INDIVIDUAL PROJECT

DAVID BRYAN CUBING LAO
2013-52731

The Masterpiece of the Unappreciated Scientist

            Have you ever imagined what it would be like without electric sockets?  Life would be dull, boring and very dark (there’d be no lights).  You’d have nowhere to plug in your laptop or cell phone when the battery’s getting low.  You’d have nowhere to plug in your refrigerator when you need to preserve some food.  You’d have nowhere to plug in your electric fan when it’s hot.  And you’d have nowhere to plug in your electric light or your night light when it’s dark.  You get the picture; the world would be a sad, lonely place.  Well, it’s a bummer, isn’t it?  But, thanks to a scientist named Nikola Tesla, the AC was generated.   Wait, what is AC first?  AC stands for alternating current.  It is the type of electricity that flows out of our electric sockets as opposed to DC or direct current which flows inside the dry cell (batteries).  AC is a much more powerful type of electricity since it could generate high voltages as compared to DC but it is also more dangerous due to fluctuations.  But nevertheless, we benefit a lot from this genius creation by Tesla more than we could have ever imagined.  AC has become a major and essential part of our lives.

            Now, who is this Tesla guy?  “Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika, which was then part of the Austo-Hungarian Empire, region of Croatia. His father, Milutin Tesla was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother Djuka Mandic was an inventor in her own right of household appliances. Tesla studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt in 1873, the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria and the University of Prague. At first, he intended to specialize in physics and mathematics, but soon he became fascinated with electricity. He began his career as an electrical engineer with a telephone company in Budapest in 1881.  His childhood dream was to come to America to harness the power of Niagara Falls. Young Nikola Tesla came to the United States in 1884 with an introduction letter from Charles Batchelor to Thomas Edison: “I know two great men,” wrote Batchelor, “one is you and the other is this young man.” Tesla spent the next 59 years of his productive life living in New York. Tesla set about improving Edison’s line of dynamos while working in Edison’s lab in New Jersey.  It was here that his divergence of opinion with Edison over direct current versus alternating current began. This disagreement climaxed in the war of the currents as Edison fought a losing battle to protect his investment in direct current equipment and facilities.” (Vujovic, 1998)

            Tesla was basically a genius, had an eidetic memory, and was a great inventor.  He had a rivalry with Thomas Alva Edison, the guy who was pro-DC, since he was pro-AC.  But Edison had no match for Tesla.  Tesla’s ideas were off the hook and were even described as bizarre by some people.  He had thought up and invented a lot of stuffs.  But the best of all, the one regarded as his masterpiece, and the greatest invention of his life, was wireless electricity.

You see, at one point in his life, Tesla had actually made wireless transmitting of electricity possible.  There was even one time that he just placed some light bulbs on the floor and made them turn on without any wires or cables.  He turned them on wirelessly. He did this by “determining the resonant frequencies of the earth to potentially transmit unlimited electric power, [where] he also recognized frequencies that acted as a damping field to nullify electric power.” (Saunders, n.d.)

“After paying off his investors, Tesla spent his remaining funds on his other inventions and culminated his efforts in a major breakthrough in 1899 at Colorado Springs by transmitting 100 million volts of high-frequency electric power wirelessly over a distance of 26 miles at which he lit up a bank of 200 light bulbs and ran one electric motor! With this souped up version of his Tesla coil, Tesla claimed that only 5% of the transmitted energy was lost in the process. But broke of funds again, he looked for investors to back his project of broadcasting electric power in almost unlimited amounts to any point on the globe. The method he would use to produce this wireless power was to employ the earth's own resonance with its specific vibrational frequency to conduct AC electricity via a large electric oscillator. When J.P. Morgan agreed to underwrite Tesla's project, a strange structure was begun and almost completed near Wardenclyffe in Long Island, N.Y.  Looking like a huge lattice-like, wooden oil derrick with a mushroom cap, it had a total height of 200 feet. Then suddenly, Morgan withdrew his support to the project in 1906, and eventually the structure was dynamited and brought down in 1917.”  (Saunders, n.d.)

The paragraph above talks about the Wardenclyffe incident.  After Tesla actually generated wireless electricity, he envisioned a world of free, wireless electricity.  He planned on creating big towers all over the world that would serve as transmitters for this wireless power.  The Wardenclyffe tower was the first (and unfortunately the last) of these but while he was working on this noble yet dangerous role, his financial supporter left him and he became broke.  His tower was later burned to the ground along with all his blueprints and all his life’s works and dreams. 

Tesla generated AC which everyone uses these days but he goes unappreciated.  It is even rare finding a Science school book describing in large detail the works and the life of the genius Tesla these days.  He is the unappreciated scientist.  He made a mark in this world but only a few knows what he did.  And as for his work of art, the wireless technology, some have ventured into it but none have ever gone to where he has gone. It was his masterpiece and it will forever be.

REFERENCES

Vujovic, Ljubo, 1998.  Tesla Biography: Nikola Tesla, the Genius Who Lit the World.  Tesla Memorial Society Website.  http://www.teslasociety.com/biography.html. March 6, 2014.
Saunders, Melvin, n.d.  Wireless Electricity of Nikola Tesla.  Creative Alternatives Website.  http://www.mind-course.com/wireless.html. March 6, 2014.