History of Ozone Technology

Nikola Tesla and the Ozone Generator: A History

October 30, 2026

Few people know that Nikola Tesla — the visionary inventor behind alternating current — was also a pioneering force in ozone technology. His 1896 patent and subsequent commercialization efforts laid the groundwork for the ozone systems used in laundry, water treatment, and medicine today.

The First Ozone Generator: Werner von Siemens (1857)

The story of the ozone generator begins not with Tesla, but with German engineer Werner von Siemens. In 1857, Siemens developed the first practical ozone-generating device using a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) tube — a design that passed electrical current through two electrodes separated by a dielectric material, causing oxygen molecules in the air to split and recombine as ozone (O₃). Siemens' invention was a scientific breakthrough, but it remained largely a laboratory curiosity. The machines were fragile, inefficient, and difficult to scale for industrial use.

Tesla's Refinement and the 1896 Patent

Nearly four decades later, Nikola Tesla dramatically improved upon Siemens' design. In 1896, Tesla was granted U.S. Patent No. 568,177 for an improved ozone generator that was far more efficient, reliable, and suitable for commercial production. Tesla's design used high-frequency alternating current — a field in which he was unmatched — to produce a more stable and concentrated ozone output. His device was smaller, more durable, and capable of continuous operation in ways that earlier generators simply were not.

The Tesla Ozone Company

Tesla didn't stop at the patent. He founded the Tesla Ozone Company to bring his invention to market, selling ozone generators to physicians, hospitals, and industrial users across the United States. Medical practitioners of the era used ozone for wound disinfection, respiratory treatments, and water purification. Tesla himself believed deeply in ozone's therapeutic potential, reportedly using his own generators personally. The Tesla Ozone Company represented one of the earliest examples of ozone being commercialized at scale — a direct ancestor of the modern ozone laundry and water treatment industries.

Tesla's Legacy in Modern Ozone Technology

Today's ozone laundry systems — including the O3 Pure units used in commercial, industrial and residential laundry facilities — trace their lineage directly back to the dielectric barrier discharge technology that Siemens pioneered and Tesla perfected. The core principle is unchanged: high-voltage electricity splits oxygen molecules, producing ozone that dissolves into water to clean, disinfect, and deodorize without heat or harsh chemicals. Tesla's 1896 patent was not just an engineering milestone — it was the foundation of an industry that continues to grow more than a century later.

Water Quality & Public Health

Suffolk County's Sole-Source Aquifer: Contamination, Risk, and the Case for Ozone

November 1, 2026

Suffolk County's sole-source aquifer system faces widespread and chronic contamination from wastewater, industrial solvents, persistent chemicals, and stormwater runoff. Because 100% of the region's drinking water comes from these underground sand and gravel formations, these pollutants pose a direct hazard to public health and local ecosystems.

A Sole-Source Aquifer Under Pressure

Unlike much of the United States, Suffolk County has no surface water reservoirs, no river intakes, and no regional water grid to fall back on. Every drop of drinking water consumed by its 1.5 million residents comes from a layered system of glacial sand and gravel aquifers — the Upper Glacial, the Magothy, and the Lloyd. The EPA designated this system a "sole-source aquifer" in 1987, a classification that acknowledges there is no viable alternative supply and that contamination poses an exceptional risk to public health. That designation has done little to slow the accumulation of pollutants that has been documented in the aquifer system for decades.

The Sources of Contamination

The contamination profile of Suffolk County's aquifer is broad and layered. Nitrogen from approximately 360,000 cesspools and septic systems — many of them decades old and never upgraded — leaches continuously into the shallow Upper Glacial aquifer, driving algal blooms in coastal bays and elevating nitrate levels in drinking water wells. Industrial solvents, particularly trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE), have been detected in dozens of municipal supply wells, the legacy of dry cleaning operations, aerospace manufacturing, and industrial facilities that operated across Long Island through the mid-twentieth century. More recently, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — the so-called "forever chemicals" used in firefighting foam, food packaging, and industrial coatings — have emerged as a pervasive and particularly intractable contaminant. PFAS compounds do not break down in the environment, accumulate in human tissue, and have been linked to cancer, thyroid disruption, immune suppression, and developmental harm.

Health Implications for Long Island Residents

The health implications of chronic low-level exposure to this contamination mix are difficult to quantify precisely, but the epidemiological signal is hard to ignore. Long Island has historically exhibited elevated rates of breast cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and bladder cancer compared to national averages — patterns that researchers have linked, at least in part, to environmental exposures including contaminated drinking water. Children and pregnant women face the greatest risk from nitrate exposure, which interferes with oxygen transport in the blood. PFAS compounds cross the placental barrier and are present in breast milk, meaning that prenatal and early-life exposure is effectively unavoidable for many Long Island families. The cumulative burden of exposure — across multiple contaminant classes, over a lifetime of drinking, cooking, and bathing with aquifer water — represents a public health challenge that conventional water treatment alone cannot fully address.

Where Ozone Fits In

Ozone is one of the most powerful oxidizing agents available for water treatment, and its application extends well beyond laundry. Municipal water systems in Europe have used ozone as a primary disinfectant and contaminant-reduction technology for over a century. Ozone effectively destroys a wide range of organic contaminants, inactivates pathogens including Cryptosporidium and Giardia that are resistant to chlorine, and breaks down many pharmaceutical compounds and endocrine disruptors. For PFAS, ozone alone is insufficient — but advanced oxidation processes (AOP) that combine ozone with hydrogen peroxide or UV light have shown significant efficacy in degrading short-chain PFAS compounds. In the context of laundry specifically, ozone washing eliminates the need for hot water and the volume of detergent chemicals — many of them endocrine-disrupting surfactants — that are discharged into Suffolk County's wastewater stream and ultimately into the aquifer. Every commercial, industrial and residential laundry operation that converts to ozone technology reduces its contribution to the chemical load that the aquifer must absorb. It is a small but meaningful piece of a much larger remediation challenge — one that Long Island cannot afford to ignore.