Thinkers Timeline

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was an electrical engineer and inventor whose work on alternating current, induction motors, and wireless power transmission helped shape the modern electrical infrastructure of the world. He was born to an ethnic Serbian family in Smiljan, a village in the Military Frontier of the Habsburg Empire, in what is now Croatia. His father was a Serbian Orthodox priest, his mother an unschooled woman with a remarkable memory and a gift for making household tools. Tesla studied engineering at the Polytechnic in Graz and briefly at the University of Prague, though he did not complete a formal degree. He worked in Budapest and Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1884. He worked briefly for Thomas Edison in New York, then set out on his own. In 1888 he patented a practical alternating current induction motor and a polyphase power system; these patents were acquired by George Westinghouse, and the system they made possible became the backbone of modern electrical power distribution. During the 1890s Tesla also demonstrated wireless lighting, developed the Tesla coil, and experimented with the transmission of energy through the atmosphere. His later career was marked by increasingly ambitious and often impractical projects, financial difficulties, and growing eccentricity. He died alone and nearly forgotten in a New York hotel in 1943, aged eighty-six. His reputation has been rebuilt in the decades since, though not always with the precision his work deserves.