TESLA
Energising
Biography
From a village in the Austrian Empire to the laboratories of New York — the documented life of an engineer who reshaped how electricity reaches us.
Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, then part of the Austrian Empire and today in Croatia. His father Milutin was a Serbian Orthodox priest; his mother Đuka Mandić built small mechanical devices and had a remarkable memory, which Tesla credited for his own inventiveness.
He studied at the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac and the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, leaving without a degree. Work in Budapest and at the Continental Edison Company in Paris followed, and it was in this period that he settled on the idea of a motor driven by a rotating magnetic field.
He arrived in New York in June 1884, worked briefly for Edison Machine Works, and in 1887–88 filed the polyphase alternating-current patents that George Westinghouse licensed. The 1890s brought the Tesla coil, the Chicago World’s Fair, and the Niagara Falls power plant.
His most ambitious project, the Wardenclyffe wireless station, ran out of funding by 1906. He lived his later decades in New York hotels and died at the Hotel New Yorker on 7 January 1943, aged 86. His ashes are held at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.