Childhood

Tesla finished primary school in Smiljan and the Lower Real Gymnasium in Gospić. In 1862, the family moved to Gospić and Tesla started the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac. From the time he was a child, Tesla showed an inclination to science. He used to spend hours reading in his father’s library. After graduating from gymnasium, he contracted cholera and spent a whole year recovering from it.

Tesla’s father, a gifted writer and poet, had a fine library. According to one belief, the Tesla family originated from the Draganić family of Banjani. According to Jovan Dučić’s notes, the Tesla family was originally from Old Herzegovina. However, there is also a belief that the Tesla family originated from the Komnenović family of Banjani in Old Herzegovina. According to the legend still well-known in Banjani, the Komnenović family had a quarrel with workers while building a church, and it ended in bloodshed. As a result, one part of the Komnenović family moved from Tupan to another part of Banjani where they were named Čivije (nails), and where they still live today. The other part of the family moved to Lika and were named Tesla, after a carpenter tool of the same name. Tesla’s mother was a hard-working woman of many talents. She was very creative and she made life in the country easier for them with her inventions. It was probably from his mother that Nikola Tesla inherited an inclination towards research. Tesla’s parents had another son, Dane, and daughters Angelina and Milka, who were older than Tesla, and another daughter Marica, who was the youngest. Dane was killed after falling off a horse when Tesla was five and this left a significant mark on the family. Dane was considered to be exceptionally gifted, while Tesla was seen as less intelligent. Dane’s death is believed to be the main reason why it took such a long time for Tesla’s father to allow him to attend engineering school far from home.

Education

He attended the first grade of primary school in Smiljan, where he was born. He finished the remaining three grades of primary school and the three grades of Lower Real Gymnasium in Gospić. The first time Tesla drew attention to himself was when a fire department was established by a merchant in Gospić. Many people from Gospić had come to see the demonstration, but the fire fighters were not able to pump water out of the Lika river. Experts tried to find out why the pump was not able to draw the water, but to no avail. Tesla, who was seven or eight years old at the time, instinctively solved the problem by getting into the river and unplugging the other end of the hose. Consequently, he became the hero of the day. At the end of the third grade, in 1870, he fell gravely ill. In the fall, he moved to Rakovac, near Karlovac, to finish the three grades of the Higher Real Gymnasium. Alongside only six other students, he graduated on July 24^th, 1873. His grade average was "very good" because his final grade in descriptive geometry was only "sufficient". He was 17 at the time. After graduation, he returned to Gospić and contracted cholera on the very first day back. He was ill for nine months. In those circumstances, he managed to convince his father to let him study engineering, instead of theology.

Studies

When he recovered from his illness, his father sent him to stay with his uncle, the archpriest Toma Mandić, in Tomingaj, near Gračac, to spend some time in the country and the mountains, to gather his strength for the efforts ahead. He started his electrical engineering studies in 1875, two years after graduating from high school. He enrolled himself in the Polytechnic School in Graz, South Styria (today’s Austria). He was 19 years old at the time. He slept very little, not more than four hours a day and spent all of his free time studying. He passed his exams with the highest grades. Around that time, he became interested in the possibility of the application of alternating current.

Concerned for his health, Tesla’s professors wrote to his father advising him to withdraw his son from school, because he might otherwise die of overwork. In December 1878, Tesla left Graz and cut all ties with his family. His friends believed he had drowned in the Mura river. He departed for Marburg (today’s Maribor) where he started working for an engineer. There he took up gambling. After a months-long unsuccessful search, his father managed to find him and bring him back home. Not long after, on April 30^th, 1879, his father died. The same year, Tesla spent some time teaching at the Real Gymnasium in Gospić.

In January 1880, he moved to Prague to finish his studies, as his father wished. He was not able to enroll in Charles University due to the fact that he had not studied Greek in high school. Having realized that his family made considerable sacrifices for his sake, he abandoned his studies the following year.

First employment and patents

Between 1881 and 1882, he worked for the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest. It was there that his long series of inventions began, when he perfected the telephone’s amplifier device. In February 1882, while taking a walk in a park with a friend, he came up with the idea of rotating magnetic fields. A year after, in 1883, he moved to Paris to work for the Continental Edison Company. His ingenious mind was noticed at once and he was offered to transfer to New York (the company’s headquarters) and work on inventions in Edison’s laboratory, which he gladly accepted.

He moved to New York in 1884. Soon after, Tesla has made some legendary discoveries in the fields of physics and electrical engineering: he discovered the alternating current, rotating magnetic fields, the induction motor, the transformer, the high frequency currents, telecommand and radio remote control via radio waves. In addition, Tesla was not adequately paid for his innovations, and in 1885, he resigned from Edison’s company and founded his own company called “Tesla Arc & Light Co.”. He started making the first alternate current polyphase motors and generators. On May 6^th, 1885, Tesla filed for his first patent to the U.S. Patent Office, naming it the Commutator for Dynamo Electric Machines.

The cofounders of Tesla’s company did not agree with his plans for introducing AC motors, which cost him his financiers, as well as his company. From 1886 to 1887, Tesla worked as a common worker in New York to earn a living and enough money for his following project. In 1887, he managed to construct the first brushless AC electric motor and he demonstrated it before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (today’s IEEE) in 1888. The same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and started working with George Westinghouse in the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company’s laboratory. Westinghouse accepted his ideas about polyphase systems which would enable alternating current transmission over long distances.

In the following years, Tesla worked with Westinghouse’s engineers on the practical application of his inventions. On July 30^th, 1891 Nikola Tesla became an American citizen. He spent most of 1892 in Europe. There he promoted his ideas during numerous lectures. He gave his "Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency" lecture in England before the Institution of Electrical Engineers and before The Royal Institution of Great Britain. He repeated the same lecture in Paris before the International Association of Electrical Engineers and the French Society of Physicists. He also managed to visit Belgrade for the only time in his life and stayed there for three days. In 1892, Tesla lost his other parent. His mother died and he took this loss very hard.

Upon his return to the United States, another struggle followed. Advocates of the use of direct current were opposed to the use of alternating current, fiercly criticizing it and warning against the dangers of using it. In 1893, this dispute known as the “War of Currents”, ended in the triumph of the ones who were greater visionaries. That year’s world fair in Chicago was lit by the use of the alternating current. Research in the field of wireless signal and energy transmission followed. Tesla presented his idea and his intention to conduct research in that direction in his speech when the Niagara Falls power plant was put into operation in 1897. You can imagine the faces of people who were hearing about wireless electric power transmission, just a short time after experiencing long-distance electric power transmission for the first time!

Tesla’s research in this field is deeply mysterious. Although he spent almost a year in Colorado Springs (1899-1900) and wrote an exhaustive research log, wireless electric power transmission is not widely used even today. Tesla intended to use the top layers of the Earth to transmit power from one side of the world to the other. Some of his discoveries were described in his "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" essay, which caught great interest in both the scientific and business society.

Starting from 1905, Tesla spent years perfecting his existing inventions and patenting new ones in the field of mechanical engineering. Those years were quite difficult for him. People were reminded of Tesla’s great genius in 1917 when he was presented with the Edison medal, the most prestigious American award in the field of electronics and electrical engineering. In 1919, Nikola Tesla published his autobiography throughout a series of articles in the Electrical Experimenter magazine.

Almost completely alone with no family, Tesla only enjoyed the company of his nephew Sava Kosanović and a few friends and rarely appeared in public at old age. The only exception was the visit of King Petar II Karađorđević, who came to meet Tesla in his apartment in June 1942.

On January 5^th, 1943, Tesla called the US War Department. During a short conversation, the great scientist offered the US military the secrets to developing his superweapon. The officer did not realize who he was talking to and probably thought it was a joke or a crazy person, so he just promised to call back later.

On January 7^th, 1943, in the Hotel New Yorker, the noble scientist’s heart gave in at the age of eighty-seven. Around two thousand people, amongst whom were numerous inventors, Nobel laureates, notable scientists in the field of electrical engineering, Yugoslav diplomats etc., gathered at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on January 12^th. Today, the remains of one of the greatest people of the 20^th century lie in a sphere-shaped urn in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

Tesla was able to memorize books and pictures, and he also had a vivid imagination, as well as the ability to visualize three dimensionally. It was this ability that helped him overcome the frightening nightmares he had as a child. To overcome his fear of cholera, from which he suffered as a young man, he developed rather excessive hygienic habits.

Tesla wrote about himself: “I have read a lot of books and, by the age of 24, I knew a lot of them by heart. Especially ‘Faust’ by Goethe.”

“If your hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world.” (Tesla to Serbian and Croatian people at the beginning of World War II)