Word: tesla
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When European engineers dismissed his invention as incredible, Tesla sailed for Manhattan and went to work in Edison's laboratory. The two did not hit it off; Tesla insisted that alternating current was the thing for power; Edison stuck stubbornly to direct...
...Tesla, who considered Edison a mere inventor, not a scientist, quit in 1885 when Edison refused to pay $50,000 Tesla thought he had been promised for his work. In 1912 Tesla refused the Nobel prize because it was to be shared with Edison. Only after long argument was Tesla prevailed upon to accept the Edison Medal for his achievements...
...alternating current system, Tesla eventually got $1,000,000 from Westinghouse. By his biographer's account he later gave up his rights to millions more in royalties to help his friend George Westinghouse out of a financial hole. Soon afterward Tesla lost everything when his Manhattan laboratory in South Fifth Avenue (now West Broadway) burned down. According to O'Neill, Tesla created some 200 inventions, but he dismissed most of them as "small-time stuff" and failed to develop them, letting others pirate his work...
...Tesla concentrated on larger projects. The most grandiose: a scheme for the wireless transmission of electric power. He proposed to charge the earth with tremendous voltages and make it "oscillate," thereby making it possible to tap electricity from any part of the globe. At his famed electrical tower in Colorado, Tesla produced a potential of 135,000,000 volts (still the highest ever achieved) and claimed that he lit 200 incandescent bulbs 26 miles away with wireless power...
Twain and Pigeon. Tesla's experiments, few of them ever finished, were financed by such backers as J. Pierpont Morgan, John Jacob Astor, John Hays Hammond, Thomas Fortune Ryan, Samuel Insull. During the last 20 years of his life, Tesla holed up in a Manhattan hotel room, dreaming of bigger & bigger projects. Before his death last year at 86, he had announced that he was on the verge of: 1) inventing a death ray, 2) communicating with other planets...