Seite - 56 - in Nikola Tesla and the Graz Tech

56 Fig.: Tesla’s lecture in Paris 1892 (Wikimedia Commons). Tesla’s experiments were fundamental for the production of fluorescent lights. They were only developed for mass production and brought onto the market five decades later. The fluorescent light has been constantly further developed and improved over 70 years and today in the form of energy-saving lamps, although its actual operating principle has not changed. With his research into high-frequency technology, Nikola Tesla laid the foun- dation stone for today’s communications engineering. In 1893, Tesla reported on the results of his experiments at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, using a variety of high-frequency oscillators which he had developed. Among oth- er things in his lecture, he described the ‘transmission of intelligible signals across some distance without the use of wires’, thus detailing the basic tech- nical principles of radio transmission. In the same year in a public demonstra- tion in Saint Louis, Tesla managed to transmit a message from a broadcasting group to a recipient group some nine metres away. By the end of 1896, Tesla managed to carry out remote transmission from a transmitter to a receiving station some 30 km away using a long-wave frequency of 2 MHz.