BIOGRAPHY OF NIKOLA TESLA

(Smiljan, present Croatia, 1856 - New York, 1943) American physicist of Serbian origin. He studied at the universities of Graz (Austria) and Prague. After having worked in several electrical industries in Paris and Budapest, he moved to the United States (1884), where he worked under Thomas A. Edison, then a supporter of the continuous electric current.

Tesla founded an electrotechnical research laboratory in New York, where he discovered the principle of the rotating magnetic field and polyphase AC systems. It created the first electric induction motor of alternating current and many other electrical devices such as the Tesla assembly, a transformer of radiofrequency in which primary and secondary are tuned, useful when preselecting the entrance of a radioelectric receiver. He predicted the possibility of wireless communications ahead of the studies carried out by Marconi, and in his honor tesla is called the unit of measurement of magnetic flux intensity in the international system.

His inventions and patents followed each other with some speed. In 1887, and as a result of John Hopkinson's discovery in 1880, that three alternating and out-of-phase currents can be translated more simply than a normal alternating current, Tesla invented the three-phase induction motor.


In that motor the three phases act on the armature in a way that it is obtained that it turns when generating a rotating magnetic field. However, the rotor was moving with a certain delay with respect to the frequency of the current. Based on this invention, the Swedish Ernst Danielson invented the synchronous motor in 1902, in which he replaced the non-magnetic armature material with a permanent magnet or electromagnet, which allowed him to obtain a motor that rotated with a number of Revolutions per minute equal to the frequency of the current.

In 1891 Tesla invented the coil that bears his name, which consists of a transformer consisting of an air nucleus and with primary and secondary coils in parallel resonance. With this coil it was able to create a field of high voltage and high frequency. Two years later he discovered the phenomenon of wave character called "Tesla light" in alternating currents of high voltage and high frequency; Through the study of these currents, observed that single-pole incandescent lamps emit light when approached to a conductor through which electric current passes, and that empty glass tubes sparkle even if they lack an electrode if they are connected by One of its ends and approaches the other to a conductor through which high-frequency current flows. He also realized that the human body is capable of conducting these high frequency currents without experiencing any damage.