Nikola Tesla is a man almost forgotten by history; yet, he invented the form of electricity we use every day. Even less known is the fact that Tesla spent nine months conducting electrical experiments in Colorado Springs.Tesla, a native of present-day Croatia, immigrated to New York City in 1884 at the age of 28. Even though his father wanted Tesla to be a priest, Tesla trained as an electrical engineer at the Austrian Polytechnic School.Tesla arrived with 4 cents in his pocket and a letter of introduction that secured him a job as an electrical engineer, working for Thomas Edison.Since the late 1870s, Edison’s company, Edison Machine Works, had been using direct current technology to power streetlights and streetcars in New York City.Tesla soon left Edison over a pay dispute and partnered with George Westinghouse, who funded Tesla’s idea of alternating current, which is a method of generating electricity allowing the transmission of electricity over longer distances than Edison’s direct current.A publicity battle over which method was better, known as “The War of the Currents,” ensued between Edison and Tesla.In spite of Edison’s gruesome campaign against Tesla, which included the public electrocution of dogs, horses, an elephant and even a condemned ax murderer; the ability of alternating current to be transmitted longer distances by using less equipment than direct current prevailed.”I like Tesla because he won that battle,” said Darryl Edwards, manager of member services at Mountain View Electric Association and a self-described Tesla fan.”Alternating current is the system we use today. It’s amazing that Edison gets the credit for electricity. Edison was a self-promoting show boater, but truly Tesla was the inventor,” Edwards said. “There are electrical engineers out there who don’t know who Tesla is.”During the 1890s, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, a machine that steps ordinary 60-cycle-per-second household current up to hundreds of thousands of cycles per second and produces extremely high voltages.He also developed some of the first neon and fluorescent illumination, took the first X-ray photographs, transmitted and received the first radio signal (a discovery once claimed by Guglielmo Marconi); and devised the first radio controlled device – a boat – that some regard as the first robot.By 1899, Tesla was convinced it was possible to transmit electrical power wirelessly.He chose Colorado Springs as the site for a new lab because of the area’s frequent thunderstorms, high altitude and dryness. Electricity was available from the El Paso Power Co. and the land was free.Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs May 17, 1899, with $30,000 from John Jacob Astor. He stayed in room 207 (Tesla required that the room number be divisible by three) at the Alta Vista Hotel and started construction of his lab on Knob Hill, east of the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind and a mile east of downtown.Tesla wrote that he came to Colorado Springs to develop a transmitter of great power, to perfect a way to isolate transmitted energy and to ascertain the laws of propagation of currents through the earth and its atmosphere.For the Fourth of July that year, Colorado Springs officials planned a gigantic display of pyrotechnics on Pikes Peak, including 35,000 pounds of powder flares with red, white and blue flames that were expected to be visible as far away as Cheyenne, Wyo.The festivities were canceled, however, when a lightning storm struck – Tesla’s first opportunity to measure the transmission of electricity through the earth. “Heavy and long persisting arcs formed almost in regular time intervals. I was observing stationary waves,” Tesla wrote.Tesla continued construction of his lab, which featured a roof that rolled back to prevent it from catching fire and an 80-foot wooden tower topped by a 142-foot metal mast supporting a large wooden ball covered by copper.Inside the lab, Tesla’s assistants assembled an enormous Tesla coil designed to send powerful electrical impulses into the earth.Tesla’s first full test of the coil caused bolts of man-made lightning – 135 feet long – to shoot out from the lab’s mast. The test also caused El Paso Power Co.’s generator to catch fire, resulting in a loss of power – lasting several days – for the entire city of Colorado Springs. Tesla pursued three methods of wireless energy transmission: through the ground, through the lower atmosphere and through the higher atmosphere.”The conditions in the pure air of the Colorado Mountains proved extremely favorable for my experiments, and the results were most gratifying to me,” Tesla wrote.Tesla left Colorado Springs Jan. 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. He returned to New York and built another lab with an even taller tower and a shaft 120 feet in the ground, with iron pipes driven down another 300 feet.Work on the wireless transmission of electrical energy through the earth stopped when Tesla was unable to secure additional funding. Westinghouse is said to have asked, “How would I bill my customers?”Tesla moved on to other ideas, including the transmission of high-frequency radio waves that would reflect off the hulls of vessels and appear on a fluorescent screen – an early description of radar. His last patent was for a flying machine resembling both a helicopter and an airplane, the progenitor of today’s tilt-rotor plane.Shortly before his death, Tesla sent a technical paper to the governments of the United States, Canada, England, France, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, providing the first technical description of what is today called a charged particle beam weapon.Tesla called the weapon a defensive “peace beam” that would end all wars.Tesla died alone and in poverty on Jan. 7, 1943, in room 3327 on the 33rd floor (both numbers divisible by three) at the Hotel New Yorker. His body was cremated, and the ashes reside at the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.His legacy in Colorado Springs is twofold: Tesla Drive, which runs from Citadel Mall to the southern end of Palmer Park and the Tesla Educational Opportunity Center, a School District 11 middle school and high school.The Tesla Museum of Science, formed by the International Tesla Society in 1984, once operated on Bijou Street but went bankrupt in 1999.”I feel bad that Tesla doesn’t get the credit he deserves,” Edwards said. “People need to know that three-phase power and alternating current were his inventions. Our whole lifestyle is based around them.” Sources: www.pbs.org/tesla, www.magnetricity.com/Tesla/Tesla_Colorado.php and www.teslasociety.com
