45 Fun Facts About Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to which electricity supply system?

Alternating current was winning out because it suited long-distance, high-voltage transmission, and his patents helped it beat direct current.

Although his parents were ethnic Serbs, Tesla was born in which present-day country?

Croatia: his home village of Smiljan lay within the Austrian Empire when he was born there in 1856.

Family legend says Tesla was born during what?

Lightning storm: the midwife called him a child of the storm, only to be told, the story goes, No, of the light.

To whom did Tesla credit his eidetic memory and creativity?

His mother never went to school, yet she invented tools and appliances to help with the work of home and farm.

Why did Tesla's teachers suspect him of cheating at school?

He did integral calculus in his head at the gymnasium in Karlovac, where his physics professor's demonstrations first drew him to electricity.

Which disease left the teenage Tesla bedridden and near death in 1873?

Cholera kept him in bed for nine months, and in despair his father promised to send him to engineering school if he recovered.

Tesla later wrote that as a young man he developed a mania for what, which greatly worried his parents?

Gambling: cards were his passion, and his father, who led an exemplary life, could not excuse the waste of time and money.

At which city's technical college did Tesla enrol in 1875?

Graz: there a professor's Gramme dynamo, with its sparking commutator, set Tesla on a problem he would chase for years.

Tesla's professor dismissed his idea for a motor without a commutator as what?

A perpetual motion scheme: the professor's verdict only spurred Tesla on, and the problem obsessed him for years until he solved it.

In which city did Tesla become chief electrician of a new telephone exchange in 1881?

Budapest: the exchange wasn't running yet when he arrived, so Tesla first worked as a draftsman in the Central Telegraph Office.

For which company did Tesla install lighting systems in Paris from 1882?

Continental Edison soon had him designing improved dynamos, and in 1883 it sent him on assignment to Strasbourg.

Tesla reached New York carrying plans for what?

A flying machine: he landed with four cents in his pocket, and 44 years later he patented an aircraft designed to rise vertically.

Soon after reaching New York, Tesla repaired, overnight, the dynamos of what?

An ocean liner: the SS Oregon, the fastest passenger steamer of its day, couldn't sail until he got both lighting machines running.

When investors abandoned Tesla's first company, what was he left holding?

Worthless stock: his arc lighting system was installed and running, yet the investors kept the earnings and he lost control of his patents.

What manual job did Tesla take for $2 a day during his 1886 hardship?

Ditch digger: within months a Western Union superintendent agreed to back his new inventions.

The Pittsburgh industrialist who bought rights to Tesla's patents in 1888 had earlier invented what?

Railway air brakes: George Westinghouse saw Tesla's patents as the missing link for sending power over long distances, and he hired Tesla too.

What did Tesla develop in 1887 that ran on polyphase current and needed no commutator?

An induction motor: Tesla said the motors he built then were exactly as he had imagined them, and he made no attempt to improve the design.

In 1891, the same year he invented his famous coil, Tesla became what?

A US citizen: the young immigrant had once judged America to be a century behind Europe in civilization.

What did Tesla give up when Westinghouse's company ran short of money?

His royalties: Westinghouse's backers had forced a renegotiation of their contract.

Tesla's high-frequency work produced early forms of which lighting?

Neon: he astonished lecture audiences by lighting glass tubes with no wires attached at all.

Which 1893 fair did Westinghouse light, with Tesla demonstrating at its exhibit?

World's Columbian Exposition: Westinghouse won the Chicago contract by substantially underbidding General Electric.

As a boy, Tesla told his uncle he would one day go to America and harness which natural wonder?

Niagara Falls: thirty years later the dream came true, when power from the new plant there, built on Tesla's system, reached Buffalo.

What destroyed Tesla's South Fifth Avenue laboratory in March 1895?

A fire: it destroyed years' worth of notes and equipment and set back his ongoing projects.

Whom did Tesla photograph in his lab in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light?

Mark Twain: the writer often visited Tesla's lab, where he took part in experiments himself.

What did Tesla demonstrate at Madison Square Garden in 1898?

A radio-controlled boat: Tesla showed it before a crowd, calling the model a teleautomaton. Patent examiners had doubted it could work until they saw it run.

Where did Tesla set up his high-altitude experimental station in 1899?

Colorado Springs: Tesla had concluded that the thinner air at high altitude would conduct electrical power better.

Which millionaire's investment helped fund Tesla's 1899 experimental station?

John Jacob Astor IV: with that backing, Tesla headed west and told reporters he would send a signal from Pikes Peak to Paris.

At his 1899 station, Tesla concluded that what could be used to conduct electricity?

The Earth: he went back to New York convinced he could send power around the world without wires, and began his giant tower on Long Island.

Where did Tesla believe his strange 1899 radio signals came from?

Another planet: he announced it to the press, and the claim was met with ridicule in scientific journals.

Who gave Tesla $150,000 in 1901 for a 51% share of his wireless patents?

J. P. Morgan: the financier later withdrew his support, and Tesla's tower project was abandoned.

What happened to Tesla's unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower in 1917?

Demolished: Morgan had withdrawn his funding years earlier, leaving the tower unfinished.

Who beat Tesla to a transatlantic wireless transmission in December 1901?

Guglielmo Marconi sent the letter S across the Atlantic, though Tesla believed Marconi's system copied his own.

Tesla patented a bladeless version of which machine?

A turbine: after his wireless tower project failed, Tesla's work shifted to turbines, and several of his bladeless designs were tested in the 1910s.

Which creatures did Tesla feed daily and nurse in his hotel room?

Pigeons: he grew especially devoted to one white female, which he said visited him at his hotel window.

Where was Tesla living when he died in 1943?

The New Yorker: his nephew rushed to his room there the morning after he died, and officials seized his belongings two days later.

Which magazine put Tesla on its cover for his 75th birthday in 1931?

The caption read All the world's his power house.

What did newspapers call Tesla's claimed 1934 superweapon?

A death ray: Tesla claimed it was a defensive weapon that would protect a country's borders.

Which engineer examined Tesla's papers for the US government after his death?

John G. Trump: after a three-day investigation, he concluded the papers held no new, sound, workable principles.

Which federal office impounded Tesla's papers after his death?

Alien Property Office: it impounded his trunks and papers, even though Tesla had been a naturalized American citizen for over fifty years.

Who delivered a eulogy for Tesla on 10 January 1943, three days after his death?

Fiorello La Guardia: the New York mayor honoured the inventor, and crowds filed into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for his funeral.

Which quantity does the SI unit named the tesla measure?

Magnetic flux density: the honour came in 1960, after years in which Tesla's work had slipped into relative obscurity.

Where are Tesla's ashes displayed in a gold-plated sphere?

Belgrade: his remaining papers and possessions were sent there in 1952, and a museum was created in his honour.

In 1915, a report said Tesla would share which award with a rival?

The Nobel Prize: yet neither man ever received it.

Which country paid Tesla $25,000 for the plans of his beam weapon?

The Soviet Union: in America, the banker he asked to fund a prototype had turned him down.

At 79, Tesla told reporters his oscillator could destroy which landmark?

The Empire State Building: an earlier version, he said, had shaken the streets around his Manhattan lab like an earthquake.