Background

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (modern-day Croatia), to Milutin Tesla, an orthodox priest, and his wife Đuka Mandić, although illiterate, was a skillful inventor of home and farm implements in her spare time.

Tesla's mother was a hard-working woman of many talents who spoke four languages and created appliances to help with home and farm responsibilities. One of these was a mechanical eggbeater. Tesla attributed all of his inventive instincts to his mother.

He was the fourth of five children in his family. He had three sisters, Milka, Angelina, and Marica, and an older brother named Dane. In 1863 Tesla’s brother was killed in a riding accident. The shock of the loss unsettled the 7-year-old Tesla, who reported seeing visions - the first signs of his lifelong mental illnesses.

Education

Even as a boy, Tesla was inventive; at the age of nine, he constructed a 16-bug power motor by harnessing June bugs to a thin wooden wheel. He received his early education of German, arithmetic, and religion from a primary school in Smiljan. Tesla showed many signs of exceptional understanding in school. He was so good in mathematics and to compute calculus problems in his head. He achieved the highest grades possible. He began to have many side effects associated with savant syndrome such as seeing flashing lights and having a severe distaste for certain objects.

Tesla's success in school was often linked to the early death of his brother, Dane, who was a very obedient and intelligent child. His death deeply affected Tesla who looked up to him. He did his very best in school to live up to his brother's name. In 1870, he was enrolled at Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac and graduated the four-year course within three years in 1873, thanks to his extraordinary intelligence. He graduated in 1873.

Tesla finished high school at the top of his class. To avoid being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army, Tesla purposely exposed himself to cholera in order to escape military service. Tesla was a student for four years at the Polytechnic School, Gratz, Austria, studying mathematics, physics, and mechanics. In his first year, Tesla attended lectures and made the highest grades.

Second-year, Tesla came into conflict with Professor Poeschl over the Gramme Dynamo, an electrical generator. He suggested that commutators weren't necessary and the use of an AC would greatly advance the machine. Tesla lost his scholarship and dropped out. He led his family to believe he had died instead of telling them their money was wasted. Afterwards, he enrolled in philosophy studies for two years at the University of Prague, Bohemia (now the capital of the Czech Republic).

Career

In 1881, Nikola Tesla worked as a draftsman in the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest. Later, he became the chief electrician at the Budapest Telephone Exchange and made significant improvements to the Central Station equipment. In 1882, he was employed by the Continental Edison Company in France as a designer of electrical equipment. After two years, at age 28 Tesla decided to leave Europe for America. He was shifted to New York to work for Thomas Edison and help him redesign the direct current generators.

For nearly a year he worked for inventor Thomas A. Edison, who was impressed by his skill and hard work, but the two men were diametrically opposed in temperament and method. Tesla was a visionary who solved problems in a flash of insight, whereas Edison relied on patient trial-and-error in practical experiments. Tesla insisted on the superiority of alternating current and its applications, whereas Edison believed it a dead end and championed direct current. Tesla parted company with Edison after being promised $50,000 for improving the design and efficiency of dynamos. When Tesla solved the problem and asked for the money, Edison said he was only joking. Tesla immediately resigned.

In 1884, Tesla received funding for the Tesla Electric Light Company and was tasked by his investors to develop improved arc lighting. After successfully doing so, however, Tesla was forced out of the venture and for a time had to work as a manual laborer in order to survive. His luck would change two years later when he received funding for his new Tesla Electric Company. In 1888, he was hired by industrialist George Westinghouse, who was impressed by his idea of developing the alternating current electric supply system. Ultimately, he won the war of currents over Edison’s DC system by demonstrating the marvels of electric appliances via alternating current.

In attempting to span the continent with an alternating current system, Westinghouse ran into financial difficulties; his own backers insisted that he renounce his royalty contract to Tesla, otherwise they would withdraw support. When Westinghouse explained his difficulty to Tesla, Tesla recalled how Westinghouse had believed in him. In a magnanimous gesture, Tesla tore up his contract, thereby sacrificing some $12 million in unpaid royalties.

Tesla went on to invent new apparatus involving original principles. He was responsible for many important innovations: the system of electricity conversion and distribution by oscillatory dischargers, generators of high-frequency current; the Tesla coil or transformer, a system of wireless transmission of intelligence; mechanical oscillators and generators of electrical oscillation; research and discoveries in radiation, material streams, and emanations; and high-potential magnifying transmitting. One of his most spectacular achievements was harnessing the water power of Niagara Falls. In 1895 the Westinghouse Electric Company installed a gigantic hydroelectric project, using the Tesla polyphase system of alternating current.

The following year, it was used to power the city of Buffalo, New York - a feat that was highly publicized throughout the world and helped further AC electricity’s path to becoming the world’s power system. In 1899, he moved to Colorado Springs where he established his laboratory for creating a wireless global energy transmission system. He experimented with man-made lightning in an attempt to provide free wireless electricity throughout the world.

In the late 19th century, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, which laid the foundation for wireless technologies and is still used in radio technology today. The heart of an electrical circuit, the Tesla coil is an inductor used in many early radio transmission antennas. The coil works with a capacitor to resonate current and voltage from a power source across the circuit. Tesla himself used his coil to study fluorescence, x-rays, radio, wireless power, and electromagnetism in the earth and its atmosphere.

Having become obsessed with the wireless transmission of energy, around 1900 Tesla set to work on his boldest project yet: to build a global, wireless communication system - to be transmitted through a large electrical tower - for sharing information and providing free energy throughout the world. With funding from a group of investors that included financial giant J. P. Morgan, in 1901 Tesla began work on the free energy project in earnest, designing and building a lab with a power plant and a massive transmission tower on a site on Long Island, New York, that became known as Wardenclyffe.

However, doubts arose among his investors about the plausibility of Tesla's system. As his rival, Guglielmo Marconi - with the financial support of Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison - continued to make great advances with his own radio technologies, Tesla had no choice but to abandon the project. The Wardenclyffe staff was laid off in 1906, and by 1915 the site had fallen into foreclosure. Two years later Tesla declared bankruptcy and the tower was dismantled and sold for scrap to help pay the debts he had accrued.

Although he continued to enjoy a measure of fame, Tesla made little money from his inventions and became increasingly poor during the last decades of his life. His name continued to flourish before the public, however, since he was a reliable source for scientific prophecy and exploited as such in the popular press. While he gave demonstrations of some of his earlier marvels - his exhibition of a radio-guided teleautomatic boat filled Madison Square Garden in 1898 - he became oracular in his later years and, for example, offered no proof of the potent "death-ray" that he announced in 1934, on his seventy-eighth birthday. Nonetheless, Tesla continued to invent devices of commercial and scientific worth, from which, since he seldom bothered to seek a patent, he received little profit.

Achievements

• 

  Tesla has shown much leadership in his life and has left behind an immense legacy. He has worked tirelessly, at times without reward, just to build a better tomorrow. He embodied leadership by taking a headfirst leap into science and inventing even when everyone had tried their best to stop him. He had set the foundation for the future 50 years before it even existed.
  
  Tesla filed more than 300 patents during his 86 years of life, and his inventions helped pave the way for alternating current, electric motors, radios, fluorescent lights, lasers, and remote controls, among many other things. One of his most celebrated inventions is the Tesla Coil, a circuit that transforms energy into extremely high voltage charges, creating powerful electrical fields capable of producing spectacular electrical arcs.
  
  In 1894, he was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal. On his 75th birthday in 1931, the inventor appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. On this occasion, Tesla received congratulatory letters from more than 70 pioneers in science and engineering including Albert Einstein. These letters were mounted and presented to Tesla in the form of a testimonial volume. In 1934, he was awarded the John Scott Medal.
  
  He was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 1975 and starting the following year, the Nikola Tesla Award, an annual prestigious honor, was presented by the Institute of Electric Engineers. The United States Postal Service honored Tesla with a commemorative stamp in 1983.

Works

More photos

• design

  • Tesla Coil

    1891

  • Magnifying Transmitter

    1914

  • Tesla Turbine

    1913

  • Induction Motor

    1887

  • Radio Controlled Boat

    1898

  • AC electric generator

    1888

Religion

Tesla was raised as an Orthodox Christian. His family was likely quite devout as his father was a priest in the church. As an adult, Tesla developed a nuanced view of religion and mankind’s place in the universe. He once stated: "Buddhism and Christianity are the greatest religions both in a number of disciples and in importance." At other times, Tesla sounded highly skeptical of religion and the supernatural and was considered an atheist. He said: "It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making."

Politics

Tesla’s political context was one of worldwide violence and destruction. He lived to see his home country broken into pieces after World War I and died as World War II was in full swing. Tesla idealistically envisioned a world of peace and understanding.

Views

Tesla did not conceive of his inventions using any sort of logical system. Instead, he relied on his deeply imaginative and highly cultivated visualization powers which would sometimes emerge while he was doing an activity not related to problem-solving. This type of activity was also experienced by Einstein and is called combinatory play.

In Tesla’s own words, "I needed no models, drawings, or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental…" Tesla regarded the mainstream scientific practice of instant experimentation as inferior to the way he created his inventions.

He worked, re-worked, fine-tuned, and perfected inventions in his mind, thereby solving the engineering problems well before he ever turned these mental constructs into reality. He believed it was a total waste of time, money and energy to carry out and test a crude idea without first an intense visualization stage.

Tesla was an environmentalist. He wanted to make sure that people were using nonfossil, renewable fuels. So Tesla researched ways to harvest the natural energy in the ground and in the sky. He created artificial lightning in his lab and probed electrical potential differences in the Earth and across tall objects. He became a vegetarian in his later years, living only on milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.

Tesla believed that women would eventually become intellectually superior to men. He predicted that in the future, "The struggle of the human female towards sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior." He went on to say that women will not shallowly imitate men, but will be awakened intellectually and in so doing, become the dominant force in the world.

He believed that the suppression of women throughout history would thereby create a potent and fermented source of energy which will emerge in the future. He said, "for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress."

Quotations: "Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses."

"The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea."

"If we want to reduce poverty and misery, if we want to give to every deserving individual what is needed for a safe existence of an intelligent being, we want to provide more machinery, more power. Power is our mainstay, the primary source of our many-sided energies."

"The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter - for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way."

Personality

By all accounts, Tesla was a striking individual. He was also a fashionable and fastidious dresser, and while he could be reclusive while deeply engaged in work, he was a fascinating company when he felt like being social. Not only did he attract the friendship of famous people like Mark Twain, but he also drew the attention of women, some of whom confessed to being "madly in love" with him.

Playing into his stereotype of a mad scientist, Tesla suffered from many characteristics that today would likely be classified as obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was obsessed with the number three and detested jewelry, round objects, and touching hair.

He was particularly wary of pearls and wouldn’t talk to women wearing them; he even sent his secretary home when she wore pearl jewelry. He was also an insomniac and claimed he only needed two hours of sleep at night, though he often took afternoon naps.

He was a germaphobe. After a near-fatal case of cholera as a teenager, Tesla became obsessive about germs and cleaning everything. He has an extensive and rigid personal hygiene routine, used 18 napkins to wipe his dining room every night, and wore white gloves to every dinner.

Tesla had what’s known as a photographic memory. He was known to memorize books and images and stockpile visions for inventions in his head. He also had a powerful imagination and the ability to visualize in three dimensions, which he used to control the terrifying vivid nightmares he suffered from as a child.

Physical Characteristics: At 6 foot 2 and just over 140 pounds, Tesla was very tall and slender, with dark, deep-set eyes.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Nikola Tesla's achievements in electrical science are monuments that symbolize America as a land of freedom and opportunity … Tesla's mind was a human dynamo that whirled to benefit mankind." - David Sarnoff
  
  "Tesla has done great things that will take the rest of us a long time to fully exploit. Let's just hope we exploit them for the right reasons!" - Kevin R. Hutson
  
  "All scientific men will be delighted to extend their warmest congratulations to Tesla and to express their appreciation of his great contributions to science." - Ernest Rutherford
  
  "Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time." - Lord Kelvin

Interests

• Gambling

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Archimedes, Michael Faraday

• Writers

  Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj, Alexander Pushkin, William Blake

• Artists

  Francisco Goya

• Music & Bands

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sebastian Bach

Connections

Nikola Tesla wasn't married and had no family of his own.

Father:

Milutin Tesla

Milutin Tesla was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Smiljan and later in Gospic. He wrote many articles in newspapers and magazines about the economic and educational problems of his home region of Lika. He advocated ardently for the formation of Serbian schools and his devotion to education for all Serbian children was immeasurable.

Mother:

Đuka Mandić

Đuka Mandić was multi-talented, inventing many improvements for farm work and household chores, and lived long enough to enjoy the fame of her son Nikola, whose inherited genius for inventing she cultivated during his youth.

Friend:

Mark Twain

Twain and Tesla became friends in the 1890s, thanks in part to Twain’s lifelong fascination with technology and new inventions. Visiting Tesla’s lab late one night, Twain posed for one of the first photographs to be lit by incandescent light. In 1895, Tesla and photographer Edward Ringwood Hewett invited Twain back to the lab to pose for another photo, this one lit using an electrical device called a Crookes tube.

When Tesla reviewed the resulting photographic negative, he found it splotchy and spotted and decided it was ruined. It was only weeks later after German scientist Wilhelm Röntigen announced his discovery of what he called X-radiation produced by Crookes tubes, that Tesla realized the photograph of Twain had been ruined by the X-ray shadows of the camera’s metal screws.

Brother:

Dane Tesla

Dane died in 1863, and Nikola became a witness to his brother's death. Dane's horse reared and threw him to the ground, hitting his head. Dane's death left an indelible memory in Nikola and for many years he tried to get rid of the nightmares.

Sister:

Milka Tesla

Sister:

Angelina Tesla

Sister:

Marica Kosanović

Acquaintance:

John Morgan

Tesla secured backing from financier J.P. Morgan and began building a global communications network centered on a giant tower at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. But funds ran out and Morgan balked at Tesla’s grandiose schemes.

Acquaintance:

Thomas Edison

Early in his career, Tesla worked for Edison, designing direct current generators, but famously quit to pursue his own project: the alternating current induction motor. On a rare occasion, Edison attended a conference where Tesla was speaking. Edison, hard of hearing and not wanting to be spotted, slipped into the back of the auditorium to listen to the lecture. But Tesla spotted Edison in the crowd, called attention to him, and led the audience in giving him a standing ovation. The two had a love/hate relationship. At first, Edison dismissed Tesla but came to eventually respect him.

References

• My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was a prophet of the electronic age. His research laid much of the groundwork for modern electrical and communication systems, and his impressive accomplishments include the development of the alternating-current electrical system, radio, the Tesla coil transformer, wireless transmission, and fluorescent lighting.
  1919
• Prodigal Genius: The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla Prodigal Genius, The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla covers, among other topics, the story of Tesla’s inspiration for his career in engineering, shows his theories of electricity that went against the scientific establishment, explores his friendships, investigates the story of the lost Nobel Prize, and, dig into Tesla’s own views of the paranormal.
  1944
• Nikola Tesla: The truth about Nikola Tesla’s life and science success revealed Nіkоlа Tеѕlа wаѕ thе ѕіnglе аnd mоѕt important ріоnееr іn hаrnеѕѕing the роwеr оf еlесtrісіtу, аnd hiѕ knоwlеdgе аnd rеѕеаrсh wаѕ соnѕіdеrеd tо bе rеvоlutіоnаrу, уеt wау аhеаd оf hіѕ timе tо bе оf аnу рrасtісаl uѕе.
  2020
• Nikola Tesla: Prophet Of The Modern Technological Age Tesla was one of the most famous inventors who ever lived, but after his death, he was nearly forgotten. He was a celebrity during the height of America’s Gilded Age. In this book, you will read about his friendship with Mark Twain, his furious competition with his former employer Thomas Edison, his uneasy relationship with billionaire J.P. Morgan, and his rivalry with Albert Einstein.
  2015