Nikola Tesla

(10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943)

was a Serbian inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen.

According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospic, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia.

Nikola Tesla - Great Scientist, Forgotten Genius

by Christopher Bird and Oliver Nichelson

In the Pike’s Peak mountain range, overlooking Colorado Springs, an eccentric Serbian-born inventor began at the dawn of the twentieth century a series of experiments on electrical properties of the atmosphere in a newly built laboratory 8,000 feet above sea level. Ringing the laboratory were freshly painted signs warning all who chanced to stumble onto the premises that their lives were in danger.

Probing the heavens from atop the laboratory’s roof was a 154-foot mast, anchored by guy-wires, supporting at its peak a hollow copper ball 4 feet in diameter. Its purpose was to collect and store an electrical charge inconceivably large for its day.

The new installation was the brain-child of Nikola Tesla, the immigrant from Austro-Hungary who, only a few years earlier, had developed the means to found a new electrical industry in North America. The invention making this possible was the alternating current generator which today generates powers for billions of people all over the globe.