NICKOLA TESLAGROWING UP

By: Maddie Christensen

Nickola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Croatia. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother, Djuka Mandic, a very intelligent woman although unschooled, was somewhat of an inventor in her own ways of household appliances, some say she created things such as a mechanical eggbeater. Tesla watched his mother invent things to make her everyday housework be a little easier.

Tesla studied engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic

School. In the beginning of his studies he was interested in physics and mathematics, but soon became captivated with electricity. He started off working as an electrical engineer with a telephone company in Budapest in

1881.

Tesla moved to Strasbourg in 1883, there he privately

built an example of the induction motor and ran it

productively. He was unsuccessful in catching

anyone’s interest in Europe with this device so he

accepted an offer to work for Thomas Edison in New

York.

Tesla came to the United States in 1884. He spent the

next fifty-nine years of his productive life living in New York. While working in the United States he became so eager in improving Edison’s

line of dynamos while working in the lab in New

Jersey that disagreements of opinion with Edison over

direct current (DC) versus alternating current (AC) began. Disagreements

peaked and soon became war.

Tesla went on to working for Westinghouse in 1888

in order to develop the alternating current system. During this

time, electricity was still new and feared by the public due to fires and electric shocks, and it didn’t help that Edison was using scare tactics to scare the community

into believing that alternating current was much more dangerous

than direct current.

Built in 1895 the new hydroelectric power plant transmitted electricity an outstanding twenty miles

away. Large AC generating stations would

eventually connected across the nation and

became the type of power supplied to homes today.

On January 7, 1943, Tesla died at the age of 87 of a heart attack in his bed at

the Hotel New Yorker where he lived. He had never married, he spent his life creating, inventing and discovering. Before his death, he owned over 700 patents, which included the modern

electric motor, remote control, wireless transmission of energy, basic laser and

radar technology, the first neon and fluorescent illumination, the first x-ray

photographs, the wireless vacuum tube, the air-friction speedometer for

automobiles and the Tesla coil, used in radio, T.V. sets, and other electronic

equipment.