Nikola Tesla - Warlock of the Twentieth Century

For those who lived next to him, the world changed, turned into a fabulous space where nothing should be surprised. Northern lights shone over the entire Atlantic, ordinary butterflies turned into bright fireflies, ball lightnings easily got out of suitcases and used to illuminate the living rooms ...

He, Nikola Tesla, was a warlock of the XX century. But the warlock is from science. His experiments always balanced on the brink of evil and good. The fall of the Tunguska meteorite, the earthquake in New York, the testing of monstrous weapons capable of instantly destroying entire armies - that's what, besides luminous butterflies, is attributed to the experiments of Nikola Tesla.

It was he who served for many science fiction writers as a prototype of the conventional image of an insane professor, whose inventions threaten to destroy the entire planet. In fact, we do not know anything about what kind of person Nikola Tesla was, what hero he should become for biographers - good or bad. Strange - yes, certainly.

Black cat

He was born in the middle of the XIX century in places famous not so much for scientific achievements as for mystical stories and legends - in a small mountain village in the south of Croatia, in the family of a village priest.

Nicola was the fourth child, but his father had enough money to raise all the children. He was known as a respected and educated person, there were books in the house, including folios devoted to the natural sciences. The mother of the future inventor was also famous throughout the county as a magnificent needlewoman, and the inhabitants of neighboring villages said that "even if her fingers are rough from homework, she can still tie three knots on her eyelash."

Not surprisingly, since childhood, Nikola has been resourceful and addicted to reading. At the age of seven, he secretly cast long candles from the fat, and read at night the volumes stolen from his father's cupboards. But then strange, inexplicable things began to happen: when looking at pearls, something happened like an attack, the sparkle of crystals led to an inexplicable delight.

"I'm still sensitive to some of these irritants: I need to drop rectangular pieces of paper into the liquid, as a strange and unpleasant aftertaste appears in my mouth," Tesla wrote seventy years later. In childhood, every day and every night filled with strange visions for him - ghosts, fairy giants, mysterious signs.

It was almost crazy, with hysterics and incomprehensible illnesses. But it was then that Nikola Tesla first discovered in himself an amazing ability: it cost him only to imagine in the imagination some kind of machine, such as a loom or mill, and he could closely monitor his work, make improvements, check how this or that wheel turns - as if he built this mechanism in fact. His memory was so perfect that he kept every line of hundreds of books read, every picture and every drawing.

One late evening, Nikola sat on the porch and stroked a large black cat with thick hair. Suddenly he noticed that between the hide of the animal and his fingers began to skip a minute spark, illuminating the thickening dusk. "What is this?" He asked his father.

"I do not know for sure, but obviously it's the same force that lives in lightning," he said, and the answer struck a ten-year-old boy more than any lightning. Now he thought only of the mysterious power of electricity that could kill a man, but so tenderly and tenderly touched his hands. Is it possible to tame it, how are cats or dogs domesticated?

From Croatia to Paris

These were the times when electricity still seemed a mysterious element, but it was already known about the electric current. Faraday conducted experiments with capacitors, and Volta had long ago created his famous battery pack - a "volt pole . " These were the times when, still not knowing anything about his physical laws, people increasingly used electricity for their own needs - the telegraph and the first DC electric motor were invented ...

All this young Tesla had to learn about all this at the Higher Technical School in Graz, where he entered after finishing the school course. Father for a long time could not accept the fact that Nicola decided to study for an engineer - he demanded that the son follow in his footsteps and become a priest.

However, the scandal that occurred in the family ended in the most unexpected way: the young Tesla suddenly fell ill, infected with some incomprehensible disease. Doctors believed that the young man picked up the cholera, and his days are numbered. For a moment recovering, Nicola begged his father to let him continue training for an engineer, promising that if he got the consent, he would "cure himself, because he will have the will to live." The father, lost all hopes, eventually agreed - and then, to the surprise of the doctors, a miracle really happened: Tesla recovered in a matter of days.

But since that time, one more thing has been added to his oddities and oddities, preserved to the most advanced years: for fear of catching the infection, he washed his hands at every opportunity, and always wore gloves.

However, by the end of his studies, Tesla stood out among the classmates not only with oddities, but with beauty and considerable physical strength: a burning brunette under two meters tall, athletic, he swiftly passed through school corridors, won almost all sports, and with the same ease received Excellent grades in all subjects.

It is said that the teacher still continued to dictate the conditions of the task, when Tesla was already giving her the right answer. His understanding of mathematics and physics was almost intuitive, as if he were born with all this knowledge, and it remained only to remember what it needed ...

Now he was learning more and more every day about the power that he felt for the first time as a ten-year-old child stroking a black cat. Electricity! His laws became clearer. And, one by one, like with sudden flashes of light, the first inventions began to appear in his imagination.

One of them was destined to become the most famous, though perhaps not the main thing in Tesla's life - and it was an alternating current generator. The same generator, without which no power station is inconceivable, without which modern energy can not do.

Do not be a generator of Tesla, and all of our present civilization would be thrown back a hundred years ago. But then, in 1872, the idea of ​​a young student seemed like delirium. If electricity can be used and transmitted over a distance, then only in the form of a direct current - so everyone thought, even the most famous physicists.

There were no motors running from alternating current. Tesla invented such a motor, much simpler and more efficient than conventional electric motors, but nobody wanted to listen to it either. After all, all this existed only in his imagination! Who would give money to a young 20-year-old engineer to translate his ideas? Just the same crazy.

Nikola Tesla in the laboratory

Meanwhile, my father fell ill, the family's financial situation deteriorated, and Tesla was forced to get a job immediately. First in a telegraph company in Budapest, and then in the continental bureau of the famous American inventor Thomas Edison , then located in Paris.

Here, Tesla was doing almost everything he had ever dreamed of doing - improving electric cars. But the trouble is: they were foreign cars, other people's inventions. In addition, the company's management regularly deceived the young engineer, refusing to pay the promised rewards.

Money was chronically lacking, and Tesla got carried away with gambling, then winning, then getting rid of one's small salary for one night. Coming home in the morning, he looked with contempt at himself in the mirror, closed his eyes - and immediately forgot about the loss, plunging into reflections on some physical task.

He was in a much more violent passion. Thrust to electricity. He eagerly read articles in foreign technical journals - and there they wrote increasingly about new experiments by Russian electrical engineers. Lodygin, Yablochkov - these names were then sounded all over the world. And Tesla decided to go to St. Petersburg.

At the last moment, one of the administrators of the Continental Company, Charles Bechlor , an assistant and Edison's personal friend, accidentally found out about it. He had long been eyeing a young engineer, and although he could not help him with money, but in his own way, he highly appreciated the talents of Tesla.

In addition, Belchor worked not only on the Continental Company. He had another, lesser-known job, which was funded by the US government. Now we would call it an industrial espionage ...

"Agree that your intention to go to St. Petersburg is unreasonable," Bechlor assured the young man, "have you not heard of the fate of poor Yablochkov, who nearly died in his laboratory?" This world-famous inventor was forced to leave his homeland and seek opportunities to improve his invention in Paris. And you are striving from Paris to Petersburg. Listen to me, I want to help you. Go to America. I'll give you a letter to Edison.

And Bechlor immediately wrote a short note: "It would be an unpardonable mistake to let such a talent go to Russia, and you will be grateful to me, Mr. Edison, for not having spared a few hours to persuade this young man to abandon the idea of ​​going to Petersburg I know two great people - one of them you, the second - this young man. "

The American byl

So a few months later Tesla found himself in New York, in the firm of Thomas Edison. But the famous inventor at first glance felt a dangerous competitor, and the better Tesla coped with his work, the more he fell into disgrace.

Especially annoyed by the American genius of Tesla's idea of ​​machines operating on alternating current. Edison himself had already made a fortune on conventional electric power stations and electric motors working on direct current. Let these machines were complex and inefficient, but they brought a good income - and why look for something else?

One day, Edison asked Tesla to solve at once ten problems for the improvement of dynamos and DC motors, which the great inventor himself could not cope with, promising for this a reward of fifty thousand dollars.

Tesla brilliantly solved the problem in a few weeks, but when he demanded money, Edison just laughed. "You, emigrants, apparently do not understand American jokes!" He said. Enraged, Tesla slammed the door and did not show up at Edison's office any more. Since that day, they have become mortal enemies.

But, resigning from the company Edison, Tesla was in an almost unfamiliar city, where he barely managed to live a year, without any means of livelihood. I had to take up any, even the dirtiest work.

He worked as a loader at the port, dug ditches, and tried to get some money to return to Europe. However, fate decreed otherwise.

Once during a day's work Tesla met a young man named Brown , also a young unemployed engineer, but - an American to the brain and bones, and he immediately seized the young inventor.

Brown was the "madman" who is ready to believe in the ideas of Nikola Tesla! But crazy in the American manner, that is - enterprising and practical. True, Brown's money was not much more than Tesla's - some fifty dollars, but that was enough to establish a small firm - Tesla Arc Light Company - accepting orders for the installation of street lamps.

Brown promised that the deal would bring million profits, and was right. With a truly American grip, he was doing business, getting orders and loans, while Tesla was developing new samples of arc lamps.

Literally a few months later the firm moved to a new office on Fifth Avenue - as if in mockery, taking the building adjacent to Edison's firm. But no matter how the famous American inventor tried to destroy his competitors, their business went on better and better.

Nikola Tesla with a light bulb

A few months later Tesla already had his own laboratory equipped with the latest technology. And he, finally, was able, without thinking about money, to start implementing all those ideas and inventions that so many years owned his imagination.

First of all, he made and tested generators and two-phase AC motors, and proved their effectiveness. The models he sent to the leading American universities convinced many famous scientists of his rightness. Tesla was invited to lecture on electrical engineering, newspapers and scientific journals wrote about him ... But this was not yet a triumph, but only the first step on the staircase to world fame.

And the second step was very close. Less than a year after the first publications about the two-phase current and other inventions of Tesla, as the well-known engineer and industrialist Georg Westinghouse , who recently built his first power plant in Pittsburgh, knocked on the door of his laboratory.

He wanted to use alternating current not only to illuminate the city, but also to drive machines in the Pittsburgh factories. "I offer you a million dollars for your patent!" - said from the threshold of Westinghouse.

Tesla was touched when he finally saw a man who believed in the future of a two-phase power supply as much as he did himself, and almost immediately agreed, making only one minor reservation - just in case: "And you will pay me one dollar a year for Every horsepower developed by your AC motors. "

Westinghouse accepted these conditions. He still did not know that after only three years, when the power of all the electric motors produced by him exceeds 15 million horsepower, he will have to literally stand in front of Tesla on his knees to persuade him to change the contract ...

The two-phase current rapidly conquered America and Europe. Soon, the generators developed by Tesla's patents began to work in the power plant building on Niagara Falls, and then in all parts of the New and Old World. But the inventor himself was almost not interested. He plunged into a circle of new problems, promising very different discoveries. And here the famous scientist Nikola Tesla ends up. And the magician and magician begins, the legendary wizard and lord of electricity.

Legends of electricity

In the early nineties of the XIX century Nikola Tesla is already a millionaire. He dines at the best New York restaurant, where a special chef prepares meals according to his own recipes. He shoots a room in one of the best New York hotels. He does not have his own house (and never will), because his house is a laboratory. In it, he spends twenty hours a day. And sometimes he receives guests.

After all, Tesla is not just a millionaire, he's a legend of New York! Dating with him looking for a variety of people. Among them are many celebrities: Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Herbert Wells, Antonin Dvorak ...

In the laboratory there are small parties, which the guests later recall with a sinking heart. "He took fireballs out of suitcases and juggled them with simple balls!", "He was filled with electricity - and every object that he touched started to glow." "He talked about the transfer of energy at a distance" ...

Nikola Tesla

Vivekananda , one of the members of the Ramakrishna mission, sent to the West at the beginning of the 20th century to find out the possibility of uniting all existing religions, visiting Tesla in his laboratory in New York, wrote later to his homeland:

"This man is different from all Western people, he demonstrated his experiences with electricity, to which he refers as a living being with whom he talks and who gives orders." This is the highest degree of spiritual personality. The highest level and is able to recognize all our gods.In its electric multicolored lights appeared all our Gods: Vishnu, Shiva, and I felt the presence of Brahma himself. "

And it's true, it seems, it's not just electro-technical tricks - it's the small sermons of Tesla trying to explain the secret of the power to which he himself came close.

"At certain moments I noticed that all the air around me is filled with the tongues of a real flame, their intensity instead of waning, growing and peaking at the age of 25. I once felt that my brain and small My heart shines in my head, "Nikola Tesla wrote in her diaries. He feels what he later will formulate as his "ether theory."

In his opinion, the whole space here, on earth, and in deep space, is filled with energy. She is everywhere. And it could be transmitted at a distance, or received directly from the air, if you understand how to do it right ...

And, it seems, Tesla discovers this secret. He begins experiments with high-frequency currents, obtained with the help of a special transformer (he is now called in electronics - "transformer Tesla") and lectures about his discoveries - first in America and then in Europe.

He proves that high voltage is safe for human life. Standing on the chair, in front of all Tesla lets through his body a voltage of three hundred thousand volts. Around him flashes the radiance of coronary discharges, with his fingers flying lightning. He takes in an electric light bulb - and she immediately lights up!

It causes flashing to anything not attached lamps at any distance, includes electric motors, to which wires are not connected ... In academic circles - an embarrassed silence. But the newsmen follow him on the heels. Therefore, we know about the most sensational inventions of Tesla from a number of newspaper reports. Here's what they say:

In 1896, the inventor begins experiments with resonant emitters. When he launches the most powerful of his instruments, the walls of the laboratory begin to walk with staggering, the stucco is poured from the ceiling ...

Turn off the radiator for too long, you have to break it with a hammer. But at the moment when Tesla is standing over the fragments of the device, alarmed police officers run into the laboratory door. They were sent here by residents of nearby houses, long troubled by Tesla's experiments: their apartments are also shaken by resonant waves. But the police station, and all other buildings in New York, too, experience underground blows ...

This is a real earthquake, by force of three points! Is it provoked by Tesla's experiments? This seems almost incredible, but there is no other explanation.

In 1897, Tesla left New York and built a large laboratory to study lightning in a deserted mountainous area. There he discovers the effect of "standing electric waves" provoked by lightning, and solves the problem of energy transfer without wires.

A small tower connected to a local power station throws out so much energy into space that the night in the whole district turns into a day. But the generator at the power station, unable to withstand the overload, burns out, and Tesla returns to New York.

A little later, in 1898 at an electrical exhibition Tesla demonstrates the world's first radio-controlled ship. Obeying the radio signals, a small boat is floating on the pool, multicolored light bulbs are on it ... Two months later, the large ship is already 25 miles from the port, obeying the radio signals from the shore.

And at the end of the year Tesla reports that he created a fully radio-controlled humanoid robot, capable of repeating all operator movements. But this invention, like many others, destroys the fire that suddenly happened in his laboratory.

And finally, in June 1900 on Coney Island near New York with the support of one of the American millionaires, the world-famous inventor begins to build his wireless transmission system - the Wardencliffe Tower .

The same tower, according to Tesla's plan, is a huge antenna for controlling robots in any part of the globe. It looks like a Martian structure: a huge, slightly flattened copper sphere, installed at the end of a sixty-meter pyramid ...

A tower in which Tesla's laboratory is simultaneously located is one of the strangest structures in the city. Eyewitnesses say that around her, especially at night, something incredible is happening: the walking townspeople suddenly notice that their bodies begin to glow, and in the air a greenish glow spreads.

The New York newspapers of that time are full of tales of these oddities. Tesla begins to experiment with the transfer of energy in the form of beams to the opposite side of the earth - and the radiance intensifies. He does not yet know that simultaneously with his experiments in Russia, in Podkamennaya Tunguska, there is a strong explosion, the causes of which will not be established ...

And then something quite inexplicable happens. After an unusual night, which all American newspapers wrote about, when by his experiment he lit the sky not only over New York, but over the indefinite space of the Atlantic Ocean, Tesla suddenly leaves his laboratory, without a clear reason, leaving everything untouched in it.

He never crossed the threshold of the Wordcliff, never visited him, and never appeared in those parts, and, strangely enough, he did not take away any calculations, not a single drawing or document, or a single paper.

Since then, until his death, the inventor abandoned all his "magical" experiments, and was only concerned with the improvement of ordinary electrotechnical devices. The cat that was ironed once by a small Tesla, and remained untamed. Electricity is uncontaminated.

And before leaving for Europe, Tesla explained to his friends that he saw the unpreparedness of mankind to accept the fruits of his inventions. "They will be created anew, many years later, when their time comes - but not now."

The most inexplicable

But there is another version of Tesla's renunciation from his discoveries. And it is contained in his own words, told to one of the friends shortly before the termination of work in the laboratory. Biographers call this the "love story of Nikola Tesla":

"I fed hundreds of pigeons, thousands of them, for years, thousands of them, for who can remember them all, but there was one pigeon-an amazing bird, white with light gray spots on its wings-it was very feminine. Everywhere, and she could also find me anywhere.It was enough that I just thought of her, called her, and she flew in. I felt her, and she felt me.

I fell in love with this bird. Yes, I loved this bird the way a man loves a woman, and she loved me too. When she fell ill, I knew about it; She flew into my room, and I nursed her for days until she recovered. This dove was the joy of my life. While she needed me, everything else was unimportant - she was the meaning of my life.

One night, when I was lying in the dark in bed and as usual was solving one of the next problems, she flew into the open window and sat down on my table. I knew she needed me: she wanted to tell me something important, and so I got up and walked over. Looking at her, I knew that she wanted to tell me that she would die. Then, when I realized this, I saw a light pouring from her eyes - a strong ray of light. "

Tesla stopped for a moment and then, as if waiting for an answer, he continued: "Yes, it was a real light, strong and bright, dazzling, brighter than the light of the strongest bulb in my laboratory." When this pigeon died, something passed from my life. Until that moment, I was quite sure that I would fulfill all my plans, and although I had distant plans, when my dove died, I realized that my life's work is over. Yes, I fed pigeons for years, and still feed them, thousands Them, after all, in the end, who knows ... ".

Nikola Tesla, the first great scientist who refused the Nobel Prize, a man whom all physicists of the world consider to be both the greatest genius and the greatest charlatan, died in New York at the New Yorker Hotel on January 7, 1943.

At first it was funneled according to Orthodox custom, and then the body was burned in the Buddhist ceremonial. Almost all of his manuscripts disappeared, and most of the experiments could not be repeated in any laboratory in the world.