One of the greatest inventors of all time Nikola Tesla (1856- 1943) gained everlasting fame with his contributions to electrical power and electrical engineering. He was a founder of the second scientific-technical revolution that began in the late nineteenth century and flourished to the full in the last century marked by unparallel increase in industrial production as well as the two world wars.
Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in the small village of Smiljan in the Lika region. This is where he began attending elementary school, which he left to continue in the town of Gospić after the tragic death of his brother and the family’s moving there. Upon completion of elementary school, he began attending high school in Gospić and in the 1871-1874 continued his education in the high school in Karlovac. In Graz, he studied at the Polytechnic School and completed it in 1879. The next year, he got his first job – he became assistant engineer in Maribor, and enrolled in the University of Prague.
After a two-year stay in Budapest as technical draftsman at the Central Telephone Office, he came up with the idea about the rotating magnetic field in 1882. The realization of this idea is to change Tesla’s life dramatically – in place of fixing and amending other people’s devices – he would proceed to focus on developing his own machines and contraptions such as the world has neither seen nor thought could exist.
For a time in the course of 1882, he stayed in Paris, where he worked with Continental Edison Company, and then in Strasburg, where he made the first model of the first induction motor. Governed by the thought that he would meet with a better acceptance of his ideas and inventions in America, Tesla arrived to the ‘Promised Land by ship in 1884. He took a job briefly with Edison, but in place of support was met with resistance and lack of understanding. This is why he soon founded his own company – the "Tesla Arc Light Co." in New York.
At the 1893 World Exhibition in Chicago, Tesla achieved great success. His electrical motors and lighting of Chicago with a bright light caused admiration not only among the exhibition’s lay visitors but also among the top savants in the areas of science and technology. Tesla has thus beaten favoured Thomas Alva Edison for building an electrical power plant on Niagara Falls. Tesla’s concept to use polyphase alternating-current generators was accepted. After the grandiose success of launching this hydro-electrical power plant in 1895, Tesla lost no time in basking in his newly-won fame but untiringly continued working on new inventions.
In the early 1890s, Tesla focused his attention on communication by radio waves at great distances and very high voltage and frequency alternating currents. He had built in Colorado Springs a radio station the power of which was 200 kW. Also, experimenting with a high voltage transformer, now called Tesla’s Transformer, Tesla was able to obtain voltage of as much as twelve million volts! Achieving something like this at the time was well-nigh inconceivable. In Colorado Springs, Tesla came up with the idea about transporting considerable quantities of energy without wires from a distance as well as about different possibilities of making use of the ionosphere.
The tireless inventor registered with the US Patent Office inventions in the area of radio technology and remote control of radio waves in the early years of the twentieth century. He began building a gigantic tower at Long Island, an island near New York City. His basic intention was to use the tower to for wireless energy transport and then subsequently as a long range radio station antenna. Unfortunately, his financier J.P Morgan backed out from the project and Tesla’s dream failed to materialize. The tower at Warden Cliff was destroyed by dynamite to appease at least in part the creditors by selling its components under price.
This was a great blow to the inventor who has spent his entire life working for the good of mankind. In a country where everything is measured with money no one remembered what Tesla had presented them with so they could feel the need to assist him in his days of loneliness and poverty. To put it in a nutshell, the world simply was not ready for the appearance of such a genius that Tesla was. It was only Tesla’s death on January 7, 1943, that reminded them that there was a man of enormous talent who cared not for money and material goods. This was a man who climbed all the way from a small village of Smiljan to the Olympian heights of science all alone. | 
