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

rotating field. When he turned on the current, the egg began to spin. Growing faster, it ceased to wobble and stood on its end. Peck was impressed. Not only had Tesla gone one better than Columbus, he had demonstrated the principle of his AC motor.
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    Tesla Electric Company
    Together Tesla, Brown and Peck formed the Tesla Electric Company in April 1887. Tesla would get a third share of any money generated. Brown and Peck would split another third, and a third would be reinvested. Tesla also received a salary of $250 a month, while Brown and Peck would cover the cost of the patents. The following month, Szigeti came to New York to work as Tesla’s assistant.
    They set up a laboratory at 89 Liberty Street above a printing company. During the day the printing shop used a steam engine to power its presses. At night it provided power for Tesla’s experiments.
    First Tesla developed his thermomagnetic motor into the pyromagnetic generator , using the same principles. Tesla believed this was a great invention, but it did not work very well and his patent application was denied. Nevertheless, Peck encouraged him to continue inventing and his mind turned back to the AC motor he built in Strasbourg.
    This time, instead of a single coil, he used four coils wound around a laminated ring. Two separate AC currents were fed to the pairs of coils on opposite sides. If these two currents were 90° out of phase – that is, when one was at its maximum positive value, the other was at its maximum negative value – a rotating electrical field was produced. To Tesla’s delight, the rotor – initially a shoe polish tin balanced on a pin – began to spin.
    From this prototype, Tesla and Szigeti produced two full-scale motors. They were, Tesla said, ‘exactly as I had imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduce the pictures as they appeared to my vision and the operation was as I expected.’
    Patents were applied for and issued on 1 May 1888. The motors were then tested for their efficiency by Professor William Anthony (1835 – 1908) of Cornell University and, on 15 May, Tesla delivered his ground-breaking paper A New Alternating Current Motor to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE).

Chapter 4 – The Westinghouse Corporation
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    There were many days when [I] did not know where my next meal was coming from. But I was never afraid to work, I went where some men were digging a ditch … [and] said I wanted to work. The boss looked at my good clothes and white hands and laughed to the others … but he said, ‘All right. Spit on your hands. Get in the ditch.’ And I worked harder than anybody. At the end of the day I had $2.
    Nikola Tesla
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    Power stations had sprung up across America and Europe to provide electric light at night. In the 1880s the owners saw electric motors as a way to sell power to factories and streetcar lines during the day. However, most of the power stations produced DC and Brown and Peck were a little dubious of Tesla’s fixation with AC.
    Other inventors had used AC to power arc lights. This was particularly popular in Europe where experimenters found they could raise or lower the voltage of an alternating current using primitive transformers. Engineers at the Ganz Company found that, at a high voltage, electricity could be distributed over long distances using thin copper wires. Then, to make it safe to use in the home, it would be stepped down using a transformer.
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    Westinghouse and AC
    In 1884, George Westinghouse became interested in electric lighting and hired the inventor William Stanley Jr (1858 – 1916), who had invented an incandescent lamp and a self-regulating dynamo. At first, Westinghouse thought of developing a DC system, but abandoned it as the market was already overcrowded.
    For a DC system to be profitable, numerous small power stations had to be situated near to the homes and