Tesla and Westinghouse

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan (Croatia) and died in New York in 1943. According to Americans, he was an American inventor. According to Hungarians, he was a great Hungarian scientist. He was born when his hometown was under the management of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied in Vienna and Budapest. While in Hungary, Tesla became intensely interested in alternating currents and rotating magnetic fields. Hungarians claim that Tesla got all of his original ideas while in Hungary.

However, acording to my Serbian friend,

Dear Prof. Kim,

I hope you remember me, I was a graduate student in the theoretical high-energy group at Maryland from 1984 till 1990. I am writing you to point out some inaccuracies in your presentation of Nikola Tesla on the robot page. First, he was a Serb, who was born in what is today Croatia, in the family of a Serbian orthodox church priest. Tesla is one of the most illustrious Serbs (he appeared on banknotes, and every Serb knows who he was). Therefore he cannot be a Croatian, nor a Hungarian. He was educated in Graz, Austria, and he worked for one year in the telegraph company in Budapest. For more info see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla.

Best regards,

Aleksandar Mikovic

Tesla came to the United States in 1884. After he was cleared from the immigration office in New York, he went to Thomas Edison to work in his electric company. He explained his AC ideas to Edison, but Edison could not see how light-bulbs could work on AC. He thought the bulbs would constantly blink. Edison could not understand how motors could work on AC. Tesla could not get along with Edison.

In 1885, George Westinghouse was building an electric company, and Tesla went to Westinghouse and became his house wizard. Earlier, Westinghouse invented the brake system for trains using compressed air, and became very rich from the brake company he built. He then developed a natural gas piping system. During this process, Westinghouse became familiar with transferring pressure to distant points. He eventually became interested in transferring electric power to far-away places. For this purpose, one has to raise the voltage and lower it. It is not clear whether Westinghouse had enough knowledge of physics to conceive this idea.

Nikola Tesla was the right person to work for Westinghouse. The idea of transformer at the text-book level exited at that time, but putting it to work in the power distribution system was another matter. It required a large amount of capital investment as well as constant technological innovations. Thomas Edison was as influential as Einstein, and he was thoroughly against AC. However, Westinghouse was strong enough to overcome these difficulties.

It is easy to generate AC electric power from rotating machines, but operating electric motors was another matter. It was Nikola Tesla who solved this problem by inventing the induction motor. Tesla's induction motor decisively established AC's superiority over DC. This was an industrial revolution!

Yes, Tesla and Westinghouse established the electric power distribution system, but equally important is the information distribution system. On this subject, I have already written two articles. One was about Marconi and Sarnoff on wireless communication and the other was about von-Neumann's electronic computer.

I would like to say more about George Westinghouse. He was born in Central Bridge (near Schenectady, New York) in 1846 and died and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 1914. He was a Civil-War veteran. He is well known to those who lived in the Pittsburgh area like myself, but is a forgotten scientist in the rest of the world. His name was and is known from the Westinghouse Electric Company he founded in 1885, which lasted for 100 years. His problem was that, whenever he had new ideas, he did not publish them. He put them into work. He was holding 361 patents set up more than 60 companies.

His first major invention was the brake system for trains using compressed air. He did not stop there. He continued his research pressure distributions. Your car's brake system is based on liquid, but it has a pressure equalizer. You do not know this because this part seldom breaks down. The concept of pressure equalization came from Westinghouse. These days, there is a branch of physics called "fluid dynamics." This branch was created by Westinghouse initially for engineering need.

George Westinghouse was a compassionate person, and the air brake company he established served as a model for all industrial companies in the United States. Westinghouse made Saturday a half-holiday for all his employees. He established infirmaries with medical doctors at all of his factories. He also initiated a pension system for life-time employees. In order to express their gratitude to George Westinghouse, the ex-employees of the Westinghouse air brake company built a fountain named after him in 1930, sixteen years after his death. The fountain is located near the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I was an undergraduate student at CMU from 1954 to 1958, and I used to go there often for rest and relaxation.

On the business side, his scope was not restricted to the U.S. territory. This was an exceptional quality among isolationist Americans at his time. He developed a series of car models and manufactured in France. There are Westinghouse cars in museums. Among his friends outside the United States was Czar Nicholas II of Russia. He was of course interested in expanding his business to Russia. The Czar needed one million additional infantry rifles to equip his army during World War I. Westinghouse decided to supply those rifles, made an arrangement with Springfield Rifle Company in Massachusetts. The rifles were delivered by his company in 1915, one year after his death. This was his gift to the Czar, as well as a business investment, but he was not smart enough to foresee the revolution in 1917.

The Russian and Soviet armies used Mosin-Nagant rifles from 1891 until the Kalashnikov model was introduced in 1947. They produced many more during World War II. The Mosin-Nagant was the longest-serving rifle in the world history, and is familiar to many people. You will be surprised to hear that I know how to to operate this machine. It is my pleasure to show you one of those one-million Mosin-Nagants carrying the white engraving of "Westinghouse" and its serial number. This photo was taken at Westinghouse Museum in Wilmerding (near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Click here for a larger image.

I would like to thank Professor Lev Okun (ITEP-Moscow) for pointing out a number of typographical errors in the original version of this article.

Y. S. Kim (30 June 2003)

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