Tesla and the Polyphase Patents

By B. A. BEHREND.

In May, 1888, were granted to Nikola Tesla, from Smiljan Lika, border country of Austria-Hungary, a series of patents, which are commonly known as the fundamental Tesla patents. These patents expired on the 4th of May, 1905.

The genius of Tesla has been instrumental in stimulating, if not in creating, a wonderful industry — wonderful in magnitude, and wonderful in the ingenuity of the apparatus used in the accomplishing of the transmission of power over long distances.

Great ideas are rarely the exclusive property of individual men. The history of the evolution of thought shows distinctly that novel ideas arise in certain generations simultaneously in the minds of some of the most talented men whose personalities, as it were, thus represent the ideas and lend them their names; and so it has undoubtedly been with the ideas and inventions that form the basis of the polyphase system. The official sanction of the Patent Office, depending as it does as much upon the technicalities observed in wording the claims as upon the character and ingenuity of the invention itself, can hardly be taken as a criterion of the originality of the inventor. The function of the Patent Office is rather to be compared with the function assumed by the courts in recording deeds of property than as a scientific court passing upon the inventor's work. The paramount importance of the Patent Office lies in the fact that, as no property can be rightfully owned without a deed therefor, no man can use his ideas and inventions without obtaining a deed, which deed we call a letters patent. You may use your ideas without such letters patent only to find that some one else, by applying for and securing such patent after you have put out your invention, has secured the deed from the Patent Office.

But we are not concerned here with the philosophy of patent law and the existing conditions — we want to pay a tribute to Nikola Tesla, the ingenious inventor who, by a "sort of glorified common sense and unfailing intuition, picked his way through puzzling mazes of complicated phenomena, and protected himself from the pitfalls and the alluring by paths ensnaring smaller intellects." With Nikola Tesla, in this country and in Europe, worked a host of capable and ingenious engineers, and their work, vivified by the ingenuity of Tesla's inventions, has become one of the greatest monuments of engineering achievement crowning the work of the nineteenth century. Let us turn our attention for a moment to Tesla's remarkable paper, entitled "A New System of Alternate-Current Motors and Transformers," read at the meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, in New York, on May 16, 1888.. This paper, even when considered in the light of subsequent discoveries and knowledge, is one of the most brilliant pieces of engineering thought, teeming with suggestions and ideas, animated with an intuition of the highest order, and giving an exposition of the working of the induction motor in a manner which resembles the methods pursued in the "Experimental Researches on Electricity," of the great master, Michael Faraday.

For seventeen years, the Tesla patents have formed the nucleus of the electrical industry. Through plenty of litigation and decisions they have survived, as all things survive the struggles of this world, only to expire, and it must be said that the expiration of these patents is looked upon in general as a very happy event. We do not wish to say that the monopoly which these patents created has been abused; we do not wish to say that the progress in this field has not been as vigorous as it would have been had the patents not been quite so sweeping; the field is so wide and the desire for vigorous competition so strong, that the expiration of these patents will give the electrical industry a new stimulus, and it must be borne in mind that, after all, these patents do not represent the only valuable ideas on the subject of polyphase alternating-current systems. Many are the inventions and ideas which have been originated by others, and which have made the polyphase system practicable. We all know how great is the difference between mere ideas, which are as plentiful as blackberries, and the working out of these ideas into practical form, which often requires the expenditure of as much genius as was required for the evolution of the idea itself. Ideas appear to me to be somewhat like what Darwin called "variations," from which, by a process of selection, those ideas are singled out which can hold their own, and are developed into practical form, while the greater number of ideas are cast aside, unfit, condemned to be destroyed in the struggle for existence. AND ENGINEER. VOL. XLV, No. 18.

Nikola Tesla and his patents have had their day; the art of electrical engineering, the capital invested therein, the users of polyphase electrical machinery, all are grateful to Nikola Tesla and to those who have developed his ideas.