Nikola Tesla

Milutin Tesla was an Orthodox priest in a village on the Austrian Empire's Military Frontier. His wife Đuka never spent a day in school, built her own household tools and could recite Serbian epic poetry at length, and her son credited her for his memory. Cholera nearly killed him at 17, and his father promised him engineering school if he lived. At Graz he passed nine exams in his first year, nearly twice the requirement, and the dean wrote to his father calling him a star of the first rank. By his third year he was failing. He left in December 1878 without a degree and told nobody where he had gone. Classmates decided he had drowned in the Mur. He was in Maribor, drafting for 60 florins a month.

He reached New York in June 1884 to work at the Edison Machine Works, quit after six months, and inside four years held the polyphase patents Westinghouse licensed and the country wired itself around. The coil, the wirelessly steered boat, the Colorado Springs experiments, the unfinished tower at Wardenclyffe — BriefHistory has the machines and the current war in full. The question left over is what the inventor was living on while the grid he described was built by other people.

In 1886 the investors in his first company took the patents he had signed over for stock, formed a utility without him and left him with nothing. He spent that year digging ditches in Manhattan for two dollars a day, and wrote later that his education had come to seem like a mockery. The pattern held. He never married, saying chastity helped the work, and admitted late on that the sacrifice may have been too large. He fired a secretary for being overweight and sent employees home to change their clothes. He argued for eugenics, holding that human pity had begun to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. From 1900 he moved hotel to hotel leaving bills behind him, and by 1934 Westinghouse was paying his rent and calling it a consulting fee.

A maid found him on January 8, 1943, past the do-not-disturb sign that had hung there three days. Two days later the FBI had the Office of Alien Property Custodian seize his effects, and an MIT engineer named John G. Trump went through them. The box said to hold a death ray held a 45-year-old resistance box. La Guardia read the eulogy at St. John the Divine. In 1952 the estate went to Belgrade in 80 trunks marked N.T., his ashes following in 1957 into a gold-plated sphere. The archive of 160,000 documents is on the UNESCO register. The SI unit of magnetic flux density took his name in 1960, and a car company took it in 2003.

Nikola Tesla's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Alternating current induction motor patent
  US Patent 381,968 — self-starting, no commutator, licensed by Westinghouse 1888
• Tesla coil invention
  The high-frequency resonant transformer behind the lecture demonstrations 1891
• Radio-controlled boat invention
  Demonstrated at Madison Square Garden — one of the first vehicles steered wirelessly 1898
• The Problem of Increasing Human Energy article
  His manifesto, published in The Century Magazine 1900
• Wardenclyffe Tower building
  Begun on Long Island and abandoned unfinished when the money stopped 1902
• Bladeless turbine patent
  Smooth discs instead of blades — never commercially adopted 1913

• 1873 aged ~17 Nearly dies of cholera and extracts a promise of engineering school He was bedridden for nine months. His father had wanted him in the priesthood.
• December 1878 aged 22 Leaves Graz failing and vanishes His family heard nothing. A classmate found him in Maribor working as a draftsman.
• 1882 aged ~26 Goes to Paris to install lighting for Continental Edison
• June 1884 aged 27 Arrives in New York and starts at the Edison Machine Works He lasted six months. His diary entry on leaving reads, Good By to the Edison Machine Works.
• 1886 aged ~30 Loses his own company and digs ditches for two dollars a day The backers kept the patents he had traded for stock.
• May 1, 1888 aged 31 Patents the polyphase induction motor Westinghouse licensed it that July for cash, stock and a royalty per horsepower.
• 1916 aged ~60 Accepts the AIEE Edison Medal The prize was named for the man whose shop he had walked out of in 1884.
• 1937 aged ~81 Struck by a taxi on his way to feed the pigeons Three broken ribs and a wrenched back at 81. He refused to see a doctor and never fully recovered.
• January 7, 1943 aged 86 Dies alone at the Hotel New Yorker The FBI had his papers seized two days later.

• Thomas Edison 1847–1931
  Inventor and scientist whose research laboratory model and electrical innovations transformed modern life. worked for and walked out on
• George Westinghouse 1846–1914
  Engineer and industrialist who championed alternating current and founded the Westinghouse Electric Company. licensed his patents
• J. P. Morgan 1837–1913
  Banking titan who stabilized the economy during the Panic of 1907 and shaped modern finance. funded Wardenclyffe and stopped
• Mark Twain 1835–1910
  Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called the father of American literature. friend in middle age
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. sent birthday congratulations in 1931
• Elon Musk b. 1971
  Engineer and entrepreneur whose companies have advanced electric vehicles, reusable rockets, and neural interfaces. named a company after him