Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah Read Online Free PDF

Menlo Park died in 1931, Tesla said:
    If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search … I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of the labour … Trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense … the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.
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    Indebted to Edison
    Despite the rift between the two men, Tesla was indebted to Edison. With Edison’s former patent attorney Lemuel Serrell, Tesla began patenting improvements to arc lights and dynamos.
    In Serrell’s office, Tesla met B.A. Vail and Robert Lane. They set up the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company. Tesla tried to interest them in his AC motor, but they were only interested in arc lighting. Together they set about lighting the streets and factories in Rahway, New Jersey, Vail’s hometown. Meanwhile Tesla used the patents he had been granted to buy shares.
    When the electrification of Rahway was completed, Electrical Review featured it on the front page of its 14 August 1886 issue. It was so successful that Vail and Lane decided to run the utility, leaving no role for Tesla. He was bounced from the company leaving him with nothing but ‘a beautifully engraved certificate of stock of hypothetical value’. He could not even use his own inventions as patents had been assigned to the company. It was the ‘hardest blow I ever received,’ he said. In the winter of 1886 – 87, he was forced to dig ditches.
    I lived though a year of terrible heartaches and bitter tears, my suffering being intensified by my material want. My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery.
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    Rescued by a Patent
    In 1884, Edison had been experimenting with ways of producing electricity from burning coal or gas. It ended when an explosion blew the laboratory’s windows out. However, Tesla figured out a simpler – and safer – way to do it, and in March 1886, he applied for a patent for his thermo-magnetic motor .
    While Tesla was digging ditches, he told his foreman about his inventions. It seems that the foreman had been digging the ditches for the underground cables that connected Western Union’s head office with the stock and commodity exchanges, and knew Alfred S. Brown (1836 – 1906) who was superintendent of Western Union’s New York Metropolitan District.
    Brown probably knew of Tesla from the article in Electrical Review and was impressed by his thermoelectric motor and his AC inventions.
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    The Egg of Columbus
    Eager to exploit Tesla’s ideas, Brown contacted Charles F. Peck, a wealthy lawyer from New Jersey. However, Peck knew of the general prejudice against AC and refused even to witness some tests.
    â€˜I was discouraged,’ Tesla said. But then he remembered the ‘Egg of Columbus’. The story goes that Columbus was having dinner with some Spanish nobles who mocked him. So he challenged them to stand an egg on its end. They all tried and failed. Then he took the egg, tapped it lightly on one end, cracking the shell and denting it, so it would stand upright. As a result he was granted an audience with Queen Isabella and won her support for his voyage.
    Tesla told Peck that he could go one better. He would make an egg stand on its end without cracking the shell. If he could trounce Columbus, Tesla asked, could he count on Peck’s support? Peck said he had no crown jewels to pawn, but he would help.
    After the meeting, Tesla took a hard-boiled egg to a blacksmith and got him to cast one in copper. Then he placed four coils under the top of a wooden table to create a magnetic