Nikola Tesla - The Founder of High-Frequency and Radio Engineering Page 8

to resonant circuits, to loosely coupled high-frequency circuits, to the high-frequency arc lamp, and to other discoveries and inventions described in some twenty special patents and in three scientific lectures, which constitute the true basis of the entire high-frequency technique.

The results which Tesla experimentally demonstrated and published in his scientific lectures from 1891 to 1893¹ did not merely signify the creation of a new technique, named “the technique of high frequencies and high voltages,” but simultaneously opened a new field of scientific research that gave impetus to new conceptions regarding the nature of electricity. At the same time, Tesla’s results were proof of the accuracy of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of light, because the luminescence of evacuated tubes without electrodes in an electromagnetic field could only be explained by Maxwell’s theory, according to which electrical energy spreads through space in the form of electromagnetic waves. The famous English newspaper “The Times,” in its issue of 5 February 1892, described Tesla’s lecture in London, which he delivered before the greatest capacities of English science, such as Crookes, Thomson, et al., and among other things stated: “Tesla’s works are on the boundary where light, heat, electricity, chemical affinity, and other forms of energy meet and intermingle. When we reflect on his experiments, we feel that old barriers have fallen, and that the time is not far off when new and fruitful general views, upon which we shall enter a new field of discoveries, will become reality.”

Today it is a widely known fact that the new physics, which is based on the theory of electrons, quanta, relativity, and material waves, rejected the old understandings of ether and matter. To a great extent it was precisely these works of Tesla in the field of high-frequency phenomena and voltages that provided the immediate impetus for science to embark on a new path in electricity.

From a practical standpoint in the field of high-frequency technology, Tesla solved the following problems in his patents and scientific lectures:

1) The problem of the economical conversion of ordinary electrical energy

¹ The first lecture was held by Tesla on 20 May 1891 before the Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York; the second, on 3 and 4 February 1892, before the Academy of Sciences and the Engineering Society in London, which was repeated in March of the same year at the Physical Institute in Paris; and the third, at the end of February 1893, before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which was repeated on 1 March of the same year before the National Electric Light Association in St. Louis.