Quotes from Nikola Tesla:
First, who was Nikola Tesla?
In 1896, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Lord Kelvin said, "Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time." After showering words of praise upon the inventor before a meeting of the Royal Society in London in 1892, Lord Rayleigh declared that Tesla possessed a great gift for electrical discovery. Fortunately, the text of Tesla's speech has been preserved and republished.1,2,3 He was one of the earliest scientists to understand the distinction between lumped and distributed resonance and the first to patent voltage magnification by standing waves.
The unit of magnetic induction is named in honor of Tesla. It is commonly understood by power engineers that he was the inventor of the induction motor utilizing the rotating magnetic field and the AC polyphase power distribution system currently used throughout the civilized world.* However, most electrical engineers are unaware that, as late as 1943, he (not Marconi**) was recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as having priority in the invention of "radio." Even fewer computer scientists are aware that, when certain computer manufacturers attempted to patent digital logic gates after World War II, the U.S. Parent Office asserted Tesla's turn-of-the-century priority in the electrical implementation of logic gates for secure communications, control systems, and robotics. As a result, a monopoly on digital logic gates was unable to be secured in the 1950s.
* Charles E Scott, past president of the AIEE has said, "The evolution of electric power from the discovery of Faraday in 1831 to the initial great installation of the Tesla polyphase system in 1896 [at Niagara Falls] is undoubtedly the most tremendous event in all engineering history. [Electrical Engineering, August, 1943 (Vol. 62, No. 8), pp. 351-355.] ** Although it took the courts several decades to figure this out, the facts were well understood by impartial technical men of the day. Robert H. Marriott, the first president of the IRE, once said that Marconi had ". . . played the part of a demonstrator and sales engineer. A money getting company was formed, which in attempting to obtain a monopoly, set out to advertise to everybody that Marconi was the inventor and that they owned that patent on wireless which entitled them to a monopoly." [Radio Broadcast, December, 1925 (Vol. 8, No. 2), pp. 159-162.]
Tesla served the electrical engineering profession in its highest offices. In the early 1890s, he was elected as vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, now the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. At the time of his election, Alexander Graham Bell was its president. Tesla served two years as vice-president of the AIEE and, a decade later, one of his laboratory technicians at the Colorado Springs experiments served as the first vice-president of the Institute of Radio Engineers when it was formed in 1903. This was the now, famous consulting engineer Fritz Lowenstein. Lowenstein was the inventor of the grid biased Class A amplifier (for which he received the sum of $150,000 from AT&T in 1918), the shaped plate capacitor, and other electrical and mechanical devices. His two IRE papers, with comments on the propagation of ground waves by Zenneck and sky waves by Austin, appeared in February and June issues of the IRE Proceedings, the year of this interview. It should also be noted that Tesla was a fellow of the AIEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a dozen other professional societies. He received over 13 honorary degrees from such diverse institutions as Columbia, Yale, and the Universities of Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Sofia.
Recently, another fascinating fact about Tesla has come to light. After all these years, it is now known that he was nominated for an undivided Nobel prize in physics in 1937. Tesla's nominator, Felix Ehernhaft, of Vienna, had previously nominated Albert Einstein for the Nobel prize.
Tesla had the remarkable talent of charming and astonishing his admirers while at the same time enraging his enemies; the phenomenon continues to the present day. It is unfortunate that, despite several current popular biographies, there still exists no definitive technical authority, other than his own scattered publications, to consult on the scientific issues of his intriguing and colorful scientific career. Consider the adulation bestowed upon him by Lord Kelvin, Hermann von Helmholtz, Sir William Crookes, Lord Rayleigh, Sir James Dewer, Robert Millikan, Sir James Fleming, B.A. Behrend, A.E. Kennally, L.W. Austin, W.H. Bragg, Ferdinand Braun, Jonathan Zenneck, E.W.E Alexanderson, J.S. Stone, Vannevar Bush, W.H. Eccles, Edwin H. Armstrong (who served as a pallbearer at Tesla's funeral, as did Alexanderson), and notably Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Arthur Compton, and Neils Bohr. There are a number of Nobel laureates, Royal Society fellows, IEEE presidents and fellows, and university presidents in that collection. No one, since Franklin, had so stirred the scientific and engineering world.
In 1893, Thomas Commerford Martin, the third president of the AIEE (1888-1889), edited and published a remarkable collection of Tesla's contemporary lectures. It is in print today, and a century from now it will still be considered an unparalleled classic in scientific literature to be read along with Franklin's letters, Priestley's history, Faraday's researches in electricity, Maxwell's treatise, Hertz's electric waves, and Heaviside's electrical papers. In 1919, 26 years after publishing the work on Tesla, Martin wrote,
"Tesla's influence may truly be said to have marked an epoch in the progress of electrical science. Very little data, however, has been procurable that is descriptive of his later researches, and more is the pity from the historical standpoint. Tesla has not finished. The world waits expectantly for each fresh touch of his vitalizing thought upon the big electrical problem of the age."
Unlike most of the aforementioned scientists, Dr. Tesla; for so it is appropriate to call him, had no financial support to fall back on from a faculty position or research institute. His ideas had to support themselves and him in the technical marketplace. It is not surprising, therefore, that he felt no compulsion to share further technical details in the open scientific literature of his day. For these you must dig (and dig, and dig) through the patent literature, where only enough is disclosed to make it clear to one "skilled in the art.
Readers will also be struck with Tesla's lighter side. His sense of humor and his quick wit shine through when he describes his 1893 RF demonstration before the public at the Sixteenth Convention of the National Electric Light Association in St. Louis, where he was distinguished as honorary member: "There was a stampede in the two upper galleries and they all rushed out. They thought it was some part of the devil's work." (p. 87) His humor is also evident in his description of the influence that his demonstrations had upon the Royal Institution in London in 1892: "The scientists simply did not know where they were when they saw it." (p. 95)
Tesla could also be sarcastic: "The greatest men of science have told me [the Tesla coil] was my best achievement. . . . For instance, a man fills this space with hydrogen; he employs all my instrumentalities, everything that is necessary, but calls it a new wireless system--I cannot stop it. Another man puts in here a kind of gap. He gets a Nobel prize for it. . . . The inventive effort involved is about the same as that of which a 30-year old mule is capable." (p. 48)
Famous, or even infamous Quotes from Dr. Nikola Tesla...
On Invention: It is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Of all the frictional resistance, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called "the greatest evil in the world." The friction which results from ignorance can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent.
Universal peace as a result of cumulative effort through centuries past might come into existence quickly -- not unlike a crystal that suddenly forms in a solution which has been slowly prepared.
George Westinghouse was a man with tremendous potential energy of which only part had taken kinetic form. Like a lion in the forest, he breathed deep and with delight the smoky air of his Pittsburgh factories. Always affable and polite, he stood in marked contrast to the small-minded financiers I had been trying to negotiate with before I met him. Yet, no fiercer adversary could have been found when aroused. Westinghouse welcomed the struggle and never lost confidence. When others would give up in despair, he triumphed.
The last 29 days of the month [are] the hardest.
No matter what we attempt to do, no matter to what fields we turn our efforts, we are dependent on power. We have to evolve means of obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever. If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations.
The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of a planter -- for the future. His duty is to lay foundation of those who are to come and point the way.
Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within. Everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside.
Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity.
We are confronted with portentous problems which can not be solved just by providing for our material existence, however abundantly. On the contrary, progress in this direction is fraught with hazards and perils not less menacing than those born from want and suffering. If we were to release the energy of the atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind... The greatest good will come from the technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories driven thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun's energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land... (Nikola Tesla, "My Inventions: the autobiography of Nikola Tesla", Hart Bros., 1982. Originally appeared in the Electrical experimenter magazine in 1919.)
War cannot be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only through annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment... (Nikola Tesla, "My Inventions: the autobiography of Nikola Tesla", Hart Bros., 1982. Originally appeared in the Electrical experimenter magazine in 1919.)
In our dynamo machines, it is well known, we generate alternate currents which we direct by means of a commutator, a complicated device and, it may be justly said, the source of most of the troubles experienced in the operation of the machines. Now, the currents, so directed cannot be utilized in the motor, but must - again by means of a similar unreliable device - be reconverted into their original state of alternate currents. The function of the commutator is entirely external, and in no way does it affect the internal workings of the machines. In reality, therefore, all machines are alternate current machines, the currents appearing as continuous only in the external circuit during the transfer from generator to motor. In view simply of this fact, alternate currents would commend themselves as a more direct application of electrical energy, and the employment of continuous currents would only be justified if we had dynamos which would primarily generate, and motors which would be directly actuated by, such currents. (Adopted from T.C. Martin, "The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla," New Work: Electrical Engineer, 1894, pp. 9-11.)
On George Westinghouse: George Westinghouse was, in my opinion, the only man on this globe who could take my alternating-current system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power. He was a pioneer of imposing stature, one of the world's true nobleman of whom America may well be proud and to whom humanity owes an immense debt of gratitude. (Speech, Institute of Immigrant Welfare, Hotel Baltimore, New York, May 12, 1938, read in absentia.)
On Edison: If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. ...
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor. (New York Times, October 19, 1931.)
On Voltaire: I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, "Never more! (Nikola Tesla, "My Inventions: the autobiography of Nikola Tesla", Hart Bros., 1982. Originally appeared in the Electrical experimenter magazine in 1919.)
On Mark Twain: I had hardly completed my course at the Real Gymnasium when I was prostrated with a dangerous illness or rather, a score of them, and my condition became so desperate that I was given up by physicians. During this period I was permitted to read constantly, obtaining books from the Public Library which had been neglected and entrusted to me for classification of the works and preparation of the catalogues. One day I was handed a few volumes of new literature unlike anything I had ever read before and so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state. They were the earlier works of Mark Twain and to them might have been due the miraculous recovery which followed. Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship between us, I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears. (Nikola Tesla, "My Inventions: the autobiography of Nikola Tesla", Hart Bros., 1982. Originally appeared in the Electrical experimenter magazine in 1919.)
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