|
Nikola Tesla
July 9/July 10, 1856 - January 7, 1943 |
|
Tesla was born around midnight between July 9th and July 10th, 1856 in the village of Smiljan near Gospic, in the Lika region of the Military Frontier (Krajina) of the Habsburg Monarchy, now in Croatia. His father, the Rev. Milutin Tesla, was a priest in the Serb Orthodox Metropolitanate of Karlovci. His mother, uka Mandi, made home craft tools. Tesla had one brother and three sisters. He went to school in Karlovac (then Austria-Hungary, now Croatia), then studied electrical engineering at the Austria Politechnic in Graz, Austria in 1875. There, he studied the uses of alternating current. |
In 1881 he moved to Budapest to work for the telegraph company, American Telephone Company. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, later engineer to the Yugoslav government and the country's first telephone system. He also developed a telephone repeater also known as an amplifier. |
For a while he stayed in Maribor. He was employed at his first job as an assistant engineer. During this time, Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1882 he moved to Paris to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company on designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in 1882. After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating at home near Gospic.
Main Page Quotes |