니콜라 테슬라의 삶과 유산: 잊혀진 천재

### 잊혀진 천재: 니콜라 테슬라의 삶과 유산
* ⚡ 니콜라 테슬라는 더 유명한 발명가들에 가려져 있지만, **교류 전기를 비롯해 현대 세계를 움직이는 기술**을 개발하는 데 중요한 역할을 했습니다.
* 📅 1856년 7월 10일 크로아티아 스밀잔에서 태어난 테슬라의 삶은 **형의 죽음과 발명가 정신에 불을 지핀 환상** 등 찬란함과 비극으로 점철되어 있습니다.
* 🎓 공대에서 유망한 출발을 보였지만 **테슬라는 도박 중독으로 중퇴**한 후 성공과 고난으로 점철된 파란만장한 커리어를 이어갔습니다.
* 💡 1882년 부다페스트에서 근무하던 중 교류에 대한 아이디어를 떠올렸고, 이는 훗날 **전기 공학에 가장 중요한 공헌**을 하게 됩니다.
* 🤝 토마스 에디슨과의 파란만장한 관계 끝에 테슬라는 **조지 웨스팅하우스와 협력**하여 **1893년 세계 콜롬비아 박람회에서 교류 전력을 성공적으로 구현**하는 데 성공했습니다.
* 💔 테슬라의 관대함 덕분에 그는 재정적 어려움에 처한 웨스팅하우스를 지원하기로 결정하면서 **로열티 1,200만 달러를 몰수**했고, 이는 결국 자신의 재정적 안정성에 영향을 미쳤습니다.
* 📻 테슬라 코일과 초기 라디오 등 수많은 획기적인 기술을 발명했지만, **화재로 연구실을 잃고 굴리엘모 마르코니가 라디오 특허를 획득**하는 등 좌절을 겪기도 했습니다.
* 🌌 결국 테슬라는 이윤보다 과학에 대한 헌신으로 인해 무명과 빚더미에 올랐지만, 그의 유산은 **'빛의 자식'이라는 어머니의 예언적 말**을 강조하며 현대 사회에 계속 영감을 불어넣고 형성하고 있습니다.

선구적인 발명가인 니콜라 테슬라는 혁신으로 세상을 바꿨지만 이윤을 무시한 탓에 무일푼으로 생을 마감했습니다.

When you think about the greatest inventors of all time, there are a few names that come to mind: Henry Ford, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison. But there's one name that is not as recognizable. When you plug your phone in, turn on the lights, or use the refrigerator, you have Nikola Tesla to thank. This is the story of the forgotten genius, and the story begins at the end. On January 7, 1943, a maid working at the New Yorker Hotel walked into room 3327, where she found the body of an 86-year-old man who called the hotel home for the past decade. Tesla died alone and broke. He lived off a diet of warm milk and crackers and was obsessed with feeding the pigeons outside. One of the greatest inventors of all time faded into obscurity and died penniless. There is a reason why this happened, which will become clear by the end.

of this story. Tesla was born in the town of Smiljan in present-day Croatia on July 10, 1856. He was born during a lightning storm. According to family legend, the midwife said halfway through the birth: This child will be a child of darkness, to which his mother replied, No, he will be a child of light. Little did she know how prophetic those words would be. When Tesla was five, he witnessed his older brother fall from a horse and later die. This would haunt him for the rest of his life. As a child, he began seeing visions accompanied by flashes of light, confusing what was real and what was imaginary. This never went away. The vision spurred his ability to conceive inventions in his head in such detail that he didn't even need to draw them out. He explained how the designs were perfected in his mind in an article in 1919. Invariably, my device works as I conceived that

It should and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In 20 years, there has not been a single exception. Tesla credits his mom for his interest in invention. Đuka Mandić invented small household appliances in her spare time. She had an eidetic memory - the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision - and she passed this on to her son. Tesla's father was a priest and wanted him to become one too, but Tesla was interested in engineering. When he contracted cholera as a teen and nearly died, his father promised to send him to engineering school if he survived, and miraculously, he did. He went to study in Austria at the Technical College of Graz, where he is said to have worked from 3 am until 11 pm every day. Professors were worried that he would die from exhaustion. Tesla had a beautiful mind. He could perform calculus in his head and

spoke eight languages. He was a good student at the start but would not finish school. He dropped out after becoming addicted to gambling and cut ties with his family so they wouldn't find out. His friends didn't know what happened to him either. They thought he drowned in a river. Tesla moved around Europe and eventually ended up in Budapest working as an electrician at a telephone company. While walking around a park in the city one day, he had an epiphany about developing a new way of generating electricity using alternating current. It would be his greatest invention that would change the world. I'll explain more about AC a little later. In 1882, he settled in Paris to work for the French branch of Thomas Edison's electric company. He started off installing indoor lighting but the managers noticed his talents and had him doing more complicated work, designing and building dynamos and motors. He was soon traveling throughout Europe

fixing problems at other Edison branches. Two years later, in 1884, Tesla's manager offered him a job at Edison Machine Works in New York City. He agreed and arrived in America with only four cents in his pocket because his money was stolen on the boat ride over. Tesla initially had a good impression of Edison. Edison was also impressed by Tesla, later saying: I have had many hard-working assistants but you take the cake. This mutual admiration didn't last. They would become bitter rivals. The two men disagreed over how electricity should be contained and delivered. Edison preferred direct current, which is a system where the electric charge only flows in one direction. Tesla was a fan of alternating current, in which the electric charge changes direction periodically. Changing directions is crucial to maintaining a steady supply of electricity because it does not overpower outlets. This means it can provide more power and transmit power over longer

distances. It's the reason AC powers our homes and other large appliances, whereas DC powers smaller items like flashlights. But Edison didn't care about AC because it could have hurt the sales of direct current since he owned all the patents for DC. According to Tesla, a manager at Edison's company offered him a $50,000 bonus if he could improve some machines that ran on DC. When he did, the manager refused to pay up. Another account of the story has Edison telling Tesla: You don't understand our American humor. Regardless of how it played out, Tesla quit and set off to form his own electric company the following year in 1885. But his investors showed little interest and decided to take the company and all of Tesla's patents, which they could do because Tesla had assigned the patents to the company in exchange for stock, which was now worthless. After losing his company, Tesla had to take a job digging ditches for two dollars a day just to survive. But

his fortunes would change. In 1887, Tesla invented an induction motor that ran on alternating current. The motor was the most efficient way to convert electricity to mechanical power. A version of it powers Tesla's vehicles, which took its name from the inventor. He patented the motor and showed it off the following year at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers that caught the attention of George Westinghouse, a major player in the electric market who realized Tesla's AC motor might just be what he needed to complete his alternating current system and compete against Edison's DC system. So Tesla licensed the patents for the AC motor to Westinghouse for $60,000 and also received stock and royalties. Westinghouse hired him as a consultant for $2,000 a month, which is the equivalent of over $50,000 a month today. The war of the currents began. Edison tried hard to try to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla.

He secretly financed the electric chair that used alternating current to prove how dangerous AC was. Edison's company also publicly tortured animals to prove its point. In 1903, they electrocuted a circus elephant named Topsy and produced a film about it called Electrocuting an Elephant. Despite Edison's schemes, good things were happening for Westinghouse and Tesla. They underbid Edison and his newly formed company General Electric to illuminate the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The first all-electric fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America. It was clear to the 27 million people who attended that AC would power the future. Their success continued when they beat out Edison's General Electric again to build the world's first alternating current power plant in Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power station was a massive success and helped light up Buffalo, New York. The building of the plant also

meant Tesla became a pioneer in renewable energy. His statue can be found at Niagara Falls today. Westinghouse and Tesla won the war of the currents, and direct current was being phased out. But there were problems. Westinghouse's company was running out of money and eventually went $10 million into debt. In 1897, he went to Tesla and asked if his royalties could be reduced in a desperate attempt to save the company. Tesla was so compelled by compassion for his friend that he ripped up his contract. He was grateful to Westinghouse for believing in him when no one else would. Tesla willingly walked away from $12 million in royalties, which in today's terms would be worth over $300 million. Had he held on to those royalties over time, he would have likely become the wealthiest person on the planet and the first person with a billion-dollar net worth. That act of compassion for his friend of tearing up his contract saved Westinghouse. In return, Westinghouse

paid Tesla $216,000 for the rights to use as ac patents forever. This is the equivalent of about $60 million today. With that money, Tesla became financially independent and set up a series of laboratories in New York for new projects where he was visited by the rich and famous, including his close friend and one of the greatest American writers of all time, Mark Twain. This was his period of many inventions. He held over 300 patents in his lifetime. He created an early version of neon lighting, the Tesla turbine - a bladeless turbine for vehicles. He pioneered x-ray technology by experimenting with radiation. This is an x-ray of his own hand. Another stand-out invention was one of the first remote controls. In 1898, he controlled a miniature boat at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was so far ahead of its time that the crowd thought he was using magic to make it move. That would be the ancestor to today's remote-controlled drones.

One of his most well-known inventions is the Tesla coil - a device that can produce large amounts of high voltage electricity. Because of the coils, he discovered he could send and receive powerful radio signals when they resonated at the same frequency. Tesla was getting ready to broadcast his first radio signal, but disaster struck. A fire destroyed his lab in 1895. He lost years of research and equipment. Tesla didn't apply for a patent for the radio until two years later. The fire would be the turning point in his life that led to a downhill spiral. At the same time that he was working on radio, an Italian entrepreneur, Guglielmo Marconi, was also working on the radio in England. He tried to acquire patent rights in the US but was turned down because it was too similar to Tesla's. However, things changed when Marconi was able to send the world's first transatlantic radio

message in 1901 using 17 of Tesla's patents. Edison then threw his financial support behind Marconi. Tesla had no problem with Marconi's achievements, but in 1904, the US Patent Office suddenly changed its mind and awarded Marconi a patent for the invention of the radio. There has never been a reason given for this decision, but the powerful financial backing Marconi received could explain it. Marconi went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1911, which was only possible due to Tesla's work. Tesla was furious and sued Marconi. The case dragged on in court for years and was only settled in Tesla's favor after his death. That radio incident negatively impacted the rest of Tesla's career. For example, Tesla was obsessed with bringing wireless communication to the world and built a huge wireless transmission station in Long Island, New York, called Wardenclyffe Tower. He imagined a world where we could send and receive messages wirelessly. He was, again, well ahead of his

time. But financial backers did not have enough faith in his project. They pulled out and banked on Marconi's radio invention instead. This left Tesla in financial ruin. He had no choice but to abandon his dream project in 1905 and eventually lost Wardenclyffe Tower to foreclosure. Tesla's mental health deteriorated. He lived his last decade in the New Yorker Hotel beginning in 1933. Westinghouse Corporation hired him as a consultant and paid for his room. He lived rent-free but died in debt. So why did one of the greatest inventors of all time fade into obscurity and die penniless? You could say Tesla was unlucky at times like when the fire burned down his New York lab. But the main reason is because Tesla was not a capitalist. He made decisions that those with more business acumen would not have made such as giving up his royalties for the AC motor. He wasn't

concerned about money. He was concerned about the pursuit of science for the betterment of humanity. He wanted to change the world, and he did. Thanks in part to Elon Musk's company, people are starting to learn more about the man who inspired the company, a man whose inventions would power our entire planet. It's because of Tesla that modern society functions the way it does. Tesla's mother called him a child of light, and she was quite right. Thanks for watching the story of Nikola Tesla. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Cindy Pom. If you like what you saw, subscribe to my new channel. I also started a Patreon where you can make a monthly contribution, and this will go a really long way toward helping this channel grow. See you soon.

The Tragic Story of Nikola Tesla

Newsthink

1856년 크로아티아에서 태어난 니콜라 테슬라는 형의 죽음과 빛의 환영으로 인해 격동의 어린 시절을 보냈습니다.

어머니의 영향과 죽을 뻔한 경험에도 불구하고 공학에 대한 열정으로 오스트리아로 유학을 떠난 테슬라는 그곳에서 끊임없이 노력했습니다.

테슬라는 천재성과 획기적인 발명에도 불구하고 1943년 홀로 세상을 떠났고, 1943년 파산하여 무명인 신세로 전락했습니다.

니콜라 테슬라의 여정과 발명품

8개 국어를 구사하던 니콜라 테슬라는 도박 중독으로 학교를 중퇴하고 가족과의 관계를 단절했습니다.

그는 부다페스트에서 교류(AC) 전기에 대한 인생의 전환점이 되는 깨달음을 얻었고, 이는 그의 가장 위대한 발명이 되었습니다.

테슬라와 토마스 에디슨의 라이벌 관계는 뉴욕에서 직류(DC)와 교류에 대한 의견 차이로 시작되었고, 결국 테슬라는 자신의 전기 회사를 설립하기 위해 떠나게 됩니다.

테슬라가 전기 혁명에 미친 영향

1887년 교류로 구동되는 테슬라의 유도 모터 발명은 조지 웨스팅하우스의 관심을 끌었고, 에디슨의 직류 시스템과 경쟁하기 위한 파트너십으로 이어졌습니다.

에디슨은 논란의 여지가 있는 방법으로 테슬라와 웨스팅하우스의 신용을 떨어뜨리는 등 전류 전쟁이 이어졌지만, 결국 1893년 세계 콜롬비아 박람회의 조명을 밝히고 나이아가라 폭포에 최초의 교류 발전소를 건설하는 데 성공했습니다.

테슬라는 동정심의 표시로 계약을 파기하고 1,200만 달러의 로열티를 포기하고 웨스팅하우스를 도와 결국 친구의 회사를 구했습니다.

테슬라의 재정적 독립과 획기적인 발명품

테슬라는 AC 특허 사용권을 21만 6천 달러를 지불하고 재정적으로 독립하여 뉴욕에 연구소를 설립했습니다.

테슬라 터빈, 초기 네온 조명, 리모컨과 같은 발명품을 만들며 300개가 넘는 특허를 보유했습니다.

그의 획기적인 업적에도 불구하고 화재로 인해 연구소가 소실되고 마르코니와 라디오 특허를 두고 법적 분쟁을 벌이게 되면서 테슬라의 나머지 경력에 부정적인 영향을 미쳤습니다.

테슬라의 재정적 후원자들이 지원을 철회하면서 그는 재정적 파탄과 함께 꿈의 프로젝트를 포기해야 했습니다.

이익보다는 더 나은 인류를 위한 열망에 따른 그의 결정은 결국 그의 고난과 무명 생활에 기여했습니다.

그의 고난에도 불구하고 테슬라의 발명품은 현대 사회에 지속적인 영향을 미쳤으며, 오늘날 그의 유산은 부분적으로는 엘론 머스크의 회사 덕분에 인정받고 있습니다.