“One day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheelwork of the universe… and the very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery,“
Inventor Nikola Tesla was born in July of 1856, in what is now Croatia. He came to the United States in 1884 and briefly worked with Thomas Edison before the two parted ways.
In 1887, He was able to find interest in his AC electrical system and funding for his new Tesla Electric Company. By the end of the year, Tesla had successfully filed several patents for AC-based inventions.
Tesla’s AC system eventually caught the attention of American engineer and business man George Westinghouse, who was seeking a solution to supplying the nation with long-distance power. Convinced that Tesla’s inventions would help him achieve this, in 1888 he purchased his patents for $60,000 in cash and stock in the Westinghouse Corporation. As interest in an alternating-current system grew, Tesla and Westinghouse were put in direct competition with Thomas Edison, who was intent on selling his direct-current system to the nation. A negative-press campaign was soon waged by Edison, in an attempt to undermine interest in AC power. Tesla, for his part, continued in his work and would patent several more inventions during this period, including his 1891 invention, the “Tesla coil,” which laid the foundation for wireless technologies and is still used in radio technology today.
Tesla died in New York City on January 7, 1943.
Tesla’s experiments showed that there was a radiant energy field – present everywhere – it just needed the right equipment to extract this energy (and sometimes you needed to put energy in to a system to make the radiant energy “visible”.
Niagara falls famously used generators which were originally designed by Tesla.
