169 Facts About Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own.

Nikola Tesla's alternating current induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company eventually marketed.

Nikola Tesla built a wirelessly controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited.

Nikola Tesla became well known as an inventor and demonstrated his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures.

Nikola Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.

Nikola Tesla died in New York City in January 1943.

Nikola Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor.

Nikola Tesla's father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Nikola Tesla credited his eidetic memory and creative abilities to his mother's genetics and influence.

Nikola Tesla had three sisters, Milka, Angelina, and Marica, and an older brother named Dane, who was killed in a horse riding accident when Tesla was aged five.

In 1861, Nikola Tesla attended primary school in Smiljan where he studied German, arithmetic, and religion.

In 1862, the Nikola Tesla family moved to the nearby Gospic, where Nikola Tesla's father worked as parish priest.

In 1870, Nikola Tesla moved to Karlovac to attend high school at the Higher Real Gymnasium where the classes were held in German, as it was usual throughout schools within the Austro-Hungarian Military Frontier.

Nikola Tesla later wrote that he became interested in demonstrations of electricity by his physics professor.

Nikola Tesla noted that these demonstrations of this "mysterious phenomena" made him want "to know more of this wonderful force".

Nikola Tesla was able to perform integral calculus in his head, which prompted his teachers to believe that he was cheating.

Nikola Tesla finished a four-year term in three years, graduating in 1873.

Nikola Tesla said that this contact with nature made him stronger, both physically and mentally.

Nikola Tesla read many books while in Tomingaj and later said that Mark Twain's works had helped him to miraculously recover from his earlier illness.

Nikola Tesla enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz in 1875 on a Military Frontier scholarship.

Nikola Tesla's family did not hear from him after he left school.

Nikola Tesla returned to Gospic later that month when he was deported for not having a residence permit.

Nikola Tesla's father died the next month, on 17 April 1879, at the age of 60 after an unspecified illness.

In January 1880, two of Nikola Tesla's uncles put together enough money to help him leave Gospic for Prague, where he was to study.

Nikola Tesla arrived too late to enroll at Charles-Ferdinand University; he had never studied Greek, a required subject; and he was illiterate in Czech, another required subject.

Nikola Tesla did attend lectures in philosophy at the university as an auditor but he did not receive grades for the courses.

Nikola Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, in 1881 to work under Tivadar Puskas at a telegraph company, the Budapest Telephone Exchange.

Nikola Tesla began working in what was then a brand new industry, installing indoor incandescent lighting citywide in large scale electric power utility.

Nikola Tesla had several subdivisions and Tesla worked at the Societe Electrique Edison, the division in the Ivry-sur-Seine suburb of Paris in charge of installing the lighting system.

In 1884, Edison manager Charles Batchelor, who had been overseeing the Paris installation, was brought back to the United States to manage the Edison Machine Works, a manufacturing division situated in New York City, and asked that Nikola Tesla be brought to the United States as well.

In June 1884, Nikola Tesla emigrated and began working almost immediately at the Machine Works on Manhattan's Lower East Side, an overcrowded shop with a workforce of several hundred machinists, laborers, managing staff, and 20 "field engineers" struggling with the task of building the large electric utility in that city.

One of the projects given to Nikola Tesla was to develop an arc lamp-based street lighting system.

Nikola Tesla's designs were never put into production, possibly because of technical improvements in incandescent street lighting or because of an installation deal that Edison made with an arc lighting company.

Nikola Tesla had been working at the Machine Works for a total of six months when he quit.

Nikola Tesla had previous run-ins with the Edison company over unpaid bonuses he believed he had earned.

Nikola Tesla's diary contains just one comment on what happened at the end of his employment, a note he scrawled across the two pages covering 7 December 1884, to 4 January 1885, saying "Good by to the Edison Machine Works".

Nikola Tesla worked for the rest of the year obtaining the patents that included an improved DC generator, the first patents issued to Nikola Tesla in the US, and building and installing the system in Rahway, New Jersey.

Nikola Tesla even lost control of the patents he had generated, since he had assigned them to the company in exchange for stock.

Nikola Tesla had to work at various electrical repair jobs and as a ditch digger for $2 per day.

Later in life Nikola Tesla recounted that part of 1886 as a time of hardship, writing "My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery".

In late 1886, Tesla met Alfred S Brown, a Western Union superintendent, and New York attorney Charles Fletcher Peck.

In 1887, Nikola Tesla developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current, a power system format that was rapidly expanding in Europe and the United States because of its advantages in long-distance, high-voltage transmission.

Nikola Tesla found it a frustrating period because of conflicts with the other Westinghouse engineers over how best to implement AC power.

Between them, they settled on a 60-cycle AC system that Nikola Tesla proposed, but they soon found that it would not work for streetcars, since Nikola Tesla's induction motor could run only at a constant speed.

The money Nikola Tesla made from licensing his AC patents made him independently wealthy and gave him the time and funds to pursue his own interests.

Nikola Tesla found this new discovery "refreshing" and decided to explore it more fully.

In repeating and then expanding on these experiments Nikola Tesla tried powering a Ruhmkorff coil with a high speed alternator he had been developing as part of an improved arc lighting system but found that the high-frequency current overheated the iron core and melted the insulation between the primary and secondary windings in the coil.

On 30 July 1891, aged 35, Nikola Tesla became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Nikola Tesla attempted to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field inductive and capacitive coupling and conducted a series of public demonstrations where he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent light bulbs from across a stage.

Nikola Tesla spent most of the decade working on variations of this new form of lighting with the help of various investors but none of the ventures succeeded in making a commercial product out of his findings.

In 1893 at St Louis, Missouri, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, Nikola Tesla told onlookers that he was sure a system like his could eventually conduct "intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires" by conducting it through the Earth.

Westinghouse Electric asked Nikola Tesla to participate in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago where the company had a large space in the "Electricity Building" devoted to electrical exhibits.

Nikola Tesla visited the fair for a week during its six-month run to attend the International Electrical Congress and put on a series of demonstrations at the Westinghouse exhibit.

Nikola Tesla advised Adams that a two-phased system would be the most reliable and that there was a Westinghouse system to light incandescent bulbs using two-phase alternating current.

Nikola Tesla awarded a contract to Westinghouse Electric for building a two-phase AC generating system at the Niagara Falls, based on Tesla's advice and Westinghouse's demonstration at the Columbian Exposition.

In 1895, Edward Dean Adams, impressed with what he saw when he toured Tesla's lab, agreed to help found the Nikola Tesla Company, set up to fund, develop, and market a variety of previous Tesla patents and inventions as well as new ones.

In March 1896, after hearing of Rontgen's discovery of X-ray and X-ray imaging, Nikola Tesla proceeded to do his own experiments in X-ray imaging, developing a high-energy single-terminal vacuum tube of his own design that had no target electrode and that worked from the output of the Nikola Tesla coil.

Nikola Tesla noted the hazards of working with his circuit and single-node X-ray-producing devices.

Nikola Tesla believed early on that damage to the skin was not caused by the Roentgen rays, but by the ozone generated in contact with the skin, and to a lesser extent, by nitrous acid.

Nikola Tesla incorrectly believed that X-rays were longitudinal waves, such as those produced in waves in plasmas.

Nikola Tesla said he could feel a sharp stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out.

Nikola Tesla tried to sell his idea to the US military as a type of radio-controlled torpedo, but they showed little interest.

Nikola Tesla took the opportunity to further demonstrate "Teleautomatics" in an address to a meeting of the Commercial Club in Chicago, while he was travelling to Colorado Springs, on 13 May 1899.

Nikola Tesla saw this as not only a way to transmit large amounts of power around the world but, as he had pointed out in his earlier lectures, a way to transmit worldwide communications.

At the time Nikola Tesla was formulating his ideas, there was no feasible way to wirelessly transmit communication signals over long distances, let alone large amounts of power.

Nikola Tesla had studied radio waves early on, and came to the conclusion that part of the existing study on them, by Hertz, was incorrect.

Nikola Tesla noted that, even if theories on radio waves were true, they were totally worthless for his intended purposes since this form of "invisible light" would diminish over a distance just like any other radiation and would travel in straight lines right out into space, becoming "hopelessly lost".

Nikola Tesla mentioned them in a letter to a reporter in December 1899 and to the Red Cross Society in December 1900.

Reporters treated it as a sensational story and jumped to the conclusion Nikola Tesla was hearing signals from Mars.

Nikola Tesla expanded on the signals he heard in a 9 February 1901 Collier's Weekly article entitled "Talking With Planets", where he said it had not been immediately apparent to him that he was hearing "intelligently controlled signals" and that the signals could have come from Mars, Venus, or other planets.

Nikola Tesla had an agreement with the editor of The Century Magazine to produce an article on his findings.

Nikola Tesla explained the superiority of the wireless system he envisioned but the article was more of a lengthy philosophical treatise than an understandable scientific description of his work, illustrated with what were to become iconic images of Tesla and his Colorado Springs experiments.

Nikola Tesla made the rounds in New York trying to find investors for what he thought would be a viable system of wireless transmission, wining and dining them at the Waldorf-Astoria's Palm Garden, The Players Club, and Delmonico's.

Nikola Tesla approached Morgan to ask for more money to build the larger system, but Morgan refused to supply any further funds.

Nikola Tesla continued the project for another nine months into 1902.

In June 1902, Nikola Tesla moved his lab operations from Houston Street to Wardenclyffe.

Investors on Wall Street were putting their money into Marconi's system, and some in the press began turning against Nikola Tesla's project, claiming it was a hoax.

The project came to a halt in 1905, and in 1906, the financial problems and other events may have led to what Tesla biographer Marc J Seifer suspects was a nervous breakdown on Tesla's part.

Nikola Tesla mortgaged the Wardenclyffe property to cover his debts at the Waldorf-Astoria, which eventually amounted to $20,000.

Nikola Tesla lost the property in foreclosure in 1915, and in 1917 the Tower was demolished by the new owner to make the land a more viable real estate asset.

In 1906, Nikola Tesla opened offices at 165 Broadway in Manhattan, trying to raise further funds by developing and marketing his patents.

Nikola Tesla went on to have offices at the Metropolitan Life Tower from 1910 to 1914; rented for a few months at the Woolworth Building, moving out because he could not afford the rent; and then to office space at 8 West 40th Street from 1915 to 1925.

Nikola Tesla worked with several companies including from 1919 to 1922 in Milwaukee, for Allis-Chalmers.

Nikola Tesla spent most of his time trying to perfect the Tesla turbine with Hans Dahlstrand, the head engineer at the company, but engineering difficulties meant it was never made into a practical device.

Nikola Tesla did license the idea to a precision instrument company and it found use in the form of luxury car speedometers and other instruments.

In 1915, Nikola Tesla attempted to sue the Marconi Company for infringement of his wireless tuning patents.

Nikola Tesla attempted to market several devices based on the production of ozone.

Nikola Tesla tried to develop a variation of this a few years later as a room sanitizer for hospitals.

Nikola Tesla theorized that the application of electricity to the brain enhanced intelligence.

The whole room will thus, Mr Nikola Tesla claims, be converted into a health-giving and stimulating electromagnetic field or 'bath.

Nikola Tesla was incorrect in his assumption that high-frequency radio waves would penetrate water.

Nikola Tesla had a further office at 350 Madison Ave but by 1928 he no longer had a laboratory or funding.

Nikola Tesla lived at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City from 1900 and ran up a large bill.

Nikola Tesla moved to the St Regis Hotel in 1922 and followed a pattern from then on of moving to a different hotel every few years and leaving unpaid bills behind.

Nikola Tesla walked to the park every day to feed the pigeons.

Nikola Tesla began feeding them at the window of his hotel room and nursed injured birds back to health.

Nikola Tesla said that he had been visited by a certain injured white pigeon daily.

Nikola Tesla spent over $2,000 to care for the bird, including a device he built to support her comfortably while her broken wing and leg healed.

Nikola Tesla was forced to leave the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930 and the Hotel Governor Clinton in 1934.

In 1931, a young journalist whom Tesla befriended, Kenneth M Swezey, organized a celebration for the inventor's 75th birthday.

Nikola Tesla received congratulations from figures in science and engineering such as Albert Einstein, and he was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Nikola Tesla invited the press in order to see his inventions and hear stories about his past exploits, views on current events, and sometimes baffling claims.

At the 1932 party, Nikola Tesla claimed he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays.

In 1933 at age 77, Nikola Tesla told reporters at the event that, after 35 years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy.

Nikola Tesla claimed it was a theory of energy that was "violently opposed" to Einsteinian physics and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years.

Nikola Tesla told reporters he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, working on breakthroughs in metallurgy, and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought.

At the 1934 occasion, Nikola Tesla told reporters he had designed a superweapon he claimed would end all war.

Nikola Tesla called it "teleforce", but was usually referred to as his death ray.

Nikola Tesla described it as a defensive weapon that would be put up along the border of a country and be used against attacking ground-based infantry or aircraft.

Nikola Tesla tried to attract interest of the US War Department, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia in the device.

In 1935 at his 79th birthday party, Nikola Tesla covered many topics.

Nikola Tesla claimed to have discovered the cosmic ray in 1896 and invented a way to produce direct current by induction, and made many claims about his mechanical oscillator.

Nikola Tesla went on to tell reporters his oscillator could destroy the Empire State Building with 5 lbs of air pressure.

Nikola Tesla explained a new technique he developed using his oscillators he called "Telegeodynamics", using it to transmit vibrations into the ground that he claimed would work over any distance to be used for communication or locating underground mineral deposits.

Nikola Tesla's back was severely wrenched and three of his ribs were broken in the accident.

The full extent of his injuries was never known; Nikola Tesla refused to consult a doctor, an almost lifelong custom, and never fully recovered.

On 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, Nikola Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker.

Nikola Tesla's body was found by maid Alice Monaghan when she entered Tesla's room, ignoring the "do not disturb" sign that Tesla had placed on his door two days earlier.

Some of Nikola Tesla's patents are not accounted for, and various sources have discovered some that have lain hidden in patent archives.

Many of Nikola Tesla's patents were in the United States, Britain, and Canada, but many other patents were approved in countries around the globe.

Many inventions developed by Nikola Tesla were not put into patent protection.

Nikola Tesla's appearance was described by newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane as "almost the tallest, almost the thinnest and certainly the most serious man who goes to Delmonico's regularly".

Nikola Tesla was an elegant, stylish figure in New York City, meticulous in his grooming, clothing, and regimented in his daily activities, an appearance he maintained so as to further his business relationships.

Nikola Tesla was described as having light eyes, "very big hands", and "remarkably big" thumbs.

Nikola Tesla read many works, memorizing complete books, and supposedly possessed a photographic memory.

Nikola Tesla was a polyglot, speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.

Nikola Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration.

Nikola Tesla visualized an invention in his mind with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before moving to the construction stage, a technique sometimes known as picture thinking.

Nikola Tesla typically did not make drawings by hand but worked from memory.

Nikola Tesla noted in his autobiography that this affliction had developed his powers of observation and enabled him to discover a "truth of great importance", namely that every thought he conceived was suggested by an external impression.

Nikola Tesla was a lifelong bachelor, who had once explained that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities.

Nikola Tesla once said in earlier years that he felt he could never be worthy enough for a woman, considering women superior in every way.

Nikola Tesla's opinion had started to sway in later years when he felt that women were trying to outdo men and make themselves more dominant.

Nikola Tesla was asocial and prone to seclude himself with his work.

Nikola Tesla's friend, Julian Hawthorne, wrote, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink".

Nikola Tesla was a good friend of Francis Marion Crawford, Robert Underwood Johnson, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey.

In middle age, Nikola Tesla became a close friend of Mark Twain; they spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere.

At a party thrown by actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1896, Nikola Tesla met Indian Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda.

Vivekananda later wrote that Nikola Tesla said he could demonstrate mathematically the relationship between matter and energy, something Vivekananda hoped would give a scientific foundation to Vedantic cosmology.

Nikola Tesla later wrote an article titled "Man's Greatest Achievenment" using Sanskrit terms akasha and prana to describe the relationship between matter and energy.

Nikola Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife.

Nikola Tesla could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary because of her weight.

Nikola Tesla was quick to criticize clothing; on several occasions, Tesla directed a subordinate to go home and change her dress.

When Thomas Edison died, in 1931, Nikola Tesla contributed the only negative opinion to The New York Times, buried in an extensive coverage of Edison's life:.

Nikola Tesla's method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor.

Nikola Tesla claimed never to sleep more than two hours per night.

On one occasion at his laboratory, Nikola Tesla worked for a period of 84 hours without rest.

Kenneth Swezey, a journalist whom Nikola Tesla had befriended, confirmed that Nikola Tesla rarely slept.

Nikola Tesla then telephoned his dinner order to the headwaiter, who could be the only one to serve him.

Nikola Tesla dined alone, except on the rare occasions when he would give a dinner to a group to meet his social obligations.

For exercise, Nikola Tesla walked between 8 and 10 miles per day.

Nikola Tesla curled his toes one hundred times for each foot every night, saying that it stimulated his brain cells.

Nikola Tesla became a vegetarian in his later years, living on only milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.

Nikola Tesla disagreed with the theory of atoms being composed of smaller subatomic particles, stating there was no such thing as an electron creating an electric charge.

Nikola Tesla believed that if electrons existed at all, they were some fourth state of matter or "sub-atom" that could exist only in an experimental vacuum and that they had nothing to do with electricity.

Nikola Tesla was a believer in the 19th-century concept of an all-pervasive ether that transmitted electrical energy.

Nikola Tesla was generally antagonistic towards theories about the conversion of matter into energy.

Nikola Tesla was critical of Einstein's theory of relativity, saying:.

Nikola Tesla has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making.

Nikola Tesla claimed to have developed his own physical principle regarding matter and energy that he started working on in 1892, and in 1937, at age 81, claimed in a letter to have completed a "dynamic theory of gravity" that "[would] put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, as that of curved space".

Nikola Tesla stated that the theory was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world.

Nikola Tesla is widely considered by his biographers to have been a humanist in philosophical outlook.

Nikola Tesla expressed the belief that human "pity" had come to interfere with the natural "ruthless workings of nature".

In 1926, Nikola Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, and indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees".

Nikola Tesla made predictions about the relevant issues of a post-World War I environment in a printed article entitled "Science and Discovery are the great Forces which will lead to the Consummation of the War".

Nikola Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues.

Nikola Tesla wrote a number of books and articles for magazines and journals.

Nikola Tesla's legacy has endured in books, films, radio, TV, music, live theater, comics, and video games.

The impact of the technologies invented or envisioned by Nikola Tesla is a recurring theme in several types of science fiction.