Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan, then part of the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire and now located in Croatia. He was the fourth of five children in a family of ethnic Serbs. His father, Milutin Tesla, born in 1819 and died in 1879, was a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church, a man of words and theology. His mother, Georgina Mandić, known as Duka, born in 1822 and died in 1892, was the daughter of an Orthodox priest as well, and though she never received any formal education, she possessed an extraordinary memory and a remarkable gift for constructing home tools and mechanical devices. Tesla credited both his eidetic memory and his creative inventiveness to his mother's influence and genetic inheritance. His father's brother Josif was a lecturer at a military academy and published several mathematics textbooks, suggesting that intellectual gifts ran across multiple branches of the family.
Tesla's childhood in Smiljan and later Gospić, where the family moved in 1862, was marked by curiosity and an early aptitude for calculation. He attended primary school in Smiljan beginning in 1861, studying German, arithmetic, and religion. In 1870 he moved to Karlovac to attend the Higher Real Gymnasium, where his abilities in mathematics stood out. He went on to study engineering and physics in the 1870s at institutions including the Technical University at Graz and the University of Prague, though he left without completing a formal degree. He nevertheless acquired a thorough grounding in electrical theory and mathematics.
His entry into the professional world came through telephony and then the early electric power industry. In the early 1880s he worked for Continental Edison in Europe, gaining practical experience with electrical systems at precisely the moment when the commercial deployment of electric power was beginning in earnest. In 1884, at the age of twenty-eight, Tesla immigrated to the United States, carrying with him a letter of recommendation for Thomas Edison. He found work at the Edison Machine Works in New York City, applying his talents to practical problems of electrical engineering. The collaboration was short-lived. Tesla and Edison clashed over both technical philosophy — Edison championed direct current, Tesla believed in alternating current — and over payment for work. Tesla left and struck out on his own.
With the backing of financial partners who recognized his potential, Tesla established laboratories and companies in New York. The centerpiece of his early American career was the development of an alternating current induction motor and a suite of related polyphase AC patents. In 1888, Westinghouse Electric licensed these patents, paying Tesla a considerable sum. The polyphase alternating current system, which Westinghouse used to build a nationwide power infrastructure, became the foundation of modern electrical supply. When Westinghouse's AC system defeated Edison's direct current system in what history remembers as the War of the Currents, Tesla's technical vision was validated on a commercial scale. The hydroelectric generators installed at Niagara Falls in the 1890s, which powered the city of Buffalo using Tesla's AC system, became the emblem of a new age.
Tesla's ambitions extended far beyond motors and power distribution. Throughout the 1890s he pursued experiments with high-voltage, high-frequency electrical phenomena in his New York laboratory and later in Colorado Springs, where he built a large experimental station. He experimented with electrical discharge tubes, generated artificial lightning of extraordinary scale, and conducted early investigations into X-ray imaging. He built a wirelessly controlled boat, demonstrating the concept of remote control at a public exhibition and producing what was among the first wirelessly controlled vehicles ever constructed. In 1893 he made public pronouncements about the possibility of wireless communication, anticipating the principle that would underlie radio technology.
His grandest ambition crystallized in the Wardenclyffe Tower project, begun in 1901 on Long Island. Tesla envisioned the tower as an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmission facility that would distribute electricity around the globe without wires. The concept was breathtaking in its scope and decades ahead of what existing technology could support. His principal financial backer, J. P. Morgan, withdrew funding after determining that the project would not generate a profitable return, and Tesla was unable to find replacement investors. The tower was never completed and was eventually demolished. The failure of Wardenclyffe marked the effective end of Tesla's period of large-scale innovation and the beginning of a long financial decline.
In the 1910s and 1920s he continued to experiment with a range of inventions and ideas with varying success, but he never regained the resources or the public momentum of his earlier years. He lived in a succession of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills and retreating increasingly into solitude and eccentricity. He died in his room at the Hotel New Yorker on January 7, 1943, at the age of eighty-six.
Tesla's death was followed by years of relative obscurity, his contributions overshadowed by those of contemporaries and successors who benefited from the systems he pioneered. Recognition came slowly. In 1960, the General Conference on Weights and Measures honored him by naming the International System of Units measurement of magnetic flux density the tesla. The following decades brought a steady rehabilitation of his reputation, and by the 1990s popular interest in Tesla had grown into something approaching cult status. In 2013, Time magazine named him one of the hundred most significant figures in all of history. His name was later given to an electric vehicle company, a choice that connected his legacy to the technology that most visibly carries forward his belief in the transformative power of electricity. He remains a figure of almost mythic proportion, a man whose genius outran the age in which he lived.
