“I only know two great men on this earth and you are one of them. The second is this young man… ” . In May 1884, a young Nikola Tesla , 28 years old and until then an employee of the Edison Company in Paris, addressed Thomas Edison with this recommendation letter, with whom he was to work in New York to improve the quality of the city power grid. Although the collaboration turned out to be very fruitful, it barely lasted six months and ended quite badly.
Much less popular and well-known than Thomas Edison, today Nikola Tesla is considered one of the most creative engineers and inventors of the late 19th century . Together with George Westinghouse he was a great defender of alternating current both for the transport and for the distribution of electricity. And he violently opposed Edison, who was betting solely on direct current.
In the early 1890s, what became known as the “War of the Currents” was so intense and violent that Thomas Edison himself did not hesitate to fund the inventor of the electric chair, Harold P. Brown, to demonstrate that the Alternating current was considerably more dangerous than direct current. In fact, when the electric chair was used for the first time, in August 18890, the technicians underestimated the tension required, horribly injuring the condemned man.
But, although alternating current eventually prevailed, at the time it did not bring any kind of notoriety to Tesla. On the contrary, unlike Edison, he died in January 1943, in debt, penniless, and leaving behind 300 patents. However, in 1884, Tesla had no reason to doubt his future.
Born in 1856 in what is now known as Croatia, the son of an Orthodox priest, Tesla stood out from an early age for his great intellectual abilities, his gift of visualization (which allowed him to do without diagrams and models) and his phenomenal memory.
In 1875 Tesla managed to enter the Polytechnic of Graz, in Austria, where he studied physics, mechanics and mathematics. Graduated three years later, he found an assistant position in Marburg. Soon after, in 1881, he worked in Budapest as an engineer at the Central Telegraph Office, until he became chief engineer of the telephone company.
However, it was the following year, in 1882, that the Edison Electric Company decided to hire Nikola Tesla. The company, founded a year earlier by Charles Batchelor, one of Thomas Edison’s closest associates, was commissioned to install incandescent lamps and dynamos developed by Edison in France.
From the beginning, Tesla stood out for his hard work, since he started work at 10 in the morning and finished at 5 in the morning , in addition to his excellent knowledge of physics and mathematics.
In fact, Batchelor himself was impressed by the creativity of his engineer, to the point of sending him everywhere in order to repair or improve the equipment installed by Edison. It was during one such mission that Tesla designed an induction motor that used alternating current, allowing electricity to be carried at higher voltages and longer distances. Given the innovation of the invention, the technique, however, did not get the expected interest. Not surprisingly, the Edison Power Company was not ready to question its entire system .
Convinced of his work, Charles Batchelor did not hesitate to recommend him to Thomas Edison …
“So here is our Parisian engineer who works all night!”
These were the words of welcome that Thomas Edison spoke to the arrival of Nikola Tesla in June 1884. At that time, at the age of 37, who had become famous in 1878 after inventing the incandescent light bulb, Edison was quite a celebrity across the Atlantic.
Now rich and respected, he had become a shrewd businessman, whose company set out to install complete power plants in both the United States and Europe. Furthermore, since Tesla was also a workaholic, he believed that sleeping was a waste of time, to the point of telling the President of the United States, Coolidge, that he was sleeping too much.
Already in New York, Tesla is entrusted with the mission of helping Thomas Edison improve the quality of the city’s electrical network . The system, based on direct current, experiences continuous “failures”, breakdowns, accidents and fires. In addition to being unreliable, the network was also characterized by being very expensive. While, due to continuous voltage drops, energy could not be transported over long distances, which led to the need to install a power plant every few kilometers.
Working side by side with Edison, Nikola Tesla was quick to propose a solution: adopt alternating current , the technology in which he had been working since 1882. As he considered, it would help solve all the existing problems in the electrical network of New York . But Edison categorically refused. He considered that ” Tesla’s ideas are brilliant but strictly unusable in practice .”
But Edison’s denial made sense: Adopting Tesla’s proposed solution would force his company to completely overhaul its industrial system. And its founder to renounce the royalties he received for his patents . In addition, as he maintained, starting from a distribution system with 5 cables (instead of 3 direct ones), alternating current would lead to a higher consumption of copper wire, significantly increasing installation costs.
But implementing a distribution system using alternating current required highly specialized knowledge of mathematics and physics. Knowledge that Thomas Edison did not have, which is why he began to see Nikola Tesla as a dangerous competitor .
Finally, in the hot summer of 1884, Thomas Edison finally refused to adopt Tesla’s proposed solution . However, it offers you the opportunity to work towards improving your dynamos, promising you a reward of $ 50,000 if you can develop a reliable system.
After working for months on this project, almost every night, in late 1884 Tesla presented Edison with the improvements made, claiming his reward in the process. To which Edison refused: ” You who are now a true American should know what an American joke is ,” he told her, offering him only a raise of $ 10 a week.
Scandalized, Tesla immediately left the company to found his own: Tesla Electric Light Company . But he did not have the expected luck, since he resigned two years later, leaving all his savings and royalties from his patents, under pressure from his financial investors.
