Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA transmission and improvements to earlier inventions. Towards the bottom of the pile was a heavy folder which dealt with such inventions as 'a novel method of and apparatus for producing light by means of electricity'. That sounded interesting. I pulled out the patent and began to read. What Tesla had done was to pump out almost all the gas from a glass globe. By applying high-frequency current at high voltage, the sort of thing he could produce with his coil, he found that the gas inside would glow. Tesla mentioned that for light to be produced there did not even need to be a completed circuit between the bright globe and the electrical generator. Today we would understand that a high-frequency field had been induced in the globe, but I imagine that such a phenomenon must have mystified Tesla's friends in the nineteenth century. I opened another file and my eye was caught by a patent for an 'Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy'. This one was dated November 5, 1901, and Tesla now described himself as 'a citizen of the United States, residing at the borough of Manhattan'. I recalled from my undergraduate physics that during the last decade of the nineteenth century there had been considerable interest in the mysterious radiation produced in cathode tubes. It had variously been called cathodic and roentgen radiation. Scientists had asked themselves if this phenomenon was a new type of radiation or, on the other hand, a beam of tiny particles. According to the patent, Tesla decided on the latter. My own experiments and observations, however, lead me to conclusions more in accord with the theory heretofore advanced by me that sources of such radiant energy throw off with great velocity minute particles of matter which are strongly electrified... Tesla then went on to suggest that these beams of charged particles could be used to control electrical machines by acting as an ultra-high-speed switch. Clearly, Tesla was not only a scientist at the forefront of knowledge but an inventor, seeing practical advantages in each new discovery, no matter how exotic it might be. In addition to a box piled full of patents on generators, motors and elec41 111
