Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 60

ciator put Teslat's manie the world's top scientists. Ĵ rom his invention sprang the ind astrial age we live in. For without his alternating current, there would be no mass production of automobiles, aircraft, refrigerators; no great water-power dams and generating plants, no Diesel-electric trains, we could not have developed radio, television or atomic power. The dort suricot that Edison worked with feeble force at best A could be sent no more than a couple of miles over wires because its power leaked away rapidly into the surrounding atmosphere. Lights near the power station might burn brightly and steadily, but those near the end of the line would be dim and fluttering. 1 Tesla sold his basic_alternatingcurrent patents in 1888, for a mitlion dollars down. By 1895, the first great power station at Stogara Falls had been built, and by the end of 18%, two more Tesla generators. had been installed. Within a few years, the pace of life over half the earth had changed from a crawl to a fast gallop and it has been gathsering speed ever since. TH MH by his brilliant idea of a “rotating m.renetic fickt," changed the face of the canh and the living habits of the Foun.m Face Was a Croat, born in 1857 in Smiljan, a village in what is now Yugoslavia, but was then part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire When he was about six, Nikole Tesha's father, the village priest, was transferred to a larger parisha in the city of Gospic. There, the Lad grew up and perfected his car-liest "inventions. Of these, his favorite was an "engine" powered by 16 June bugs, harnessed in sets of four to spokes which radiated from the drive shaft. Nikola was a frail lad, often ill; and he nearly went blind from foo much reading. He read everything he could get his hands on not only science but also religion, philosophy, history, literature. By the time he finished high school, he was fluent in French, German and Indian, as well as his native Serbo-Croat. He got his schooling the best his doting family could afford at Gospic, Carlstadt, Gratz, the University of Prague and, finally, t Budapest. At the University, he saw his first electric motor, a new type direct-current affair whose brushes and commutators sent out showers of crackling blue sparks. "If we got rid of those brushes and commutators, with all that noise and loss of energy, we'd have a much better motor," Nikola toid his professor. "Perhaps it might be done with an alternating current "Nonsense!" barked the profesSOT. An alternating current would never run anything. You're not the brilliant student I thought you were Torget it! But Tesla could not forget. The teacher's ridicule only stamped the idea indelibly on his brain. It be came an obsession, à passion how to make an alternating current drive a motor. In every idle moment, wherever he went, he wrestled with this problem. Tesla's mind had an unustral twist. Almost from infaney, he had been able to see things in his mind's y eso viv and in such minute detail that ofter he had trouble telling the real from the Timaginary. CORONE. I 60