Nikola Tesla – The Pioneer who Paved the Road to the World and Ham Radio as We Know It (Invited Tutorial)

I presented a talk in 2006 at Penn State that was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, the inventor of many things that we still use today. That talk presented the history and life of Tesla who is one of the most interesting scientists and persons of all time. He has a cult following and is the subject of many conspiracies and mysteries. He was at the forefront of the current wars at the time (DC vs AC), and his system of power generation is still the basic system we use to this day, quite a feat for something in engineering to last that long. Nikola Tesla also had some very eccentric personality traits that I will discuss as well. His Tesla Coil invention is still a popular item to be built and cause fascination by many Tesla hobbyists. This talk will essentially be an abbreviated version to what was given at Penn State. Many of Tesla’s most important inventions and patents will be discussed and how they changed the world as we know it now. Guglielmo Marconi is usually credited with inventing radio, but it was shown after a long fight in 1943 that Tesla was indeed the first, and his much earlier patent proved it. Unfortunately, Tesla’s death occurred about 6 months before the patent office corrected the history. In the talk at Penn State, many demos were performed and recorded on video. Some of these videos of the demos will be shown of various Tesla Coils including some playing music. Tesla’s work and inventions would clearly be something similar in the spirit of today’s HamSCI charter.