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Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (10 July 1856 - 7 January 1943) was a world-renowned Serb-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. more...

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Tesla is regarded as one of the most important inventors in history. He is well known for his contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work form the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

In the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture. After his demonstration of wireless communication in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Never putting much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished and forgotten at the age of 86.

His contribution was recognised and the derived SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field Tesla's legacy can be seen across the modern world wherever electricity is used. Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the fields of robotics, ballistics, computer science, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In his later years, Tesla was regarded as a mad scientist and became noted for making bizarre claims about possible scientific developments. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and New Age occultism. Contemporary admirers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century."

Early years

According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serb family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Austrian Empire, in the Croatian part of the Military Frontier, located in present-day Croatia. His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Tesla was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac, Croatia then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, Austria (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. He attended only through the first semester of his junior year and did not graduate. He then attended the Charles-Ferdinand branch of the University of Prague for one summer term where he studied physics and higher mathematics.

Read more at Wikipedia.org