Nikola Tesla

About this figure

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer whose work on alternating current systems helped determine the form of the electrical grid still in use today. Born in the village of Smiljan, in what was then the Austrian Empire, to a Serbian Orthodox priest, he studied engineering in Austria and worked for a time at a subsidiary of Edison's telephone company in Europe before emigrating to the United States in 1884 to work directly for Thomas Edison in New York, a collaboration that ended within a year amid a dispute over pay Tesla felt he was owed.

Tesla's central technical achievement was a practical system for generating, transmitting, and using alternating current (AC), including motors and transformers that made AC far more viable for large-scale power distribution than Edison's rival direct current (DC) system. He described in his memoir, My Inventions, how the idea for a rotating-field AC induction motor came to him as a sudden, complete vision while walking in a park in Budapest, years before he could build it. In 1888 he licensed his AC patents to George Westinghouse, and the resulting "War of the Currents" between Westinghouse's AC and Edison's DC systems was settled largely in AC's favor after the Westinghouse-Tesla system won the contract to light the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and, soon after, to harness Niagara Falls for electric power -- a project Tesla later recalled having dreamed of as a boy after reading a description of the falls.

Tesla continued to experiment restlessly across a wide range of electrical phenomena, publishing on high-frequency currents and wireless transmission of energy, and pursuing an ambitious and ultimately unrealized project at Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island, funded partly by financier J. P. Morgan, intended to transmit both information and power wirelessly across the Atlantic. The project collapsed for lack of further funding in the early 1900s, and it, along with his growing reputation for grandiose claims -- including, late in life, speculation about communicating with other planets -- contributed to his decline from a celebrated public inventor to a more marginal, financially precarious figure. He spent his final decades in New York hotel rooms, still filing patents and giving occasional interviews, and died alone and in debt in 1943, though he was posthumously honored in numerous ways, including having the SI unit of magnetic flux density named after him.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.