Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Serbia during a lightning storm.
His mother, it is said, claimed he would be a “Man of Light”. Later he was the first human
to produce artificial lightning, and his Alternating Current inventions eventually
illuminated the entire world.
Nikola was the youngest of five children. His father, Milutin, was a Serbian Orthodox Priest;
his mother, Duka, also the daughter of a Serbian Priest.
At age 17, Nikola contacted cholera and was bedridden for nine months. After he recovered,
although Milutin wanted Nikola to enter the clergy, he eventually consented to young Nikola’s
passion to study Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics instead. Milutin secured for his son
a military scholarship
at Graz Polytechnic University in Austria which entailed 4-years of military
service after graduation. But Milutin suggested that Nikola spend a year regaining his strength
in solitude in the woods before journeying to Graz. Tesla packed numerous books and off he went.
The year of recovery possibly was Milutin’s plan to save Nikola from military conscription.
Nikola studied two years at the Graz, never graduating, but achieving highest honors and the
laudation of his professors. He later audited courses at the University of Prague.
Graz Polytechnic Institute
Yale University
Columbia University
University of Paris
Vienna Polytechnic Institute
University of de Poitiers
Unive
rsity of Beograd
University of Prague
University of Brno
University of Zagreb
Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest
University of Grenoble
University of Sophia
Nikola Tesla’s Early Life
Despite the fact that Tesla never finished college studies, he was highly educated in the
Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. During his lifetime he was awarded 13 Honorary Doctorates
from prestigious European as well as American universities:
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In addition to his impressive Doctoral Awards, Tesla spoke Serbian, Latin, German, French, Italian,
and English fluently, and could mentally compute Calculus as well as Engineering Design.
George Westinghouse spent only 3-months at Union College in Schenectady, NY, but received
his first Patent at age 19 and later garnered an Honorary Doctorate from Union College.
Elon Musk, a Stanford Graduate School drop-out, holds a dual degree in Physics and Economics
from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School. He has received 2 Honorary Doctorates.
In 1884 Tesla was encouraged to join Thomas Edison’s New York City facility where he worked
for six months at $18/week.
As a college drop-out, Tesla is joined by a pantheon of geniuses who never finished college:
Nikola Tesla’s American Achievements
Prior to coming to the United States, Tesla worked as an engineer and consultant to two
American companies in Budapest and Paris. It was during this time that Tesla conceived his
revolutionary alternating current rotating magnetic field motor, despite the fact that all
electricity was exclusively direct current at the time.
It was here that Edison offered Tesla $50,000 if he could improve several of Edison’s failing
direct current generators in New York City.
When Tesla completed the project in a few months, Edison refused to pay him, claiming,
“You don’t understand our American humor,” and instead offered Tesla
a paltry increase of $10/week. Tesla quit.
In 1889, George Westinghouse bought Tesla’s AC patents for $25,000 cash,
$50,000 in stock, and Royalties of $2.50 per Horsepower of electricity produced.
These Royalties could have made Tesla the world’s first billionaire.
In 1888, Tesla patented his AC rotating magnetic field induction motor,
considered one of the top ten greatest inventions of all time.
Tesla resorted to ditch-digging for $2/day in order to subsist. Eventually, Tesla joined an
engineer and a lawyer and formed the Tesla Electric Company.
He soon was offered a position by two New Jersey entrepreneurs to design street arc-lighting.
But after Tesla successfully designed and patented a new arc-light,
the entrepreneurs dissolved the company, le
aving Tesla penniless.
03
Tesla’s multiphase AC dynamos produced all the electricity for the Fair.
When a defiant Edison refused to sell his screw-in light bulbs to the Expo,
Westinghouse produced over 200,000 of his own plug-in bulbs.
27 million visitors paid 25¢ to enter the Expo and witnessed the brilliance
of Tesla’s AC generated lighting.
The Expo extended 350 acres, from Elmwood Avenue to Delaware Avenue and from
Lincoln Parkway to the RR Line south of Hertel Avenue.
Eight million visitors (at 50¢ each) witnessed the magic of Tesla’s AC illumination.
The result of this great development of electric power
will be that the Falls and Buffalo
will join each other and become one great city.
United, they will form the greatest city in the world.
On November 15, 1896, Buffalo, NY became the first city on planet Earth
to receive long-distance AC electricity. To celebrate this momentous occasion,
Buffalo and the State of New York held “The Pan American Exposition” in 1901.
Together Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse won the contract to produce
AC electricity over Edison’s proposed direct current system for the 1893
Chicago Columbian Exhibition World’s Fair, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.
Tesla attended the Expo as did Edison and President William McKinley.
Another dominant attraction, to rival Paris’s newly erected Eiffel Tower, was the
steam powered 265-ft “Ferris Wheel” designed by GW Carver Ferris, a 33-yr old
graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Ferris died 4-yrs later.
It is truly ironic that the Chicago Expo definitively proved the superiority of AC
electricity through the brilliant work of Tesla and Westinghouse, which ultimately
changed our global civilization, yet the name of Ferris lives on forever worldwide
due to an amusement park ride.
Tesla, the Controlling Engineer of the Niagara Power Project, surveyed progress
at the Falls on July 19, 1896 with George Westinghouse. Tesla prophesied :
Tesla and Westinghouse next won the Niagara Power Project contract to transmit AC
electricity from the Falls to Buffalo, the first City on the planet to be so honored.
A two mile tunnel was engineered from the Rapids to the Niagara River to
hydro-drive eleven Tesla patented AC 5000 HP generators.
04
President McKinley was shot on that fateful September 6 visit. He was treated
at the Expo Emergency Hospital which ironically had no interior electric lights.
Later the President was taken by an electric ambulance to a friend’s house on
Delaware Avenue where Canisius High School stands today. He died there 8 days later.
With the success of the Chicago World’s Fair, the Niagara Power Project
and the Buffalo Pan American Expo, the “AC/DC War of the Currents” concluded
triumphantly for Tesla and Westinghouse. As the 20th century began, Tesla turned
his creativity to developing the means of transmission of wireless communication
and wireless power. He designed and built laboratories in Colorado Springs and
Wardenclyffe on Shoreham, Long Island.
“It was the journey of
God’s own Lightning
to the employ of mankind”
-Buffalo Enquirer, 1896
05
As disheartening as it was to receive credit posthumously for inventing
Radio, Tesla invented and received patents for
AC Polyphase Induction Motors
AC Polyphase Induction Generators
Hydro-electric Generators
Wireless Telegraphy (Radio)
Remote Control
Speedometers
and several hundreds of other inventions.
He did pioneering and break-through research in
Fluorescent and Neon Lights
X-rays
Micro-waves
Radar
Robotics
Solar Energy
Wireless Communication
... invented Wireless Telegraphy (Radio).
He was granted a US patent for Radio in 1900.
In 1903 Guglielmo Marconi submitted a Wireless Telegraphy patent
using several of Tesla’s patented ideas and therefore was denied a patent.
However, in 1904, the US Patent Office, reversing its decision, issued
a patent to Marconi, and in 1909 Marconi was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing Radio.
Tesla never won a Nobel Prize. But three months after his death in
1943, the US Supreme Court reinstated Tesla’s patents over Marconi’s.
The US Patent Office issued this rejection:
Many of the claims (of Marconi) are not patentable over
Tesla’s patent numbers....the amendment to overcome said
references as well as Marconi’s pretended ignorance of the nature of
a “Tesla Oscillator” being little short of absurd...the term
“Tesla Oscillator” (Tesla Coil) has become a household term on
both continents...
NikolaTesla
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Tesla never married, explaining:
“Marriage is for an Artist, yes; for a Musician, yes;
for a Writer, yes; but for an Inventor, no.
The first three must gain inspiration from a woman’s influence
and be led by their love of finer achievement,
but an Inventor has so intense a nature with so much of it in wild,
passionate quality that in giving himself to a woman he might love,
he would give everything and so take everything from his chosen field...
It is a pity, too, for sometimes we feel so lonely...”
Tesla had many friends, some quite famous, such as
Mark Twain and Stanford White.
But he valued solitude.
He observed that
“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude.
No big laboratory is needed in which to think.
Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences
Be alone, that is the secret of invention;
be alone, that is when ideas are born.
That is why many of the earthly miracles
have had their genesis in humble surroundings.”
To celebrate the City of Buffalo as the first Electric City on planet Earth, a gala
“Electric Banquet” was held at the then newly built Ellicott Square Building on January 12, 1897.
There were many guest speakers; Tesla was scheduled to present the keynote address
but had to leave early to catch a train to New York City.
“We shall hope that other cities...will soon follow Buffalo’s lead.
This fortunate city herself is to be congratulated.
With resources now unequaled, with commercial facilities and
advantages such as few cities in the world possess, and with the
enthusiasm and progressive spirit of its citizens,
it is sure to become one of the greatest industrial centers of the globe.”
Nikola Tesla’s Buffalo Connection
He said this about Buffalo:
07
Tesla never owned a home or a horse or an automobile.
He lived his entire life in America in hotels.
He lived at these New York City Hotels:
The Saint Regis
The Governor Clinton
The Pennsylvania
The Waldorf-Astoria
The New Yorker
He arrived in the US with 4 cents and died on
January 7, 1943, alone and impoverished.
His last 10 years at The New Yorker Hotel
were funded by the Westinghouse Corporation.
And Tesla was not an avaricious man:
Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it.
All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made
new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.
The desire that guides me in all I do is the desire to
harness the forces of nature to the service of mankind.
In 1907 George Westinghouse asked Tesla to renegotiate his Royalty Contract.
Loyal to his friend, Tesla tore up the Contract to help the company survive.
He was owed $300 million; he was given $60,000
Tesla was a Vegetarian long before it was popular:
He argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomical meat when large numbers
of people were starving. He believed that plant food was “superior to meat
in regard to both mechanical and mental performance.”
I think...that vegetarianism is a commendable
departure from the established barbarous habit.
He also argued that animal slaughter was “wanton and cruel”.
Tesla gave up smoking and coffee at an early age; he enjoyed an occasional wine.
In his final years, he subsisted on milk and crackers.
08
How the United States Honored Nikola Tesla
40 years after Tesla died, the US Postal Service issued a
20¢ stamp with his likeness on it.
Days after Tesla was found deceased in his hotel
room in 1943, the Department of Justice raided his quarters searching
for war-related documents due to his previous announcement of having invented
a device that would end all wars.
Astronomers named Asteroid # 2244 after Tesla
and a small crater on the “Far Side” of the Moon
Physicists named a unit of Magnetic Flux Density after Tesla.
The Tesla Statue in Niagara Falls, NY was donated in 1976 by the government of Yugoslavia.
The US Navy named one of their 300 ”Ugly Duckling” cargo ships after Tesla
during World War II.
Nikola Tesla was
The Mozart of Invention
A Poet of Science
A Passionate Humanitarian
A Serbian Immigrant
An American Citizen
A Fellow New Yorker
Tesla was an elegant man. His mathematics, physics, and inventions were elegant.
The elegant statue of Nikola Tesla in Nikola Tesla Park, Buffalo was presented by the
BNNTC* in gratitude for Tesla’s timeless
contributions to humankind ...
and to encourage posterity to pay long-overdue appreciation to Nikola Tesla.
*The Buffalo Niagara Nikola Tesla Council, Inc
Martin McGee Paul Swisher
Stephen J Lestingi Francis S Lestingi, PhD
acknowledge most gratefully the generous assistance of
our Community Project Contributors
