Nikola Tesla on His Work With Alternating Currents and Their Application to Wireless Telegraphy, Telephony and Transmission of Power: An Extended Interview

by Nikola Tesla

In this recently discovered transcript of a three day interview conducted in 1916, Nikola Tesla, using words and graphic illustrations, provides a step by step description of his remarkable accomplishments in the area of radio frequency engineering. In a style uniquely his own, Tesla carefully traces his work - from the first high frequency alternators constructed at his New York City Grand Street laboratory and their associated tuned circuits through the establishment of his huge broadcasting facility, the Wardenclyffe Plant, at Shoreham, Long Island. Among the variety of topics discussed high frequency alternators, experiments with wireless telegraphy and telephony, mechanical and electrical oscillators, the Colorado experiments, theory and technique of energy transmission, the Long Island plant, and arrangements for receiving. Seldom, in technical research, has such a treasure of descriptive commentary and historical documentation been discovered. The previously untold story found within the pages of this remarkable book has been described by the prominent Tesla researcher James Corum as a "veritable Rosetta stone" for tracing the technical thoughts of one of our most distinguished engineering scientists. Includes 61 photos and 42 line-art illustrations, many never before published.

237 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2002

About the author

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist. He is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla first studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without receiving a degree. He then gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884 he emigrated to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His AC induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company eventually marketed.
Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wirelessly controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and demonstrated his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.
After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943. Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the International System of Units (SI) measurement of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s.