Nikola Tesla

Childhood in the Austro-Hungarian Military Frontier

Nikola Tesla was born July 10, 1856 (Julian calendar; July 22 Gregorian), in the village of Smiljan in the Austro-Hungarian Military Frontier - now part of modern Croatia. His father Milutin was a Serbian Orthodox priest; his mother Đuka was the daughter of a Serbian Orthodox priest. The family was Serbian, in a Habsburg-administered region with a substantial Serbian Orthodox population.

Tesla's autobiography (Tesla, written in the late 1910s, published in 1919) describes an unusually visual childhood imagination - he reported being able to visualize mechanical and electrical devices in such detail that he could "test" them mentally without prototype construction. The autobiography is the central primary source for his early life; it is, however, a self-presentation written more than 50 years after the events it describes.

He attended Realgymnasium in Karlovac (1873-1877) and the Technische Universität in Graz (1875-1878). His Graz studies were unfinished - he left without a degree, apparently after a personal crisis involving gambling debts and family difficulties. He spent a transitional period in Maribor, Slovenia, and then completed some additional study at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague before beginning his engineering career in earnest.

Budapest, Paris, and the move to America (1881-1884)

In 1881 Tesla took a position at the Budapest Telephone Exchange, then in its first year of operation. He was responsible for improving the central station's equipment. His Budapest period is significant in his autobiography for an event he described as a sudden flash of insight in a Budapest park in February 1882, in which the principle of the rotating magnetic field that would underpin his AC induction motor became clear to him.

In 1882 he moved to Paris to work for the Continental Edison Company. The Continental Edison Company was the French branch of Thomas Edison's growing electrical empire, then expanding rapidly across European cities. Tesla worked on power-system installation and improvement projects across France and Germany.

In 1884 he immigrated to the United States. He arrived in New York with, by his own later account, "four cents in his pocket, a letter of introduction" to Edison, and a notebook with technical ideas. The letter of introduction came from Charles Batchelor, Edison's European manager. Tesla began work at Edison's Manhattan facility immediately.

The AC/DC dispute and the Westinghouse partnership

Tesla's relationship with Edison soured within a year. The central technical dispute was over alternating-current (AC) versus direct-current (DC) power-transmission systems. Edison was committed to DC; Tesla, whose Paris work and earlier theoretical insight had convinced him that AC was the correct approach for long-distance transmission, found Edison's opposition unproductive. Tesla left Edison in 1885.

In 1888 Tesla licensed his AC patents (the induction motor and the polyphase distribution system) to George Westinghouse, who had been developing AC power systems in competition with Edison. The Westinghouse-Tesla partnership produced the AC systems that won the so-called "War of the Currents" against Edison's DC systems. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1895 Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant were the two highest-profile installations.

Tesla relinquished his royalties on the AC patents in the mid-1890s to help Westinghouse through financial difficulties. The decision substantially reduced his lifetime wealth; later commentators have noted that, had he retained the royalties, he would have been among the wealthiest men in America. Tesla's response in later interviews was characteristically that he had been more interested in the technology than in the money.

The Wardenclyffe period and the wireless ambitions

Through the late 1890s Tesla turned to wireless transmission. He demonstrated radio-controlled boats at Madison Square Garden in 1898 - among the first public demonstrations of radio remote control - and developed the resonant air-core transformer now known as the Tesla coil. He also performed significant experiments at his Colorado Springs laboratory in 1899-1900 on extremely high-voltage transmission.

In 1901 Tesla began construction of the Wardenclyffe Tower at Shoreham, Long Island, designed as a station for both wireless telegraphy and wireless power transmission across the Atlantic. The project was funded by J.P. Morgan. It was never completed; Morgan withdrew funding after Marconi successfully transmitted across the Atlantic in 1901 using a substantially simpler approach, and Tesla was unable to attract subsequent funding at the scale required.

The Wardenclyffe Tower was eventually demolished for scrap during World War I. The site is preserved today as a museum (the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe). Tesla's vision of wireless power transmission has never been technically realized at any practical scale; his radio patents, however, were posthumously credited with priority over Marconi's by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943.

Late life and the IQ-figure problem

Tesla's later life was financially difficult and increasingly isolated. He lived in residence hotels in New York from the 1910s onward, supported by a small allowance from Westinghouse and by occasional public lectures. His later patents and announced projects often did not result in functional devices; press coverage of his late-life announcements ranged from sympathetic to mocking.

He died January 7, 1943, in his apartment at the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan, at age 86. Federal investigators seized his papers immediately after his death under the Office of Alien Property. Most of the seized materials were later returned to his family and are now held by the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

The IQ figures circulated for Tesla illustrate the central problem of historical-IQ estimation. Different popular sources give figures ranging from 160 to 310 - a span so wide that no single number can be called "his" IQ in any sense. The Stanford-Binet was published in 1916 (when Tesla was 60 years old and well past his patent-producing years); no instrument that would have produced a comparable measurement existed during his productive career. Any specific number attributed to him is a posthumous popular estimate, not a measurement.

Timeline

• 1856Born in Smiljan, Austro-Hungarian Military Frontier.
• 1875Begins study at the Technische Universität Graz.
• 1881Position at the Budapest Telephone Exchange.
• 1882Insight in a Budapest park on the rotating magnetic field.
• 1884Immigrates to the United States; begins work with Edison.
• 1885Leaves Edison after the AC/DC dispute.
• 1888Licenses AC patents to George Westinghouse.
• 1893AC systems power the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
• 1895Westinghouse-Tesla AC systems open the Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant.
• 1898Demonstrates radio-controlled boat at Madison Square Garden.
• 1899Colorado Springs experiments on high-voltage transmission.
• 1901Begins Wardenclyffe Tower construction with J.P. Morgan funding.
• 1905Wardenclyffe project effectively shut down after Morgan withdraws funding.
• 1943Dies in the Hotel New Yorker at age 86. U.S. Supreme Court rules on Tesla radio patents posthumously.

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