Sunday, November 15, 2009

Nikola Tesla


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!

15 comments:

  1. great tribute to a great scientist. You know, i actually believe that the more enigmatic a person, the more secrets he bears. Tesla and his genious could not reach its true potential.
    In a way, he reminds me of Ramanujam.
    But seriously, consider the other great inventions. the capacitor for instance..
    Without this 'magnetism', one can't explain the di-electric properties and field line propagations. Frankly, every frigging field is incomplete without 'T'.
    But as they say, shit happens, and the poor chap didn't get the credit he deserves.

    P:S- I cringe everytime i hear someone say- Marconi invented the radio

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  2. Awesome to hear that from you Kishore! I guess Ramanujam was lucky in the fact that he was put out of his misery earlier than Tesla!Good to know that you are a Tesla fan man! Welcome to the crackpots club!

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  3. A great follower of great scientist!!!.. I came to know lot about tesla after reading this.. Hats off to TESLA.
    Some things we never know unless a person or some incident reveals it. Tesla is one among them. He revealed many of natures secrets which others used to make great achievements.
    And very good writing!!! keep it up viky!!!!!

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  4. INSPIRATIONAL DUDE....tribute to a true genius.
    not intelligence alone but the courage to persevere makes a true genius. sadly the modern day term for it is lunacy.wundervoll writing mein bruder.
    taking some inspiration from the great man before heading out,signs of things to come????

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  5. @Naveen - Thanks a lot bro! Good to know that he inspired you.
    @Kiran- Ya man the 3 P's-Patience, Persistence & Perseverance makes an inventor.Besides Lunacy is not a modern day term for a creative genius its an age old term . But I think a creative genius inherently knows that he is way ahead of his time so i guess he liked the Lunatic epithet!
    And thats a big yes I have always been inspired by him-thats why i chose engg in the first place! Hope I can accomplish atleast a modicum of what he managed to conjure!!!:-)

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  6. No true scientist can become immortal unless they are physically dead!!! The reason for this is the most arcane conundrum which can never be cracked :(

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  7. Pj, you hopeless bugger, please tell us wtf this means- 'arcane conundrum'. wtf is up with you man?

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  8. @Gautam-Immortality implies that your idea, thought, writing or creation lives on forever coz it gets embedded into the fabric of Humanity ! Einstein became immortal even when he was alive! Now how do you explain that?!

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  9. Dad wrote
    Tesla was a true experimental scientist, a wizard who waved the magic wand of electricity. If somebody has understood all about electricity, it is Tesla.In a ocean of documentational scientists, Tesla is an island of excellence, standing tall and achieving. Tesla might not have come up with a mind boggling equation, but dealt with a mind boggling problem with enormous success.
    We have not understood what all Tesla had done.

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  10. It truly shows us that edison was an evil,capitalist genius and the greatness and humility of tesla although he did not get the true recognition he deserved.I always feel that he should be as famous as what einstein is.It tells us that it is patience and interest are the ones which keep a man going.all hail vikram for an inspirational one.

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  11. Avinash You Said it My Bro! Thanks man.. Great to know that I was able to inspire you !

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  12. Nicola Tesla and Swami Vivekananda were impressed and influenced by one another. Swamiji shared the concept of charged bodies, described in Vedanta with this genius and asked him to explore it further. Influenced by Vivekananda, Tesla started using many Sanskrit words in his research papers (eg. Akasa, Parna etc. Vivekanada quotes in his work on Rajayoga as follows: "To give another example we can transmit electricity to any part of the world, but we have to send it through wires. The nature, however, can transmit enormous quantities of electricity without any wires. Why wouldn't we be able to do the same? We can send mental electricity anywhere. What we call the spirit, in a great measure is the same as electricity. Now we can send these mental electricity only through our nerve channels. Why wouldn't we be able to send it without this aid? Yogi's say that this is quite possible and realizable, and when you succeed in doing it, you will be able to do it throught the whole Universe. You will be able to act with anybody, anywhere, without any aid of nervous system". I think this is the immortality!

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  13. "Yes, I sleep only two hours a day,
    but when I sleep,
    I sleep well, artistically,
    because sleeping is an art,
    just like deep breathing....
    which must be learned.
    That is one of the secrets of the East ....
    which, for me is not a secret.

    After the sleep, however short, ....
    I have to do some mind exercise
    in the order to balance ....
    the newly received life energy. " -Nicola Tesla


    "I have myself been told by some of the best scientific minds of the day how wonderfully rational the conclusions of Vedanta are. I know one of them (Tesla) personally, who scarcely has time to eat his meal or go out of his laboratory, but who yet would stand by the hour to attend my lectures on the Vedanta; for, as he expresses it, they are so scientific, they so exactly harmonize with the aspirations of the age and with the conclusions to which modern science is coming at the present time." -Swami Vivekanada

    http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=30631436&blogId=67055949

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  14. About the article: Really a nice one! It made my mind stronger. Keep it up dude:)

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  15. Thanks a lot Varun. Thanks for the connection between Tesla and Swami Vivekananda. I didnt know that they had that much in common. I guess it would take a lot for my meek brain to understand what in the hell they were talking about! But lets see what time has in store! I am sure this century will bring the genius of Tesla to limelight.

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