AC induction motors and a Death Ray at the Tesla Museum
The Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade is celebrating the technology and life of the eponymous power pioneer and even hosts his research into a ‘death ray’.
Nikola Tesla was born in what is now Serbia and studied at the Technical University Graz and Prague. He was employed in 1882 in Budapest in the telephone exchange where he developed an amplifier for music and is said to have came up with the idea for a three phase AC induction motor. That technology has underpinned power generation and motors for over a century.
He left Europe in 1884 with a recommendation from Charles Batchelor to Thomas Edison in New York where he worked on Edison dynamo.
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After finding investors he set up a lab in New York. Westinghouse bought Tesla patent on polyphase induction motor and in 1893 developed several systems to show at the World Exhibition in Chicago in 1903. This led to a deal for a hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, where Tesla owned 9 of the 13 patents for key technology at the plant.
Described as a ‘superstar celebrity’ he gave talks around the world, including at the Royal Society in London in 1892, talking about global energy needs.
He set up a lab in Colorado Springs and developed an oscillating transformer to resonant frequency of the Earth. With sponsorship from banker JP Morgan he built a lab on Long Island with a tower to resonant frequency to transmit energy, aiming to create a ’world wireless system’ at a similar time to Marconi’s work on wireless telegraphy.
However JP Morgan withdrew funding in 1908 and after a change in focus towards energy reduction, renewables, energy harvesting and wireless power transmission, key topics today, as well as a design for a vertical takeoff aircraft. He closed his labs in 1929 having filed 300 patents.
In 1934, aged 77, he claimed to have developed an energy weapon he called ‘teleforce’ but was popularly called a ‘death ray’. He never revealed detailed plans of how the weapon worked during his lifetime but, in 1984, the details were found at the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. Tesla tried to attract the interest of the US, UK and Soviet Union in the design, having said he had built, demonstrated and used it.
However he suffered a traffic accident in 1937 from which he never fully recovered and died in 1943. The Museum maintains that he had signed a deal with the Soviet Union for the weapon, and the ‘suspicious traffic accident’ led to his death.
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