Text: Nikola Tesla, was an inventor and researcher who discovered the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He is known as the inventor of the transformer. He was born in 1856, in Smiljan, Croatia, to a Serbian family; his father was an Orthodox priest and his mother was unschooled yet highly intelligent. Growing up a dreamer, and with a desire to pursue an engineering career, he attended the Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague. During this time he conceived a way to use alternating current to an advantage. Later, he visualized the principle of the rotating magnetic field and developed plans for an induction motor that would become his first step toward the successful utilization of alternating current. In 1882 Tesla went to work in Paris, France for the Continental Edison Company, and, while on assignment to Strassburg in 1883, he constructed, in after-work hours, his first induction motor. In 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States. He had a short-lived employment with Thomas Edison. However, their difference in background and methods ended the association. He sold the patent rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse in 1885. The transaction precipitated a titanic power struggle between Edison's direct-current systems and the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating-current approach, which eventually won out. Tesla soon established his own laboratory, where his inventive mind could be given free rein. He experimented with shadowgraphs similar to those that later were to be used by Wilhelm Röntgen when he discovered X-rays in 1895. Tesla's countless experiments included work on a carbon button lamp, on the power of electrical resonance, and on various types of lighting. He was often invited to lecture at home and abroad. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is widely used today in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment. That year also marked the date of Tesla's United States citizenship. Westinghouse used Tesla's system to light the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. His success was a factor in winning him the contract to install the first power machinery at Niagara Falls, which bore Tesla's name and patent numbers. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he stayed from May 1899 until early 1900, Tesla made what he regarded as his most important discovery - terrestrial stationary waves. By this discovery he proved that the Earth could be used as a conductor and would be as responsive as a tuning fork to electrical vibrations of a certain frequency. Tesla was the recipient of the Edison Medal in 1917, the highest honour that the American Institute of Electrical Engineers could bestow. Nikola Tesla allowed himself only a few close friends. He was quite impractical in financial matters and an eccentric, driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia. But he had a way of intuitively sensing hidden scientific secrets and employing his inventive talent to prove his hypotheses. He died in New York, New York in 1943. Hundreds filed into New York City's Cathedral of Saint John the Divine for his funeral services, and a flood of messages acknowledged the loss of a great genius. Three Nobel Prize recipients addressed their tribute to "one of the outstanding intellects of the world who paved the way for many of the technological developments of modern times." http://www.pactran.com/tesla.html

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