Need someone to proofread my essay. I know it's long but I despreately need it checked. This is a rough draft version, if you can just read at least the first two body paragraphs that would be amazing. It is a historical essay on Nikola Tesla, for a upper-level history university course. There is no conclusion yet as I am working on it.
ESSAY:
Nikola Tesla, a genius ahead of his time, is the father of many widely used technologies today, including: Alternating Current & the Induction Motor, Radio, Fluorescent and Neon Lighting, and even early x-ray technology. In recent years, there has been a resurgence among the public in interest for Tesla, and he has received names as "The man from the future", or "The man out of time"; all drawing attention to how he was a futurist and a forward-thinking inventor. This paper will examine Tesla's impact on the modern world from his inventions. It will discuss Tesla's science-over-business philosophy, and the effects it can have in terms of technological progress. Finally, it will discuss the downfall of Nikola Tesla, and how the inventor was largely neglected, not only from his inventions/patents, but also his investors and businessmen, and a large part of the world at the time.
Born in Lika, Smiljan (now known as Croatia), 1856, Tesla's father was a priest, while his mother an inventor. From an early age, he was trained with memory exercises, as well as how to visualize and modify objects in his mind (an important skill for engineers). These exercises were likely why he was thought of as a genius, he commonly described that his inventions came in "flashes of light", and he further could envision how his product would work all in his mind, as well as do any testing or modifications. Tesla went to study in the Graz Polytechnic Institute in Austria, however eventually he stopped attending classes and dropped out. Afterwards, he attended another school in Prague, Karl-Ferdinand University, but later moved on and found himself working in Budapest to install Edison telephone systems. A man by the name of Charles Batchelor (stakeholder of Edison's company), was enthralled by his work and asked Tesla if he would like to travel to the United States to work for Edison directly. In 1884, he arrived in New York and started his job at Edison Machine Works, working on dynamos and arc-lighting systems. Initially, Edison and Tesla got along, but things changed when they disagreed on AC vs. DC systems. Edison also refused to pay him what was promised for redesigning his DC dynamos, according to sources, only giving him a small raise. After leaving Edison's company, he formed his own company, Tesla Electric Company, and got to work on his ideas. Throughout his life, he filed 800+ patents; and many of his creations could be pretty wild (e.g., death beam, artificial tidal waves, "Thought Camera", and wireless energy transmission). However, many of his inventions were also extremely important, namely his AC Induction Motor and remote controlled boat. It is common to assume Tesla as the revolutionary electrical engineer, but what people may not know is that he was also a renowned physicist. Particularly in his work on magnetism, for discovering the rotating magnetic field, which is what drives his Induction Motor; and is why the unit T (Tesla) is used to define the strength of a magnetic field. In simple terms, his Induction Motor works by harnessing the power of magnetism to turn a rotor, with magnets as coils opposing and attracting each other to continuously turn the rotor. His motor was much more efficient, and it made significant contributions to power generation... At the time, His remote controlled boat (a miniature boat which he could operate using wireless signals) was another astounding feat, largely thanks to his faith in AC. In his paper A New System of Alternate Current Motors and Transformers, he noted that there are diverse opinions about AC vs. DC, but AC presents clear advantages, which could never be fulfilled by DC systems. He was right in many aspects, for example, how AC can carry data and signals while DC cannot; this is largely because DC is just a flat line, while AC has variations in it's value. As learned by electrical engineers today, the DC component of a signal is primarily used to set an appropriate operating point, while the AC component is what actually carries the information (i.e., the data or bits) to be processed by other electronics. Accordingly, without an AC signal, you can't have these rapid communications; and this is what Tesla envisioned. He did not think of the latter type of current as inferior (unlike Edison), but he saw both had their positives and negatives, while AC could be much more powerful if better understood. The demonstration of his boat didn't go as he planned, however; much of the audience were in disbelief; thinking Tesla was using some sort of magic. There were even claims that he had a trained monkey controlling the boat from the inside; alas he was ahead of his time, but the major innovation in this project was the use of Hertzian waves. Tesla was not using Morse code to send and receive the signals (the standard a the time), but rather an encoded message in the form of a radio wave would be sent to a receiver on the boat, then it would be decoded and further used to move whatever actuator or motor to steer and control the boat. This device not only had profound effects on communications, but also remote operated devices. You can think of Tesla's boat as the pioneer to Drones for example, or even pretty much any infrared remote (e.g., TV Remote).
Technological progress is the process of innovating existing technology, or inventing new technologies. Unfortunately, today's companies are more worried about their investors and stocks rather than the actual product or service they're providing. This represents the dichotomy between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, one being a businessman, while the other a more industrialist/entrepreneur. While Tesla became a very rich man, as well a little more corporate when it came to his patents; all in all, he didn't care or think about his wealth much. As mentioned "To him the value of money consisted in what one did with it rather than in any intrinsic worth." He more cared about what could be done with electricity, magnets, or physics; the money was there to just help fund his research and invention process. This is part of the reason why he ended up signing off his patents to Westinghouse; estimated to be around 12 million dollars in royalties at the time, Tesla was set to become a billionaire. He gave that up so that the Westinghouse company could continue to operate and distribute AC across the world, as well as to help someone who believed in him. One the other hand, Edison made his top priority to take care of his inventions with patents, and make royalties from them. The primary reason why Edison was so stubborn about a DC world is because he owned all the patents for it; transitioning into AC, would make his old DC patents mostly obsolete in many areas, he would lose a tonne of capital. This is understandable for a businessman, but Tesla would certainly think differently. He invested tonnes of money into risky projects (e.g., Wardenclyffe Tower); furthermore, most of the cash he made went into funding laboratories and research. His primarily goal was to push humanity further, it is clear he was not after royalties. This is a fundamental problem of tech firms; when a company is primarily after capital, they tend to lose focus on make sure their product or service is up to par. Moreover, their product goes down in quality, due to optimizations to yield the greatest profit. This is a major impact to technological progress because the main goal isn't engineering or innovation here, it is lost; the primary goal is to make sure investors are satisfied and the company's stock is at a decent level. Another point to be made is Edison vs. Tesla on the process of invention. Edison's goal was to streamline the process of invention, as he had the "invention factory" in Menlo Park. Tesla on the other hand, did it the classic way, letting his creative mind flow out on the blueprint, and allowed the more ambitious ideas to make their way. This is much of the reason why there is a major difference in the scale and complexity of these men's inventions. Thomas Edison only considered practical inventions, while Tesla was trying to develop more futuristic and forward-thinking technologies, that had the potential to change the world indefinitely. Edison thinks, as mentioned in Tesla: man out of time "Tesla was "the poet of science"—his ideas "magnificent but ut- terly impractical." He is however very wrong; forward-thinking people is exactly what we need more of in the world. If you set a set of standards in how something will be researched and developed; your product will likely be less revolutionary, as well as become obsolete sooner and won't have as many use cases. Take for example, Edison's incandescent light bulb; at the time, his invention was marvellous as it provided light for many buildings. In recent years however, it has commonly been replaced by LED and Fluorescent lights, the latter which was helped to create by Tesla. Infact, here in Canada, it's likely very difficult to get your hands on an incandescent light bulb nowadays, as they were banned in early 2014. All in all, the main takeaway is that Tesla was much more of a forward-thinking inventor, he thought about what is needed tomorrow, instead of today. Edison was more akin to one-and-done type inventions where they would serve one purpose, and would likely become obsolete in the near future. The only goal was to create contraptions that would sell at the time, but didn't consider much about their long-term practicality. Unlike Edison, Tesla wasn't stuck in the past, which is the reason why many of his inventions are still widely used today.
As we know, Tesla was a man ahead of his time, and his downfall really makes you wonder what kind of inventions he would make if he wasn't as neglected. There are three major events that led to his downfall, namely: the fire in 1895 that destroyed his lab and years of research, Guglielmo Marconi receiving the patent for the radio after using many of Tesla's patents, and the abandonment of Wardenclyffe Tower (or the "magnifying transmitter" as he called it). All of these cascading events were detrimental to Tesla's mental health, and once his dream of wireless power transmission seemed like it was over, his inventions and innovations largely came to a halt. As Tesla was getting prepared to send a radio signal across a large distance, on the morning of March 13th, 1895, his six-story laboratory caught on fire. All of his research was destroyed; years of research on radio, wireless power transmission, guided vehicles, all gone. Not only that, but also very expensive lab equipment and a research apparatus was ruined, some of which he had spent ton of time just building. An 1895 newspaper article on March 14th described it perfectly, "The destruction of Nikola Tesla's workshop, with its wonderful contents, is something more than a private calamity. It is a misfortune to the whole world. It is not in any degree an exaggeration to say that the men living at this time who are more important to the human race than this yonge gentlemen". Indeed, many possible innovations and engineering feats were lost in this fire, and while Tesla did get help getting back up by his colleagues, namely Edward Dean Adams, gave him large amounts of funding, stock, and even a new laboratory. Even so, this chapter of his life is the beginning of his downward spiral. At the time Tesla's lab was destroyed, he was preparing to send a radio signal across a distance of 50km, but then Guglielmo Marconi came along. Using 17 of Tesla's patents, he was able to send radio signals across the english channel; when he went to patent his radio, he was denied by the US Patent Office due to it being too similar to Tesla's patents. However, in 1904, when Marconi is able to send a radio signal across the Atlantic, the Patent Office reverses its decision and grants Marconi the patent for the Inventor of the Radio, without any reason. Tesla, of course, further sued Marconi and the battle dragged on for many years, eventually being settled for Tesla in 1943, just a few months after his death. One problem is that even today, it isn't 100% clear on who is the inventor of the radio, although most people give the title to Marconi. This is however wrong, as Marconi himself didn't even understand his own invention, he admitted this. Tesla was key in providing the technologies needed to build the radio, for example, his Tesla Coil.The discovery that he could use his Tesla coil to send and receive radio signals is the fundamental principle that allows the device to work. All in all, this situation can be viewed as: Tesla did all of the hard work developing the physics and electrical science needed for radio communication, while Marconi used that work and put it together to build his radio. This can be compared to Rosalind Franklin's case with the discovery of DNA, as without her photo, Watson and Crick would inherently have nothing to go on. The same injustice is still going on today with Tesla, as most people still credit Marconi for the invention of the radio. If you do a quick Google Search "inventor of the radio", the first image that pops up is Marconi, and there is no mention of Tesla. The final straw for Tesla was the destruction of his magnifying transmitter, or Wardenclyffe Tower. In the 1900's, he set out to construct a tower and wireless telegraphy and power plant thanks to a group of investors on Long Island. He had spent time researching for this project for 2 years; it proposed to deliver free energy, and transmit messages and signals wirelessly to anywhere in the world. On the other side, a person would only need a small receiver, as Tesla described "an inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch". The tower was sought to use the Earth's atmosphere and ground as conductors; the Tower would provide power to many different devices wirelessly through the air. Which, as we now know, was the primary source of failure. At this time, Tesla, and the physics and scientific community did not know the atmosphere and ground were actually insulators, or even the physics of conductors, this was all a complete mystery. But, it is important to point out that this wasn't a drastic misjudgement/mistake by Tesla, he was building on great ideas, but he didn't know what everyone didn't know. This idea is still being worked on today however, to many it seems like the future, and people are to trying to understand and improve on the physics that make it virtually impossible "One approach is to postulate that Tesla was generating not only ordinary electromagnetic waves but other forms of electromagnetic radiation as well." Not to mention, smaller forms of wireless power transmission are slowing making their way into modern life. For example, wireless cell phone charges, or a more exotic example is wireless pads on the road that charge electric vehicles as they drive, virtually making it's mileage infinite. Many people point out that wireless power transmission is more inefficient than it's wired counterparts, and this is true. But what they don't mention is that wired power transmission also requires a ton of infrastructure, including cables, transmission lines, transformers, and more. What Tesla envisioned was to have a network of magnifying transmitters, and distribute power across cities and even continents. This would cut down on much of the maintenance needed for wires, for example laying out the cables underneath the ocean. Even if Tesla's idea wasn't going to work for power transmission, it still pioneered the modern internet and telecommunications that are available so readily to us today.
