DR. NIKOLA TESLA
Wizard of electricity, and inventor of the wireless transmission of power.
DOCTOR TESLA'S FIRST POWER PLANT
From this oscillator Doctor Tesla sends out the electrical waves with which he hopes to revolutionize industry.
Throughout his life Tesla has been more interested in the adventurous and scientific side of electricity than the commercial side, and all of his inventions smack of the marvellous. To name all his inventions would be almost like giving a list of the machines and devices that mark man's progress in the use of electricity. His invention for the alternating current dynamo, for instance, brought forth an entirely new principle, while his rotating magnetic field made possible the transmission of alternating currents from large power plants over great distances and is very extensively used to-day. High power dynamos, transformers, induction coils, oscillators, and various kinds of electric lamps all came in for his attention.
He became one of the foremost authorities on high tension currents and in 1889 invented a system of electrical conversion and distribution by oscillatory discharges which was a step toward his great goal, the wireless transmission of power. He was very near the prize when in 1893 he announced a system of wireless transmission of intelligence. His studies continued and finally, in 1897, he announced his famous high potential transmitter by which he claimed to be able to send power through the earth without wires. The art of telautomatics announced in 1899 was really a part of Tesla's invention for the wireless transmission of power, for the plan was to control such objects, for instance, as airships or boats, from a distance by electricity transmitted without wires.
Through that marvellous invention the boat or aeroplane dispatcher, sitting before a complex little wireless dispatching board could send his craft, at any speed, at any height, in perfect safety, and with exact precision to the place or port he desired it to go. It would not be necessary for the dispatcher ever to see the craft he was directing, for his instruments would show him everything in regard to its speed, direction, and location; nor yet would it be necessary for a craft to have a crew aboard, for all the operations in connection with sending it from one place to another would be controlled perfectly by telautomatics.