of yesterday's practices. Synchronous motors and the electric clock are but two of his contributions to today's better living.

But when we follow his studies - and working experiments - of phosphors and of fluorescent materials and of discharges in low pressure gases (he gave explanations of molecular and atomic phenomena and remote control or guided missiles, etc., years ago), the wonder is why today's fluorescent, sodium, and mercury lamps were so slow to hatch into commercial illuminants!

Through the kaleidoscopic years of the early part of this century, Tesla, oblivious to fame and money, was truly prodigal in demonstrating - then, too often dropping - idea after idea, including light sources operating without filaments. He showed the methods of getting light from neon, carbon dioxide and mercury vapors, and though he lacked today's electronic oscillator or magnetron tubes, yet with pressures on the order of 100,000 to 4,000,000 volts and frequencies beyond 200,000 cycles, often from resonant circuits and capacitor discharges through spark-gaps, he led far along the road that we are traveling today.

For instance, he predicted and demonstrated wireless power for generating “cold” light, and such devices as the electroluminescent plates - still to be perfected today.

If all other basic contributions of Tesla be omitted, he should be famous for the standardization of 60-cycle power; for proving that the incandescent method of generating light was but a first step toward the future better methods; and for demonstrating how high frequency electric excitation of atoms can result in creating higher frequency oscillations, or radiant energies called “light.”

Nikola Tesla has for much too long been the lighting fraternity's “forgotten man.” It is appropriate that he be now honored.

Author: Chairman, Historical Committee, I.E.S.