Tesla's Egg of Columbus was a device exhibited in the Westinghouse Electric display at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition to explain the rotating magnetic field that drove the new alternating current induction motors designed by inventor Nikola Tesla by using that magnetic field to spin a copper egg on end.
At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition Westinghouse Electric (who had a large space in the "Electricity Building" devoted to their electrical exhibits) asked Tesla to participate and gave his devices their own exhibit space. [1] The display demonstrated a series of electrical effects related to alternating current, AC generators, and displayed many types of induction motors and explained the rotating magnetic field that drove them.
With the fair celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World, the "Egg of Columbus" exhibit, building on the apocryphal 15th century story of the "Egg of Columbus" (where the explorer stood an egg on end by smashing its bottom), is described as going "one better" by using a magnetic field to stand an egg on end. [2] It presented the viewer with a flat round wooden surface surrounded by a wooden rim. Inside this rim it performed Christopher Columbus's feat by spinning a copper egg, larger than an ostrich egg, in a rotating magnetic field causing it to stand on end on its major axis due to gyroscopic action. [3] The display also included round copper balls that seemed to orbit around the edge similar to the way planets move. Whenever the large rotating magnetic field set up by the Egg of Columbus was turned on it impressed the public by spinning various magnetized metal balls and painted metal disks on the display table and even small disks inside vacuum bulbs placed at some distance around the Electricity Building. [4] [5]
Underneath what the public saw was a toroidal iron core stator on which four electromagnetic coils were wound. The device was powered by a two-phase alternating current source (such as a variable speed alternator) to create the rotating magnetic field. The device operated on a frequency of 25 to 300 hertz. The ideal operating frequency was described as being between 35 and 40 hertz.
The device has been described as being built by Westinghouse engineer Charles F. Scott, [6] who was in charge of development of the induction motor for the company, [7] although a March 1919 Electrical Experimenter article claimed it was built by Westinghouse Electric Superintendent Albert Schmid. [8] [9]
The Columbian Exposition "Egg of Columbus" ended up at Tesla's 46 & 48 East Houston Street New York City laboratory where he would demonstrate it to visitors. [10] Margaret Cheney's 1981 book Tesla: Man Out of Time says that after Tesla's death the device was sent to Yugoslavia 1952 along with many other Tesla papers, models and artifacts, becoming part of the collection at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade [11] although her later 1999 book Tesla: Master of Lightning seems to indicate that the museum has only a smaller copy. [12]
An alternative origin for Tesla's "Egg of Columbus" was told by Nikola Tesla himself to the editors of Electrical Experimenter and published in their March, 1919 article "How Tesla Performed the Feat of Columbus Without Cracking the Egg". In this version the year of invention was 1887 when "He had approached a Wall Street capitalist — a prominent lawyer — with a view of getting financial support and this gentleman called in a friend of his, a well-known engineer at the head of one of the big corporations in New York, to pass upon the merits of the scheme". At that time these would have been Charles F. Peck and Alfred S. Brown, Tesla's financial backers and partners in the Tesla Electric Company. [13] Tesla's story has him convincing these men that a rotating magnetic field AC induction motor would be a feasible invention worth developing via building the "Egg of Columbus" the next day and demonstrating it to them. [14] [15]
Reproductions of the device are displayed at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, the Memorial Centre "Nikola Tesla" in Smiljan, the Technical Museum in Zagreb, the Croatian History Museum in Zagreb, in the Ampère Museum in Lyon, France, in the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe in Shoreham, NY.
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
George Westinghouse Jr. was an American entrepreneur and engineer based in Pennsylvania who created the railway air brake and was a pioneer of the electrical industry, receiving his first patent at the age of 19. Westinghouse saw the potential of using alternating current for electric power distribution in the early 1880s and put all his resources into developing and marketing it. This put Westinghouse's business in direct competition with Thomas Edison, who marketed direct current for electric power distribution. In 1911 Westinghouse received the American Institute of Electrical Engineers's (AIEE) Edison Medal "For meritorious achievement in connection with the development of the alternating current system." He founded the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1886.
An electric motor is an electrical machine that converts electrical energy into mechanical energy. Most electric motors operate through the interaction between the motor's magnetic field and electric current in a wire winding to generate force in the form of torque applied on the motor's shaft. An electric generator is mechanically identical to an electric motor, but operates in reverse, converting mechanical energy into electrical energy.
Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917), also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early experimental wireless transmission station designed and built by Nikola Tesla on Long Island in 1901–1902, located in the village of Shoreham, New York. Tesla intended to transmit messages, telephony, and even facsimile images across the Atlantic Ocean to England and to ships at sea based on his theories of using the Earth to conduct the signals. His decision to increase the scale of the facility and implement his ideas of wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi's radio-based telegraph system was met with refusal to fund the changes by the project's primary backer, financier J. P. Morgan. Additional investment could not be found, and the project was abandoned in 1906, never to become operational.
An induction motor or asynchronous motor is an AC electric motor in which the electric current in the rotor needed to produce torque is obtained by electromagnetic induction from the magnetic field of the stator winding. An induction motor can therefore be made without electrical connections to the rotor. An induction motor's rotor can be either wound type or squirrel-cage type.
A rotating magnetic field is the resultant magnetic field produced by a system of coils symmetrically placed and supplied with polyphase currents. A rotating magnetic field can be produced by a poly-phase current or by a single phase current provided that, in the latter case, two field windings are supplied and are so designed that the two resulting magnetic fields generated thereby are out of phase.
A polyphase system is a means of distributing alternating-current (AC) electrical power that utilize more than one AC phase, which refers to the phase offset value between AC in multiple conducting wires; phases may also refer to the corresponding terminals and conductors, as in color codes. Polyphase systems have two or more energized electrical conductors carrying alternating currents with a defined phase between the voltage waves in each conductor; early systems used 4 wire two-phase) with a 90° phase angle but for three-phase voltage, the phase angle is 120° or 2π/3 radians as Dolivo-Dolobrovolsky mathematically had shown this reduce the magnetic field fluxuation from 40% to a mere 15%. Polyphase systems are particularly useful for transmitting power to electric motors which rely on alternating current to rotate. The most common example is the three-phase power system used for industrial applications and for power transmission. Compared to a single-phase, two-wire system, a three-phase three-wire system transmits three times as much power for the same conductor size and voltage.
My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla is a book compiled and edited by Ben Johnston detailing the work of Nikola Tesla. The content was largely drawn from a series of articles that Nikola Tesla had written for Electrical Experimenter magazine in 1919, when he was 63 years old. Tesla's personal account is divided into six chapters covering different periods of his life: My Early Life, My First Efforts At Invention, My Later Endeavors, The Discovery of the Rotating Magnetic Field, The Discovery of the Tesla Coil and Transformer, The Magnifying Transmitter, and The Art of Telautomatics.
Galileo Ferraris was an Italian university professor, physicist and electrical engineer, one of the pioneers of AC power system and inventor of the induction motor although he never patented his work. Many newspapers touted that his work on the induction motor and power transmission systems were some of the greatest inventions of all ages. He published an extensive and complete monograph on the experimental results obtained with open-circuit transformers of the type designed by the power engineers Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs.
A homopolar generator is a DC electrical generator comprising an electrically conductive disc or cylinder rotating in a plane perpendicular to a uniform static magnetic field. A potential difference is created between the center of the disc and the rim with an electrical polarity that depends on the direction of rotation and the orientation of the field. It is also known as a unipolar generator, acyclic generator, disk dynamo, or Faraday disc. The voltage is typically low, on the order of a few volts in the case of small demonstration models, but large research generators can produce hundreds of volts, and some systems have multiple generators in series to produce an even larger voltage. They are unusual in that they can source tremendous electric current, some more than a million amperes, because the homopolar generator can be made to have very low internal resistance. Also, the homopolar generator is unique in that no other rotary electric machine can produce DC without using rectifiers or commutators.
The Nikola Tesla Museum is a science museum located in the central area of Belgrade, Serbia. It is dedicated to honoring and displaying the life and work of Nikola Tesla as well as the final resting place for Tesla. It holds more than 160,000 original documents, over 2,000 books and journals, over 1,200 historical technical exhibits, over 1,500 photographs and photo plates of original, technical objects, instruments and apparatus, and over 1,000 plans and drawings. Very little is on display in the small ground floor exhibition space.
An AC motor is an electric motor driven by an alternating current (AC). The AC motor commonly consists of two basic parts, an outside stator having coils supplied with alternating current to produce a rotating magnetic field, and an inside rotor attached to the output shaft producing a second rotating magnetic field. The rotor magnetic field may be produced by permanent magnets, reluctance saliency, or DC or AC electrical windings.
The book Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla is a biography of Nikola Tesla by Marc J. Seifer published in 1996.
The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla is a book compiled and edited by Thomas Commerford Martin detailing the work of Nikola Tesla through 1893. The book is a comprehensive compilation of Tesla's early work with many illustrations.
Benjamin Garver Lamme was an American electrical engineer and chief engineer at Westinghouse, where he was responsible for the design of electrical power machines. Lamme created an efficient induction motor from Nikola Tesla's patents and went on to design the giant Niagara Falls generators and motors and the power plant of the Manhattan Elevated Railway in New York City.
The IEEE Nikola Tesla Award is a Technical Field Award given annually to an individual or team that has made an outstanding contribution to the generation or utilization of electric power. It is awarded by the Board of Directors of the IEEE. The award is named in honor of Nikola Tesla. This award may be presented to an individual or a team.
The Electrical Experimenter was an American technical science magazine that was published monthly. It was established in May 1913, as the successor to Modern Electrics, a combination of a magazine and mail-order catalog that had been published by Hugo Gernsback starting in 1908. The Electrical Experimenter continued from May 1913 to July 1920 under that name, focusing on scientific articles about radio, and continued with a broader focus as Science and Invention until August 1931.
Oliver Blackburn Shallenberger was an American electrical engineer and inventor. He is associated with electrical inventions related to alternating current. He is most noted for inventing the first successful alternating current (AC) electrical meter, the forerunner of the modern electric meter. This was critical to general acceptance of AC power.
The World Wireless System was a turn of the 20th century proposed telecommunications and electrical power delivery system designed by inventor Nikola Tesla based on his theories of using Earth and its atmosphere as electrical conductors. He claimed this system would allow for "the transmission of electric energy without wires" on a global scale as well as point-to-point wireless telecommunications and broadcasting. He made public statements citing two related methods to accomplish this from the mid-1890s on. By the end of 1900 he had convinced banker J. P. Morgan to finance construction of a wireless station based on his ideas intended to transmit messages across the Atlantic to England and to ships at sea. His decision to change the design to include wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi's new radio based telegraph system was met with Morgan's refusal to fund the changes. The project was abandoned in 1906, never to become operational.
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