Tesla never took an IQ test. The Stanford-Binet appeared in 1916, when he was 60 and past his patent-producing years. The ≈200 is a posthumous popular estimate — one of many, from 160 to 310.
One man, a 150-point range
Figures circulated in popular sourcesMachines tested in his head
Born in Smiljan, in the Habsburg Military Frontier (now Croatia), the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest, Tesla later described visualising devices so completely he could “test” them without building a prototype — though his autobiography was written more than 50 years after the fact.
He nearly died of cholera at 17; his father, who wanted him in the priesthood, promised engineering school if he recovered. In 1881 he joined the new Budapest Telephone Exchange.
There, in a park in February 1882, came the insight he always described as sudden: the rotating magnetic field behind the AC induction motor.
Education, wound turn by turn
Each stage adds a turn to the coil. The last two — where the degree should be — are left open.
German, arithmetic and religion in his home village.
Where he says he could do integral calculus in his head, leading teachers to suspect cheating.
Finished the four-year course in three, inspired by his physics teacher's demonstrations.
Top marks in his first year on a Military Frontier scholarship; lost it, fell into gambling and left without a degree.
Attended lectures for a term but, with his father just dead and no money, never formally enrolled.
Everything after was learned on the job — in Budapest, at Edison's Paris subsidiary and in New York.
Why high-voltage AC won
AC can be stepped up to high voltage with a transformer; Edison's DC, in practice, couldn't. Same power, higher voltage, less current — and line losses fall with the square of the current. Stretch the line.
In the mid-1890s Tesla gave up his royalties on the AC patents to help Westinghouse through financial trouble — a decision that cost him a fortune. He said he cared more about the technology than the money.
Key patents and inventions
He held around 300 patents in more than 25 countries. These are the ones that mattered most, on blueprint sheets.
The AC induction motor, one of the patents licensed to Westinghouse.
His polyphase system: generators, transformers and motors working together — the basis of today's grids.
A resonant transformer producing very high voltages; still used in radio and demos.
Lit tubes without wires at his lectures, a forerunner of fluorescent and neon lighting.
Made X-ray images soon after Röntgen and warned early about radiation injuries.
A radio-controlled boat — the ancestor of drones and remote controls.
His wireless-power system, the patent behind Wardenclyffe.
A turbine driven by fluid friction on smooth discs.
His autobiography, serialised in Electrical Experimenter.
After radio-controlled boats at Madison Square Garden (1898) and high-voltage experiments in Colorado Springs, Tesla began a tower on Long Island for transatlantic wireless telegraphy — and wireless power. J.P. Morgan funded it, then pulled out after Marconi crossed the Atlantic with a far simpler system. It was never finished and was scrapped during the First World War.
Wireless power at scale has never been realised. His radio patents, though, were credited with priority over Marconi's by the US Supreme Court in 1943 — a complicated ruling that didn't simply hand him the invention of radio.
“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”
He spent his last decades in residence hotels on a small Westinghouse allowance, announcing projects that rarely worked. He died in January 1943 at 86. Federal agents seized his papers; most are now in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
Timeline
Reading the ≈200
Not from Cox's study, and not a measurement. The width of the circulated range is the clearest sign that nothing anchors any single number.
Sources
- Tesla, N. (1919). My Inventions. Electrical Experimenter
- Cheney, M. (1981). Tesla: Man Out of Time. Prentice-Hall
- Carlson, W. B. (2013). Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age. Princeton
- Hunt, I. & Draper, W. W. (1964). Lightning in His Hand. Sage
- US Patent and Trademark Office — Tesla patents
- Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America v. United States (1943)
- Nikola Tesla Museum, Belgrade