Been a long time since I wrote a post. Was lost in my head I guess! SO I thought what better way to encourage myself to write than Tesla. Not many blokes have heard of Tesla other than in the science books dealing with the mystery that is magnetism. No other name would have been more apt to quantify magnetism coz Tesla like magnets is an enigma! Tesla has a couple of epithets in the present time some of them being -"The Lost Wizard of the twentieth century" , " Man out of time". Titles which have an ominous ring to them. I consider myself fortunate to have read about Tesla.
Let me tell you why...........
Nikola Tesla was born in a small town called Smiljan in Croatia. I guess he always knew that he was different from the rest of the lot. His mind was a free spirited one but without the frivolity associated with it. He had a different perception of Nature and space. He had an inclination to mechanics and kinematics. When he was little he is said to have observed the way ladybugs flap their wings , took a few of them and stuck them on to a wheel which rotated coz of their flapping.
He was also gifted with an uncanny ability to imagine an entire mechanical setup in his head . He took this gift to such an extent that he would run experiments in his head and would implement them only when he thought it worked and magically they always worked without a hitch the very first time!
Oh yeah- He defined eccentric!never was able to swallow a classroom education. He left his bachelors course on Electrical Engg and set out to the US of A . He approached Edison (dude who invented the bulb) with a recommendation letter saying " There are only two very intelligent people in this world today. One is you and the other is the man bearing this letter" . Edison grew jealous of him and started illtreating him. Being an upright man he promptly left General Electric (Edison's company) and went on to work as a manual labourer whilst delivering lectures in universities , coz Tesla had already managed to strike a few chords designing DC machines for Edison.
He later collaborated with Westinghouse,Edison's competitor and strongly started propounding the feasibility of AC machines . Coz in the timeline i am speaking of electricity was a rich mans pride possession !!! Edisons DC machines were run by noisy steam engines in the basement of house and had power enough for that house alone. Tesla was audacious enough to claim that hydel gens could be used to transmit power to large population of people for a smaller price.
And he proved it too, at the Chicago fair using coils for transformers. but his employer Westinghouse was bankrupt at the time and he asked Tesla to keep his patent rights at bay for the time as Westinghouse owed him more than a million dollars at the time!! He promptly tore his patent contracts and burned them just to console his friend.
All this success made him very famous. But I guess his life thus far is kinda the "regular run of the mill crackpot inventor success story" but his life changed from this point onwards.
The true genius of Nikola Tesla was in uncanny understanding of inductors and the remarkabe concept of RESONANCE. If at all any man came close to understanding the very esoteric concept of resonance, it would be Tesla.
His work on resonance led him to build devices that could transmit energy in the form of waves -TESLAWALLEN(tesla waves) .He was obsessed with the concept of wireless transmission of electricity. Communication was never on his mind . But that was not the case with the young ambitious , unscupulous italian Marconi. He used 19 of Tesla's Patents to "come up " with the radio!!!! But Tesla did not mind his mind wanted bigger things. He was going towards obscurity , people being capitalist fools started going towards the next big thing -The radio , slowly forgetting the genius that created it.But Tesla Persevered , this crazy insane lunatic genius believe it or not built a huge remote controlled steamer using Tesla Coils ( The ones you know as "Plasma Globes")! This was in a time before diodes, transistors or any of the control circuits mind you!
Now the time is 1900 -the bloody 20th century, Tesla comes up with the most god awesome of ideas ! He says to himself -"The Earth is a conductor covered by a Dielectric -Atmosphere, So the earth is a giant cavity in the eyes of radio waves "and he does a resonance collumn experiment that we did in 11th But the tuning fork happens to be a gargantuan Tesla Coil powered by a Hydroelectric generator Spewing out 100 foot long Electric arcs. He tweaks with the resonant frequency of the coils and hits a magic number 8Khz! Resonance!!!!! His electric arcs rise to hundreds of feet and burns the generator!
He never gave up. Tesla went on to build a huge "Magnifying transmitter" called Wardenclyffe tower at Long Island ,New York . but the project was abandoned coz the capitalistic money hungry pigs came and asked him " Where do i put the meter on this thing?". A dejected and demoralized Tesla was forced to go into isolation and oblivion. But the man was Undaunted in what he wanted , He is supposed to have come with the idea of a Radar and a satanic ray called the Death Ray which had the ability to destroy enemy vessels and planes to name a few. He is also to have been involved in the Philadelphia Experiment and other Dark projects.
A true scientist till the very end he believed in something and pursued it come hell or high water. This legend of a man who made electricity accessible over the world which we now take for granted , and who opened our minds to the beauty of Radio waves and Resonance died a miserable death , a pauper and no one to care for at a grand old age of 87 . His life's work in the later years is still a secret ,his work was confiscated by the military. No one other than Tesla himself knows what secrets of nature he was able to unravel.
But after his death the court ruled that Tesla was the true inventor of the radio! Schumann discovered that the resonant frequency of the earth was 8Khz! Edison accepted that staunchly following DC to AC was the worst mistake of his life! Nobody knows how many more codes of God tesla was able to decipher before his demise! I am sure theres a lot we will never know! AND now we know the genius that was Tesla.So now my friends if you have read patiently thus far you would have realized the reason why magnetism has the unit Tesla.
Tesla's life though may seem tragic to the weakhearted let me tell you its not!
His life stands as a testament to the fact that when you truly believe something to be true and your heart asks you to go for it , Then go for it come hell or high water!! The one who takes the most practical or pragmatic path is a meek,cowardly fool who may have everything in life but will die a Mortal. The one who sets of on the unexplored path will have to face a great deal of strife and misery ,but when his time on this blue planet has come to pass he will transcend the confines of mortality and will truly become a GOD.
Dark black hair , lean disposition, on first glance he does not appear to be a redoubtable personality. But if you look carefully at his photograph you will see in those deep unfathomable eyes a sense of achievement and look deeper and you will see true and unblemished contentment!
