There Is a Statue of Nikola Tesla in Palo Alto...with Free WiFi

Tesla is most famous these days as the name of a car company. But Nikola Tesla was an amazing inventor. Today, July 10, is his birthday. He was born in 1856 at Smiljan in what was the "The Austrian Empire" and today is in Croatia (but Tesla was Serbian).

I assumed Elon Musk named Tesla (the car company) but in fact the company was founded before Musk had anything to do with it, with its first CEO being Martin Eberhard. He apparently came up with the name in the Blue Bayou restaurant in Disneyland, of all places. He picked the name because Tesla was the inventor of the type of electric motor that the vehicles use.

As it says in the title of this post, there is a statue of Tesla in Palo Alto. And, in a unique twist, since Tesla worked on various aspects of wireless/radio, it is a free WiFi hotspot. I assume the antennas are in those PVC pipes by his feet that you can see in the picture.

One of the most important of Tesla's inventions was domestic electricity. Edison has better publicity, and many people think of Edison as the inventor of electric power, among other things like light bulbs, phonographs, and cinema. But Edison's electricity was all direct current (DC) and not the alternating current (AC) invented by Tesla. For long-distance power distribution, DC didn't work and so homes connected to Edison's power company could be at most a few miles away. AC allows transformers to step up the voltage (and back down again at the substation). Power lines today are typically 350KV and sometimes over twice that. The reason that this is important is that the power loss in transmission (as heat) is a function of the current (actually the square of the current) times the resistance (I²R). There is not a lot that can be done about the resistance, other than using thicker wires or more expensive materials. But at hundreds of thousands of volts, the current to move energy from one place to another is minimal. Funnily enough, high voltage direct current is sometimes used today since it is more efficient over long distances and in some specialist areas like undersea cables. We now can step up and down voltage using solid-state technology.

Tesla worked at Niagara Falls on the hydroelectric power generation. As it happens, there is another statue of him there. I recently wrote a post with the self-explanatory title Alessandra Nardi Receives Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA. In a nice coincidence, one of the pictures she sent me was herself along with her family in front of that statue!

Tesla worked on an amazing number of things other than electricity generation, far too many to discuss in any detail here.

• Wireless transmission (radio, where he had prior art over Marconi, and eventually had all Marconi's patents overturned...but unfortunately after his death)
• Wireless power transmission
• Bladeless turbine (see below)
• He did a lot of experiments with X-rays (although he didn't discover them, that was Röntgen)

Perhaps the most surprising, and one I only found out about while doing a little research for this post, was that Tesla filed two patents for logic gates in 1903, numbers 723188 and 725605. Both patents are titled "Method of Signaling". He filed over 300 patents on other topics. Of course, these gates not based on transistors, since those had not been invented. But if you ever wondered why, when electronics and computers started to be created, there were no foundational patents on gates (just on transistors) it's because Tesla go there first and so there was what patent examiners call "prior art". You can't patent something if it has already been patented, even if the old patent has expired.

Tesla Trivia

There were lots of rumors that Edison and Tesla were going to be awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics. But the rumors also said that one of them had said he would not accept it. Nobody really seems to know. In the end, neither of them ever won the Nobel Prize despite electric power doing much to usher in the technologies of the 20th century.

Belgrade's Airport is The Nikola Tesla Belgrade Airport. It is nice to see airports named after people other than politicians. Wouldn't it be better if San Jose airport was named after Gordon Moore or Bob Noyce, rather than Norm Mineta? I can only think of a few others: John Wayne in Orange Country, John Lennon in Liverpool, Saint Exupéry in Lyon.

The largest power plant in Serbia is also named after him, the TPP Nikola Tesla.

The SI unit of magnetic flux density is the tesla (abbreviation T). It is one weber per square meter (1 T = 1 Wb/m^2).

July 10 (Tesla's birthday) is:

• The Day of Science in Serbia, the country of his nationality
• The Day of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls, where he consulted on building the hydroelectric generating system
• Nikola Tesla Day in Croatia, the country where his birthplace is today

On his deathbed, he said that his bladeless turbine was his favorite invention. He actually died subsequent to being hit by a taxi aged 81. You can see the turbine in action in this demonstration video:

Learn More

If you like your Tesla history in comic form, here's The Oatmeal's Why Nikola Tesla Was the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived (warning, it's quite long and covers his whole life...and is nasty about both Edison and Marconi who stole some of his ideas). But it's a great read. The author, Matthew Inman, went on at the end of the comic to start to crowdfund a project to raise money to buy Tesla's old laboratory and turn it into a museum and science center. See below for a little more detail.

If you prefer your biography as a conventional book (also on Kindle) then there is Tesla: Man out of Time.

If you go for the movie version, there is an old movie The Secret of Nikola Tesla. I can confirm The Oatmeal's description of the video as:

It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life.

Plus, of course, you can take your Tesla in statue form. Google Maps knows just where it is:

The Tesla Museum

There seems to be a Tesla museum in Belgrade. I've never visited. I have actually been to Belgrade when I was 19 on Interrail. Back then, that part of the world was still Yugoslavia.

As I mentioned above, there is, however, a "work-in-progress" museum. A few years ago, Matthew Inman, who writes and draws The Oatmeal (here's the link again) launched a program to acquire Tesla's old laboratory at Wardenclyffe by crowdfunding a project of over $850K. Oatmeal readers and users of Reddit and elsewhere donated over $1.3M and the State of New York gave an $850K grant. That step was done, and the land is acquired. However, it will take more money and time to build a museum on the site. You can click on the image below to take you to a link with all the details.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.