Working for the Telephone Company in Budapest Hungary he had developed the first loudspeaker. Working for Thomas Edison's European company he had conceived of a new type of motor (an 'induction motor'), and of electrical devices that used rotating magnetic fields (what would eventually become "alternating current").
In Tesla's hand was a letter to Thomas Edison, recommending Tesla for employment.
Tesla was hired by Edison, and given the job of redesiging Edison's motor and generators, which were notoriously inefficient. Tesla was paid $18 a week. When he completed his task, after prodigious labor, and requested a raise to $25 a week, he was refused. Tesla quit. One of Tesla's next jobs was a ditch digger, including digging ditches for Thomas Edison's company. The ensuing rivalry and relationship between the young Tesla and the established Edison reflect - and may actually dwarf - any such rivalries in modern Silicon Valley.
Tesla was fundamentally convinced that the proper way to generate, transmit, and use electricity, was in a polyphase manner, "alternating current".
Edison's systems were all based on "direct current". Edison was electrifying entire cities based on direct current.
Tesla formed the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing company in 1886 to exploit alternating current - initially to build an alternating current motor. Disagreeing with Tesla's plans to exploit alternating current, investors relieved him of his position, and for the next two years Tesla worked as a manual laborer.
Edison, based on "direct current" transmission and generation, created a business megalith which ultimately morphed through merger with a rival into the modern General Electric company.
The story of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison provide an interesting lens through which to view technology, its implementation, and its exploitation - whether the question is the best electrical system, the best operating system, or the 'best' way to proceed in any essentially knowledge-based endeavour.
Tesla eventually moved himself and his research to Colorado Springs, Colorado.
During his lifetime, his various inventions and investigations encompassed a wide swath of modern physics, including:
X-rays (before the term existed)
cosmic rays
field emissions
the Tesla effect (transmision of electrical energy without wires)
mechanical resonance (and its potential uses)
fluorescent lamps
induction motors
electric igniters (spark plugs for internal combustion engines)
wireless telegraphy
telluric currents
artificial lightning
arc lights
extra-terrestrial radio communications
early RADAR systems
aerial transportation
a superconductivity predecessor
electric vehicles
a theory of gravity
robotics and remote control
a directed-energy superweapon
... and lots more.
Tesla spoke eight languages, never married, and thought by some to have obsessive compulsive disorder (revolving around the number three - inlcuding the insistence on staying only in hotel rooms whose number was divisible by 3), and was compulsive about cleanliness. He was also soft-spoken, poetic, and appreciated fine msuic, fine food, and fine wine.
Tesla died destitute, in debt, and alone, on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327, in January of 1943, as near as anyone can tell some time between the evening of January 5th, and the morning of January 8th.
Thomas Edison, who predeceased Tesla, died in 1931, at his "Glenmont" home in West Orange New Jersey, his last breath reputedly captured in a test tube and deposited at the Henry Ford Museum.
Edison is characterized as a 'freethinker' and the "Wizard of Menlo Park".
Tesla has recently been characterized by biographers as 'the man who invented the 20th century", "the father of modern physics" and the "patron saint of modern electricity".
The day after Edison died, Tesla was quoted in a newspaper coverage with the only negative comments on Edison and his life:
"He (Edison) had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene... His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense."
Thomas Edison built fame and commercial success on a system of power generation and transmission based on direct current.
The system in almost universal use today for the large-scale generation and transmission of electrical power is Tesla's system of alternating current.
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