engleski

Tesla’ s contributions to medicine

Nikola Tesla was an inventor, scientist, and electrical engineer. His invention of high voltage transformer (Tesla’ s coil) for generation alternating current with high frequency was an important contribution to medicine. While he was doing experiments with high frequency alternating currents he found out that these currents were not dangerous for the human body. In 1891, Tesla was the first who observed and published in Electrical World that high-frequency alternating current caused heating of tissue and he pointed out its possible medical uses. These currents were later called Tesla’ s currents. Although Tesla did not have formal medical education, he corresponded with physicians W.J. Duganom and S.H. Monellom about possibilities to use high frequency alternating currents in electrotherapy. Today, the high-frequency currents are used in medical diathermy. In this paper authors give a short review on a very old high-voltage Tesla's transformer dating from 1908 which belongs to Physics Department at Faculty of Medicine Rijeka. It was used in the past for the demonstration of physics experiments with high frequency currents. Tesla was a pioneer in the field of X-rays, too. He performed several experiments with shadowgraphs similar to those that later were used by W.C. Rontgen when he discovered X-rays in 1895. The Electrical Review in 1896 published X-rays of a man, made by Tesla, with X-ray tube of his own design. Six years earlier, Tesla found that if an object on a photographic plate was subjected to a strong electric field, an image was created on the plate. This phenomenon and technique were variously called electrography or Kirlian photography. In the last part of this paper the authors summarize other Tesla’ s inventions which are not well known but are also interesting for medicine such as an ozone generator. Tesla patented his first ozone generator in 1896, and in 1900, he formed the Tesla Ozone Company. Tesla sold ozone machines to doctors for medical use. With inventions which are summarised and presented in this paper, Nikola Tesla gave a very important contribution to medicine althought medicine was not his main field of research.

Nikola Tesla; Tesla’ s transformer; high frequency currents; electrotherapy; X-rays; ozone generator

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