He could memorize entire books and store logarithmic tables in his brain. From an early age, he demonstrated the obsessiveness that would puzzle and amuse those around him. Nikola Tesla was born in modern-day Croatia in 1856 his father, Milutin, was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church. In 1898, as Tesla’s plans to create a worldwide wireless transmission system became known, Wardenclyffe Tower would be Tesla’s last chance to claim the recognition and wealth that had always escaped him. Morgan that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, and the financier gave Tesla more than $150,000 to fund what would become a gigantic, futuristic and startling tower in the middle of Long Island, New York. And in the last days of America’s Gilded Age, Nikola Tesla made a dramatic attempt to change the future of communications and power transmission around the world.
I was a sorry witness of such doing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.”īut what his contemporaries may have been lacking in scientific talent (by Tesla’s estimation), men like Edison and George Westinghouse clearly possessed the one trait that Tesla did not-a mind for business. “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack,” Tesla once wrote, “he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison, who once hired him. His inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination.
That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. He spent days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him-pigeons-and his sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room.
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