Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother managed the family’s farm. In 1863 Tesla’s brother Daniel was killed in a riding accident. The shock of the loss unsettled the 7-year-old Tesla, who reported seeing visions—the first signs of his lifelong mental illnesses.
Did you know? During the 1890s Mark Twain struck up a friendship with inventor Nikola Tesla. Twain often visited him in his lab, where in 1894 Tesla photographed the great American writer in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light.
Tesla says Ac current is more efficient than Dc . Edison make money with Dc current then the current war starts⁸
Obsessed with his work and known to be an exacting boss, Edison had an ego as incandescent as his light bulbs, a sense of his own greatness that was undoubtedly justified. He was also incredibly competitive, willing to do whatever was required to ensure that his idea won out.
Edison invented DC lighting, a safer solution to the often dangerous arc lamps
Born in Serbia, Tesla was a different kind of genius. Whereas Edison was an eternal experimenter and tinkerer, Tesla was a human calculator, and his ability to work out complex math and physics equations in his mind helped him achieve early career success in Europe.
After a nomadic adolescence spent traveling and taking classes across Eastern Europe, Tesla wound up in Hungary at the age of 25, hired to work as an electrical engineer at the Budapest Telephone Exchange. He excelled there, channeling the workaholic tendencies he’d displayed as a top student back in Croatia before dropping out of school. Within a year he was off to Paris to work for the Continental Edison Company, an offshoot of the inventor’s successful American business.
At that point, electricity was beginning to light up the streets of cities around the world. At first, most cities were using high-voltage arc lamps to illuminate the night sky, but while they shone bright and amazed a civilization that had throughout all of history been governed by the sun’s rise and fall, the early lighting technology also presented a problem: it was very dangerous. Arc lighting was fueled by power stations that pumped through more than 3,000 volts of electricity at a time, which often led to sparks, overheating and full-on explosions in public places, raining flickers of electricity down on pedestrians and starting fires with regularity.
Electricity generated by direct current (DC) was a far safer alternative, and once Edison developed a stable and long-lasting incandescent lightbulb, he set out to provide lighting to homes and buildings around the world. By 1882, his Edison Illuminating Company opened the world’s first central power station on Pearl Street in Manhattan. The company used direct current to deliver 110 volts of electricity to nearby buildings — it started out with 59 customers — and provided a significantly reduced risk of accidental mishap.
Tesla invented an alternating current power system
For the next two years, Edison’s DC electric generation spread the incandescent light to a growing number of cities across the country. But for its growing reach, it had a significant weakness: electricity delivered by direct current could only travel so far, especially in those early days. As a result, other inventors continued to develop what was called alternating current (AC), which could easily modulate voltage using transformers.
Tesla was one of those AC devotees. In 1882, while working for Edison’s Parisian outpost and out on a walk with a friend, Tesla was suddenly struck with the solution to an engineering challenge that had been vexing him for some time. His ability to visualize entire complex mathematical equations and feats of engineering came in handy, as Tesla dreamed up the mechanics of an AC-generating motor.
Developing and honing the alternating current generator became something of an obsession for him, and in 1884, when his American boss in Paris was summoned back to the United States, he suggested that Tesla emigrates to the west. And so in September of that year, Tesla arrived in Manhattan after a harrowing journey in which most of his possessions were stolen during a mutiny on the ship
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