Nikola Tesla

Inventor of Alternating Current · Electrical Inventor · 1856–1943

The Serbian-American inventor of AC power, the Tesla coil, and a world of wireless electricity that never quite arrived.

Explore the life of Tesla — five chapters

1. The Priest's Son — A village in the Austrian Empire and a brother's death
2. The War of the Currents — Edison, Westinghouse, and how electricity reached the world
3. Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe — The great ambition that was never finished
4. Hotels, Pigeons and Rituals — The private world of a man who lived alone
5. The Legend and the Record — What Tesla actually did, and what the internet says he did

Read the five-chapter life of Nikola Tesla →

Where Tesla appears in your course

Nikola Tesla has a genuine claim on 6 lessons of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE science course built into Incandio:

• Series and Parallel Circuits — Physics: The question this page ends on — how do you actually wire a building — was settled by a public and vicious commercial fight in the 1880s, and Tesla was on one side of it. His alternating-current system, backed by Westinghouse, competed against Edison's direct current for the electrification of American cities, and the decision determined how every home has been wired since. He is the right person to ask why an engineering choice about circuits became a matter of demonstrations, publicity and reputation.
• Electrical Power and Energy — Physics: The equation on this page has a consequence Tesla built a career on: the same power can be delivered as a large current at a low voltage or a small current at a high voltage, and since the heating in a cable depends on the square of the current, the second wastes vastly less. That is why transmission lines run at hundreds of thousands of volts, and it is the argument his alternating-current system won on — because a.c. can be transformed to a high voltage for transmission and back down again, and direct current at the time could not.
• Mains Electricity and Safety — Physics: Statement 2.6 exists because of an argument Tesla was at the centre of. His polyphase alternating-current system, developed with Westinghouse, competed against direct current for the electrification of cities, and it won for the reason this page gives: alternating voltages can be transformed up for transmission and down again for use, so power can be sent a long way without enormous losses in the cables. The current in every socket reverses fifty times a second because of how that dispute was settled.
• Uses and Dangers of Static Electricity — Physics: Tesla spent years generating potentials of millions of volts and watching what they did to the air around them, so he is the person on this page who has looked hardest at the event it turns on. A spark is the air itself briefly becoming a conductor, and he studied exactly where that threshold lies, how discharges creep along surfaces and how they can be steered. His Colorado Springs work in 1899 produced discharges tens of metres long — the same physics as a crackle from a jumper, differing only in scale.
• Electromagnets — Physics: An electromagnet is the first device on this course that can be switched, strengthened and reversed at will, and Tesla's whole career is an argument about what that makes possible. His induction motor works by arranging several coils so that their fields peak in turn, producing a magnetic field that rotates without anything mechanical rotating at all — no brushes, no commutator, nothing to wear out. He is the right second figure here because he shows the destination of this page: the point of a coil is not that it is a magnet but that it is a magnet you can command.
• Transformers — Physics: This page explains why mains electricity has to be a.c., and Tesla is the person who forced that outcome. In the 1880s Edison had built direct-current stations, which could not transform and so could not transmit power more than about a mile before the losses became hopeless. Tesla's alternating-current system, backed by Westinghouse, could be stepped up for transmission and down for use, and it won the contract to harness Niagara Falls in 1893. The dispute was fought partly with public demonstrations designed to make a.c. look lethal. He is the right person to ask what the choice actually turned on, and what it cost him.

Begin

• Start a conversation with Tesla — a dramatised, historically grounded AI portrayal
• Read the Historical Brief
• Explore the life of Tesla — five chapters
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