The mad man behind the company name

The award-winning Tesla Model S car is built by a company whose aim is to accelerate the world’s transition to affordable electric mobility. However, the man behind the company name was basically a mad scientist. Interesting, prolific, but pretty nuts.

The Tesla Model S, the world’s first premium sedan built from the ground up as an electric vehicle, has been named Motor Trend’s 2013 Car of the Year after it garnered a unanimous vote from the panel of Motor Trend judges and guest judges, garnering a unanimous vote from the panel judges.

Tesla Model S.

Setting the bar for electric driving range, the Model S offers 40, 60 and 85 kWh battery options, with the 85 kWh variant achieving an EPA-certified range of 426 km. All three batteries use automotive-grade lithium-ion cells arranged for optimal energy density, thermal management and safety.

Tesla’s goal is to accelerate the world’s transition to electric mobility with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars.

However, who was the man behind the company name?

Nikola Tesla was one of the nineteenth century’s most colourful characters and possibly the most underrated genius of his time. He brought flair and imagination to electronics, electrical and radio problems and, despite some tumultuous relationships, this eccentric scientist and engineer is scarcely remembered today.

Tesla, a Serbian, was born 150 years ago in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (now Croatia), and while he later took on US citizenship, he remained close to his European heritage.

He was a man of action and huge energy as well as being a physicist and an electrical and mechanical engineer. And he achieved all this after leaving university without a degree.

Throughout his life he was confrontational and controversial, so perhaps it is not surprising that his most contentious claim to fame is that he is regarded as the inventor of radio - a claim upheld by the Supreme Court of the US. He also experimented with high voltage and high frequencies as well as X-rays and attempted intercontinental radio transmissions from his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower.

Although he became world famous in his time, he is not best remembered today, with names such as Faraday, Marconi, Thomson, Fleming and Hertz being more familiar. However, his place in history has been assured by having his name chosen as the SI unit for magnetic field strength.

He suffered from cholera as a youngster and had several other periods of ill health including mental breakdowns throughout his life, which may have contributed to the label he was given of the ‘mad scientist’. However, at school in 1870 he could work out integral calculus in his head even though his teacher thought he was cheating. Five years later he attended the Austrian Polytechnic under a scholarship where he was a model student for a year working from 3 am to 11 pm. During his second year he suggested to one of his teachers that commutators were unnecessary in a dynamo. His suggestion was regarded as so outrageous that he lost his scholarship, took up gambling and did not graduate.

As a result, he cut himself off from his family because he did not want his parents to know that he had failed at university and went to Marburg as a draughtsman and spent his free time playing cards with men in the street.

By 1881 he was working at the Budapest Telephone Exchange where he became head electrician. Here he is said to have developed a phone repeater but it was never publicly detailed. The following year he started designing and improving electrical equipment for the Continental Edison Co in France, and two years later he went to New York where Edison employed him at the Edison Machine Works where he became involved in redesigning the company’s DC generators.

It is said that Edison offered $50,000 to Tesla if he could improve his inefficient motors and generators. This was seen as a strange promise from Edison who was known as being miserly with wages so that when Tesla did improve the machines and sought his reward, Edison said his offer was a joke. Instead he offered his employee an $18 a week pay rise, which Tesla turned down and promptly resigned.

In 1886 the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing company was founded with illumination systems and designs for dynamo commutators being its main activity. He suggested the company should develop his proposals for AC transmission systems but the investors disagreed and sacked Tesla.

Although this setback forced him into more ill health, he recovered to start the Tesla Electric Co that received the backing of New York lawyers Charles Peck and a director of Western Union, Alfred Brown.

A laboratory was set up where Tesla could develop his AC motors and other devices for power distribution. A major product invented here was a brushless AC induction motor based on a rotating magnetic field, which was patented in 1888.

This claim is disputed because several European researchers had been working along the same lines and an induction motor had been demonstrated by Italian physicist Galileo Ferraris in the same year. Then, George Westinghouse became interested in Tesla’s motor and a deal was set up between the two men that led Tesla to Pittsburgh where he helped develop an AC system to power the city’s trams.

His induction motor was attempted as the motive power but because these machines run at a constant speed dependent on frequency, they were quite unsuitable for powering vehicles and DC traction motors were adopted for the trams.

At the same time as the ill-fated induction motor attempt, Tesla, in collaboration with Westinghouse engineers, came up with the AC three-phase system that is today at the heart of AC industrial power supplies.

At the age of 35, Tesla became an American citizen, set up a New York laboratory and powered electric lamps wirelessly, proving his theory that wireless power transmission was possible.

For two years, from 1892 to 1894, he was vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers that later became the IEEE. This was a period of great activity. While holding this position he looked into high-frequency AC, generating a million volts using a conical Tesla coil. He looked at the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, invented a gas discharge lamp and, according to him, built the first radio transmitter.

But AC, its generation, distribution and application was always a major driving force behind his energies. This led, in 1893, to Westinghouse winning the contract to install AC at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago where electrical exhibits were on display and this form of electricity was shown to be both safe and reliable.

His ever active mind then turned to investigating ‘invisible’ radiant energy, later identified as X-rays. Early on he used a cold cathode discharge called a Crookes tube, but after learning about Rontgen’s work, he designed a high-energy, single-terminal vacuum tube without a target electrode powered from a Tesla coil output. He was one of the first to recognise the hazards of X-rays but believed that skin damage was caused by ozone and nitrous acid generated when the rays came into contact with the skin rather than the waves themselves.

He turned again and again to his belief in the possibility of transmitting electrical energy without wires. He maintained the theory depended on the Earth’s conductivity where current that passes between two points can power devices. As a result, he proposed a high-power ultraviolet beam that could form a vertical ionised channel in the air above transceiver stations.

Meanwhile, his interest in radio continued when in 1898 he showed a radio-controlled boat called a ‘teleautomaton’, which he tried to sell to a disinterested US military as a sort of radio-controlled torpedo.

His invention of an electromechanical oscillator ended in disaster. A steam-powered device, it is believed to have generated the resonant frequency of several buildings presumably causing them to tremble. The frequency of the oscillator grew causing increased resonance in the building housing the device and forcing Tesla to take a sledgehammer to the oscillator, destroying it.

Recorded in his diary are details of experiments involving the ionosphere and ground currents via transverse and longitudinal waves. He again looked at sending energy long distance by wireless using transverse waves and longitudinal waves including very low frequencies, and he mathematically calculated the Earth’s resonant frequency at 8 Hz, which was confirmed in the Schumann resonance in the 1950s.

That the Earth is a conductor was proved by experiment reinforced by artificial lightning of millions of volts with discharges up to 40 m long. People 24 km away are said to have heard the thunderclap and see sparks on the ground. Any light bulbs within 30 m of the laboratory where the experiment was carried out are said to have glowed.

Marconi and his successful trans-Atlantic radio transmission of the letter ‘s’ in 1901 provided a spur to Tesla to complete the ill-fated Wardenclyffe Tower.

This ambitious project sat on top of Tesla’s laboratory on land near Long Island Sound. The tower, standing at 80 m, had a two-fold purpose - it was supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of transmitting electricity by radio, so eliminating the need for cables and pylons in its distribution, and also act as a conventional radio transmitting antenna network. Design changes and increased costs held up its completion and the principal backer, Morgan of bank fame, would not provide more funding, so the tower was never completed.

It was later taken over by the government and blown up because it was thought the structure could be used as a target by German submarines during the First World War.

Tesla toyed with aviation when in 1928 he patented a biplane that could take off vertically and then fly forwards like a conventional fixed-wing aircraft. Weighing around 365 kg and costing $1000, it was aimed at both military and civilian users. But, as they say, the project never got off the ground.

One of his last inventions was for a ‘teleforce’ weapon that could be used against infantry or aircraft. Tesla described the device as “sending concentrated beams of particles through the air at such energy as to bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy planes, 320 km from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks”.

Although he had sold many patents throughout his lifetime, he was virtually penniless and in debt when, at the age of 86, he died alone in a New York hotel room. He was sufficiently recognised to be given a state funeral, attended by 2000. He was then cremated, his ashes being held in Belgrade.

His legacy of many inventions, many patents and a desire to push the boundaries of electrical understanding is still with us even if the man himself is not exactly a household name.