“Soon it will be possible to transmit wireless messages around the world so simply that each person can carry and operate their own device.” Intelligent, pioneer, eccentric and deep dreamer are some of the characteristics attributed to the physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla. According to many, Tesla was the one who invented the future, as his inventions drastically changed people’s lives in the 20th century. His life has been full of upheavals and surprises, successes and disappointments, being a source of inspiration for many artists.
Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in the village of Smilian in what is now Croatia, which was then part of the Austrian Empire. His parents were Orthodox priest Milutin Tesla and Georgina Madic, a priest’s daughter. From an early age he demonstrated his talent for memorizing entire books and tables of logarithms, his appeal for learning foreign languages, and his ability to study for days and nights on only a few hours of sleep. During his studies at the Graz University of Technology. attended courses in Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry among others. What piqued his interest, however, was the study of electromagnetic fields and direct current.
Tesla was not to finish his studies in Graz. He became addicted to gambling and stopped attending university. resulting in the termination of his scholarship. After moving to Marburg and Prague, in 1881 he settled in Budapest, where he took a job as a technical draftsman at the city’s Central Telegraph Office. There he gained practical experience, which proved valuable for his later career. He was then employed by the Edison Electric Company in Paris and in 1884 boarded the ship “Saturnia” bound for New York
In New York he met his idol until then, Thomas Edison, who assigned him as his first job to repair the generator of the steamship “Oregon”. It didn’t take long for the two men’s disagreements to appear, which were related to both the subject of their work and their temperament. Edison was a practical man, who relied mainly on the experiences he had gained from his work, while Tesla was more theoretical, an intellectual who did not hesitate to take risks. Frustrated with his working conditions, Tesla resigned just six months after being hired by Edison’s company.
In 1887 Western Union telegraph company director A. Brown agreed to finance Tesla’s research on alternating current. His inventions also attracted the interest of the industrialist George Westinghouse, who invested a lot of money in the implementation of Tesla’s studies. Soon the “power war” between Tesla and Edison began, with the latter launching a major campaign of slander against the Serbian inventor.
In 1891 he invented the Tesla coil, an induction coil that was used to conduct experiments in electric current source lighting, X-ray radiography, and the mass transfer of large amounts of electricity without wires. Tesla coils made it possible to transmit and receive radio waves, earning him recognition as the inventor of the radio. This recognition was of course posthumous, as it was preceded by a long legal dispute with the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who, according to Tesla, used 17 of his own patents in his discovery.
In the last years of his life, Tesla was ostracized by the scientific community with the designation of a mad scientist. His eccentric character and extreme for the time positions on the possibilities of scientific and technological development contributed to the spread of this characterization. He passed away poor and alone in his room on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel, where he had been staying for the past nine years. The diary read January 7, 1943. Today, much of Tesla’s personal belongings, notes and blueprints of his inventions are kept in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
Column editor: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigoni-Despina Poimenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
