NICKOLA TESLA GROWING 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 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.