a biography about nikola tesla

Nikola Tesla

Serbian American scientist Nikola Tesla invented the Tesla coil and alternating-current (AC) electricity, in addition to discovering the rotating magnetic field.

Quick Facts

When was nikola tesla born, nikola tesla and thomas edison, solo venture, how did nikola tesla die, legacy: movies, electric car, and wardenclyffe tower renovation, who was nikola tesla.

Engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla designed the alternating-current (AC) electric system, which is the predominant electrical system used across the world today. He also created the “Tesla coil” that is still used in radio technology. Born in modern-day Croatia, Tesla immigrated to the United States in 1884 and briefly worked with Thomas Edison before the two parted ways. The Serbian American sold several patent rights, including those to his AC machinery, to George Westinghouse . Tesla died at age 86 in January 1943, but his legacy lives on through his inventions and the electric car company Tesla that’s named in his honor.

FULL NAME: Nikola Tesla BORN: July 10, 1856 DIED: January 7, 1943 BIRTHPLACE: Smiljan, Croatia ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer

Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the Austrian Empire town of Smiljan that is now part of Croatia.

He was one of five children, including siblings Dane, Angelina, Milka, and Marica. Nikola’s interest in electrical invention was spurred by his mother, Djuka Mandic, who invented small household appliances in her spare time while her son was growing up.

Tesla’s father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian orthodox priest and a writer, and he pushed for his son to join the priesthood. But Nikola’s interests lay squarely in the sciences.

Tesla received quite a bit of education. He studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt (later renamed the Johann-Rudolph-Glauber Realschule Karlstadt) in Germany; the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria; and the University of Prague during the 1870s.

After university, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, where for a time he worked at the Central Telephone Exchange. It was while in Budapest that the idea for the induction motor first came to Tesla, but after several years of trying to gain interest in his invention, at age 28, Tesla decided to leave Europe for America.

In 1884, Tesla arrived in the United States with little more than the clothes on his back and a letter of introduction to famed inventor and business mogul Thomas Edison , whose DC-based electrical works were fast becoming the standard in the country. Edison hired Tesla, and the two men were soon working tirelessly alongside each other, making improvements to Edison’s inventions.

Several months later, the two parted ways due to a conflicting business-scientific relationship , attributed by historians to their incredibly different personalities. While Edison was a power figure who focused on marketing and financial success, Tesla was commercially out-of-touch and somewhat vulnerable. Their feud would continue to affect Tesla’s career.

In 1885, 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 changed two years later when he received funding for his new Tesla Electric Company.

Throughout his career, Tesla discovered, designed, and developed ideas for a number of important inventions—most of which were officially patented by other inventors—including dynamos (electrical generators similar to batteries) and the induction motor.

He was also a pioneer in the discovery of radar technology, X-ray technology, remote control, and the rotating magnetic field—the basis of most AC machinery. Tesla is most well-known for his contributions in AC electricity and for the Tesla coil.

AC Electrical System

Tesla designed the alternating-current (AC) electrical system, which quickly became the preeminent power system of the 20 th century and has remained the worldwide standard ever since. In 1887, Tesla found funding for his new Tesla Electric Company, and by the end of the year, he had successfully filed several patents for AC-based inventions.

Tesla’s AC system soon caught the attention of American engineer and businessman George Westinghouse , who was seeking a solution to supplying the nation with long-distance power. Convinced that Tesla’s inventions would help him achieve this, in 1888, he purchased his patents for $60,000 in cash and stock in the Westinghouse Corporation.

As interest in an AC system grew, Tesla and Westinghouse were put in direct competition with Thomas Edison , who was intent on selling his direct-current (DC) system to the nation. A negative press campaign was soon waged by Edison, in an attempt to undermine interest in AC power.

Unfortunately for Edison, the Westinghouse Corporation was chosen to supply the lighting at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Tesla conducted demonstrations of his AC system there.

Hydroelectric Power Plant

In 1895, Tesla designed what was among the first AC hydroelectric power plants in the United States, at Niagara Falls. 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 the late 19 th 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 used his coil to study fluorescence, x-rays, radio, wireless power, and electromagnetism in the earth and its atmosphere.

Wireless Power and Wardenclyffe Tower

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 transmitted through a large electrical tower that would enable information sharing and provide free energy throughout the world.

With funding from a group of investors that included financial giant J. P. Morgan , Tesla began work on the free energy project in earnest in 1901. He designed and built 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.

After suffering a nervous breakdown following the closure of his wireless power project, Tesla eventually returned to work, primarily as a consultant. But as time went on, his ideas became progressively more outlandish and impractical. He grew increasingly eccentric, devoting much of his time to the care of wild pigeons in the parks of New York City . Tesla even drew the attention of the FBI with his talk of building a powerful “death ray,” which had received some interest from the Soviet Union during World War II.

Poor and reclusive, Tesla died of coronary thrombosis on January 7, 1943, at the age of 86 in New York City, where he had lived for nearly 60 years.

The legacy of Tesla’s work lives on to this day. In 1994, a street sign identifying “Nikola Tesla Corner” was installed near the site of his former New York City laboratory, at the intersection of 40 th Street and 6 th Avenue.

Several movies have highlighted Tesla’s life and famous works, most notably:

• The Secret of Nikola Tesla , a 1980 biographical film starring Orson Welles as J. P. Morgan .
• Nikola Tesla, The Genius Who Lit the World , a 1994 documentary produced by the Tesla Memorial Society and the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.
• The Prestige , a 2006 fictional film about two magicians directed by Christopher Nolan , with rock star David Bowie portraying Tesla.

In 2003, a group of engineers founded Tesla Motors, a car company named after Tesla dedicated to building the first fully electric-powered car. Entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk contributed over $30 million to Tesla in 2004 and serves as the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Tesla Motors unveiled its first electric car, the Roadster, in 2008. A high-performance sports vehicle, the Roadster helped changed the perception of what electric cars could be. In 2014, Tesla launched the Model S, a lower-priced model that, in 2017, set the MotorTrend world record for 0 to 60 miles per hour acceleration at 2.28 seconds. The company’s designs showed that an electric car could have the same performance as gasoline-powered sports car brands like Porsche and Lamborghini.

Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe

Since Tesla’s original forfeiture of his free energy project, ownership of the Wardenclyffe property has passed through numerous hands. Several attempts have been made to preserve it, but efforts to declare it a national historic site failed in 1967, 1976, and 1994.

Then, in 2008, a group called the Tesla Science Center (TSC) was formed with the intention of purchasing the property and turning it into a museum dedicated to the inventor’s work. In 2009, the Wardenclyffe site went on the market for nearly $1.6 million, and for the next several years, the TSC worked diligently to raise funds for its purchase. In 2012, public interest in the project peaked when Matthew Inman of TheOatmeal.com collaborated with the TSC in an Internet fundraising effort, ultimately receiving enough contributions to acquire the site in May 2013.

Wardenclyffe Tower finally joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. Work on its restoration is still in progress. A $20 million redevelopment broke ground in April 2023, but those efforts were complicated by large fire that November. The site is closed to the public “for the foreseeable future” for reasons of safety and preservation, according to the Tesla Science Center.

• Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
• I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.
• The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Famous Inventors

Frederick Jones

Lonnie Johnson

11 Famous Black Inventors Who Changed Your Life

Lewis Howard Latimer

Nikola Tesla's Secrets to Longevity

Garrett Morgan

Sarah Boone

Henry Blair

Alfred Nobel

Johannes Gutenberg

The Best Books About Inventors

Biography Online

Nikola Tesla Biography

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was one of the greatest and most enigmatic scientists who played a key role in the development of electromagnetism and other scientific discoveries of his time. Despite his breathtaking number of patents and discoveries, his achievements were often underplayed during his lifetime.

Short Biography Nikola Tesla

Tesla was a bright student and in 1875 went to the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz. However, he left to gain employment in Marburg in Slovenia. Evidence of his difficult temperament sometimes manifested and after an estrangement from his family, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He later enrolled in the Charles Ferdinand University in Prague, but again he left before completing his degree.

During his early life, he experienced many periods of illness and periods of startling inspiration. Accompanied by blinding flashes of light, he would often visualise mechanical and theoretical inventions spontaneously. He had a unique capacity to visualise images in his head. When working on projects, he would rarely write down plans or scale drawings, but rely on the images in his mind.

In 1880, he moved to Budapest where he worked for a telegraph company. During this time, he became acquainted with twin turbines and helped develop a device that provided amplification for when using the telephone.

In 1882, he moved to Paris, where he worked for the Continental Edison Company. Here he improved various devices used by the Edison company. He also conceived the induction motor and devices that used rotating magnetic fields.

With a strong letter of recommendation, Tesla went to the United States in 1884 to work for the Edison Machine Works company. Here he became one of the chief engineers and designers. Tesla was given a task to improve the electrical system of direct current generators. Tesla claimed he was offered $50,000 if he could significantly improve the motor generators. However, after completing his task, Tesla received no reward. This was one of several factors that led to a deep rivalry and bitterness between Tesla and Thomas Edison . It was to become a defining feature of Tesla’s life and impacted his financial situation and prestige. This deep rivalry was also seen as a reason why neither Tesla or Edison was awarded a Nobel prize for their electrical discoveries.

Disgusted that he did not ever receive a pay rise, Tesla resigned, and for a short while, found himself having to gain employment digging ditches for the Edison telephone company.

In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, but it wasn’t a success as his backers didn’t support his faith in AC current.

In 1887, Tesla worked on a form of X-Rays. He was able to photograph the bones in his hand; he also became aware of the side-effects of using radiation. However, his work in this area gained little coverage, and much of his research was later lost in a fire at a New York warehouse.

“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up… His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.”

– Nikola Tesla,  Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

In 1891, Tesla became an American citizen. This was also a period of great advances in electrical knowledge. Tesla demonstrated the potential for wireless energy transfer and the capacity for AC power generation. Tesla’s promotion of AC current placed him in opposition to Edison who sought to promote his Direct Current DC for electric power. Shortly before his death, Edison said his biggest mistake was spending so much time on DC current rather than the AC current Tesla had promoted.

In 1899, Tesla moved to Colorado Springs where he had the space to develop high voltage experiments. This included a variety of radio and electrical transmission experiments. He left after a year in Colorado Springs, and the buildings were later sold to pay off debts.

In 1900, Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. This was an ambitious project costing $150,000, a fortune at the time.

In 1904, the US patent office reversed his earlier patent for the radio, giving it instead to G. Marconi . This infuriated Tesla who felt he was the rightful inventor. He began a long, expensive and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to fight the decision. Marconi went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909. This seemed to be a repeating theme in Tesla’s life: a great invention that he failed to personally profit from.

Nikola Tesla also displayed fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs.

Tesla was in many ways an eccentric and genius. His discoveries and inventions were unprecedented. Yet, he was often ostracised for his erratic behaviour (during his later years, he developed a form of obsessive-compulsive behaviour). He was not frightened of suggesting unorthodox ideas such as radio waves from extraterrestrial beings. His ideas, lack of personal finance and unorthodox behaviour put him outside the scientific establishment and because of this, his ideas were sometimes slow to be accepted or used.

“All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.”

– Nikola Tesla, A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Outside of science, he had many artistic and literary friends; in later life he became friendly with Mark Twain , inviting him to his laboratory. He also took an interest in poetry, literature and modern Vedic thought, in particular being interested in the teachings and vision of the modern Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda . Tesla was brought up an Orthodox Christian, although he later didn’t consider himself a believer in the true sense. He retained an admiration for Christianity and Buddhism.

“For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one.”

– Nikola Tesla,  The Problem of Increasing Human Energy (1900)

As well as considering scientific issues, Tesla was thoughtful about greater problems of war and conflict, and he wrote a book on the subject called   A Means for Furthering Peace (1905).  This expressed his views on how conflict may be avoided and humanity learn to live in harmony.

“What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.”

– Nikola Tesla,  My Inventions (1919)

Personal life

Tesla was famous for working hard and throwing himself into his work. He ate alone and rarely slept, sleeping as little as two hours a day.  He remained unmarried and claimed that his chastity was helpful to his scientific abilities. In later years, he became a vegetarian, living on only milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.

Tesla passed away on 7 January 1943, in a New York hotel room.  He was 86 years old.

After his death, in 1960 the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic field strength the Tesla in his honour.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Nikola Tesla” , Oxford, UK – www.biographyonline.net . Last updated 25th September 2017

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age at Amazon

Tesla: The Man who invented the Twentieth Century

Key Inventions of Nikola Tesla

• Development in electromagnetism
• Theoretical work on Alternating Current (AC)
• Tesla Coil – magnifying transmitter
• Polyphase system of electrical distribution
• Patent for an early form of radio
• Wireless electrical transfer
• Devices for lightning protection
• Concepts for electrical vehicles

Important contributions in

• Early models of radar
• Remote control
• Nuclear physics

Related pages

Inventions that changed the world  – Famous inventions that made a great difference to the progress of the world, including aluminium, the telephone and the printing press.

External pages

• Tesla Museum

Biography of Nikola Tesla, Serbian-American Inventor

Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

• People & Events
• Fads & Fashions
• Early 20th Century
• American History
• African American History
• African History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
• Latin American History
• Medieval & Renaissance History
• Military History
• Women's History
• B.S., Texas A&M University

Nikola Tesla (July 10, 1856–January 7, 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, and futurist. As the holder of nearly 300 patents, Tesla is best known for his role in developing the modern three-phase alternating current (AC) electric power supply system and for his invention of the Tesla coil, an early advancement in the field of radio transmission.

During the 1880s, Tesla and Thomas Edison , inventor and champion of direct electrical current (DC), would become embattled in the “War of the Currents” over whether Tesla’s AC or Edison’s DC would become the standard current used in long-distance transmission of electrical power.

Fast Facts: Nikola Tesla

• Known For: Development of alternating current (AC) electrical power
• Born: July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia)
• Parents: Milutin Tesla and Đuka Tesla
• Died: January 7, 1943 in New York City, New York
• Education: Austrian Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria (1875)
• Patents: US381968A —Electro-magnetic motor, US512,340A —coil for electro-magnets
• Awards and Honors : Edison Medal (1917), Inventor’s Hall of Fame (1975)
• Notable Quote : “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

Early Life and Education

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan in the Austrian Empire (now Croatia) to his Serbian father Milutin Tesla, an Eastern Orthodox priest, and his mother Đuka Tesla, who invented small household appliances and had the ability to memorize lengthy Serbian epic poems. Tesla credited his mother for his own interest in inventing and photographic memory. He had four siblings, a brother Dane, and sisters Angelina, Milka, and Marica. 

In 1870, Tesla started high school at the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac, Austria. He recalled that his physics teacher’s demonstrations of electricity made him want “to know more of this wonderful force.” Able to do integral calculus in his head, Tesla completed high school in just three years, graduating in 1873.

Determined to pursue a career in engineering, Tesla enrolled at the Austrian Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, in 1875. It was here that Tesla studied a Gramme dynamo, an electrical generator that produces direct current. Observing that the dynamo functioned like an electric motor when the direction of its current was reversed, Tesla began thinking of ways this alternating current could be used in industrial applications. Though he never graduated—as was not uncommon then—Tesla posted excellent grades and was even given a letter from the dean of the technical faculty addressed to his father stating, “Your son is a star of first rank.”

Feeling that chastity would help him focus on his career, Tesla never married or had any known romantic relationships. In her 2001 book, “ Tesla: Man Out of Time ,” biographer Margaret Cheney writes that Tesla felt himself to be unworthy of women, considering them to be superior to him in every way. Later in life, however, he publicly expressed strong dislike what he called the “new woman,” women he felt were abandoning their femininity in an attempt to dominate men.

The Path to Alternating Current

In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he gained practical experience as the chief electrician at the Central Telephone Exchange. In 1882, Tesla was hired by the Continental Edison Company in Paris where he worked in the emerging industry of installing the direct current-powered indoor incandescent lighting system patented by Thomas Edison in 1879. Impressed by Tesla’s mastery of engineering and physics, the company’s management soon had him designing improved versions of generating dynamos and motors and fixing problems at other Edison facilities throughout France and Germany.

When the manager of the Continental Edison facility in Paris was transferred back to the United States in 1884, he asked that Tesla be brought to the U.S. as well. In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States and went to work at the Edison Machine Works in New York City, where Edison’s DC-based electrical lighting system was fast becoming the standard. Just six months later, Tesla quit Edison after a heated dispute over unpaid wages and bonuses. In his diary, Notebook from the Edison Machine Works: 1884-1885 , Tesla marked the end of the amicable relationship between the two great inventors. Across two pages, Tesla wrote in large letters, “Good By to the Edison Machine Works.”

By March 1885, Tesla, with the financial backing of businessmen Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail, started his own lighting utility company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. Instead of Edison’s incandescent lamp bulbs, Tesla’s company installed a DC-powered arc lighting system he had designed while working at Edison Machine Works. While Tesla’s arc light system was praised for its advanced features, his investors, Lane and Vail, had little interest in his ideas for perfecting and harnessing alternating current. In 1886, they abandoned Tesla’s company to start their own company. The move left Tesla penniless, forcing him to survive by taking electrical repair jobs and digging ditches for $2.00 per day. Of this period of hardship, Tesla would later recall, “My high education in various branches of science, mechanics, and literature seemed to me like a mockery.”

During his time of near destitution, Tesla’s resolve to prove the superiority of alternating current over Edison’s direct current grew even stronger.

Alternating Current and the Induction Motor

In April 1887, Tesla, along with his investors, Western Union telegraph superintendent Alfred S. Brown and attorney Charles F. Peck, founded the Tesla Electric Company in New York City for the purpose of developing new types of electric motors and generators.

Tesla soon developed a new type of electromagnetic induction motor that ran on alternating current. Patented in May 1888, Tesla’s motor proved to be simple, dependable, and not subject to the constant need for repairs that plagued direct current-driven motors at the time.

In July 1888, Tesla sold his patent for AC-powered motors to Westinghouse Electric Corporation, owned by electrical industry pioneer George Westinghouse. In the deal, which proved financially lucrative for Tesla, Westinghouse Electric got the rights to market Tesla’s AC motor and agreed to hire Tesla as a consultant.

With Westinghouse now backing AC and Edison backing DC, the stage was set for what would become known as “The War of the Currents.”

The War of the Currents: Tesla vs. Edison

Recognizing the economic and technical superiority of alternating current to his direct current for long-distance power distribution, Edison undertook an unprecedently aggressive public relations campaign to discredit AC as posing a deadly threat to the public—a force should never allow in their homes. Edison and his associates toured the U.S. presenting grizzly public demonstrations of animals being electrocuted with AC electricity. When New York State sought a faster, “more humane” alternative to hanging for executing condemned prisoners, Edison, though once a vocal opponent of capital punishment, recommended using AC-powered electrocution. In 1890, murderer William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in a Westinghouse AC generator-powered electric chair that had been secretly designed by one of Edison’s salesmen.

Despite his best efforts, Edison failed to discredit alternating current. In 1892, Westinghouse and Edison’s new company General Electric, competed head-to-head for the contract to supply electricity to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. When Westinghouse ultimately won the contract, the fair served as a dazzling public display of Tesla’s AC system.

On the tails of their success at the World’s Fair, Tesla and Westinghouse won a historic contract to build the generators for a new hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls. In 1896, the power plant began delivering AC electricity to Buffalo, New York, 26 miles away. In his speech at the opening ceremony of the power plant, Tesla said of the accomplishment, “It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.”

The success of the Niagara Falls power plant firmly established Tesla’s AC as the standard for the electric power industry, effectively ending the War of the Currents.

The Tesla Coil

In 1891, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, an electrical transformer circuit capable of producing high-voltage, low-current AC electricity. Though best-known today for its use in spectacular, lightening-spitting demonstrations of electricity, the Tesla coil was fundamental to the development of wireless communications. Still used in modern radio technology, the Tesla coil inductor was an essential part of many early radio transmission antennas.

Tesla would go on to use his Tesla coil in experiments with radio remote control, fluorescent lighting , x-rays , electromagnetism , and universal wireless power transmission. 

On July 30, 1891, the same year he patented his coil, the 35-year-old Tesla was sworn in as a naturalized United States citizen.

Radio Remote Control

At the 1898 Electrical Exposition in Boston’s Madison Square Gardens, Tesla demonstrated an invention he called a “telautomaton,” a three-foot-long, radio-controlled boat propelled by a small battery-powered motor and rudder. Members of the amazed crowd accused Tesla of using telepathy, a trained monkey, or pure magic to steer the boat.

Finding little consumer interest in radio-controlled devices, Tesla tried unsuccessfully to sell his “Teleautomatics” idea to the US Navy as a type of radio-controlled torpedo. However, during and after World War I (1914-1918), the militaries of many countries, including the United States incorporated it.

Wireless Power Transmission

From 1901 through 1906, Tesla spent most of his time and savings working on arguably his most ambitious, if a far-fetched, project—an electrical transmission system he believed could provide free energy and communications throughout the world without the need for wires. 

In 1901, with the backing of investors headed by financial giant J. P. Morgan, Tesla began building a power plant and massive power transmission tower at his

Wardenclyffe laboratory on Long Island, New York. Seizing on the then commonly-held belief that the Earth’s atmosphere conducted electricity, Tesla envisioned a globe-spanning network of power transmitting and receiving antennas suspended by balloons 30,000 feet (9,100 m) in the air. 

However, as Tesla’s project drug on, its sheer enormity caused his investors to doubt its plausibility and withdraw their support. With his rival, Guglielmo Marconi—enjoying the substantial financial support of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison—was making great advances in his own radio transmission developments, Tesla was forced to abandon his wireless power project in 1906.

Later Life and Death

In 1922, Tesla, deeply in debt from his failed wireless power project, was forced to leave the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City where he had been living since 1900, and move into the more-affordable St. Regis Hotel. While living at the St. Regis, Tesla took to feeding pigeons on the windowsill of his room, often bringing weak or injured birds into his room to nurse them back to health.

Of his love for one particular injured pigeon, Tesla would write, “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”

By late 1923, the St. Regis evicted Tesla because of unpaid bills and complaints about the smell from keeping pigeons in his room. For the next decade, he would live in a series of hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills at each. Finally, in 1934, his former employer, Westinghouse Electric Company, began paying Tesla $125 per month as a “consulting fee,” as well as paying his rent at the Hotel New Yorker.

In 1937, at age 81, Tesla was knocked to the ground by a taxicab while crossing a street a few blocks from the New Yorker. Though he suffered a severely wrenched back and broken ribs, Tesla characteristically refused extended medical attention. While he survived the incident, the full extent of his injuries, from which he never fully recovered, was never known.

On January 7, 1943, Tesla died alone in his room at the New Yorker Hotel at the age of 86. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as coronary thrombosis, a heart attack.

On January 10, 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivered a eulogy to Tesla broadcast live over WNYC radio. On January 12, over 2,000 people attended Tesla’s funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Following the funeral, Tesla’s body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York.

With the United States then fully engaged in World War II ., fears that the Austrian-born inventor might have been in possession of devices or designs helpful to Nazi Germany , drove the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seize Tesla’s possessions after his death. However, the FBI reported finding nothing of interest, concluding that since about 1928, Tesla’s work had been “primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

In his 1944 book, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla , journalist, and historian John Joseph O’Neill wrote that Tesla claimed to have never slept more than two hours per night, “dozing” during the day instead to “recharge his batteries.” He was reported to have once spent 84 straight hours without sleep working in his laboratory.

It is believed that Tesla was granted around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions during his lifetime. While several of his patents remain unaccounted for or archived, he holds at least 278 known patents in 26 countries, mostly in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Tesla never attempted to patent many of his other inventions and ideas.

Today, Tesla’s legacy can be seen in multiple forms of popular culture, including movies, TV, video games and several genres of science fiction. For example, in the 2006 movie The Prestige, David Bowie portrays Tesla developing an amazing electro-replicating device for a magician. In Disney’s 2015 film Tomorrowland: A World Beyond, Tesla helps Thomas Edison, Gustave Eiffel , and Jules Verne discover a better future in an alternate dimension. And in the 2019 film The Current War, Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult, squares off with Thomas Edison, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, in a history-based depiction of the war of the currents.

In 1917, Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal, the most coveted electrical prize in the United States, and in 1975, Tesla was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. In 1983, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Tesla. Most recently, in 2003, a group of investors headed by engineer and futurist Elon Musk founded Tesla Motors, a company dedicated to producing the first car fittingly powered totally by Tesla’s obsession—electricity.

• Carlson, W. Bernard. “Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age.” Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Cheney, Margaret. “Tesla: Man Out of Time.” Simon & Schuster, 2001.
• O'Neill, John J. (1944). “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla.” Cosimo Classics, 2006.
• Gunderman, Richard. “The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla.” Smithsonian.com , January 5, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/extraordinary-life-nikola-tesla-180967758/ .
• Tesla, Nikola. “Notebook from the Edison Machine Works: 1884-1885.” Tesla Universe, https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/books/nikola-tesla-notebook-edison-machine-works-1884-1885 .
• “The War of the Currents: AC vs. DC Power.” U.S. Department of Energy , https://www.energy.gov/articles/war-currents-ac-vs-dc-power .
• Cheney, Margaret. “Tesla: Master of Lightning.” MetroBooks, 2001.
• Dickerson, Kelly.“Wireless Electricity? How the Tesla Coil Works.” LiveScience , July 10, 2014, https://www.livescience.com/46745-how-tesla-coil-works.html .
• “About Nikola Tesla.” Tesla Society , https://web.archive.org/web/20120525133151/http:/www.teslasociety.org/about.html .
• O’Neill, John J. “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla.” Cosimo Classics, 2006.
• All About Wireless Electricity
• Notable American Inventors of the Industrial Revolution
• George Westinghouse's Influence on Electricity
• Timeline of Electronics
• History's 15 Most Popular Inventors
• Reginald Fessenden and the First Radio Broadcast
• Significant Eras of the American Industrial Revolution
• Death, Money, and the History of the Electric Chair
• What Is an Electrical Current?
• Biography of Guglielmo Marconi, Italian Inventor and Electrical Engineer
• The History of Radio Technology
• Thomas Edison's Greatest Inventions
• History of Electric Christmas Tree Lights
• Biography of Granville T. Woods, American Inventor
• History of Electricity
• Biography of Thomas Edison, American Inventor

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

Nikola Tesla

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 13, 2020 | Original: November 9, 2009

Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power. He invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology. Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.

Nikola Tesla’s Early Years

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother managed the family’s farm. In 1863 Tesla’s brother Daniel 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.

Did you know? During the 1890s Mark Twain struck up a friendship with inventor Nikola Tesla. Twain often visited him in his lab, where in 1894 Tesla photographed the great American writer in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light.

Tesla studied math and physics at the Technical University of Graz and philosophy at the University of Prague. In 1882, while on a walk, he came up with the idea for a brushless AC motor, making the first sketches of its rotating electromagnets in the sand of the path. Later that year he moved to Paris and got a job repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison Company. Two years later he immigrated to the United States.

Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison

Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 and was hired as an engineer at Thomas Edison’s Manhattan headquarters. He worked there for a year, impressing Edison with his diligence and ingenuity. At one point Edison told Tesla he would pay $50,000 for an improved design for his DC dynamos. After months of experimentation, Tesla presented a solution and asked for the money. Edison demurred, saying, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.” Tesla quit soon after.

Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse

After an unsuccessful attempt to start his own Tesla Electric Light Company and a stint digging ditches for $2 a day, Tesla found backers to support his research into alternating current. In 1887 and 1888 he was granted more than 30 patents for his inventions and invited to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on his work. His lecture caught the attention of George Westinghouse, the inventor who had launched the first AC power system near Boston and was Edison’s major competitor in the “Battle of the Currents.”

Westinghouse hired Tesla, licensed the patents for his AC motor and gave him his own lab. In 1890 Edison arranged for a convicted New York murderer to be put to death in an AC-powered electric chair—a stunt designed to show how dangerous the Westinghouse standard could be.

Buoyed by Westinghouse’s royalties, Tesla struck out on his own again. But Westinghouse was soon forced by his backers to renegotiate their contract, with Tesla relinquishing his royalty rights.

In the 1890s Tesla invented electric oscillators, meters, improved lights and the high-voltage transformer known as the Tesla coil. He also experimented with X-rays, gave short-range demonstrations of radio communication two years before Guglielmo Marconi and piloted a radio-controlled boat around a pool in Madison Square Garden. Together, Tesla and Westinghouse lit the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and partnered with General Electric to install AC generators at Niagara Falls , creating the first modern power station.

Nikola Tesla’s Failures, Death and Legacy

In 1895 Tesla’s New York lab burned, destroying years’ worth of notes and equipment. Tesla relocated to Colorado Springs for two years, returning to New York in 1900. He 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.

Tesla lived his last decades in a New York hotel, working on new inventions even as his energy and mental health faded. His obsession with the number three and fastidious washing were dismissed as the eccentricities of genius. He spent his final years feeding—and, he claimed, communicating with—the city’s pigeons.

Tesla died in his room on January 7, 1943. Later that year the U.S. Supreme Court voided four of Marconi’s key patents, belatedly acknowledging Tesla’s innovations in radio. The AC system he championed and improved remains the global standard for power transmission.

HISTORY Vault: The Tesla Files

Declassified CIA documents reveal a secret history surrounding Nikola Tesla.

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

Nikola Tesla – The Genius Who Lit the World and Saw the Future

• by history tools
• November 19, 2023

Nikola Tesla was one of the most forward-thinking inventors and engineers in history whose pioneering work with electricity literally lit up the modern world. Though underappreciated in his own time, Tesla created hundreds of groundbreaking innovations that fundamentally advanced technology and changed the course of history. This complete biography explores Tesla’s storied life, brilliant vision, and lasting impact.

Introduction to the Master of Electricity

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia and displayed astonishing mental abilities and imagination from an early age. His lifelong passion for energy and electricity was evident even as a child when he created his own tiny waterwheels and turbines. Tesla went on to study math, physics, and mechanics in his teen years at advanced schools in Austria and Germany, showing great promise. After graduating, he worked with Thomas Edison on DC power projects for a period but soon struck out on his own to champion AC electricity instead.

Tesla constructed his first AC motors in the late 1880s and partnered with George Westinghouse to commercialize AC power. This set the stage for an epic technology battle against Edison called the “War of the Currents” which Tesla and Westinghouse ultimately won, ensuring AC became the global standard. Throughout his life, Tesla discovered groundbreaking electrical innovations that form the basis of modern power and communication systems. Though he died in obscurity, Tesla‘s inventionsUNDOUBTEDLY constituted some of the most important technological advances in history.

Early Life and Education – The Making of a Genius

Childhood of creativity and tragedy.

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10th, 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother Djuka Mandic was a homemaker and amateur inventor who created household appliances to help with daily tasks. Tesla inherited much of his inventive spirit from his mother. Tesla was one of five children, though his older brother died tragically in an accident when Nikola was five years old. The loss deeply impacted him and shaped his obsessive and eccentric personality later in life.

As a child, Tesla displayed astonishing creativity and visualization abilities. He could supposedly perform complex mathematical equations entirely in his mind without writing them down. Young Tesla was also captivated by thunderstorms and lightning. He made sketches of inventions like turbines and engines, even constructing a tiny waterwheel as a boy by observing the local river. His interests foreshadowed his future passion for electricity and engineering.

Immersive Education Shapes a Visionary Mind

In 1870, Tesla attended the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz on an academic scholarship where he studied physics, mechanics, and mathematics. There, Tesla became fascinated with the Gramme dynamo which generated direct current electricity while also exploring fields like electrical engineering before they were widely taught. In his second year, Tesla stopped attending lectures and studied independently instead, astonishing professors with his brilliance but also worrying them with his unusual study habits and solitary nature.

After leaving Graz without a degree in 1878, Tesla contracted cholera and seemingly had intense visions during his recovery where he claimed to have unlocked the secrets of alternating current in a moment of insight. The following year, he attended the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague deepening his education even further and receiving a degree in physics in 1882. Tesla’s academic efforts clearly shaped his boundary-pushing innovations down the line.

Early Career – Harnessing the Magic of Electricity

Fresh out of school in 1882, Tesla began working for the Continental Edison Company in Paris. He focused on improving direct current generators and motors. At the time, Edison’s DC system was the only existing power system. After two years, Tesla departed for America to meet Edison himself and share his ideas.

Working With his Hero-turned-Rival, Edison

In 1884, Tesla arrived in New York and was hired to work directly for Thomas Edison. The two inventors got along well initially, and Edison was impressed by Tesla‘s skill. But things began deteriorating as Tesla pushed for more pay and Edison denied him. Edison reportedly offered $50,000 if Tesla could improve his inefficient direct current dynamos. Tesla succeeded but Edison dismissed the offer as a joke, causing bad blood between them.

Tesla left Edison‘s company after just one year of service. But this marked the start of Tesla’s pioneering research into alternating current electricity which would become his claim to fame. The messy split also sparked an intense rivalry with Edison that would culminate in the War of the Currents.

Discovering Alternating Current

In 1885, Tesla secured funding for his own startup focused on arc lighting systems and began developing his own AC motors and transformers. While working with high frequency alternators, he rediscovered the rotating magnetic field principle that essentially forms the basis of AC machinery today.

Tesla acquired several patents for AC motors, generators, and transformers in 1887-1888. His innovations relied on polyphase alternating currents rather than direct currents to distribute power more efficiently over long distances. Tesla gave acclaimed lectures to engineers describing the advantages of AC over DC. His ideas quickly caught the attention of American entrepreneur George Westinghouse.

Winning the War of the Currents – AC vs DC

George Westinghouse recognized the merits of Tesla’s AC approach and purchased his polyphase system patents in 1888 which included AC motors and transformers. This decision set the stage for a battle over the future of electricity between Westinghouse backing AC and Thomas Edison promoting DC. The stakes were enormous given the two incompatible electrical standards.

Edison wielded his broad patents and influence to block adoption of AC as much as possible, even staging public stunts to portray AC as dangerous. But thanks to Tesla’s innovations, Westinghouse prevailed when AC was chosen to power the Chicago World Fair of 1893 illuminating over 200,000 lightbulbs. Niagara Falls also chose AC to generate their groundbreaking hydroelectric plant in 1895. AC proved capable of transmitting power over vastly greater distances than DC which required power stations every mile.

This victory by Westinghouse demonstrated the superiority of AC power which was quickly adopted as the standard. To this day, our homes and cities are powered by Tesla‘s polyphase AC system showing its profound impact. Tesla‘s innovations literally electrified the modern world.

Trailblazing Inventions – Fueling the Future

In addition to revolutionizing electric power, Tesla discovered countless groundbreaking inventions over his lifetime that changed the future of technology and paved the way for modern wireless communication.

Radio and Wireless Communication

Tesla is credited by many to have been the first person to transmit and receive radio signals when he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat in 1898. While Guglielmo Marconi won the Nobel Prize for radio in 1909, Tesla had developed the underlying principles two years earlier. Tesla predicted the coming age of wireless communication, stating:

“As I review the events of my past life I realize how subtle are the influences that shape our destinies…we can never fathom the marvellous complexity of the causes behind the daily incidents that pass before our eyes and their altered relationships.” (Tesla 1926)

Tesla also patented various fundamental radio circuits between 1896-1900 that formed the basis for modern radio engineering. Though Marconi is often viewed as the inventor of radio, clearly Tesla‘s groundwork was pivotal.

Remote Control

In 1898 at Madison Square Garden, Tesla demonstrated a boat controlled wirelessly using radio-like technology to the amazement of crowds. This was one of the earliest implementations of remote control technology. Tesla described the system as being wireless like “invisible waves” and foresaw remote control being used in all kinds of mechanical devices and vehicles in the future.

Working with high voltage electricity and vacuum tubes, Tesla created some of the first X-ray images in 1895. They were produced earlier than Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays which garnered him the first Nobel Prize in Physics. Though Tesla did not win that prize, his innovations contributed to the field.

Electric Motors

Tesla invented the first AC induction motor in 1883 exploiting rotating magnetic fields generated by alternating current. Induction motors are brushless motors that provide high efficiency and operational speeds. They are the most common type of AC motors in use today powering appliances, tools, conveyors, and more.

Neon Lights

While investigating gases, Tesla created fluorescent light bulbs that lit up when electricity passed through them. This discovery led to the development of neon signs and lighting. Tesla‘s innovations literally brightened up the world.

Laser Vision

Tesla proposed using high voltage electricity and tiny metal particles to produce beams of concentrated light. Essentially, he had envisioned laser technology before the first working laser was invented in 1960. This showed Tesla’s thinking was decades ahead of his time.

A Futurist Stalled by Business Failures

In addition to his AC system and visionary inventions, Tesla conceived of even more ambitious plans that were simply impossible with the technology of his era. He envisioned worldwide wireless transmission of electricity essentially turning the earth into a giant conductor. In 1901, he began constructing his Wardenclyffe Tower facility on Long Island to demonstrate wireless power transmission on a large scale and provide telecommunications. But unable to secure adequate funding from industrialists like J.P Morgan, Tesla had to abandon the unfinished project in 1905.

Tesla articulated many forward-thinking concepts like wireless networks, self-driving vehicles, smart homes, and AI. But his poor business skills and inability to gain investors meant many of these revolutionary technologies could only be realized later by others. While a brilliant scientist, Tesla lacked the entrepreneurial abilities of businessmen like Edison or Westinghouse to commercialize his ideas. Tesla lived the final decade of his life in poverty relying on the kindness of friends until passing in 1943.

Legacy – Illuminating the Modern Age

Though Tesla‘s pioneering technologies were not always recognized during his lifetime, his inventions legitimately transformed the world and remain integral to our electrical infrastructure today. He was a pivotal figure whose work ranks among the most important innovations in history. Tesla undisputably provided the key infrastructure enabling modern society to flourish. He electrified the world and saw the future more clearly than almost anyone.

Related posts:

• Who is Ben Horowitz, Silicon Valley‘s Billionaire Rainmaker?
• Robert Noyce – Complete Biography, History and Inventions
• What Does RGB Stand For? – A Complete History
• John Patterson — Complete Biography, History and Inventions
• Hello There! Let‘s Explore How Jabez Burns‘ Addometer Paved the Way for Modern Computing
• Samuel Kelso: Complete Biography, History, and Inventions
• Friedrich Kaufmann and the Trumpet Player: A Complete History
• The Integrated Circuit Revolution – How Jack Kilby‘s Microchip Changed the World

Join the conversation Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Nikola Tesla: Biography, Inventions & Quotes

Nikola Tesla is often called one of history’s most important inventors, one whose discoveries in the field of electricity were way ahead of his time and continue to influence technology today. Despite his accomplishments, however, Tesla died penniless and without the accolades that would he would ultimately earn over a century later.

The “genius who lit the world” is now commemorated with an electrical unit called the Tesla, has a place in the inventor’s hall of fame, streets, statues, and a prestigious engineer’s award in his name, but in life he wasn’t always so successful.

Brilliant scientist, terrible businessman

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in a town called Smiljan, today part of Croatia but then located within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest and his mother, despite not having any formal education, tinkered in machinery and was known for having a spectacular memory.

Tesla’s career as an inventor began early; while working at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, at the age of just 26, he is reported to have first sketched out the principles for a rotating magnetic field — an important idea still used in many electromechanical devices. This major achievement laid the groundwork for many of his future inventions, including the alternating current motor and ultimately led him to New York City in 1884, lured by Thomas Edison and his groundbreaking engineering factory, Edison Machine Works.

It is often said that as brilliant a scientist as Tesla was, he was an equally terrible businessman, unable (or possibly unwilling) to see the commercial value behind his ideas. Thomas Edison was both an inventor and a business mogul focused on the bottom line, and he often clashed with Tesla over methods and ideology. It was also unlikely, perhaps, that two minds so brilliant could coexist in peace for very long and, indeed, Tesla quit Edison Machine Works only a year later.

Tesla’s creativity was given free rein at the new laboratory he established, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing, where he experimented with early X-ray technology, electrical resonance, arc lamps and other ideas. Moves to Colorado and then back to New York coincided with other great scientific feats, including advances in turbine science, the installation of the first hydroelectric power station at Niagara Falls and, most importantly, the perfection of his alternating current system.

Through it all, the compulsive, eccentric and often sensational Tesla provided terrific sound bites for reporters, speaking frequently to the press about new, futuristic ideas up to a few years before his death, when he became a recluse. Tesla died in 1943, broke and alone in a New York City hotel room.

Tesla’s legacy has experienced a resurgence of sorts in recent years, thanks to a handful of supporters who have popularized his work in the media, in the hopes of having a Nikola Tesla science museum built on the grounds of a former laboratory on Long Island, New York.

Innumerable patents

The exact number of patents held by Tesla is disputed, as some likely remain undiscovered, historians believe. He is thought to be responsible for at least 300 inventions (many related to each other), in addition to countless unpatented ideas that he developed over the course of his career.

Alternating current

Perhaps Tesla’s most famous and important idea, alternating current (AC), was an answer to his old boss Edison’s inefficient — as Tesla put it — use of direct current (DC) in the new electric age. While DC power stations sent electricity flowing in one direction in a straight line, alternating currents change direction quickly, and could do so at a much higher voltage.

Indeed, Edison’s power lines that crisscrossed the Atlantic seaboard were short and weak due to DC, while AC was able to send electricity much farther afield. Though Thomas Edison had more resources and an established reputation, Tesla’s AC power grids eventually became the norm. Several dozen of Tesla’s patents were related to alternating current science.

The Tesla Coil

Since named for its inventor, this impressive machine transforms energy into extremely high voltage charges, creating powerful electrical fields capable of producing spectacular electrical arcs. Besides the lightning-bolt shows they can put on, Tesla Coils had very practical applications in wireless radio technology and some medical devices. Tesla experimented with his coils in the last years of the 19th century.

The true father of radio

Tesla tinkered with radio waves as early as 1892, debuting a radio wave-controlled boat in 1898 with great fanfare at an electrical exhibition at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Expanding on the technology, he patented more than a dozen ideas related to radio communication, before Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi leapt ahead of a financially unstable Tesla and completed the first transatlantic radio transmission (a bit of Morse code, sent from England to Newfoundland) on the back of Tesla’s science. Marconi and Tesla’s battle for intellectual recognition waged for decades before the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately revoked some of Marconi’s patents in 1943, restoring Tesla as the father of radio, at least legally.

Tesla quotes

“Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.” — "A Visit to Nikola Tesla" by Dragislav L. Petković in Politika (April 1927)

“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. He lives and labors and hopes.” — “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” — “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

Further reading:

• Tesla Memorial Society

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

Largest 3D map of our universe could 'turn cosmology upside down'

Avi Wigderson wins $1 million Turing Award for using randomness to change computer science

Are we in a 6th mass extinction?

Most Popular

• 2 No, you didn't see a solar flare during the total eclipse — but you may have seen something just as special
• 3 Total solar eclipse reveals tiny new comet moments before it was destroyed by the sun
• 4 Here are the best photos of the April 8 total solar eclipse over North America
• 5 Underwater mountain range off Easter Island hosts creatures unknown to science, expedition reveals
• 3 Largest 3D map of our universe could 'turn cosmology upside down'
• 4 Eclipse from space: See the moon's shadow race across North America at 1,500 mph in epic satellite footage
• 5 James Webb telescope finds origins of the biggest explosion since the Big Bang — revealing a new cosmological mystery

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in what is now Croatia to Serbian parents Milutin and Djuka Tesla. His father was a priest, an intellectual who prodded his son to develop unusual mental discipline. His mother was an inventor of many time-saving devices used for domestic tasks. Despite his early success at school and obvious interest in experimenting with mechanical devices, Tesla’s father was determined that young Nikola become a minister. Only after Tesla sank into an acute physical decline did his father relent and allow him to continue his scientific education at Graz Polytechnic Institute in Austria.

While still a student, Tesla began to think about the possibilities of alternating current (AC) electricity. AC electricity could generate high voltages for long distances without growing weaker. Tesla became convinced that AC was far more effective and less costly than direct current (DC) electricity, which was more common at the time.

After three years at the Graz Polytechnic Institute, Tesla stopped attending lectures. He left Graz in 1878 and began working as a draughtsman in Maribor. In 1880, Tesla moved to Prague to continue his studies at the Karl-Ferdinand University. Leaving Prague in 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest where Ferenc Puskás hired him to help install an Edison telephone exchange there. The Continental Edison Company sent Tesla to work in Paris and Strasbourg, where his work caught the eye of Charles Batchelor, head of Edison's operations in France, who invited Tesla to work for Edison in the United States. In 1884, he went to New York and immediately took a job with Edison , who recognized Tesla’s abilities but did not want to support his work on arc lighting . In 1886 Tesla founded the Tesla Electric Company, which funded his arc light experiments. More importantly, Tesla returned to his AC experiments and within two years had applied for more than thirty patents on his system.

After agreeing to a contract that turned over AC development and patents to the Westinghouse Corporation , Tesla became a wealthy man. When Westinghouse got into financial difficulties later, Tesla supposedly tore up his contract and refused further royalties for his patents. This decision affected his future work because he had fewer financial resources for laboratory space and equipment. He worked on a number of other inventions, including a transformer that changed low voltage to high voltage with a safe electrical current. This transformer is known as the Tesla coil.

Westinghouse supplied all the lighting for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 using the Tesla system, including the engine, dynamo , and AC generator. Thereafter, AC became the preferred method of generating electricity.

As a result of this and other successes, Tesla became a famous man. He enjoyed high society in New York, lectured internationally, and gave demonstrations of electricity that seemed like displays of magic to the public. His interests ranged beyond pure research on electricity. At an address to the National Electric Light Association, he proposed the principles of wireless broadcasting. Tesla also experimented with vibration, the rapid motion of an object that creates air waves, and with resonance, the effect of air waves on an object. As he grew older he began to rely more on empirical experiments instead of his original method of visual invention, which involved perfecting devices in his head and not building models until he was sure they would actually work. This shift in methodology made an 1895 fire in his research laboratory a major disaster, as he lost his books and notes as well as his equipment. At sites in Colorado and Long Island, he tried to develop worldwide communications and power transmission systems, but problems with money and physics led to failure.

Along with Edison , Tesla was popularized by the press as an electrical wizard. Images of the inventor sitting calmly beneath dazzling displays of electricity became common sights. Tesla remained active and continued to work on new ideas. In 1916, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) recognized Tesla's contributions and awarded him the Edison Medal for "meritorious achievement in his early original work in polyphase and high-frequency electrical currents."

Financial difficulties continued to plague him, however, especially once his early patents expired. Increasingly reclusive and eccentric, Tesla lived alone in a room in the New Yorker Hotel until he died in 1943. The unit of magnetic flux density was named in his honor in 1960.

Image Gallery

Photo credit: Richard Warren Lipack / Wikimedia Commons. Interior of main hall of Electrical Building at 1893 Columbian Exposition at Chicago, Illinois using Tesla designed Polyphase A.C. alternating current electrical system introduced by the Westinghouse Corporstion. The Tesla A.C. system soon became the preferred method of generating electricity worldwide.

Photo credit: Richard Warren Lipack / Wikimedia Commons. Detail of primary electric lighting display of two supplied for 1893 Chicago World’s Fair / Columbian Exposition by Westinghouse Corporation.

Photo credit: Richard Warren Lipack / Wikimedia Commons. Westinghouse Corporation Tesla based Polyphase A.C. electrical system lighting display shown in foreground dominating Edison-Thomson General Electric Company D.C. / direct current based electric lighting display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair / Columbian Exposition.

Tesla Corner, NYC

Tesla Induction Motor

Business card, circa 1916

Further Reading

Papers of Nikola Tesla

• Biographies
• Power generation

The fascinating life of Nikola Tesla, the genius who electrified the world and dreamed up death rays

July 10 is the birthday of Nikola Tesla, who would have been 161 years old today.

It's a good time to celebrate the life of the Serbian-American engineer and physicist: Without Tesla, you might not be able to affordably power your home, let alone read this sentence.

Tesla filed more than 300 patents during his 86 years of life, and his inventions helped pave the way for alternating current (AC), electric motors, radios, fluorescent lights, lasers, and remote controls, among many other things.

Some of his ideas later in life, however, seem strange even now. He once described plans for a death ray, for example, and alluded to another idea for an impenetrable "wall of force" to block and destroy foreign invasions.

Here's a glimpse into the remarkable life of one of history's most important — and eccentric — geniuses.

Tanya Lewis wrote a previous version of this story.

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan in the Austo-Hungarian Empire (modern-day Croatia).

His father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother, Djuka Mandic, was an inventor of household appliances.

Source: Tesla Society

In college, Tesla was initially interested in studying physics and mathematics, but soon became fascinated by electricity.

He attended the Realschule, Karlstadt in 1873, the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria and the University of Prague. He took a job as an electrical engineer at a telephone company in Budapest in 1881.

He developed the concept of an induction motor while walking in a park with a friend.

Later, while he was in Strasbourg, France in 1883, he built a prototype of the induction motor (an AC motor powered by electromagnetic induction) and tested it successfully. Since he couldn't get anyone in Europe interested in it, Tesla came to the United States to work for Thomas Edison in New York.

Tesla's childhood dream was to harness the power of Niagara Falls.

In 1895, he designed the first hydroelectric power plant in the Falls, a major victory for alternating current. A statue was later erected on Goat Island in Tesla's honor.

For all his brilliance, Tesla was pretty eccentric. At one point, he stopped eating solid foods.

He ate honey, drank bowls of warm milk, and made a potion from vegetables like artichokes and celery.

Source: " The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla - Biography of a Genius "

He claimed he never slept for more than two hours at a time.

However, Tesla did admit to dozing off sometimes to "recharge his batteries." According to one report, he once worked for 84 hours without sleeping.

Source: " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla "

In 1882, Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field, a principle of physics that forms the basis for nearly all devices that use AC power.

He used this principle to construct the AC induction motor and polyphase system for the generation, transmission, distribution and use of electric power.

While Tesla was working in Thomas Edison’s lab in New Jersey, the two fought a 'war' with over the best form of electrical current.

Edison favored direct current or DC (which flows in one direction), while Tesla favored alternating current or AC (which changes direction periodically). This led to the "war of the currents," which Tesla eventually won because of AC's greater efficiency. 

Tesla also worked closely with industrialist and inventor George Westinghouse, and their partnership helped establish electricity across America.

Tesla wrote a classic paper called "A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers," in 1888, in which he introduced the concept of his motors and electrical systems. The work caught Westinghouse's attention, and they ended up partnering to work on bringing electricity to the rest of the country.

Tesla's AC-driven system  remains the world standard for delivering electricity today.

He also invented the Tesla coil, a device that is widely used today in radios, TV sets, and other electronics.

In 1891, Tesla developed an induction coil that produced high-frequency alternating currents, now known as the Tesla coil. He used it in experiments to produce electric lighting, X-rays, and wireless power, and it became the basis of radio and TV. Today, the coils are mostly used in educational displays and entertainment.

Source: PBS.org

Tesla patented the basic system of radio in 1896.

The invention of radio is often credited to  Guglielmo Marconi, who made the first transatlantic radio transmission in 1901. But Tesla developed patents for the basic elements of a radio transmitter that were later used by Marconi — a point that led the two into a court battle.

Source: Earlyradiohistory.us

Tesla also dreamed up two concepts that remained purely theoretical: the 'death ray' and an 'impenetrable wall of force' that'd ward off foreign invasions.

T he FBI kept a dossier on Tesla throughout his life in the US, but kept it classified until 2011, when the bureau publicly released  250 pages .  

In 1943, when Tesla died, electrical engineer and military technology researcher  John G. Trump  — who an  April 2016 New Yorker article  dubbed President Trump's "nuclear" uncle  — examined Tesla's effects for the FBI and reported his findings.

John Trump reportedly told the Bureau: "Tesla's 'thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character,' but 'did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.'"

Source: Business Insider

Through his life, Tesla never married, but he once claimed to love a pigeon.

Tesla used to take walks to the park to feed the pigeons. He developed an unusual relationship with a white pigeon that used to visit him every day.

" I loved that pigeon as a man loves a women, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life," Tesla reportedly said.

Source: Tesla Society  and Tesla Universe

• Main content

The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla and His Tower

The inventor’s vision of a global wireless-transmission tower proved to be his undoing

Gilbert King

By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. His inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination.

Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison , who once hired him. “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack,” Tesla once wrote, “he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.”

But what his contemporaries may have been lacking in scientific talent (by Tesla’s estimation), men like Edison and George Westinghouse clearly possessed the one trait that Tesla did not—a mind for business. And in the last days of America’s Gilded Age, Nikola Tesla made a dramatic attempt to change the future of communications and power transmission around the world. He managed to convince J.P. Morgan that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, and the financier gave Tesla more than $150,000 to fund what would become a gigantic, futuristic and startling tower in the middle of Long Island, New York. In 1898, as Tesla’s plans to create a worldwide wireless transmission system became known, Wardenclyffe Tower would be Tesla’s last chance to claim the recognition and wealth that had always escaped him.

Nikola Tesla was born in modern-day Croatia in 1856; his father, Milutin, was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church. From an early age, he demonstrated the obsessiveness that would puzzle and amuse those around him. He could memorize entire books and store logarithmic tables in his brain. He picked up languages easily, and he could work through days and nights on only a few hours sleep.

At the age of 19, he was studying electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute at Graz in Austria, where he quickly established himself as a star student. He found himself in an ongoing debate with a professor over perceived design flaws in the direct-current (DC) motors that were being demonstrated in class. “In attacking the problem again I almost regretted that the struggle was soon to end,” Tesla later wrote. “I had so much energy to spare. When I undertook the task it was not with a resolve such as men often make. With me it was a sacred vow, a question of life and death. I knew that I would perish if I failed. Now I felt that the battle was won. Back in the deep recesses of the brain was the solution, but I could not yet give it outward expression.”

He would spend the next six years of his life “thinking” about electromagnetic fields and a hypothetical motor powered by alternate-current that would and should work. The thoughts obsessed him, and he was unable to focus on his schoolwork. Professors at the university warned Tesla’s father that the young scholar’s working and sleeping habits were killing him. But rather than finish his studies, Tesla became a gambling addict, lost all his tuition money, dropped out of school and suffered a nervous breakdown. It would not be his last.

In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest, after recovering from his breakdown, and he was walking through a park with a friend, reciting poetry, when a vision came to him. There in the park, with a stick, Tesla drew a crude diagram in the dirt—a motor using the principle of rotating magnetic fields created by two or more alternating currents. While AC electrification had been employed before, there would never be a practical, working motor run on alternating current until he invented his induction motor several years later.

In June 1884, Tesla sailed for New York City and arrived with four cents in his pocket and a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor—a former employer—to Thomas Edison, which was purported to say, “My Dear Edison: I know two great men and you are one of them. The other is this young man!”

A meeting was arranged, and once Tesla described the engineering work he was doing, Edison, though skeptical, hired him. According to Tesla, Edison offered him $50,000 if he could improve upon the DC generation plants Edison favored. Within a few months, Tesla informed the American inventor that he had indeed improved upon Edison’s motors. Edison, Tesla noted, refused to pay up. “When you become a full-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke,” Edison told him.

Tesla promptly quit and took a job digging ditches. But it wasn’t long before word got out that Tesla’s AC motor was worth investing in, and the Western Union Company put Tesla to work in a lab not far from Edison’s office, where he designed AC power systems that are still used around the world. “The motors I built there,” Tesla said, “were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision, and the operation was always as I expected.”

Tesla patented his AC motors and power systems, which were said to be the most valuable inventions since the telephone. Soon, George Westinghouse, recognizing that Tesla’s designs might be just what he needed in his efforts to unseat Edison’s DC current, licensed his patents for $60,000 in stocks and cash and royalties based on how much electricity Westinghouse could sell. Ultimately, he won the “War of the Currents,” but at a steep cost in litigation and competition for both Westinghouse and Edison’s General Electric Company.

Wardenclyffe Tower. Photo: Wikipedia

Fearing ruin, Westinghouse begged Tesla for relief from the royalties Westinghouse agreed to. “Your decision determines the fate of the Westinghouse Company,” he said. Tesla, grateful to the man who had never tried to swindle him, tore up the royalty contract, walking away from millions in royalties that he was already owed and billions that would have accrued in the future. He would have been one of the wealthiest men in the world—a titan of the Gilded Age.

His work with electricity reflected just one facet of his fertile mind. Before the turn of the 20th century, Tesla had invented a powerful coil that was capable of generating high voltages and frequencies, leading to new forms of light, such as neon and fluorescent, as well as X-rays. Tesla also discovered that these coils, soon to be called “Tesla Coils,” made it possible to send and receive radio signals. He quickly filed for American patents in 1897, beating the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi to the punch.

Tesla continued to work on his ideas for wireless transmissions when he proposed to J.P. Morgan his idea of a wireless globe. After Morgan put up the $150,000 to build the giant transmission tower, Tesla promptly hired the noted architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead, and White in New York. White, too, was smitten with Tesla’s idea. After all, Tesla was the highly acclaimed man behind Westinghouse’s success with alternating current, and when Tesla talked, he was persuasive.

“As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere,” Tesla said at the time. “He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind.”

White quickly got to work designing Wardenclyffe Tower in 1901, but soon after construction began it became apparent that Tesla was going to run out of money before it was finished. An appeal to Morgan for more money proved fruitless, and in the meantime investors were rushing to throw their money behind Marconi. In December 1901, Marconi successfully sent a signal from England to Newfoundland. Tesla grumbled that the Italian was using 17 of his patents, but litigation eventually favored Marconi and the commercial damage was done. (The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld Tesla’s claims, clarifying Tesla’s role in the invention of the radio—but not until 1943, after he died.) Thus the Italian inventor was credited as the inventor of radio and became rich. Wardenclyffe Tower became a 186-foot-tall relic (it would be razed in 1917), and the defeat—Tesla’s worst—led to another of his breakdowns. ”It is not a dream,” Tesla said, “it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive—blind, faint-hearted, doubting world!”

Guglielmo Marconi in 1903. Photo: Library of Congress

By 1912, Tesla began to withdraw from that doubting world. He was clearly showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was potentially a high-functioning autistic. He became obsessed with cleanliness and fixated on the number three; he began shaking hands with people and washing his hands—all done in sets of three. He had to have 18 napkins on his table during meals, and would count his steps whenever he walked anywhere. He claimed to have an abnormal sensitivity to sounds, as well as an acute sense of sight, and he later wrote that he had “a violent aversion against the earrings of women,” and “the sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit.”

Near the end of his life, Tesla became fixated on pigeons, especially a specific white female, which he claimed to love almost as one would love a human being. One night, Tesla claimed the white pigeon visited him through an open window at his hotel, and he believed the bird had come to tell him she was dying. He saw “two powerful beans of light” in the bird’s eyes, he later said. “Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.” The pigeon died in his arms, and the inventor claimed that in that moment, he knew that he had finished his life’s work.

Nikola Tesla would go on to make news from time to time while living on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel. In 1931 he made the cover of Time magazine, which featured his inventions on his 75th birthday. And in 1934, the New York Times reported that Tesla was working on a “Death Beam” capable of knocking 10,000 enemy airplanes out of the sky. He hoped to fund a prototypical defensive weapon in the interest of world peace, but his appeals to J.P. Morgan Jr. and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went nowhere. Tesla did, however, receive a $25,000 check from the Soviet Union, but the project languished. He died in 1943, in debt, although Westinghouse had been paying his room and board at the hotel for years.

Books: Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla , Hart Brothers, Pub., 1982. Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time , Touchstone, 1981.

Articles: “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy With Special References to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy,” by Nikola Tesla, Century Magazine , June, 1900. “Reflections on the Mind of Nikola Tesla,” by R. (Chandra) Chandrasekhar, Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems, School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, Augst 27, 2006, http://www.ee.uwa.edu.au/~chandra/Downloads/Tesla/MindOfTesla.html”Tesla: Live and Legacy, Tower of Dreams,” PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_todre.html. ”The Cult of Nikola Tesla,” by Brian Dunning, Skeptoid #345, January 15, 2003. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4345. “Nikola Tesla, History of Technology, The Famous Inventors Worldwide,” by David S. Zondy, Worldwide Independent Inventors Association, http://www.worldwideinvention.com/articles/details/474/Nikola-Tesla-History-of-Technology-The-famous-Inventors-Worldwide.html. “The Future of Wireless Art by Nikola Tesla,” Wireless Telegraphy & Telephony , by Walter W. Massid & Charles R. Underhill, 1908. http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1908-00-00.htm

Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Click to visit our Privacy Statement .

Gilbert King | | READ MORE

Gilbert King is a contributing writer in history for Smithsonian.com. His book Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013.

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was a well-known Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, and mechanical engineer who was awarded about 300 patents for his inventions. He was born in Smiljan, Croatia on July 10, 1856. Tesla’s mother, Duka, was an early inspiration to him as she invented small household appliances during his childhood. Tesla clearly inherited his mother’s inventive spirit, as he went on to develop some of the most important inventions in history, such as alternating current (AC) electricity and the Tesla Coil. 

Growing up, Tesla studied in various places in Europe including Germany, Austria, and Prague. In the late 1870s, he had the opportunity to go to Budapest where he worked at the Telephone Exchange. While in Budapest he made improvements to some inventions and came up with his idea for the induction motor, which produced an alternating current system and used electromagnetic induction from the magnetic field, instead of electrical connections to the rotor. He later tried to gain attention for his proposed invention but didn’t gain any recognition. At age 28, in 1884, he decided to move to the U.S. where there were more opportunities. While in the U.S. Tesla met Thomas Edison and worked alongside him for a couple of months. When Edison refused to pay Tesla for his work, Tesla decided to leave and pursue his own journey as an inventor. 

In 1887, Tesla received funding to start a company from American entrepreneur George Westinghouse. Tesla was able to finalize his induction motor to compete against Edison’s direct current system. Tesla’s motor was certainly an asset during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century as it was found to be more durable, cheaper, and more efficient than his competitors. Tesla licensed his invention to the Westinghouse Company in 1888. In 1893, Tesla achieved a milestone at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This exposition was the turning point for public acceptance of alternating current as it dispelled the public’s doubts about the safety and reliability of alternating current. . The exposition demonstrated that alternating current could run smoothly and it later became the main standard for power systems.  

In 1895, Tesla’s lab burned down in New York, which destroyed most of his work including notes, designs, patents and inventions. After the trauma of losing everything, Tesla moved to Colorado Springs. During this time, Tesla thought of the idea of a world-wireless-network for communication. He was able to network with J.P. Morgan, a wealthy financier, and together they set up a laboratory back in Long Island, New York. 

In 1901 another famous inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, transmitted Morse code from England to Canada, but Tesla believed that Marconi stole some of his world-wireless-network ideas. The following year, Tesla proposed a different angle of communication and came up with the “World Telegraphy System,” in which he envisioned transmitting stations would collect and broadcast news stories through individual receivers. However, this early idea of radio was shut down and Tesla lost the funding from J.P. Morgan that supported his lab because his idea didn’t seem feasible. Investors started to favor Marconi because of his previous success and began funding him instead. 

Tesla’s last living years were spent in poverty until he died on January 7, 1943. Six months after his death, the United States Supreme Court awarded the patent of radio back to Tesla. The reason for why the U.S. revoked Tesla’s patent for radio in the first place is debated, but many assume it is because of Marconi’s robust financial backing. .  Although the last of Tesla’s years were tragic, he is remembered as an accomplished inventor who made significant advancements in the world of communication, electricity, and manufacturing. 

Don't Miss Our Next Newsletter!

222 Third Street, Suite 0300 Cambridge, MA 02142 [email protected]  » 617-253-3352

Encyclopedia of Humanities

The most comprehensive and reliable Encyclopedia of Humanities

Nikola Tesla

We explore Nikola Tesla, his life and major contributions. In addition, we discuss his main characteristics, awards, and more.

Who was Nikola Tesla?

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-born engineer, scientist, and inventor , noted for his numerous contributions to the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He is regarded as a pioneering genius in numerous technology fields including electromechanical engineering, robotics, radar, computer science, ballistics, theoretical physics, and nuclear physics.

Tesla’s patents and his rigorous theoretical work laid the foundation for a great number of modern technological systems such as the alternating current polyphase system and the alternating current motor, key to the advent of the Industrial Revolution .

In recent times, Tesla's eccentric character and the story of his famous demonstration of radio communication have established him as a figure in popular culture, often at the center of conspiracy theories that attribute totally fallacious discoveries and research to him.

• See also: René Descartes

Biography of Nikola Tesla

Tesla was born in the Serbian village of Smiljan , in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, present-day Croatia. His parents were Milutin Tesla, a Christian Orthodox Church priest, and Duka Mandici, a housewife and self-taught scientist who developed home craft tools in her spare time.

The family moved to the town of Gospić in 1862 , where young Nikola began his education, completing it ahead of schedule thanks to his remarkable photographic memory.

During his childhood, he suffered from a strange disease that caused visual flashes and hallucinations , often triggered by ideas or as a solution to problems that had been posed to him.

In 1880, while in Budapest, he worked as chief electrician in a telegraph company, where he met a young Serbian inventor named Nebojša Petrović with whom he embarked on his early projects. He then traveled to Paris, joining one of Thomas Edison's companies, and later to New York, where he worked with the American genius himself.

Subsequent years of Nikola Tesla

In 1886, Tesla founded Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing . However, investors' disagreement over the development of an alternating current motor led to his expulsion from his own company.

Undeterred, in the following years he developed the greatest inventions of his life, working with George Westinghouse at the latter's company.

In 1891, Tesla became a naturalized United States citizen and set up his laboratory in New York City . A year later, he was granted his first patents, and was elected vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE). This was the first of many laboratories and projects he would lead in the United States.

Personality of Nikola Tesla

Raised in the Orthodox Christian faith , Tesla held throughout his life true respect and an inclination towards other religions like Buddhism and Catholicism. His notes reflect an interest in finding common ground between science and religion, as well as a certain fascination to understand the unknown.

Tesla reportedly never drew plans of any kind, relying entirely on his memory instead . This played against him in his fight over patents for the invention of the radio, disputed with Guglielmo Marconi. Numerous other patents were taken away from him, since Tesla felt a deep contempt for legal and business matters.

He may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which would account for his complete devotion to his projects, often to the extent of forgoing sleep when he felt most inspired. He is not known to have engaged in any relationship.

Major contributions of Nikola Tesla

Tesla's major contributions are associated with the following fields:

• Electromagnetism . Tesla's major work concerned the transmission of electrical power, the alternating current energy supply system, and wireless power transmission. He made pioneering achievements in the construction of alternating current motors, experiments with high-voltage, and electric field measurements.
• Radiation . He experimented with X-rays or Roentgen rays, but lost his notes on the subject in an 1895 laboratory fire. He later studied radio waves, and even designed devices to "listen" to space, with which he claimed to have detected signals of extraterrestrial origin.
• Physics of gases . The liquefaction of air was one of Tesla's objectives, as he knew from Lord Kelvin's experiments that this process could be used to absorb energy for cooling purposes.

Inventions and discoveries of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla is officially credited with the following inventions:

• Wireless transmission of electrical energy, using electromagnetic waves.
• Alternating current.
• Directed energy weapons (an electricity-based "death ray" that was discarded by the United States government as too costly)
• The theoretical principles of radar.
• Spark plugs for electrical ignition engines.
• Direction finding.
• The "Tesla Coil", a resonant transformer.
• The remote control.
• The polyphase induction motor.
• The "Teslascope", an extraplanetary wave receiver.

Relationship with Thomas Edison

Tesla's relationship with Thomas Edison was fraught with tension. They worked together upon Tesla's arrival in the United States in 1884 , when he was charged with redesigning Edison's direct current generators for a promised $50,000 (equivalent to about $1.1 million today).

However, when the work was completed, Edison refused to pay Tesl a, on the grounds that the latter "did not understand American humor".

Tesla resigned shortly afterwards from Edison's company , and thus began a rivalry between the two scientists. The dispute became known as the "war of the currents", as Edison was a proponent of direct current while Tesla championed the superiority of alternating current.

Unknown inventions by Nikola Tesla

Tesla is credited with numerous secret or unknown inventions that were found in his laboratory after his death and confiscated by the United States government.

These include eccentric machines such as a UFO , and devices to extract electrical energy out of nothing, among other inventions. The first hydroelectric power plant is erroneously ascribed to him.

Nikola Tesla in popular culture

Tesla and his so peculiar life have been the subject of artistic portrayals in movies including The Secret of Nikola Tesla (1980), Tesla (1993, TV) , Tesla: Master of Lightning (2000), The Visionary (2005), Tesla's Engine (2015), and Tesla (2015). In addition, a documentary about his life, entitled "Tesla," was released in 2014.

Awards and recognition of Nikola Tesla

The only award Tesla received during his lifetime was, ironically, the Edison Medal, the highest distinction of the IEEE . Edison's intrigues and the injustice over the contested radio patent with Marconi twice deprived him of a Nobel Prize nomination in Physics.

Nevertheless, Tesla's name has been honored by the International System of Units that measures magnetic flux density (tesla), a lunar crater has been named after him, as well as a minor planet (2244 Tesla). In addition, the most prestigious award for the popularization of science in the Spanish-speaking world bears his name.

Death of Nikola Tesla

Tesla died in the United States, at the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel, on January 7, 1943.

Explore next:

• Thales of Miletus
• Alexander the Great

Was this information useful to you?

Updates? Omissions? Article suggestions? Send us your comments and suggestions

Thank you for visiting us :)

• Engineering & Transportation
• Engineering

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: $17.99 $17.99 FREE delivery: Monday, April 22 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon. Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select the return method

Buy used: $16.19

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a service we offer sellers that lets them store their products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and we directly pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. Something we hope you'll especially enjoy: FBA items qualify for FREE Shipping and Amazon Prime.

If you're a seller, Fulfillment by Amazon can help you grow your business. Learn more about the program.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla: Biography of a Genius Paperback – August 30, 2016

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 576 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Citadel
• Publication date August 30, 2016
• Dimensions 5.94 x 1.18 x 8.93 inches
• ISBN-10 0806539968
• ISBN-13 978-0806539966
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., the life and times of nikola tesla biography of a genius, kensington publishing corp..

Hardly is there a nation which has met with a sadder fate than the Servians. From the height of its splendor, when the empire embraced almost the entire northern part of the Balkan peninsula and a large portion of what is now Austria, the Servian nation was plunged into abject slavery, after the fateful battle of 1389 at the Kosovo Polje, against the overwhelming Asian hordes. Europe can never repay the great debt it owes to the Servians for checking, by the sacrifice of its own liberty, that barbarian influx.

Nikola Tesla

It was during a crackling summer storm in Smiljan, a small hamlet at the back edge of a plateau set high in the mountains, when Nikola Tesla was born. The Serbian family resided in the province of Lika, a plateau and gentle river valley in Croatia where wild boar and deer still dwell and farmers still travel on ox-drawn wagons. Only a cart ride from the Adriatic, the land is well protected from invasion by sea, by the Velebit ridge to the west, which runs the length of the province and towers over the coastline as a steep cliff, and by the Dinaric Alps to the east, a chain of mountains that emerge from Austria, span the Balkan peninsula and culminate in the south as the isle of Crete.

Though hidden, Smiljan was centrally located, fifteen miles east of the tiny seaport of Karlobag, six miles west of the bustling town of Gospic and forty-five miles southwest of the cascading wonder known as Plitvice Lakes, an interlinking chasm of caves and streams and magnificent waterfalls that lie at the base of the Dinaric chain.

In the early 1800s, having been briefly part of Napoleon's Illyrian provinces, Croatia was now a domain of Austria-Hungary. With its neighboring Slavic countries of Bosnia, Hercegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, Croatia was sandwiched between the ruling Hapsburg dynasty to the north and the Ottoman Empire to the south.

In ancient times, and for many centuries, much of the coastline along the Adriatic was ruled by the Illyrians, a piratical tribe believed to have descended from regions around Austria. Successfully protecting their borders from such rulers as Alexander the Great, many Illyrians rose into social prominence; some, at the time of Christ, became emperors.

Slavs, traveling in close-knit clans known as zadrugas, were first recognized by the Byzantines in the second century A.D. in the areas around what is now Belgrade. Tesla's appearance resembled the characteristic features of the Ghegs, a tribe described as being tall and having convex-shaped noses and flat skulls. Like other Slavs, these people were originally pagans and worshiped nature spirits and a god of thunder and lightning. Tesla's early ancestors were probably born in the Ukraine. They most likely traveled down through Romania into Serbia and lived near Belgrade, along the Danube. After the Battle of Kosovo in the latter part of the fourteenth century, they crossed the Kosovo plains into Montenegro and continued their migration northward into Croatia in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

All Slavs speak the same language. The major distinction between Croats and Serbs stems from the differences in the histories of their respective countries. The Croats adopted the pope as their spiritual leader and followed the Roman form of Catholicism; the Serbs adopted a Byzantine patriarch and the Greek Orthodox view. Whereas Roman priests remain celibate, Greek Orthodox priests may marry.

In the east and central regions Slavs were more successful in maintaining their own control over what came to be called the kingdom of Serbia; whereas in the west, in Croatia, outside rulers, such as Charlemagne in A.D. 800, occupied the region. While Croatia maintained the Christianization policies of the Franks, the Serbs and Bulgarians drove out the papacy and revived their own pagan faith, which included animal sacrifice and pantheism. Many of the ancient pagan gods were made saints and were celebrated in higher esteem than Jesus. Tesla's patron saint Nicholas was a fourth-century god who protected sailors.

To further alienate the two groups, although speaking the same verbal language, Croats adopted the Latin alphabet, whereas Serbs and Bulgarians took on the Cyrillic alphabet used by the Greek Orthodox church.

Before Turkish rule, from the ninth century until the 1300s, Serbia had maintained autonomy. For Serbia, this period was its golden age, as the Byzantines accepted its autonomous status. Due to the philanthropic nature of its kings, a dynamic medieval art flourished, and great monasteries were erected.

Croatia, on the other hand, was in much more turmoil. Influenced by western Europe, the ruling class attempted unsuccessfully to institute a feudal system of lords and serfs. This policy directly opposed the inherent structure of the democratic zadrugas, and so Croatia was never able to establish a unified identity. Nevertheless, one independent offshoot of Croatia, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), which had established itself as a port of commerce and a rival of Venice as a major sea power, became a melting pot for south Slavic culture and a symbol for the Illyrian ideal of a unified Yugoslavia.

The identity of Serbia as a nation, however, changed for all time on June 15, 1389, the day 30,000 Turks obliterated the Serbian nation in the Battle of Kosovo. Cruel conquerors, the Turks destroyed Serbian churches or converted them to mosques. Drafting the healthiest male children into their armies, they skewered and tortured the men and forced the women to convert and marry Turks. Many Serbs fled, taking up residence in the craggy mountains of Montenegro or the hidden valleys of Croatia. Some of those that remained became wealthy as Turkish vassals; others, mostly of mixed blood, became pariahs.

The Battle of Kosovo is as important to the Serbs as the Exodus to the Jews or the Crucifixion to the Christians. It is commemorated every year on the anniversary of the tragedy as Vidov Dan, the day "when we shall see." As one Serb told the author, "It follows us always." The massacre and ensuing defilement of the kingdom became the dominant motif of the great epic poems which served to unify the identity of the Serbian people through their centuries of hardship.

Unlike the Croats, who did not have this kind of all-embracing exigency, the Serbs had Kosovo. Combined with their adherence to the Greek Orthodox religion in a twofold way, Serbs, no matter where they lived, felt united.

The century of Tesla's birth was marked by the rise of Napoleon. In 1809 the emperor wrested Croatia from Austro-Hungarian rule and established French occupation. Extending his domain down the Adriatic coast, Napoleon reunited the Illyrian provinces and introduced French libertarian ideals. This philosophy helped dismantle the outmoded feudal system of lords and serfs and reawaken the idea of a unified Balkan nation. At the same time, the occupation created an identity with the French culture. Tesla's paternal grandfather and maternal great- grandfather both served under the French emperor.

With support from the Russians, Serbian bands united in 1804 under the leadership of the flamboyant hog farmer George Petrovich, known as Kara-George (in Turkish, Black George), a man of Montenegrin heritage trained in the Austrian army. However, in 1811, Napoleon invaded Russia; thus, support for Serbia evaporated.

Forty thousand Turks marched against the Serbs, leveling towns and butchering citizens. Serbs were often executed by impalement, their writhing bodies lined up along the roads to the city. All males captured above the age of fifteen were slaughtered, and women and children were sold as slaves. Kara-George fled the country.

Milosh, the new Serbian leader, was a sly and treacherous character, able to walk a thin line between Serbs and the sultan. In 1817, when Kara-George returned, he was decapitated, his head sent by Milosh to Istanbul. A tyrant as terrible as any Turkish pasha, Milosh became the official head of Serbia in 1830.

One of the more sapient figures of the day was the scholar and Serb Vuk Karadjich (1787-1864). Schooled in Vienna and St. Petersburg, Vuk believed "all Yugoslavs were one."

Pleading with Milosh to build schools and to form a constitution, Vuk created, with a student, a Serbo-Croatian dictionary that combined the two written languages. He published the epic folk ballads, which gained the attention of Goethe, and through this means the Serbian plight and also its unique literature were translated and spread to the western world.

In Croatia, the land of Tesla's birth, Emperor Ferdinand of Austria, in 1843, issued a proclamation forbidding any discussion about Illyrianism, thereby helping keep the Serbs and Croats a separate people. In 1867 the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy was created, and Croatia became a semiautonomous province of the new empire. Simultaneously, in Serbia, Michael Obrenovich was finally able to "secure the departure ... of the Turkish garrisons from Belgrade" and convert the state into a constitutional monarchy.

Tesla's background was thus a mixture of crossed influences, a monastic environment, a Byzantine legacy of a once great culture, and incessant battles against barbarous invaders. As a Serb growing up in Croatia, Tesla inherited a rich mix of tribal rituals, egalitarian rule, a modified form of Greek Orthodox Catholicism, pantheistic beliefs, and myriad superstitions. Women cloaked their bodies in black garb, and men packed a cross in one pocket and a weapon in another. Living at the edge of civilization, Serbs saw themselves as protectors of Europe from the Asian hordes. They bore that responsibility with their blood for many centuries.

CHILDHOOD (1856-74)

I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous sight on my childish imagination. Day after day I asked myself what is electricity and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.

NIKOLA TESLA

Nikola Tesla descended from a well established frontier zadruga whose original family name had been Draganic. By the mid-1700s the clan had migrated to Croatia, and the Tesla name arose. It was "a trade name like Smith ... or Carpenter," which described a woodworking ax that had a "broad cutting blade at right angles to the handle." Supposedly, the Teslas gained the name because their teeth resembled this instrument.

The inventor's grandfather, also named Nikola Tesla, was born about 1789 and became a sergeant in Napoleon's Illyrian army during the years 1809-13. Like other Serbs living in Croatia, Nikola Tesla, the elder, was honored by fighting for an emperor who sought to unify the Balkan states and overthrow the oppressive regime of the Austro-Hungarians. He "came from a region known as the military frontier which stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the plains of the Danube including ... the province of Lika [where the inventor was born]. This so-called 'corpus separatum' in the Hapsburg monarchy had its own military administration different from the rest of the country, and therefore [they were] not subjects of the feudal lords." Mostly Serbs, these people were warriors whose responsibility was to protect the territory from the Turks. And in return, unlike the Croats, Serbs were able to own their own land.

Shortly after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Nikola Tesla married Ana Kalinic, the daughter of a prominent officer. After the collapse of Illyria, the grandfather moved to Gospic, where he and his wife could raise a family in a civilized environment.

On February 3, 1819, Milutin Tesla, the inventor's father, was born. One of five children, Milutin was educated in a German elementary school, the only one available in Gospic. Like his brother Josip, Milutin tried to follow in his father's footsteps. In his late teens he enrolled in an Austro-Hungarian military academy but rebelled against the trivialities of regimented life. He was hypersensitive and dropped out after an officer criticized him for not keeping his brass buttons polished.

Whereas Josip became an officer and later a professor of mathematics, first in Gospic and then at a military academy in Austria, Milutin became politically active, wrote poetry, and entered the priesthood. Influenced by the philosopher Vuk Karadjich, Milutin promulgated the "Yugoslav idea" in editorials published in the local newspapers under the nom de plume Srbin Pravicich, "Man of Justice." Tesla wrote that his father's "style of writing was much admired ... pen[ning] sentences ... full of wit and satire." He called for social equality among peoples, the need for compulsory education for children, and the creation of Serbian schools in Croatia.

Through these articles, Milutin attracted the attention of the intellectual elite. In 1847 he married Djouka Mandic, a daughter from one of the more prominent Serbian families.

Djouka's maternal grandfather was Toma Budisavljevic (1777-1840), a regal, white-bearded priest who was decorated with the French Medal of Honor by Napoleon himself in 1811 for providing leadership during the French occupation of Croatia. Soka Budisavljevic, one of Toma's seven children, followed the family tradition by marrying a Serbian minister, Nikola Mandic, who himself came from a distinguished clerical and military family. Their daughter, Djouka, who was born in 1821, was Tesla's mother.

Eldest daughter of eight children, Djouka's duties increased rapidly, for her mother was stricken with failing eyesight and eventually became blind.

"My mother ... was a truly great woman of rare skill and courage," Tesla wrote. Probably due to the magnitude of her responsibilities, which included, at age sixteen, preparing for burial the bodies of an entire family stricken with cholera, Djouka never learned to read. Instead, she memorized the great epic Serbian poems and also long passages of the Bible.

Tesla could trace his lineage to a segment of the "educated aristocracy" of the Serbian community. On both sides of the family and for generations there could be found clerical and military leaders, many of whom achieved multiple doctorates. One of Djouka's brothers, Pajo Mandic, was a field marshal in the imperial Austro-Hungarian army. Another Mandic ran an Austrian military academy.

Petar Mandic, a third brother and later favorite uncle of Nikola's, met with tragedy as a young man when his wife passed away. In 1850, Petar entered the Gomirje Monastery, where he rose in the clerical hierarchy to become the regional bishop of Bosnia.

In 1848, through the help of the Mandic name, Milutin Tesla obtained a parish at Senj, a northern coastal fortress located just seventy-five miles from the Italian port of Trieste. From the stone church, situated high on austere cliffs, Milutin and his new bride could overlook the blue-green Adriatic Sea and the mountainous islands of Krk, Cres, and Rab.

For eight years the Teslas lived in Senj, where they sired their first three children: Dane (pronounced Dah-nay), born in 1849, the first son, and two daughters, Angelina, born the following year, who would later become the grandmother to the current honorary head of the Tesla Memorial Society, William Terbo, and Milka, who followed two years later. As with her other two sisters and like her mother, Milka would eventually marry a Serbian Orthodox priest.

Djouka was proud of her son, Dane, who used to sit with the fishermen on the shore and bring back stories of great adventure. Like his younger brother, who was yet to be born, Dane was endowed with extraordinary powers of eidetic imagery.

Due to a profound sermon on the subject of "labor," as a result of which Milutin was awarded a special red sash by the archbishop, the minister was promoted to a congregation of forty homes in the pastoral farming village of Smiljan, situated only six miles from Gospic. Milutin was returning home, where his father still lived. In 1855, the young minister, his pregnant wife, and his three children packed their oxcart and made the fifty-mile journey over the Velebit ridge through the Lika valley to their new dwelling.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Citadel; Reprint edition (August 30, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0806539968
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0806539966
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.94 x 1.18 x 8.93 inches
• #4 in Physics of Electricity
• #8 in History of Technology
• #71 in Scientist Biographies

Videos for this product

Click to play video

Author Marc J. Seifer describes a segment from Wizard.

Marc Seifer

Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla | A True Genius!

✅ Jay Rule Productions 🎬

About the author

Marc j. seifer.

Marc J. Seifer, PhD has been a handwriting expert for more than 35 years and was editor-in-chief of The Journal of the American Society of Professional Graphologists for more than a decade. He has worked for the Rhode Island Attorney General's Office and Crime Laboratory, the Department of Defense, Undersea Warfare, United Parcel Service, and numerous banks, insurance agencies, and lawyers. He was featured on the History Channel discussing the Howard Hughes Mormon Will and on Associated Press International TV on the handwriting of bin Laden and on PBS American Experience discussing Nikola Tesla. He has lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Brandeis, Cranbrook Retreat, and numerous conferences around the world. Featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and MIT's Technology Review, his articles have appeared in Wired, Civilization, The Historian, Extraordinary Science and Psychiatric Clinics of North America.

Having lived an extraordinary life in a variety of fields, Marc set out to fictionalize his interests and aspects of his life in THE RUDY STYNE QUADRILOGY, four novels spanning over 30 years of writing. In the first novel, RASPUTIN'S NEPHEW, having taught Parapsychology and having worked with a number of super psychics, Marc covers this complex and controversial field in an exciting thriller involving assassination and the attempted kidnapping of a super psychic by the Russians uncovered by his hero, ace reporter for Modern Times Magazine, Rudy Styne.

The next two novels, DOPPELGANGER and CRYSTAL NIGHT, continue the exploits of ace reporter Rudy Styne in the modern story as Rudy seeks to track down a major computer hacker. And in the back story, starting in 1906, Marc creates a full-bodied saga about the Maxwells, a Jewish family who build an elite airline in southern Germany, as we follow their travails as one of the brothers, Simon Maxwell, flies with the Red Baron and Hermann Goring for the Kaiser in World War I, and as the Maxwells work hard to maintain their airline as Hitler rises to power through the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II.

And in the fourth novel, FATE LINE, Marc fictionalizes aspects of his life as a handwriting expert by constructing a graphological murder mystery as he takes Rudy Styne to Bountiful Utah to track down a kidnapper of a child-star ice-skater, and then back to New York, Indiana, Florida and Rhode Island in his quest to uncover a diabolical plot involving the mystery killings of handwriting experts in all of these states.

Along the way, as with each novel, Marc constructs his stories so that the reader learns a great deal of history about each of these fields. These are unique stories that do not follow formula. They are original works that create characters that will stay with the reader long after the last page of each book has been turned.

A retired teacher of psychology and forensic graphology at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, his book WIZARD: THE LIFE & TIMES OF NIKOLA TESLA: BIOGRAPHY OF A GENIUS, translated into nine languages has been called "Revelatory" by Publisher's Weekly (a boxed and starred review), "Serious Scholarship" by Scientific American, a "Masterpiece" by Nelson DeMille and is "Highly Recommended" by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• Scientific Methods
• Famous Physicists

Nikola Tesla

Amongst many inventors throughout the history of science, one of the most prominent inventors was Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla was an inventor, an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. Nikola Tesla was also a Serbian-American Engineer who was highly regarded for his achievements in energy for the advancement and growth of Alternating Current (AC) in electrical systems. He also provided his extraordinary contributions to electromagnetism and wireless radio communications.

Table of Contents

Introduction of nikola tesla, nikola tesla’s education, awards and achievements, contribution in alternating currents (ac).

• Tesla Turbine

Nikola Tesla was a mastermind inventor who shaped some ground-breaking inventions. He was an engineer who was awarded about 300 patents for his innovations in history. He also collaborated with many prominent names and companies in history.

Nikola Tesla was born on 10th July in 1856 to a priest father in the Croatian town of Smiljan (Austrian Empire).

Tesla’s inventions constitute significant technological breakthroughs throughout his lifetime. He invented the widely used Tesla coil and induction coil in radio technology. This math and physics genius made a substantial impact on our daily lives through his important innovations.

Tesla studied at several places in Europe, which also included Germany, Austria, and Prague. At the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, he pursued electrical engineering, and later, joined the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.

He had the opportunity to go to Budapest in the late 1870s, where he worked at the Telephone Exchange. He made enhancements to some inventions and came up with an idea for the induction motor, which produced an alternating current system, and used electromagnetic induction from the magnetic field instead of electrical connections to the rotor.

At age 28, in 1884, he decided to move to the U.S., in search of more opportunities. Tesla met Thomas Edison in the U.S. Tesla worked alongside him for a couple of months. When Edison declined to pay Tesla for his work, Tesla decided to quit and pursue his journey as an inventor.

Tesla’s legacy holds nine decorations with certificates of honours with which the scientist was decorated between 1892 and 1939.

Nikola Tesla’s best-known invention was Alternating Current . AC power permits electricity to be sent over extended distances much more efficiently.

Tesla’s AC patents were accepted by Westinghouse and used for the lighting of the Chicago World’s Fair. Tesla’s apparent essential skill for invention and profound imagination made him one of the most prolific inventors of our times. Clearly, his genius was unmatched in his time and perhaps ours.

Perhaps the most well-known symbol of Tesla’s work is the Tesla coil. It is a transformer that produces high-voltage, low-current, high-frequency alternating-current electricity.

A Tesla coil comprises a primary coil and secondary coil, each coil with its own capacitor to store electrical energy. A spark gap links both the coils and capacitors. The system is powered by a high-voltage source. As the current flows out of the capacitor down the primary coil, a magnetic field is created.

This field breaks down quickly and produces an electric current in the secondary coil. The subsequent high-frequency voltage can lighten fluorescent bulbs several feet away with no wire connection.

Watch Video :Charging By Induction

Tesla revealed that he could use his coils to transmit and receive powerful radio signals before his lab burned down. Tuning those radio signals to resonate at the same frequency radio signals could be sent and received. He was ready to convey a signal 50 miles from his lab to West Point, New York, by early 1895. But the fire in Tesla’s lab demolished his work.

Guglielmo Marconi (inventor of the wireless telegraph system) established long-distance demonstrations in the future, and he used a Tesla oscillator to spread the signals across the English Channel.

Tesla Turbine and Induction Motor

As a way to make a change in the world, Tesla saw the growth of piston engines in the automobile industry. Therefore, Tesla developed his own turbine engine that used the combustion process to rotate the disks.

With 90% of fuel efficiency, this engine was a significant achievement.

Also, Nikola Tesla and Galileo Ferraris independently invented the first AC commutator-free three-phase induction motor in 1885, and it was Tesla who filed for a patent first. This type of motor is generally used in vacuums, blow dryers, and power tools, even today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Define alternating current..

Alternating current is an electric current that periodically reverses direction, in contrast to DC which flows in only one direction.

Where is Nikola Tesla Tower located?

Shoreham, Long Island, Newyork

Nikola Tesla was most famous for which inventions?

Tesla Coil, Alternating Current (AC) and discovery of rotating magnetic field.

What is a Tesla Coil?

A form of Induction coil used for producing high-frequency alternating currents.

Which principle is responsible for the working of induction motor?

Electromagnetic Induction.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your Mobile number and Email id will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Request OTP on Voice Call

Post My Comment

• Share Share

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Register with byju's & watch live videos.

• About Tesla

Biography of Nikola Tesla

Nikola tesla biography.

Already at an early age, Tesla shows insight and ambition. There is an anecdote from his life related to his first sight of Niagara Falls, where he announced to his uncle Josip that one day, he would put a big wheel there and use the potential of the falls. This was his childhood dream.

Tesla started school in Smiljan, where he learned German, mathematics, and religion. After moving to Gospic, he carried forward with elementary school finishing Preparatory Elementary School and Lower Real Gymnasium. From Gospic, he left for Rakovac, located near Karlovac, and finished Higher Real Gymnasium.

When Tesla completed high school, he avoided forced enlistment in an ongoing war, and went to study physics and other disciplines at the Polytechnic School in Graz, located south of Vienna. However, he did not stay to complete his degree. Still, he later enrolled at the University of Prague, where he advanced his knowledge of wave mechanics (and indirectly AC), working with Professor Ernst Mach.

After his studies, Tesla began his career as an electrical engineer with a telephone company in Budapest in 1881. Tinkering with equipment as a telephone line repairman, he created a kind of amplifier, a forerunner of loudspeakers, which he never filed as his own patent.

Tesla started to work in Edison’s lab in New Jersey, where he began to improve Edison’s line of dynamos. This is the point where his divergence of opinion with Edison over direct current versus alternating current began. Due to disagreements with Edison, he decides to found his own company.

In 1885, he founded a company called the Tesla Electric and Manufacturing Company, which went bankrupt a year later. After that, Tesla is forced to finance himself through hard manual work. Two years later, he founded a new company called Tesla Electric Company. That same year, 1887, Tesla decided to register his patents, which included a multi-phase electric power transmission motor system, an induction motor, generators and transformers. A year later, in partnership with George Westinghouse, Tesla sold his alternating current patents for $1 million (some sources claim he received only $60,000).

After going to Europe and visiting Lika, Tesla's birthplace, in 1890, he began researching high-frequency current, where after a year, he constructed the first transformer, the so-called Tesla coil. In 1892, he returned to Lika for his mother's funeral.

In 1896 the first hydroelectric plant was commissioned at the foot of Niagara Falls and used Tesla's alternating current patents. In 1899, Tesla built an experimental station in Colorado Springs to experiment with high voltage, high-frequency electricity and other phenomena. There he worked for one year, and after that, he moved to Long Island, where he never had a chance to finish his research on wireless transmission of electricity because J.P. Morgan stopped to finance him.

From 1910 to 1922, Tesla continued with his engineering inventions, where 1919, Tesla's autobiography „My inventions” was first published. He was awarded the Edison medal in 1917 and, in 1926, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zagreb. In 1937 he earned two honorary doctorates from the Polytechnic University in Graz and the University of Paris.

Tesla spent his life in hotels, and he lived in the Hotel New Yorker for the last ten years. He died there on January 7th, 1943, in his apartment on the 33rd floor. A state funeral was held at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City. He was cremated, and his ashes were interned in a golden sphere, Tesla’s favorite shape, which was handed over to the Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

Our website also has a mobile app. Would you like to install it?

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Stay connected with us. Subscribe to our newsletter to find out what we have recently discovered and published about Nikola Tesla.

• ABOUT TESLA

Talk to our experts

1800-120-456-456

• Nikola Tesla Biography

Who is Nikola Tesla?

Nikola Tesla is regarded as one of history's most influential inventors, with discoveries in the area of electricity that were far ahead of their time and continue to have an impact on technology today. Tesla died penniless and without the acclaim that he would eventually receive over a century later, despite his achievements.

Tesla's career as an inventor began early; at the age of 26, he is said to have sketched up the concepts for a rotating magnetic field while working at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, an essential innovation that is currently employed in many electromechanical devices. This huge breakthrough paved the way for many of his other innovations, including the alternating current motor, and eventually brought him to New York City in 1884, where he was drawn by Thomas Edison and his groundbreaking engineering firm, Edison Machine Works.

The “genius who illuminated the world” is now memorialised with an electrical unit known as the Tesla, as well as streets, statues, and a prominent engineer's award in his honour, but he wasn't always so successful in life. But Tesla was a scientist, who had deep theories always in mind. Let’s discuss Nikola Tesla Information here completely. 

(Image will be uploaded soon)

Where Was Nikola Tesla Born?

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in the town of Smiljan, which is now part of Croatia but was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest, while his mother, despite her lack of formal education, worked with machinery and was known for her incredible memory. Keep reading the article for the entire Nikola Tesla biography.

Nikola Tesla Education Qualification

Tesla's family relocated to nearby Gospi in 1862, where Tesla's father served as a parish priest. Nikola finished primary school and then moved on to middle school. Tesla travelled to Karlovac in 1870 to attend the Higher Real Gymnasium, where classes were taught in German, as was the case throughout the Austro-Hungarian Military Frontier. Tesla later wrote that his physics professor sparked his interest in electricity demonstrations. These displays of this "mystery phenomenon" made Tesla want to "know more about this wonderful power," he said. Tesla's ability to complete integral calculus in his mind led his teachers to suspect he was cheating. He graduated in 1873 after completing a four-year term in three years.

Tesla returned to Smiljan in 1873. He developed cholera shortly after arriving, was bedridden for nine months, and came close to death several times. Tesla's father pledged to send him to the top engineering school if he recovered from his illness in a time of despair. Tesla escaped conscription into the Austro-Hungarian Army in Smiljan in 1874 by fleeing to Tomingaj, southeast of Lika. He went there dressed as a hunter and explored the mountains. Tesla claimed that his contact with nature made him physically and intellectually stronger. While at Tomingaj, he studied a lot of books and later claimed that Mark Twain's works had miraculously helped him recover from his former illness.

Tesla received a Military Frontier scholarship to the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz in 1875. Tesla never missed a lecture during his first year, obtained the highest marks possible, passed nine tests, founded a Serb cultural society, and even received a letter of congratulations from the dean of the technical college to his father, stating, "Your son is a star of the first rank." Professor Jakob Pöschl's thorough lectures on electricity enthralled Tesla while he was in Graz.

Tesla Discoveries

Tesla discovered, designed, and developed ideas for a number of significant innovations, the majority of which were officially patented by other inventors, including dynamos (electrical generators comparable to batteries) and the induction motor, over the course of his career. He was also a pioneer in the development of radar, X-ray, remote control, and the rotating magnetic field, which is the foundation of most AC machinery. Tesla is most recognised for his contributions to AC power and the Tesla coil, which he invented.

1. AC Electrical System

Alternating current (AC), perhaps Tesla's most famous and essential innovation, was a response to his old boss Edison's inefficient (as Tesla called it) use of direct current (DC) in the new electric age. Unlike DC power plants, which carry energy in a straight line in one direction, alternating currents change direction quickly and at a significantly greater voltage. Because of DC, Edison's power lines that crossed the Atlantic coast were short and weak, whereas AC could deliver current considerably further. Tesla's AC power grids finally became the standard, despite the fact that Thomas Edison had more resources and a better reputation.

2. Hydroelectric Power Plant

At Niagara Falls, Tesla developed one of the first AC hydroelectric power facilities in the United States in 1895. It was used to power the city of Buffalo, New York the next year, a feat that was widely recognised around the world and aided AC electricity's progress toward becoming the world's power system.

3. Tesla Coil

Tesla patented the Tesla coil in the late 1800s, which established the groundwork for wireless technology and is still used in radio technology today. The Tesla coil is an inductor that was used in many early radio transmission antennas as the heart of an electrical circuit. The coil and a capacitor work together to resonate current and voltage across the circuit from a power source. Tesla studied fluorescence, x-rays, radio, wireless power, and electromagnetic radiation in the earth and its atmosphere with his coil.

4. Death Ray

Tesla subsequently returned to work, largely as a consultant, after suffering a nervous breakdown following the end of his free energy project. Tesla even caught the FBI's attention with his claims of developing a strong "death ray," which had attracted the Soviet Union's interest during WWII.

5. Free Energy

Tesla began work on his most ambitious project yet around 1900, after becoming obsessed with the wireless transmission of energy. He planned 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. Tesla began work on the free energy project in earnest in 1901, with finance from a group of investors that included financial titan J. P. Morgan, constructing and building a facility with a power plant and a gigantic transmission tower on a site on Long Island, New York, that became known as Wardenclyffe.

Tesla also experimented with radio waves as early as 1892, displaying a radio wave-controlled boat in 1898 at an electrical show in New York's Madison Square Garden to much acclaim. Expanding on the technology, Tesla patented more than a dozen radio communication ideas before Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi beat Tesla to the punch and completed the first transatlantic radio transmission using Tesla's research. The dispute for intellectual recognition between Marconi and Tesla lasted decades before the United States Supreme Court cancelled part of Marconi's patents in 1943, restoring Tesla as the founder of radio, at least legally.

Nikola Tesla vs. Thomas Edison

Tesla came to the United States in 1884 with nothing but the clothing on his back and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison, the renowned inventor and business mogul whose DC-based electrical works were quickly becoming the industry standard. Edison hired Tesla, and the two men spent the next few years working side by side on improving Edison's innovations. Several months later, the two parted ways due to a tense business-scientific relationship, which historians attribute to their polar opposite personalities: while Edison was a powerful personality focused on marketing and financial success, Tesla was commercially out-of-touch and fragile.

Nikola Tesla Facts

Tesla was a scientist, physicist, engineer, and inventor. Alternating current (AC), the form of electricity that fuels civilization and is essential for lighting, was one of his greatest innovations.

Tesla became close friends with Mark Twain after claiming that reading author Mark Twain's writing helped him recover from a terrible illness.

Tesla was given ＄50,000 by Thomas Edison to upgrade his existing electricity-generating technology. Tesla was successful, although Edison later stated that he was joking. Tesla abruptly resigned.

According to several who recounted Tesla's obsessive rituals and superstitions, he may have suffered from what is now known as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

Tesla never married. Tesla once expressed his view that he would never be worthy of a lady. He devoted himself to scientific research.

Tesla was a multilingual genius with a photographic memory.

Tesla's alternating current (AC) clashed with Edison's direct current (DC), which required power plants to be built every square mile, rendering DC wasteful in comparison to AC.

To show that AC was too unsafe to utilise, Edison staged gruesome public demonstrations of animal electrocutions.

Tesla once stated that he was in love with a white pigeon because he feared that personal connection would interfere with his study.

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor and engineer who developed the rotating magnetic field, which is the foundation of most alternating-current machines. He also invented the three-phase electric power transmission system. In 1884, he immigrated to the United States and sold George Westinghouse the patent rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors. He created the Tesla coil, an induction coil that is widely utilised in radio technology, in 1891. Tesla was born into a Serbian family. His father was an Orthodox priest, and his mother, though uneducated, was quite brilliant. He developed incredible imagination and originality, as well as a poetic touch, as he grew older. Historians believe that several of Tesla's patents have yet to be discovered, hence the precise number of patents he holds is contested. He is credited with at least 300 innovations (many of which are related), as well as many unpatented ideas that he developed over the course of his career.

FAQs on Nikola Tesla Biography

1. When is Nikola Tesla’s Birthday?

Ans: Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Austrian Empire, on July 9th or 10th, 1856. (now in Croatia).

2. How Did Nikola Tesla Die & Nikola Tesla Age at Death Was?

Ans: Tesla died of coronary thrombosis at the age of 86 in New York City, where he had lived for nearly 60 years, on January 7, 1943. The legacy of Tesla's work, on the other hand, continues to this day. Near the site of his former New York City laboratory, at the intersection of 40th Street and 6th Avenue, a street sign identifying "Nikola Tesla Corner" was put up in 1994.

3. Why Was Tesla’s Lab Burned?

Ans: During the construction of the tower, Tesla ran out of money and was foreclosed on twice. Assets were liquidated to pay off his debts, much as they did with his prior Colorado Springs lab. The US government detonated a bomb in the tower in 1917, thinking that it was being used by German spies during World War I.

The True Story of Nikola Tesla [Pt.1]

Posted: April 13, 2024 | Last updated: April 13, 2024

Part 2: <a href="http://tinyurl.com/hc3qkkjCF">http://tinyurl.com/hc3qkkjCF</a> Bitcoin address: 13SjyCXPB9o3iN4LitYQ2wYKeqYTShPub8This is a re-upload of an old classic. It was taken down but I've fixed the copyright issue.In this video, watch and learn all about Nikola Tesla without the common myths. You’ll see that the story of Tesla was a bit of a roller coaster.Special thanks to the Curious Engineer for the illustrations: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/c0defapCutscene">https://www.youtube.com/user/c0defapCutscene</a> footage from: American Genius - Nikola Tesla vs Thomas EdisonSubscribe here: <a href="https://goo.gl/9FS8uFBecome">https://goo.gl/9FS8uFBecome</a> a Patreon!: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TVHi">https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TVHi</a>, welcome to ColdFusion (formally known as ColdfusTion).Experience the cutting edge of the world around us in a fun relaxed atmosphere.Sources:http://tinyurl.com/zdzszh5 “Beyond the Mechanical Universe: From Electricity to Modern Physics”http://theoatmeal.com/comics/teslaIf link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/d9s9mjzhttp://www.danielcelton.com/2015/02/22/teslas-folly-why-wardenclyff-didnt-work/If link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/hqww39uhttp://www.activistpost.com/2012/01/10-inventions-of-nikola-tesla-that.htmlIf link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/6wwnzavhttp://www.teslasociety.com/hall_of_fame.htmIf link above is broken http://www.teslasociety.com/hall_of_fame.htmhttp://www.history.com/news/history-lists/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-nikola-teslaIf link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/zl72rbvhttp://www.iflscience.com/technology/10-fun-facts-you-may-not-have-known-about-nikola-teslaIf link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/olkr2w3http://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/in-1897-nikola-tesla-tore-up-a-contract-that-would-have-made-him-the-worlds-first-billionaire/If link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/lwnkh4nhttp://www.teslasociety.com/niagarafalls.htmIf link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/j946cw3http://teslaresearch.jimdo.com/niagara-falls-power-project-1888/If link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/j4yhftwhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Madison_DallyIf link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/gwkt8ybhttp://www.businessinsider.com.au/mysterious-ball-lightning-made-in-lab-2013-8If link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/hqjcgxrhttp://www.capturedlightning.com/frames/Tesla0.htmlIf link above is broken http://tinyurl.com/z7dkdvfhttp://www.excludedmiddle.com/earthquake.htmIf link above is broken <a href="http://tinyurl.com/6puqpy//Soundtrack//0:00">http://tinyurl.com/6puqpy//Soundtrack//0:00</a> - JackLNDN – Aeterna1:31 - M A B E L – My Boy My Town (SHURA Remix)4:06 - Toronto Is Broken - Field Of Poppies feat. Nuala (Furney remix)5:21 - U137 - Let Me Keep This Memory7:32 - Ø F D R E A M – Thelema9:17 - Jack Haining - Embers (Rameses B Remix)10:40 - Blackbear - 90210 ft. G-Eazy (Matt DiMona Remix)» Google + | <a href="http://www.google.com/+coldfustion»">http://www.google.com/+coldfustion»</a> Facebook | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ColdFusionTV»">https://www.facebook.com/ColdFusionTV»</a> Patreon: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TV»">https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TV»</a> My music | <a href="http://burnwater.bandcamp.com">http://burnwater.bandcamp.com</a> or » <a href="http://www.soundcloud.com/burnwater»">http://www.soundcloud.com/burnwater»</a> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TV»">https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TV»</a> Collection of music used in videos: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOrJJ...Producer:">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOrJJ...Producer:</a> Dagogo Altraide» Twitter | @ColdFusion_TV

More for You

‘Hero’ who confronted Sydney attacker offered permanent residency

29 Ridiculous Lies That Hollywood Has Managed to Mainstream

Is It Safe To Grill Frozen Hamburger Patties Straight From The Freezer?

These Are 10 Smells That Cats Absolutely Hate

Top 20 Saturday Night Live Sketches That Broke the Whole Cast

The Coolest Car From the Year You Were Born (1945-1995)

Angel Reese's WNBA Salary Revealed After Being Selected With No. 7 Overall Pick

10 pairs of movies with strikingly similar plots that came out the same year

The Pool Noodle Hack That Makes Spray Painting Cabinet Doors A Breeze

78 Riddles for Adults That Will Test Your Smarts

How to digitize VHS tapes the cheap way

Coachella weekend 1: No Doubt reunites, Blur flops and influencers influence

Ketanji Brown Jackson's New Warning To Supreme Court

Traumatic Disney Movies That Scarred a Generation of Children

50 of the most memorable TV lines ever written

Several Popular Fast Food Chains File Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

Panned M. Night Shyamalan Sequel Becomes Netflix Hit Five Years Later

13 Polite Habits Flight Attendants Actually Dislike—and What to Do Instead

Ford Will Reportedly Pay Dealers $15,000 Per Mustang GTD Sold

10 Countries To Live Outside the US That Are So Cheap You Could Quit Your Job