Nikola Tesla
1856–1943 8 entries
Biography
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer whose work laid the foundations of modern electric power systems. He was born in Smiljan, in the Lika region of the Austrian Empire, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest, and studied engineering in Graz. After working in Budapest and Paris he emigrated to the United States in 1884 and worked briefly for Thomas Edison. His system of alternating current, backed by George Westinghouse, won out over Edison’s direct current.
In 1893 his system lit the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and soon afterwards it was used in the great hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls. He also worked on radio, the wireless transmission of power and remote control, and held some three hundred patents around the world. Brilliant but careless with money, he spent his last years in a New York hotel, where he died in 1943. The unit of magnetic flux density, the tesla, is named after him.
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