Nikola Tesla Books
2 In 1885, George Westinghouse, head of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh bought the patent rights to Tesla's polyphase system of alternating current dynamos, transformers and motors and this started the great struggle between the direct current systems of Edison and the TeslaWestinghouse alternating current approach. Westinghouse eventually won out. The Tesla coil which Tesla invented in 1891 is widely used today in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment. In the period from 1899 to 1900, Tesla stayed in Colorado Springs where he made one of his most important discoveries. This was terrestrial stationary waves. In this discovery, he proved that the earth could be used as a conductor and would be as responsive as a tuning fork to electrical vibrations of a certain pitch. He also lighted 200 lamps without wires from a distance of 25 miles and created man-made lightning producing flashes measuring 135 feet. He was very futuristic in his prophecies and like Darwin of the same period he was ridiculed for them. In 1900 he wrote: - "In the near future we shall see a great many new uses of electricity... .....we shall be able to disperse fogs by electric force and powerful and penetrative rays.... wireless plants will be installed for the purpose of illuminating the oceans.....picture transmission by ordinary telegraphic methods will soon be achieved.. another valuable novelty will be a typewriter electrically operated by the human voice.....we will have smoke annihilators, dust .absorbers, sterilizers of water, air, food and clothing.....it will become next to impossible to contract disease germs and country folk will go to town to rest and get well..... "If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations. The inevitable conclusion is that water power is by far our most valuable resource. On this humanity must build its hopes for the future. With its full development and a perfect system of wireless transmission of the energy to any distance man will be able to solve all the problems of material existence. Distance, which is the chief impediment to human progress, will be completely annihilated in thought, word, and action. Humanity will be united, wars will be made impossible, and peace will reign supreme."
