II.

Tesla’s Life

Tesla was born to Serbian parents in Smiljan, Croatia (then part of Austria–Hungary). His father was a priest of the local Serbian Orthodox Church. Tesla was very clever as a child and liked to write poetry and experiment. His parents wanted him to follow his father and become a priest, but Tesla developed an interest in scientific pursuits while he was at the Real Gymnasium in Karlovac from 1871 to 1877. He studied engineering at the Technical University in Graz, Austria, from 1877 to 1880. In 1880 he went to the University of Prague to continue his studies, but the death of his father caused him to leave without graduating.

In 1881 Tesla went to Budapest as an engineer for a telephone company and a year later took up a similar position in Paris. He went to the United States in 1884 and worked for American inventor Thomas Edison for a year before setting up his own workshop. For much of his time in the United States, Tesla worked with American industrialist George Westinghouse, who bought and successfully developed Tesla's patents, leading to the introduction of alternating current for power transmission. Tesla became a United States citizen in 1889. After his mother’s death in 1892, he became increasingly withdrawn and eccentric. In 1912 both he and Edison were proposed for the Nobel Prize in physics, but Tesla refused to be associated with Edison, who he believed had conducted an unscrupulous campaign for the adoption of direct current. Neither inventor received the prize. Tesla neglected to patent many of his discoveries and made little profit from them. He lived his last years as a recluse and died in New York.