Nikola Tesla-Nikola Tesla was the son of an Orthodox priest. His mother, in spite of her lack of formal education, was a remarkably capable woman who invented numerous household devices and developed a prodigious memory for epic poetry. Tesla was later to attribute his own development as an inventor to her influence. When he was six, the family moved to the city of Gospic, and Tesla excelled at the local school, particularly in languages and mathematics. From his earliest years he showed a remarkable aptitude for solving mechanical problems and the rigid self-discipline and unshakable self-confidence that were to lead him to success. As a boy, he frequently suffered from ill health. In 1875, Tesla entered the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz, where he studied compulsively. Even at this young age he was occupied with the problem of the feasibility of using alternating current for the distribution of electrical energy. His solution, when it came, was to revolutionize the world of electrical engineering .
In 1881, he traveled to Budapest and found a lowly position in the Central Telegraph Office. While in Hungary he suffered from one of the nervous disorders that were to be a regular feature of his life, but following his recovery came a significant moment. One evening he was walking toward the sunset reciting a passage from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust , when the principle of the rotating magnetic field came to him in a sudden flash of realization, and he knew that he had the solution to the problem of the alternating current system. At this time, however, he had neither time nor means to build the machine he could see so clearly in his mind. In 1882, he moved to Paris, where he secured a job with the Continental Edison Company. Two years later, in 1884, armed with a splendid recommendation from the manager of the company, a former associate of Thomas Alva Edison , Tesla sailed for the richer pastures of America, arriving in New York in June of that year. The stage was set for Tesla’s brilliant and extraordinary career.
Edison was impressed by Tesla and offered him a job. The two great inventors were vastly different in method and personality, however, and were not destined to have a long working relationship. Tesla resigned over a disagreement about financial compensation for his redesign of Edison’s dynamos. Tesla’s reputation had been growing, however, and a group of financiers offered him a company under his own name, for which Tesla developed an improved and more economical arc lamp . However, he was given little control over the company, and there was no scope for his large ambitions. He soon resigned. For the next year, his life was difficult, and he was forced to take any job that came along in order to support himself.By 1887, his luck changed, and so began a decade of high achievement and recognition. A. K. Brown, of the Western Union Telegraph Company, became interested in Tesla’s ideas concerning alternating current, and this quickly led to the formation of the Tesla Electric Company. In the same year Tesla filed his first patents for the alternating current, and in 1888 he was invited to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. He made such an impact that another inventor and industrialist, George Westinghouse , showed keen interest. Westinghouse soon negotiated a contract with Tesla for his polyphase system of alternating current dynamos, a system that would allow power to be economically distributed over large distances. This gave rise to a bitter rivalry between Westinghouse, armed with Tesla’s system, and Edison, whose company was committed to using the direct current system; it became known as the “battle of the currents.”