PART I.
POLYPHASE CURRENTS.
POLYPHASE CURRENTS.
Biographical and Introductory.
As an introduction to the record contained in this
volume of Mr. Tesla's investigations and discoveries, a few words of a
biographical nature will, it is deemed, not be out of place, nor other than
welcome.
Nikola Tesla was born in 1857 at Smiljan, Lika, a borderland
region of Austro-Hungary, of the Serbian race, which has maintained against
Turkey and all comers so unceasing a struggle for freedom. His family is an old
and representative one among these Switzers of Eastern Europe, and his father
was an eloquent clergyman in the Greek Church. An uncle is to-day Metropolitan
in Bosnia. His mother was a woman of inherited ingenuity, and delighted not
only in skilful work of the ordinary household character, but in the
construction of such mechanical appliances as looms and churns and other
machinery required in a rural community. Nikola was educated at Gospich in the
public school for four years, and then spent three years in the Real Schule. He
was then sent to Carstatt, Croatia, where he continued his studies for three
years in the Higher Real Schule. There for the first time he saw a steam
locomotive. He graduated in 1873, and, surviving an attack of cholera, devoted
himself to experimentation, especially in electricity and magnetism. His father
would have had him maintain the family tradition by entering the Church, but
native genius was too strong, and he was allowed to enter the Polytechnic
School at Gratz, to finish his studies, and with the object of becoming a
professor of mathematics and physics. One of the machines there experimented
with was a Gramme dynamo, used as a motor. Despite his instructor's perfect
demonstration of the fact that it was impossible to operate a dynamo without
commutator or brushes, Mr. Tesla could not be convinced that such accessories
were necessary or desirable. He had already seen with quick intuition that a
way could be found to dispense with them; and from that time he may be said to have begun work on the ideas that
fructified ultimately in his rotating field motors.
In the second year of his Gratz course, Mr. Tesla gave
up the notion of becoming a teacher, and took up the engineering curriculum.
His studies ended, he returned home in time to see his father die, and then
went to Prague and Buda-Pesth to study languages, with the object of qualifying
himself broadly for the practice of the engineering profession. For a short
time he served as an assistant in the Government Telegraph Engineering
Department, and then became associated with M. Puskas, a personal and family friend,
and other exploiters of the telephone in Hungary. He made a number of
telephonic inventions, but found his opportunities of benefiting by them
limited in various ways. To gain a wider field of action, he pushed on to Paris
and there secured employment as an electrical engineer with one of the large
companies in the new industry of electric lighting.
It was during this period, and as early as 1882, that
he began serious and continued efforts to embody the rotating field principle
in operative apparatus. He was enthusiastic about it; believed it to mark a new
departure in the electrical arts, and could think of nothing else. In fact, but
for the solicitations of a few friends in commercial circles who urged him to
form a company to exploit the invention, Mr. Tesla, then a youth of little
worldly experience, would have sought an immediate opportunity to publish his
ideas, believing them to be worthy of note as a novel and radical advance in
electrical theory as well as destined to have a profound influence on all
dynamo electric machinery.
At last he determined that it would be best to try his
fortunes in America. In France he had met many Americans, and in contact with
them learned the desirability of turning every new idea in electricity to
practical use. He learned also of the ready encouragement given in the United
States to any inventor who could attain some new and valuable result. The
resolution was formed with characteristic quickness, and abandoning all his
prospects in Europe, he at once set his face westward.
Arrived in the United States, Mr. Tesla took off his
coat the day he arrived, in the Edison Works. That place had been a goal of his
ambition, and one can readily imagine the benefit and stimulus derived from
association with Mr. Edison, for whom Mr. Tesla has always had the strongest
admiration. It was impossible, however, that, with his own ideas to carry out,
and his[Pg 5] own
inventions to develop, Mr. Tesla could long remain in even the most delightful
employ; and, his work now attracting attention, he left the Edison ranks to
join a company intended to make and sell an arc lighting system based on some
of his inventions in that branch of the art. With unceasing diligence he
brought the system to perfection, and saw it placed on the market. But the
thing which most occupied his time and thoughts, however, all through this
period, was his old discovery of the rotating field principle for alternating
current work, and the application of it in motors that have now become known
the world over.
Strong as his convictions on the subject then were, it
is a fact that he stood very much alone, for the alternating current had no
well recognized place. Few electrical engineers had ever used it, and the
majority were entirely unfamiliar with its value, or even its essential
features. Even Mr. Tesla himself did not, until after protracted effort and
experimentation, learn how to construct alternating current apparatus of fair
efficiency. But that he had accomplished his purpose was shown by the tests of Prof.
Anthony, made in the of winter 1887-8, when Tesla motors in the hands of that
distinguished expert gave an efficiency equal to that of direct current motors.
Nothing now stood in the way of the commercial development and introduction of
such motors, except that they had to be constructed with a view to operating on
the circuits then existing, which in this country were all of high frequency.
The first full publication of his work in this
direction—outside his patents—was a paper read before the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers in New York, in May, 1888 (read at the suggestion of Prof.
Anthony and the present writer), when he exhibited motors that had been in
operation long previous, and with which his belief that brushes and commutators
could be dispensed with, was triumphantly proved to be correct. The section of
this volume devoted to Mr. Tesla's inventions in the utilization of polyphase
currents will show how thoroughly from the outset he had mastered the
fundamental idea and applied it in the greatest variety of ways.
Having noted for years the many advantages obtainable
with alternating currents, Mr. Tesla was naturally led on to experiment with
them at higher potentials and higher frequencies than were common or approved
of. Ever pressing forward to determine in even the slightest degree the
outlines of the unknown, he[Pg 6] was rewarded very quickly in this field with results of the most
surprising nature. A slight acquaintance with some of these experiments led the
compiler of this volume to urge Mr. Tesla to repeat them before the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was done in May, 1891, in a lecture
that marked, beyond question, a distinct departure in electrical theory and
practice, and all the results of which have not yet made themselves fully
apparent. The New York lecture, and its successors, two in number, are also
included in this volume, with a few supplementary notes.
Mr. Tesla's work ranges far beyond the vast
departments of polyphase currents and high potential lighting. The
"Miscellaneous" section of this volume includes a great many other
inventions in arc lighting, transformers, pyro-magnetic generators,
thermo-magnetic motors, third-brush regulation, improvements in dynamos, new
forms of incandescent lamps, electrical meters, condensers, unipolar dynamos,
the conversion of alternating into direct currents, etc. It is needless to say
that at this moment Mr. Tesla is engaged on a number of interesting ideas and
inventions, to be made public in due course. The present volume deals simply
with his work accomplished to date.
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