Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 to his father Milutin and mother Djuka who were both Serbian by birth. Tesla’s father was an Orthodox priest, gifted writer and poet. Much of Tesla’s childhood was spent reading in his father’s extensive library. His mother was a very hard working woman who often invented appliances to help around the farm, one being a mechanical eggbeater. Later Nikola would attribute all his inventive abilities to his mother.
Tesla’s education was started at home and later he attended school in Croatia. His genius was recognized early as he was able to solve calculus in his mind, prompting his teachers to think he was cheating. While visiting his uncle he saw an etching of Niagara Falls and envisioned a giant water-wheel being turned to generate power. He told his uncle he would one day move to America to capture energy and thirty years later he did exactly that.
His passion for mathematics and science was constantly hindered by his father who urged him to become a priest. Upon contracting cholera at age seventeen his father promised him if he survived he could attend the Austrian Polytechnic School at Graz to study engineering. That promise became a reality and Tesla began his study of mechanical and electrical engineering.
Upon being shown a new Gramme dynamo that employed direct current (DC) and could be used as both a motor and generator, the young scientist had his first major breakthrough. Tesla questioned if it were possible to do away with the inefficient sparking connections known as commutators; Tesla’s professor laughed and said that it would be like building a perpetual motion machine. Tesla would be obsessed with a solution that lay in electric currents being alternated.
At age twenty-four while living in Budapest the answer would come to him while walking with a friend reciting poetry. He used a stick to draw his solution in the sand which six years later would be shown to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This moment marked the invention of the induction motor, an advance that would soon change the world.
After his discovery in Budapest, Tesla was offered work by electric power companies in Strasbourg and Paris to improve their DC generation facilities. While in Germany and France he was unable to sell investors on his ideas about an efficient AC motor and felt in order to realize his dream he would have to cross the ocean to America and meet Thomas Alva Edison, who at the time was labeled the greatest electrical engineer in the world.
This educational article was written by Matthew Jorn
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