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The Suppression of Fuel Savers and Alternate Energy Resources 415
college days was always with him; he was determined to improve the
electrical motor and dynamo. Dynamos naturally make alternating current,
the type of electric flow which continually changes directions. Tesla
intuitively felt that it should be possible to run a motor on AC electricity
and eliminate the inefficient sparking of brushes from a commutator. His
theory went against textbook knowledge in those early days of electrification,
when direct current (DC) was considered the only type of current
that would run motors.
MAGNETIC WHIRLWIND
Despite ridicule from his engineering professor, Tesla maintained that there
had to be a better way. He worked so intensely on this and other engineering
problems that his health broke down. While Tesla recuperated, a friend
who was a master mechanic and an athlete took him for long walks
through Budapest. In February of 1882 one day while they walked in a
park, Tesla was inspired by the setting sun. To his amazement, that is
when he made a breakthrough to answering the technical challenge of
making a workable AC electrical system to turn a motor. He was reciting
lines from the German poet Goethe's Faust:
The glow retreats, done is the break of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring.
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil,
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
Tesla was stopped in his tracks by a vivid vision. It was as if a 3-D
holographic picture of a rotating magnetic field was in motion in front of
his eyes and he could reach out and put his hands into it. He saw how the
field—a magnetic whirlwind—was produced by alternating currents out
of step with each other. He saw separate coils of wire, arranged as four
segments of a circle. The first alternating current would energize a coil
creating an electromagnetic field which attracted the magnet and then
faded. The second overlapping current would feed the next coil and drag
the magnet around further and then fade and so on. He saw it as a process
similar to the sun traveling around and "giving life wherever she goes."
Speechless, Tesla waved his arms in excitement. His buddy tried to lead
him to a nearby bench, but Tesla grabbed a stick to draw a diagram in the
dust.
"See my motor here! Watch me reverse it," Tesla blurted out. His friend
was afraid that Tesla had lost his mind. Tesla was indeed in another world
at that moment. As he watched his vision move, he saw the electrical principle
that later made the twentieth century operate.