NEW YORK — With this month's kickoff of a Nikola Tesla-related exhibit, and with the swelling trove of data and dialogue on the inventor's life and legacy available on the Internet, it's clear that Teslaphiles in the engineering community are intent on ensuring the controversial pioneer's rightful place in the annals of electrical science.

The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project runs through October on Long Island at the Museums at Stony Brook and showcases the ill-fated work in wireless communications and energy that obsessed the prolific inventor in the early 1900s. Some of the scientists and engineers involved in that project are calling for nothing short of a reconsideration of Tesla's work. They are joined by legions of Tesla fans who have weighed in over the Net on hundreds of pages devoted to the enigmatic inventor.

Indeed, many EEs, citing Tesla as their inspiration in their decision to enter the profession, are looking to focus other technologists' attention on Tesla's vision and away from the public perception of him as a "mad scientist." The latter is a perception that Tesla himself may have unwittingly promulgated in his time.

"Tesla was undoubtedly one of America's greatest electrical and mechanical engineers," asserted Gary Peterson, vice president of corporate affairs on the Wardenclyffe project and an electrical engineer at a Breckinridge, Colo., company. "His [contributions to] ac power, radio communication and fluorescent lighting are vital components to life. But he also developed many as-yet-unused innovations which have the capacity for even greater value to society."

Peterson said the aim of the Wardenclyffe project and similar efforts is to persuade the scientific and engineering communities to initiate dedicated research programs that will bring "Tesla's entire vision closer to reality."

"History has not done Tesla justice," agreed Bert Pool, a member of the Tesla Coil Builders Association (Queensbury, N.Y.; ), comprised of hobbyist devotees of the invention. "My God, the man created the entire power system the world runs on today, and no one even knows who he is."

Brent Turner, an EE at Tesla-coil company kVA Effects (Los Angeles;), agreed that the "the general population must [be made to] realize Tesla's genius. The key is awareness."

Spreading the word
Certainly, hundreds of engineers are already aware, and they have taken to the Internet with a like number of Web pages devoted to Tesla's legacy. There are at least three organizations devoted to promoting his memory: the Nikola Tesla Museum (Belgrade, Yugoslavia); the Tesla Memorial Society (Lackawanna, N.Y.) and the International Tesla Society (Colorado Springs, Colo.).

There's also the 1,000-member Tesla Engine Builders Association (Milwaukee). The Tesla Coil Web Ring boasts nearly 100 sites, where engineering hobbyists post photos and videos of electrical displays that make Hollywood special effects pale by comparison.

The IEEE, which considers Tesla one of the 12 "apostles" of electrical science, continues to offer an annual prize in the field of power engineering in his name. And in 1960, the "tesla" was named the international electrical unit of magnetic flux density.

Why all the fuss? One EE put it elegantly: "Tesla's spirit of inventive engineering continues to capture me when I think of him," said Jim Bieberich, a design engineer at Oki Semiconductor (Sunnyvale, Calif.). "He reached into the dream world and brought it into the real world."

Indeed, the stork-like, impeccably dressed Tesla, who immigrated to the United States in 1884 with 4 cents in his pocket, had a revolutionary impact on the real world within a few years of his arrival.

His greatest impact, around the turn of the century, was on power-distribution methodology; here, with his ingeniously simple two-phase induction motor, Tesla effectively shifted the paradigm to include alternating current in the then-burgeoning direct-current methodology.

In his landmark lecture before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) in 1888, Tesla showed how to construct single-phase, two-phase and three-phase ac motors, as well as how to link his system with dc apparatus. To this day, virtually every electric induction motor in use around the world is based on one of Tesla's designs.

Tesla followed up with the Tesla coil — an air-core transformer that converts relatively low-voltage current to high-voltage low current at high frequencies. The device, used today in one form or another in every radio and television set, anticipated the wireless experiments of Guglielmo Marconi by several years.

Tesla Technology Research (Monrovia, Calif.) manufactures laboratory-grade Tesla coils, the largest of which produce arcs 20 feet long. TTR's coils have been used in feature films and at major theme parks but are also an integral tool at Ohio State's high-voltage engineering lab. TTR founder Bill Wysock said his fascination began when he saw a coil displayed 40 years ago: "I was awestruck by the blue-white and purple tongues of electric arcs leaping out."

Beyond ac
But Tesla's ac innovations are the tip of the iceberg, said Peterson — who, in addition to his engineering work and his affiliation with the traveling exhibit, runs Twenty First Century Books, which specializes in Tesla-related literature. "Tesla also originated and built all the basic circuits required for the transmission and reception of wireless communications — what we now call radio and broadcast television," Peterson said.

That legacy was acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943, when it upheld that Tesla had indeed beaten Marconi to the punch in securing fundamental wireless patents.

Tesla also was the brains behind a slew of other inventions on which the modern world has come to rely. He did pioneering work, for example, on fluorescent light, the neon tube and the incandescent carbon button lamp. He was an early developer of the X-ray (he termed it the shadowgraph) and even undertook dangerous experiments on himself to demonstrate its utility for medical applications. And in 1893, Tesla began perfecting a system of telephotography that anticipated the fax machine.

A Tesla invention demonstrated at an IEEE-sponsored show in 1989 established the essential principles behind what came to be known as the radio and formed the basis for the wireless telephone, the garage-door opener, television and remote-controlled robotics. Tesla had designed and prototyped a remote-controlled robotic boat as a demonstration of what he called tele-automaton.

Tesla was a similarly prolific mechanical engineer. He proposed a powerful but lightweight turbine that could replace conventional automotive engines, be fitted on airplanes or be converted into a pump for transporting air, solids or liquids.

Jeff Hayes, a member of the Tesla Engine Builders Association, noted that in conjunction with that work, Tesla patented a one-way check valve, or "valvular conduit," that employed no moving parts. "This device made big news recently when it was 'rediscovered' by engineers at the University of Washington," said Hayes. Researchers there are using the invention to create pumps on the micro level, where active checking devices are not practical.

"Hopefully, the next 'rediscovery' will be Tesla's turbine itself," Hayes said.

Peterson cited "recent tests on the Tesla turbine [indicating] that it [may] rank as the world's most efficient gas engine."

Tesla's wireless patents made millionaires of others. But he maintained a single-minded focus on developing global wireless communications and energy systems.

Working in Colorado Springs in 1899, Tesla developed a transmitter to perfect a method by which transmitted energy could be channelized through natural media. Two years later, working on Long Island at Wardenclyffe, he set to work on his ultimate goal: construction of a "world telegraphy center" that was to have a lab, a wireless transmitter and production facilities for manufacturing oscillators and vacuum tubes. Constructed on the "model city's" 1,800 acres would be homes, stores and buildings to accommodate 2,500 workers.

By year's end, however, Marconi had usurped the inventor by transmitting an overseas signal. That left Tesla at the mercy of his financier, J.P. Morgan, who literally pulled the plug on his vision. Morgan, at the time the prime force behind General Electric Co., may have been unnerved by Tesla's claims that the technology could transmit "unlimited power" by wireless means.

Some Tesla devotees suspect he may have been a pioneer of the transistor. "Inventors of the modern computer have repeatedly been surprised, when seeking patents, to encounter Tesla's basic ones already on file," noted Tesla historian Leland Anderson, a former EE and a board member of the Wardenclyffe project. Indeed, two of Tesla's patents from 1903 contain the basic principles of the logical AND circuit element.

Despite his accomplishments, by 1915, at age 60, Tesla was living on credit and drifting from one cheap hotel another, a victim of his own poor business decisions, underdeveloped ideas and inability to create another innovation as profound as the ac paradigm. At age 86, the great inventor died alone, nearly penniless and all but forgotten.

Years earlier, however, Tesla had appeared to predict the posthumous recognition that today's scientific community would afford him when he wrote: "Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments.

"The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine."