Nikola Tesla: the Wizard of Electricity

Nikola Tesla stands as one of the most fascinating and consequential figures in the history of science and technology. Born in Serbia in 1856, he emigrated to the United States in 1884 and proceeded to transform the world's understanding of electricity, developing the systems of alternating current generation and transmission that power virtually every electrical device on earth. He was a man of towering intellect and volcanic imagination, a visionary who foresaw wireless communication, remote control, and global energy transmission decades before they became realities, and an eccentric personality whose unconventional personal habits and increasingly grandiose claims made him one of the most controversial scientific figures of his era.

His greatest achievement was the development of the polyphase alternating current system -- the generators, motors, and transformers that made possible the efficient long-distance transmission of electrical power and the widespread electrification of industry and homes. This achievement, which he accomplished in partnership with the industrialist George Westinghouse in the 1880s and 1890s, gave humanity the foundation of the modern electrical grid and remains the basis of the world's electrical infrastructure more than a century later.

But Tesla's ambitions extended far beyond the practical electrification of the world. He dreamed of transmitting energy wirelessly across the globe, of creating a worldwide system of communication that would make every person on earth instantaneously accessible to every other, of harnessing the natural energies of the earth and atmosphere in ways that would make fossil fuels obsolete. Many of these visions were unrealized, some were genuinely impossible, and a few have been realized in forms he could not have exactly predicted by his successors. His life was a complex mixture of extraordinary achievement, personal eccentricity, financial failure, and visionary aspiration that continues to fascinate and inspire.

The Tesla of popular imagination -- the solitary genius defeated by unscrupulous rivals, the prophet without honor in his own time, the man whose ideas were stolen and whose contributions were suppressed -- is a figure of mythology as much as history, constructed partly by Tesla himself and partly by the admirers who have lionized him. The historical Tesla was more complex: a brilliant but sometimes difficult person, capable of extraordinary scientific insight and extraordinary professional misjudgment, whose life embodied both the possibilities and the limitations of the individual inventor in an age of increasingly corporate technological development.

Origins in Serbia and Early Education

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan, in the Lika region of what is now Croatia, then part of the Austrian Empire. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian Orthodox priest and poet; his mother, Georgina Duka Tesla, was an inventive woman who, according to family legend, created various household implements and tools during her youth. Tesla later claimed that his mother's mechanical ingenuity was a major inspiration for his own, and that his father's literary facility shaped his ability to visualize ideas in concrete, detailed mental images.

He was the fourth of five children, and his childhood was marked by both intellectual stimulus and personal loss. An older brother, Dane, who was considered the more promising of the brothers, died in a riding accident when Nikola was seven years old. The loss affected the family deeply and may have intensified the expectations placed on Nikola as the surviving son. He attended schools in Smiljan and Gospic, then the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac, where his mathematical ability attracted the attention of his teachers.