Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American engineer, futurist, and inventor whose life ran from 10 July 1856 to 7 January 1943. He was born into a family of ethnic Serbs in Smiljan, then in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire and now in Croatia. His working life unfolded in the new electric power industry, first in Europe and then in the United States, where he moved in 1884 and became a naturalized citizen. He is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current, or AC, electricity supply system.

Tesla’s early mind was shaped by family, schooling, illness, and a strong pull toward nature and electricity. His father, Milutin Tesla, was an Eastern Orthodox priest; his mother, Georgina “Đuka” Mandić, had a talent for making home craft tools and mechanical appliances and could memorize Serbian epic poems, though she had no formal education. Tesla later credited his eidetic memory and creative abilities to his mother’s influence. At the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac, his physics professor’s demonstrations of electricity stirred his wish to know more of what he called a “wonderful force.” After a severe bout of cholera, his father promised to send him to the best engineering school if he recovered.

In the 1870s Tesla studied engineering and physics, though he did not receive a degree. He enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz in 1875, where lectures on electricity by professor Jakob Pöschl fascinated him, but he left in 1878 and never graduated. He later attended philosophy lectures in Prague as an auditor without receiving grades. In 1881 he moved to Budapest to work at the Budapest Telephone Exchange, gaining experience in telephony. By the early 1880s he was working in the new electric power field, including at Continental Edison, before leaving for the United States.

In New York, Tesla worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works, then set out on his own. With partners who helped finance and market his ideas, he created laboratories and companies to develop electrical and mechanical devices. His AC induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, brought him considerable money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system marketed by Westinghouse. He also experimented with mechanical oscillators and generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging, and he built a wirelessly controlled boat, one of the first wirelessly controlled vehicles ever produced.

During the 1890s, Tesla became well known for public lectures, laboratory demonstrations, and high-voltage, high-frequency experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. He pursued wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution, and in 1893 spoke of the possibility of wireless communication using his devices. His unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project was meant as an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but he ran out of funding before completing it. Afterward he continued experimenting in the 1910s and 1920s with mixed success, spent most of his money, and lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving unpaid bills.

Tesla died in New York City in January 1943. His work later fell into relative obscurity until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. Popular interest in him rose again from the 1990s, and in 2013 Time named him one of the 100 most significant figures of all time. His words still fit the life behind them: restless, exacting, and full of faith in discovery. “Of all things, I like books best” sounds simple, but for Tesla it points back to memory, study, experiment, and the hunger to understand nature’s forces.