NICOLA TESLA IS THE PATRON SAINT OF MODERN ELECTRICITY

Until recently the name Nicola Tesla was almost totally forgotten, at least in North America, until a new electric car was introduced called the “Tesla”.  Few today know of his many extraordinary inventions and contributions. He has been called “the man who invented the 20th century”. Born in Croatia in 1856. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power. Tesla contributed to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. He studied at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz and excelled because of his photographic memory. Tesla would visualize an invention in his brain, in precise form, before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Nicola devised an early telephone repeater but never went past that point.

In 1884 he arrived in New York and Edison asked him to work for his company. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators, which he did. But Edison cheated him out of the promised reward and he resigned. The first radio transmitter was built in 1893, and soon after that followed the pioneering efforts on radio receiving. There were a flurry of inventions that followed, including radio controlled torpedoes, a unique spark plug for the internal combustion engine, and even the first “radio telescopes to monitor space radio waves. He built a primitive RADAR system in 1917 and theorized an ion propelled engine for air travel that now will be used for space propulsion.

Tesla died of heart failure in New York in January 1943, almost destitute, at the age of 86. The FBI seized all of his records and they have been mostly sealed to public view ever since. So important was some of his work that even today more is being gleaned from his research and deep ideas. He even devised a so-called “death ray” to be used on the battlefield and in air combat. At the time it was called “hair brained” but even today his basic ideas are being revered.