Geniuses of Mankind – Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s legacy to mankind has been obscured by that of his one-time employer and rival, Thomas Edison. Tesla was an engineer and scientist who obtained more than 700 patents. While most famous for alternating current, induction motors, and electric generators, Tesla made significant contributions in the areas of x-rays, lighting, wireless communications, and many others.

Tesla was born in 1856 in the Austrian Empire city of Smiljan, which is now in Croatia. He was educated at the Technical University of Graz and later the University of Prague. After graduation Tesla worked as an engineer at the Continental Edison Company in Paris and in 1884 he emigrated to the United States where he worked for a time for Edison.

Tesla’s insistence on alternating current, as opposed to direct current which was favored by Edison, caused him to leave Consolidated Edison and found his own company. Unable to obtain sufficient financing for his own startups, Tesla ended up working with George Westinghouse, a bitter rival to Edison. Unfortunately, Tesla gave up his patent rights to Westinghouse, whose investors did not want to pay the royalties. These royalties would have made Tesla a billionaire by today’s standards.

The war of the currents, as it was called, was won by Tesla and Westinghouse, and they went on to build the first large scale power generation and distribution system in Niagara Falls, powering the city of Buffalo, NY in 1896.

Among Tesla’s many inventions must be included the Tesla coil, widely used in radio, and the wireless transmission of electricity. In the year of his death the US Supreme Court invalidated several of Marconi’s patents, thereby acknowledging Tesla’s primacy in the development of wireless telecommunications.

Tesla’s final years were spent living in a hotel in New York City. His increasing eccentricity isolating him from the world he had changed so much, but Nikola Tesla’s legacy to mankind lives on, every time we turn on the lights, listen to the radio, or fly a drone to create breathtaking videos.