10 Reasons Why Tesla Is a Scientific God

In an era when the dollar was king, in which scientists and engineers built business empires on the backs of one or two breakthroughs, Tesla's focus never strayed from his work. Consequently, he was both prolific and, at times, poor.

While his competitors in the War of the Currents -- the struggle between Tesla's and Edison's camps over whose electrical technology would reign supreme -- fought tooth-and-nail to secure electrical monopolies, his desire to acquire funding for his next big project repeatedly trumped his interest in protecting his patents and inventions [sources: Cheney; Jonnes].

Tesla's focus and farsightedness worked to the inventor's detriment almost as much as they benefited society. Unlike Edison, he did not actively cultivate a reputation with the public, wield the press for publicity (or to launch attacks) or possess a strong business standing. More to the point, his work delved into realms beyond the grasp of many of his contemporaries. Consequently, Tesla struggled to gain funding to support his research [sources: Jonnes; PBS; Secor]. For example, Tesla suggested bouncing high-frequency electrical waves off the hulls of ships and subs made of nonferrous and nonconducting materials. The Navy passed on funding his research [sources: PBS; Secor].

Like any world-changing inventor, Tesla was a man of vision, and his career ran most smoothly when he could convey that vision to other pioneers. In 1893, his alternating current beat out Edison's direct current proposal to light the monumental World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (aka the Chicago World's Fair). Not only did this event mark a turning point in the War of the Currents, it also enabled him to follow his grandest ambitions, including his childhood dream of harnessing the power of Niagara Falls [sources: Cheney and Uth; Jonnes; PBS].

Even after he'd won the Niagara contract, most of his backers remained dubious about whether Tesla's hydroelectric machines would work. The inventor did not. When the switch was thrown at midnight, Nov. 16, 1896, lights turned on in Buffalo, N.Y., 21 miles (34 kilometers) away. Within a few years, the station expanded its reach to New York City, roughly 400 miles (644 kilometers) away [sources: Cheney and Uth; Jonnes; PBS]. Tesla's youthful dream had come true.

Tesla also proposed controlling, or at least catalyzing, weather with electricity. He visualized transmitting power globally and, with it, information -- an early version of a global wireless communications system [sources: Cheney and Uth; PBS]. The scientist told investor J.P. Morgan, "When wireless is fully applied the Earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts" [source: PBS].

Oh, we're sorry, did we say "death ray"? We meant "peace beam that can knock airplanes out of the sky hundreds of miles away and give infantry a very, very bad day."

Amid the gathering clouds of World War II, Tesla announced that he had conceived a new "peace beam" weapon capable of ending war forever. He saw his device, which we now know as a charged particle beam, as a kind of "Chinese wall," an anti-war device that would safeguard national borders. The papers took a different view: "TESLA, AT 78, BARES NEW 'DEATH BEAM'" blared The New York Times' front page on July 11, 1934.

The possibility of a world power developing a particle beam haunted the Cold War, especially after some of Tesla's papers went missing following his death [sources: Cheney and Uth; Jonnes; PBS; PBS].

CPBs were made famous by Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, program, but the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was investigating them as early as 1958 [source: Roberds].

For good or ill, quirkiness is a quality we associate with genius, and Tesla does not disappoint.

Some say Tesla constructed his greatest inventions, including his induction motor, entirely within his own mind. Unlike Edison, who worked a problem through prototyping, trial and error and similar hands-on methods, Tesla found that key solutions sometimes came to him in blinding flashes of insight [sources: Cheney and Uth; Jonnes].

By his own account, Tesla suffered from visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as hypersensitivity to vibrations and strong light [sources: Chandrasekhar; Pickover]. He also feared round objects, such as women's pearls, and fixated on the number three [sources: Jonnes; Pickover].

The inventor also suffered a progressive germ aversion and eventually limited his diet to boiled foods. This phobia reportedly arose after a scientific colleague showed him unboiled water under a microscope. Late in life, the aging scientist kept pigeons in his hotel room, but continued to dress as nattily as ever -- behaviors that led some to question his mental state [sources: Jonnes; PBS].

Tesla's peculiarities did not impair his socializing, however; reporters and friends described him as charming, humble and well-spoken.

They don't just hand those things out like party favors, you know.

Tesla, like Carl Friedrich Gauss, lends his name to a unit of magnetic flux density in the International System of Units (abbreviated SI). A tesla can also be thought of as a unit of magnetic induction [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica]. At one time, high-frequency currents were known as Tesla currents [source: Houston and Kennelly].

One tesla equals one weber per square meter, or 10,000 gauss (hence, scientists often use gauss to measure weak magnetic fields, reserving tesla for stronger ones, like those used in MRIs). A weber is a unit of magnetic flux, which can be thought of as the amount of magnetic energy "flowing" over an area, such as the surface of a magnet.

Remember above when we described induction, and how changing magnetic fields can induce currents to flow in a conductor? One weber is the amount of this magnetic energy "flow" required to induce one volt of current in a loop of wire. Actually, it's a bit more specific than that: The definition assumes that you drop the flow, or flux, to zero at a uniform rate, and do it in one second [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica].

The weber is named for Wilhelm Eduard Weber, a German physicist known for his work in terrestrial magnetism and his invention in 1833 of an electromagnetic telegraph [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica].

Over his long career, Tesla registered more than 111 American patents and around 300 patents worldwide [sources: Jonnes; Šarboh].

While investigating high-frequency electricity and trying to improve upon Edison's light bulbs, which were only 5 percent efficient, Tesla developed some of the first neon lights. He premiered them at that same 1893 World's Fair we mentioned, twisting their tubes to spell out the names of beloved scientists such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell [sources: Cheney and Uth; PBS]. He also developed early fluorescent lights, which he illuminated wirelessly using electrostatic waves [sources: Cheney and Uth; Jonnes].

Tesla's invention and demonstration of radio-controlled vehicles has earned him a place among the pioneers of robotics. In fact, the scientist described his "teleautomaton" as the first step in a race of robots, although it had no more programming or self-guidance than a modern RC car [sources: Cheney and Uth; PBS].

A novel bladeless turbine designed by Tesla rotated at such high speeds that its component disks distorted. Tesla never solved the problem, but modern materials such as Kevlar, carbon-fiber and titanium-impregnated plastic have inspired some to pick up where he left off [sources: PBS].

Tesla also reported taking X-ray photographs in 1896, a short time after Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays [sources: Electrical Review; PBS].

Radio arose from an array of discoveries and innovations, but Tesla's work devising and refining its foundational technologies has earned him hard-fought recognition as its father [sources: Jonnes; Vujovic].

The scientist's work in the field grew out of his foray into the wireless transmission of energy -- which, if you think about it, is exactly what radio is.

Not only did Tesla file the first radio patents, he also gave a lecture in1893 -- two years before Marconi began experimenting with radio -- that laid out how radio broadcasting worked, complete with a demonstration of radio communication. By mid-1894, he had built and begun testing a small, portable radio-transmitting station [sources: Cheney; Jonnes].

As with the induction generator and transformer, Tesla built upon the work of his predecessors, but with unparalleled vision. James Clerk Maxwell had theorized electromagnetic waves, and Heinrich Hertz had figured out how to transmit them, but the Tesla coil, and Tesla's four tuned circuits for transmitting and receiving, made radio a reality. His patents describe the fundamental way we still transmit and receive radio signals [sources: Cheney and Uth; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Vujovic].

Tesla also pioneered radio control -- an idea he patented on Nov. 8, 1898, and demonstrated at the 1898 Electrical Exhibition at Madison Square Garden [sources: Jonnes; PBS; Vujovic].

Like any great movie scientist or Bond villain, any self-respecting science god requires a secret laboratory -- preferably one located in some remote locale and bristling with mad machines. Tesla had two.

In 1899, Tesla constructed a lab in Colorado Springs, Colo., to delve into the mysteries of high voltage and high frequency electricity [sources: Jonnes; PBS; Vujovic]. In one experiment, a 42-foot (12.8-meter) metal mast drove huge electrical impulses into the ground; in another, a Tesla coil shot 100-foot (30.5-meter) arcs of electricity across the room. The latter's surge blew out the electric company's dynamo and cast Colorado Springs into darkness [sources: Jonnes; PBS].

While at Colorado Springs, Tesla proved the existence of terrestrial stationary waves -- a means by which the Earth could conduct energy at certain electrical frequencies -- by illuminating 200 lamps from 25 miles (40 kilometers) away [sources: PBS; Vujovic]. As far as we know (contrary to the film "The Prestige"), he never worked on human teleportation.

Tesla later built his second secret lab, Wardenclyffe, closer to his Manhattan home. The Shoreham, Long Island, facility featured a 50-ton, 187-foot-high (45,000-kilogram, 57-meter-high) transmitting tower above a 120-foot-deep (36.6-meter-deep) well, along with 16 iron pipes sunk 300 feet (91.4 meters) deeper. Tesla planned to transmit power through the planet, using the rods to "get a grip of the Earth ... so that the whole of this globe can quiver." [sources: Greenfieldboyce; Jonnes; PBS].

We revere geniuses as much for their struggles as for their triumphs. Perhaps it comforts us to know that brilliance comes at a cost, or maybe we find that suffering humanizes those rare souls who truly operate on a higher level.

Tesla, an outsider, fought an uneven battle against wealthier and better-connected businessmen: Edison smeared his name and took his electric fame; Marconi beat him in the radio market -- and to a Nobel Prize -- using his own technology; and industrialist George Westinghouse built an empire out of his torn-up patent agreements [sources: Cheney; Harkins; Jonnes; PBS].

Tesla's loyalty to his first loves, science and progress, cost him his fame, his fortune and, some argue, his sanity. Indeed, it is likely that, after losing J.P. Morgan's financing and, with it, his dreams for Wardenclyffe, Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown. "It is not a dream," he said. "It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive ... blind, faint-hearted, doubting world" [sources: Jonnes; PBS].

Tesla's system of alternating current generators, motors and transformers powers the world's industry, lights our homes and underpins most modern electronics. Edison, though more famous, backed a direct current (DC) system used today primarily in batteries.

DC vexed Edison because he could not find a way to send it long distances [sources: Jonnes; Vujovic]. He also struggled to convert the alternating current produced by his dynamos into direct current. Edison's solution involved "commutators" -- brushes that allowed current to flow in only one direction but created inefficient friction and required frequent replacing [source: Jonnes].

Tesla's generators didn't require such a cumbersome approach. Moreover, his system could "step up" voltages for transmission over long distances, then "step down" voltages at the destination to levels usable in homes and factories.

Take the electric motor pioneered by Belgian engineer Zénobe-Théophile Gramme. Whereas Edison and others tried to tether the device inefficiently to DC, Tesla revolutionized it by adding a second circuit that would "alternate" a current out of phase with the first, creating the prototype for his successful polyphase system.

The transformer, like the generator, was invented by Michael Faraday, but both lay fallow until Tesla unlocked their potential and, by doing so, harnessed electricity to do the work of the modern world [source: Jonnes].