- Born
- Died
- Nickname
- The Mad Scientist
- Height6′ 3″ (1.91 m)
- Nikola Tesla (28 June 1856 - 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without receiving a degree, gaining practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884 he emigrated to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His alternating current (AC) induction motor and related poly-phase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the poly-phase system which that company eventually marketed.
Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless-controlled boat, one of the first-ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and demonstrated his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.
After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943. Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the Tesla in his honor. There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s.
- IMDb mini biography by: Bonitao
- His Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which was not a classified illness in his time but considered a symptom of insanity, made him obsess over the number three where every hotel he stayed at had to include a 3, he would always sit at the same table at his hotel restaurants, have 18 napkins brought over so he can clean his silverware, plates, and glasses due to his great fear of germs so he never shook hands with people, also before entering a building he would circle the block 3 times. He was disgusted by anyone else's hair, he hated jewelry especially pearl necklaces, and loathed perfume. He had so many phobias he couldn't engage into relationships with women and he remained celibate all his life.
- Tesla was fluent in many languages besides his native Serbian, he also spoke English, French, German, Italian, Czech, Hungarian and Latin.
- Appeared on the cover of Time magazine (was chosen for man of the year) on July 20, 1931.
- He discovered X-rays years before Wilhelm Roentgen, invented the radio before Guglielmo Marconi, who would receive the Nobel Prize for it, and worked on inventing machines that ran on renewable resource, such as solar power and hydroelectricity, he contributed to robotics with his invention of a remote controlled motorboat, supposedly contributed to nuclear explosives with the Manhattan Project, and he dreamed of inventing a machine that would end war, since his father Milutin Tesla instilled in him a great loathing of war, and as a result he invented a particle beam ("death ray") which may have lead to his demise when the schematics of his death ray went missing from his hotel room where he supposedly died of heart failure.
- Was good friends with Mark Twain.
- I am equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian fatherland.
- I can also say that, in my heart, I firmly believe... Since my youth, before bedtime, kneeling on my bare knees, I prayed to God. I prayed that way until I reached the age of 50. From that time onwards, I pray a bit different, but it doesn't matter, the essence is the same, and I pray to God every day.
- I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
- It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.
- The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.
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