Nikola Tesla Quotes - Page 3
But we shall not satisfy ourselves simply with improving steam and explosive engines or inventing new batteries; we have something much better to work for, a greater task to fulfill. We have to evolve means for obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever.
March, 1897Source:
I expect to live to be able to set a machine in the middle of this room and move it by the energy of no other agency than the medium in motion around us.
May 3rd, 1896
More than 35 years ago, I undertook the production of these phenomena (of lightning) and, in 1899 I actually succeeded, using a generator of 2,000 horsepower, in obtaining discharges of 18,000,000 volts carrying currents of 1,200 amperes, which were of such power as to be audible at a distance of 13 miles. I also learned how to produce such lightnings as occur in Nature, and mastered all the technical difficulties in this connection. But I found that even in the small and comparatively negligible trigger work called for the employment of thousands of horsepower; and this is the great obstacle now in the way of this supreme accomplishment.
December, 1933Source:
Had Tesla published the measuring methods he developed in New York and Colorado Springs, his name would probably be frequently encountered in earlier textbooks and handbooks on electrical measurements at high frequencies. As it is, we can only remark his exceptional ingenuity in designing measuring devices and the accuracy with which he determined the resonance of oscillatory circuits. An especially interesting feature is his method using a lamp already heated up by a supplementary power source, greatly increasing its sensitivity to small amplitude changes around the resonance peak of the oscillatory circuit.1978
It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering — only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world.
January 7th, 1905
I have hundreds of inventions which I could not take the patents of, on account of my misfortune.
All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed - only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle. Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs, the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
January 7th, 1905
Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them.
June, 1900
The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.
April 8th, 1934
What the result of these investigations will be the future will tell; but whatever they may be, and to whatever this principle may lead, I shall be sufficiently recompensed if later it will be admitted that I have contributed a share, however small, to the advancement of science.
June 22nd, 1888