Landmarks of Human Thought I - Catalog - Page 28
Nikola
Tesla
B
orn in Smiljan, Croatia, the son of a Serbian
Orthodox clergyman, Tesla attended
Johanneum, a polytechnic school in Graz and
the University of Prague for two years.
He started work in the engineering department of
the Austrian telegraph system, then became an
electrical engineer at an electric power company in
Budapest and later at another in Strasbourg.
Tesla
Turbine
U.S. Patents
No. 1,061,142 and No. 1,061,206
Inducted in 1975
Born July 10, 1856 - Died Jan. 07, 1943
In 1884, Tesla came to the United States and joined
the Edison Machine Works as a dynamo designer. In
1887 and 1888 Tesla had an experimental shop at
89 Liberty Street, New York, and there he invented
the induction motor. He sold the invention to
Westinghouse in July 1888 and spent a year in
Pittsburgh instructing Westinghouse engineers.
One of his later well-known invention is the socalled “Tesla turbine”, a bladeless centripetal flow
turbine (U.S. Patents No. 1,061,142 and No.
1,061,206). It uses the boundary-layer effect to
convert fluid energy into motion. The Tesla turbine
attains a very high level of efficiency. Due to the
fact that the direction of movement of the fluid is as
gradual as possible, it enables the fluid to move in
natural paths, or streamlines, with the lowest
possible resistant.
Tesla obtained more than 100 patents in his lifetime.
Despite his inventions Tesla was not wealthy. For
many years he worked in his room at the Hotel New
Yorker, where he died.
Reference: National Inventors Hall of Fame (2024, 23. February)
Inductee: Nikola Tesla.
NIHF. https://www.invent.org/inductees/nikola-tesla
