Seite - 17 - in Nikola Tesla and the Graz Tech

17 This connection to his earlier homeland can be seen in his patent applications. The data bank of ‘privileges’ at the Austrian Patent Office in Vienna contains a total of five privileges (at this time a ‘privilege’ was the name given to the later word ‘patent’) for the years 1889 to 1890. These petitions for privileges referred to the following inventions: 16.4.1889: Innovations in the transmission of electric power 24.4.1889: Innovations in the process and apparatus for converting and distributing electric currents 2.4.1890: Innovations in alternating current motors 24.9.1890: Innovations in the processes of converting alternating current into direct current 27.9.1890: Alternating current motor Furthermore, Nikola Tesla devoted his attention to experiments on the wireless transmission of messages, which in turn had an impact on numer- ous patents. On 13 March 1895, his laboratory in New York, along with the appliances he had developed up until then, was destroyed by a fire. In a report for the Elec- trical Review, Nikola Tesla stated: ‘I was engaged on four main lines of work and investigation. One of these was the oscillator. Another was improved methods of electric lighting. Another was the transmission of intelligence any distance without wires. A fourth, which is an ever present problem for every thinking electrician, touches on the nature of electricity’. But in 1896, he was continuing his scientific inves- tigations and experiments in the field of radio technology in a laboratory in New York. In 1899 he built a radio station in Colorado which made it possible to send signals by wireless telegraphy over distances greater than 1,000 km. With this idea of the wireless transmission of energy and information, he managed to win over J. Pierpoint Morgan as a financial backer. The project was called Wardenclyffe and its aim was to transmit radio signals between two towers – one on a plot of land on Long Island and the other in England. The project failed, however.