Edison, Tesla and the Solar Future

By
Branko Terzic

The American-Serb inventor, engineer, and scientist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) introduced the world to his version of electric lighting at the 1893 World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Tesla’s generators and lighting, financed by George Westinghouse (1846-1914), amazed the global audience in Chicago with its wizardry of light without flames through electricity.

Later Tesla’s alternating-current (AC) electric motor supported by the introduction of AC transmission and distribution and made large scale electrification possible. A few years earlier, with the potential benefits of electricity mostly unknown to the general public, Tesla made the following remarks about the abundance of energy May 20, 1891, to the Association of Electrical Engineers at Columbia College:

“There is no subject more captivating, more worthy of study, than nature. To understand this great mechanism, to discover the forces which are active, and the laws which govern them, is the highest aim of the intellect of man."  

“Nature has stored up in the universe infinite energy.”

“We are whirling through endless space with an inconceivable speed, all around us everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere is energy. The must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly. Then with the light obtained from the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from the store forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides.”

Two years later in 1893 Tesla would tell an audience at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia about the potential for what we now call “renewable energy”:

“The day we shall know exactly what “electricity” is, will chronicle an event probably greater, more important than any other recorded in the history of the human race. The time will come when the comfort, the very existence, perhaps of man will depend upon that wonderful agent. For our existence and comfort will require heat, light and mechanical power. How do we now get all these? We get them from fuel, we get them by consuming material. What will we do when the frosts disappear, when the coal fields are exhausted? Only, one thing, according to our present knowledge will remain: that is. To transmit power at great distances. Men will go to the waterfalls, to the tides, which are the stores of an infinitesimal part of Nature’s immeasurable energy. … Judge then, if the comfort, nay, the very existence of man will not depend on electricity." 

Today, it can be said that the “very existence of man”, or at least the lifestyle of modern man, does depend on electricity. The correlation of increased standard of living, improved health and welfare with increased electricity usage is well established.

Interestingly, both Thomas Edison (1847-1931) and Nikola Tesla believed that the combustion of coal was too dirty a way of converting energy. Both viewed coal as the storage of energy originally from the sun and believed that there was some yet undiscovered “cold” way of extracting the energy from coal without combustion. Edison continued, unsuccessfully, to investigate alternative methods of energy extraction from coal late into his life.

Tesla focused on the wireless transmission of electricity as looked to solve the challenges of how  “to transmit power over great distances”. While in the earlier quote Tesla foresees the conversion of energy of waterfalls and tides, he and Edison also shared the view that eventually man would directly harness the energy of the sun for conversion to energy delivery via electricity. With the developments in photovoltaic cells, that day has come.