In 18 he was granted more than 30 patents for his inventions and invited to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on his work. Nikola Tesla and WestinghouseĪfter an unsuccessful attempt to start his own Tesla Electric Light Company and a stint digging ditches for $2 a day, Tesla found backers to support his research into alternating current. Edison demurred, saying, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.” Tesla quit soon after. After months of experimentation, Tesla presented a solution and asked for the money. At one point Edison told Tesla he would pay $50,000 for an improved design for his DC dynamos. He worked there for a year, impressing Edison with his diligence and ingenuity. Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 and was hired as an engineer at Thomas Edison’s Manhattan headquarters. Two years later he immigrated to the United States. Later that year he moved to Paris and got a job repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison Company. In 1882, while on a walk, he came up with the idea for a brushless AC motor, making the first sketches of its rotating electromagnets in the sand of the path. Tesla studied math and physics at the Technical University of Graz and philosophy at the University of Prague.

Twain often visited him in his lab, where in 1894 Tesla photographed the great American writer in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light. The shock of the loss unsettled the 7-year-old Tesla, who reported seeing visions-the first signs of his lifelong mental illnesses.ĭid you know? During the 1890s Mark Twain struck up a friendship with inventor Nikola Tesla. In 1863 Tesla’s brother Daniel was killed in a riding accident.

His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother managed the family’s farm. Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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