My grandfather was full-blooded Croatian, so I always enjoy discovering new things about his cultural heritage. I recently found out that Edison's fiercest competitor was Nikola Tesla, a Serb from modern day Croatia. Tesla's father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church, which may help explain Tesla's later pledge of abstinence. Tesla studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic, where he memorized complete books with the help of a photographic memory. He worked for the National Telephone Company in Budapest and the Continental Edison Company in Paris. Along the way, he conceived many inventions and adaptations of electrical devices related to his field. In 1884, Tesla came to the US to work for Edison himself, and, in 1886, Tesla formed his own company, where he continued to develop advancements in electric engineering (that I couldn't begin to explain, thus the vagueness). Tesla and Edison butted heads in the late 1880s partly due to Edison's promotion of the less efficient DC (direct current) and Tesla's advocation of AC (alternating current). During his life, Tesla contributed research to radiation, remote control devices, radio, commercial electricity, wireless telegraphy, and energy conversion. After his death in 1943, Tesla was cremated and his papers confiscated and declared top secret, as officials like J. Edgar Hoover feared that Tesla's work on such hypothetical weapons as "the death ray" would fall into the wrong hands.
Tesla, circa 1890.
Interesting facts about Nikola Tesla: predicted his mother's death after a dream; was influenced by Hinduism and named devices after Sanskrit words; displayed obsessive-compulsive tendencies; was obsessed with pigeons; spoke eight languages; never married; openly expressed disgust for overweight people; was a close friend of Mark Twain; famously ripped up a contract that would have made him a billionaire; lived the last ten years of his life on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker; believed women would become the dominant sex in the future; was a vegetarian.
Publicity picture of Tesla's magnifying transmitter.
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