Seite - 29 - in Nikola Tesla and the Graz Tech

29 years ago, came from a small Croatian town and sought out the College of Technology at Graz in order to gain from it the intellectual tools for his physi- cal-technical creativity. His name was Nikola Tesla. Tesla attended our College of Technology from 1875 to 1878. He then, as is reported, ran out of funds and had to leave the Institute without having completed his degree. But what Tesla learnt in those few semesters of his studies in Graz was sufficient to establish his career as an electrical engineer in such a fruitful and success- ful way. On the basis of the knowledge acquired in Graz, Tesla found employ- ment in a telephone company in Budapest, and he was there able to continue his investigations which he had begun here at the Institute of Physics on the construction of an electric motor using a rotating electromagnet field and without commutator and brushes. But he did not stay long in Budapest. He was driven yonder, towards the west, where for the inventor genius that he was, there appeared more fertile ground than here in central Europe. In 1883 we see Tesla in Strasbourg, and one year later he has arrived in the land of unlimited opportunity – America. And before one full decade since the com- mencement of his studies at Graz had elapsed, he was able to reap the rich fruits of his technical creativity and ability. In 1887, the fundamental patents for the construction of polyphase alternating current machines were granted to him. In other words, those machines which conquered the world in a fast triumphal procession and which almost no power station does without today. ‘It is typical of Tesla’s inventive spirit and drive for research that no sooner had he considered the problems in the field of engine construction to be solved – those which he had entertained and which had been a leading force in his thoughts and creativity – than he directed his keen enquiring mind to another place and in a completely different direction, and drove it on with tremen- dous perspicacity into a new, completely unknown land – into the land of high- frequency technology. The name of Tesla is today inextricably linked with this vast, rich and beautiful field of technical physics – and will be for ever, as is the name Columbus with America.