Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born on  July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia).

Tesla, aged 34, circa 1890. Photo by Napoleon Sarony

Nikola's father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His mother was a housewife who was of Serbian descent. 

Tesla was born at midnight during a fierce thunderstorm. The midwife thought the storm was a bad omen, saying he would be a child of darkness. His mother replied, "No. He will be a child of light."

He was the fourth child out of five. He had one older brother, Dane, two older sisters, Angelina and Milka, and one younger sister, Marica.

The picture below shows Tesla's house (parish hall) in Smiljan where he was born, and the rebuilt church, where his father served. During the Yugoslav Wars, several of the buildings were severely damaged by fire. They were restored and reopened in 2006. 

By I, MayaSimFan, Wikipedia

Nikola was able to do integral calculus in his head, leading his teachers to believe he was cheating.
Nikola Tesla had a photographic memory.

Nikola Tesla's childhood cat, Macak, played a role in his famous contribution to science. decades later, he reflected upon the experience of static electricity after he stroked his black moggy. In a 1939 letter to a 12-year-old he wrote, "Is Nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? Day after day I have asked myself, what is electricity?"

Tesla got his first job in Budapest in 1882, working at a telephone company before moving to the United States two years later to work for Thomas Edison.

Edison once offered $50,000 to Tesla if he succeeded in improving the efficiency of his prototypical dynamos. Despite Tesla making a great deal of progress, Edison claimed that the offer was a joke.

They quarreled and soon Tesla started working on his own with other people investing in his work. He set up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. On May 16, 1888 Nikola Tesla delivered a lecture describing the equipment which would allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over long distances.

Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo-electric machine  in an 1888 U.S. Patent 390,721

Five years later, Nikola Tesla gave the first public demonstration of radio in St. Louis. In 1898, at the Electrical Exhibition held at Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla successfully demonstrated a radio-controlled boat. He was awarded U.S. patent No. 613,809 for a "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles."

Nikola Tesla installed the first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls in 1896. Around this time Tesla disavowed coal and oil in favor of renewable energy sources.

Nikola Tesla developed the idea for smartphone technology in 1901. By 1909, he'd conceptualized the first integration of data signals with telephony.

Tesla was 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall and weighed 142 pounds (64 kg) with dark, deep-set eyes, He had almost almost no weight variance from 1888 to about 1926.

He was also an elegant, stylish figure in New York City, a fastidious dresser who was fascinating company when he felt like being social. However, much of Tesla’s personal life remains a mystery, and he never married.

Nikola Tesla, c. 1896

The French actress Sarah Bernhardt was romantically interested in Tesla; however, he rejected her on the grounds that she distracted him from his work. 

Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain were good pals. They met at a club in New York and struck up a friendship. Tesla even helped Twain with some gastrointestinal issues by having Twain stand on an oscillating platform for 90 seconds, causing him to run for the bathroom!

He openly expressed disgust for overweight people. Once, Tesla fired his secretary solely because of her weight.

Nikola Tesla could not stand the sight of pearls, to the extent that he refused to speak to women wearing them.

Tesla was an advocate of sterilizing criminals and people with mental problems, and he believed that by 2100 people that aren't "desireable parents" shouldn't be able to breed.

Tesla was very fond of pigeons and took to feeding them at the window of his hotel room and bringing the injured ones in to nurse back to health.

Nikola Tesla once spent over $2,000 on an injured white pigeon. The amount includes building a device that comfortably supported her so her bones could heal. "I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life," he said of her. 

In 1922, Nikola Tesla imagined that his favorite pigeon told him that she was dying. When she actually did shortly after, he said that "something went out of his life and he knew his life's work was finished".

Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died of coronary thrombosis in a hotel room in Manhattan, New York City on January 7, 1943.

During World War II,  the Japanese built a death ray inspired by ideas from Nikola Tesla. The problem was that enemies would have to stand perfectly still for 10 minutes before it would work. 

Nikola Tesla once paid an overdue hotel bill with a 'working model' of his 'death beam'. He warned the management never to open it without taking proper precautions to avoid detonation. After his death, the box was pried open and they found nothing but a bunch of old lab components.

Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity after his death. However in 1960 the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. Since then his reputation has experienced a comeback in popular culture.

The statue of Nikoli Tesla in Silicon Valley provides free WiFi.