Nikola Tesla - Heroj Tehnike (Technical Hero) Page 37

Only a short time after Tesla's death, the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of June 21, 1943, annulled Marconi's 1904 patent, which had been granted to him in error by the Patent Office in Washington.

For the history of radio engineering, this decision of the Supreme Court of the United States is of decisive importance, for it definitively establishes that “tuned wireless telegraphy,” based on the principle of “four resonant circuits,” was the work of Nikola Tesla.

In the court’s ruling we find another important statement, namely that Tesla had already proposed in a lecture in 1893 “that high-frequency oscillations, which can be adjusted to different wavelengths, be used for the wireless transmission of signals.”

That Tesla did not merely present this proposal, but had at that time also realized it experimentally, is evidenced by a lecture of the Russian scientist and inventor A. S. Popov, delivered in January 1900 before the First All-Russian Electrotechnical Congress, in which it is stated that in 1893 Tesla experimentally achieved wireless telegraphy by means of a transmitting and receiving station, in which an antenna and a ground connection were used for the first time in the history of radio engineering.

It is interesting how Tesla arrived at his discoveries. In the journal American Magazine of April 1921, he stated:

When an idea came to me to invent something, I would carry that idea in my mind for months and years. From time to time my imagination would work, and I would reflect upon it, but without special concentration. That was the period of incubation. Then followed the period of direct effort. I carefully sought all possible solutions to the problem. I reflected and concentrated all my attention on the narrow field of my investigation.