68 Fun Facts About Tesla

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

Alternating current: his induction motor and polyphase designs became the backbone of the modern grid, putting him opposite Edison in the 'war of the currents'.

In which present-day country was Nikola Tesla born in 1856?

Croatia: he was born to an ethnic Serb family in Smiljan, then in the Austrian Empire's Military Frontier.

Which company licensed Tesla's polyphase induction motor patents in 1888?

Westinghouse Electric, which used Tesla's system to win the contract to harness Niagara Falls.

At which 1898 New York exhibition did Tesla show a radio-controlled boat, his 'telautomaton'?

Madison Square Garden; Tesla then tried to sell the idea to the U.S. military as a radio-controlled torpedo, which showed little interest.

In which Rocky Mountain city did Tesla set up a high-altitude experimental station in 1899?

Colorado Springs, where his artificial lightning reportedly burned out a local power-station generator and caused an outage.

What was Wardenclyffe Tower, built on Long Island in 1901-02?

Wardenclyffe was a wireless transmission station meant to send messages across the Atlantic. A web cartoonist's crowdfunding campaign helped buy the site for a Tesla museum in 2013.

Which financier put $150,000 into Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower project?

J. P. Morgan put up $150,000 for the tower, then refused Tesla's repeated pleas for more money and the project collapsed.

Which rival beat Tesla in December 1901 by sending the letter S across the Atlantic?

Tesla believed Guglielmo Marconi's system copied his own patents. The U.S. Supreme Court partly vindicated Tesla's radio patents in 1943, months after his death.

Which famous author became a close friend of Tesla in middle age and spent time in his lab?

A photo shows Twain holding one of Tesla's glowing lamps.

Where did Nikola Tesla live from 1934 until his death in 1943?

The Hotel New Yorker was his last stop after decades of unpaid hotel bills; he died alone in room 3327 in January 1943.

In his last years Tesla spoke of a special bond with what kind of animal that visited him?

He fed the birds in Bryant Park daily and said one injured white pigeon visited him and that he loved her 'as a man loves a woman.'

In 1960 the tesla was adopted as the SI unit of what?

The tesla measures magnetic flux density, the strength of a magnetic field. Slovenian engineer France Avčin proposed naming the unit after Tesla.

Which rock star played Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige?

David Bowie turned the role down at first, so Nolan, a lifelong fan, flew to New York to persuade him in person.

Which Tesla invention throws artificial lightning at science shows?

Tesla designed the Tesla coil in 1891, the same year he became a U.S. citizen.

Which 1893 fair showcased Tesla's polyphase system, helping win the Niagara Falls contract?

Tesla's polyphase system lit up the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a public triumph in the war of the currents against Edison.

Which two men incorporated Tesla Motors in July 2003?

Eberhard was CEO and Tarpenning CFO. A 2009 legal settlement lets five people, including Musk, Wright and Straubel, call themselves co-founders.

How did Elon Musk first become involved with Tesla?

Led its 2004 funding round: Musk became chairman using his PayPal fortune, and he took over as CEO only in 2008.

The first-generation Tesla Roadster was built on the chassis of which British sports car?

Lotus built the Roadster's modified Lotus Elise chassis in England and shipped it to Tesla for final assembly.

Tesla's 2010 IPO made it the first American car company to go public since which automaker in 1956?

Ford went public in 1956, and no other American carmaker listed until Tesla's Nasdaq debut in June 2010.

From which automaker did Tesla buy the former NUMMI plant in Fremont for $42 million in 2010?

NUMMI had been a GM-Toyota joint venture. The Fremont Factory remains Tesla's first major assembly plant.

Which Tesla won Motor Trend's Car of the Year in 2013?

The Model S won by a unanimous vote, the first Car of the Year winner in the award's 64-year history not powered by an internal combustion engine.

Which Tesla is known for its 'falcon wing' rear doors?

The Model X's falcon-wing doors were among the problems that delayed its launch.

Which Tesla drew more than 325,000 reservations within a week of its 2016 unveiling?

Tesla called the Model 3's first week of pre-orders, about $14 billion in implied sales, the biggest one-week launch of any product ever.

The Cybertruck's angular body panels are made of what material?

The Cybertruck's unpainted stainless steel panels drew comparisons to low-polygon computer models when it was unveiled in 2019.

At the Cybertruck's launch event, what broke when Tesla's designer threw a metal ball at it?

Tesla billed the side windows as nearly unbreakable 'Armor Glass', yet both windows he hit cracked during the demo.

Which SpaceX rocket carried Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster into space in February 2018?

The Falcon Heavy's maiden test flight used Musk's cherry-red Roadster as a dummy payload, with a spacesuited mannequin called Starman at the wheel.

Which Japanese electronics company agreed in 2014 to invest in Tesla's Nevada battery Gigafactory?

Panasonic agreed to equip the Nevada Gigafactory near Sparks with machinery to make battery cells, in a plant first estimated to cost $5 billion.

Gigafactory Shanghai, begun in 2019, was notable as the first Chinese car plant to be what?

Giga Shanghai was the first car plant in China fully owned by a foreign company, where other foreign carmakers had needed Chinese joint-venture partners.

Which Tesla did Gigafactory Berlin start delivering to customers at its March 2022 opening?

Giga Berlin opened by handing customers Model Y Performance crossovers, while environmentalists still fought the plant's water use.

Which solar company did Tesla acquire in an all-stock deal in November 2016?

SolarCity was founded by Musk's cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive, and Musk chaired both companies when Tesla bought it.

To which city did Tesla move its headquarters in 2021?

Tesla moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Gigafactory Texas, just outside Austin, Texas, the site it had picked for its new factory.

What is the name of the humanoid robot Tesla first showed off in 2021?

Optimus was announced at Tesla's 2021 AI Day, where an actor in a robot body suit danced on stage before Musk promised a real prototype.

When Tesla unveiled Autopilot in 2014, what did Musk say its cars could do on private property?

Tesla said owners could call the car so it would come when summoned on private property, or have it park itself in the garage.

In July 2020, Tesla gained what distinction among car companies?

Tesla overtook Toyota as the world's most valuable automaker by market capitalization, even though Toyota had sold about 30 times more cars.

How much was the pay package for Elon Musk that Tesla shareholders approved in November 2025?

Shareholders approved the $1 trillion package, paid over 10 years only if Musk hits specific targets.

Which Class 8 truck did Tesla begin producing in 2022?

The Semi's first units went to PepsiCo's Frito-Lay at a December 2022 delivery event, five years after Musk had unveiled the truck.

Which newsmagazine named Nikola Tesla one of history's 100 most significant figures in 2013?

Time's 2013 list, drawn from the book Who's Bigger?, ranked Tesla 93rd, one place ahead of President Harry S. Truman.

In Tesla's own account, his promised $50,000 bonus at the Edison Machine Works turned out to be what?

Tesla wrote that the manager's promise 'turned out to be a practical joke', and he resigned; later retellings put the joke in Edison's own mouth.

Tesla claimed his 1930s 'death ray' could bring down how many enemy planes at 250 miles?

Tesla told reporters in 1934 that his 'death beam' could down 10,000 enemy planes and would make war impossible.

In which city is the Nikola Tesla Museum, holding his archive, located?

The Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade holds his urn, and his nephew had his papers and belongings shipped there from New York in 1951.

What sparked Tesla's interest in electricity as a teenager, by his own account?

Tesla wrote that his physics professor's demonstrations, using apparatus the teacher had invented himself, made him intensely interested in electricity.

Tesla's father Milutin worked as what?

Milutin was an Orthodox priest, but Tesla traced his own inventiveness to his mother, who made her own household tools.

Tesla's high-school teachers suspected him of cheating because he could do what in his head?

Tesla did integral calculus in his head at the Karlovac gymnasium and finished its course in three years, graduating at 17.

Which disease left the 17-year-old Tesla bedridden for nine months?

While cholera kept Tesla near death, his despairing father promised to send him to the best engineering school if he recovered.

Tesla studied at a technical college in which Austrian city, leaving in 1878 without a degree?

Tesla passed nine exams in his first year at Graz, but by his third he was failing, and one biographer suggests he may have been expelled for gambling.

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

Tesla reached Budapest to find the exchange unfinished, so he worked as a draftsman in the Central Telegraph Office until it opened.

Before emigrating to America, Tesla installed lighting for the Continental Edison Company in which city?

Charles Batchelor, who oversaw the Paris installation, moved to New York in 1884 and asked that Tesla be brought over too.

After his first company's backers abandoned him in 1886, Tesla was reduced to what job for $2 a day?

Tesla spent part of 1886 digging ditches, and later wrote that his high education 'seemed to me like a mockery'.

Tesla's 1888 licensing deal for his induction motor paid $60,000 plus a royalty of $2.50 per what?

Tesla later gave up his royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower so his licensee could survive the loan calls that followed the Panic of 1890.

Tesla explained his induction motor by using a rotating field to make what stand on end?

The copper egg stood on its end and spun at high speed, driven by the same rotating field that turned Tesla's induction motors.

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

The fire broke out at night low in the building, and Tesla's fourth-floor lab collapsed, destroying his notes, models and demonstration pieces.

Which millionaire bankrolled Tesla's 1899 high-altitude experiments?

John Jacob Astor IV put up money for the work, and 13 years later he died on the Titanic.

In 1899 Tesla claimed to have received strange signals that the press concluded came from where?

Tesla believed the repeating signals came from outer space, and reporters jumped to Mars; he described them in Collier's Weekly in 1901.

Tesla's bladeless turbine, demonstrated in 1906, eventually found commercial use in what?

Tesla assigned his disc-based speed-indicator patent to the Waltham Watch Company, so the idea ended up in car speedometers, not power plants.

In 1912 Tesla proposed wiring schoolroom walls with high-frequency electricity in order to do what?

Tesla's plan to make dull students bright by bathing classrooms in high-frequency waves won provisional approval from New York's schools superintendent.

Tesla's 1928 patent, one of his last, was for what kind of vehicle?

Tesla's vertical take-off aircraft would rise like a helicopter, then tilt forward so its wings took over for level flight.

Tesla made the cover of a leading newsmagazine in 1931 to mark what occasion?

For his 75th birthday, a young journalist gathered about 70 letters of congratulation from scientists and engineers, including Albert Einstein.

In 1937 the 81-year-old Tesla broke three ribs after being struck by what on a New York street?

The taxicab threw Tesla to the ground, but he refused to see a doctor, as he had almost all his life, and never fully recovered.

Which MIT professor examined Tesla's seized papers in 1943 and found nothing hazardous?

John G. Trump, uncle of future president Donald Trump, reported that Tesla's papers would not 'constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands.'

Which New York mayor read a eulogy for Tesla over the radio in January 1943?

Fiorello La Guardia read his eulogy over New York radio two days before Tesla's state funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

In his last years, Tesla lived on little more than milk, bread and what?

Tesla gave up meat, then almost all fish, and in his last years lived on little more than milk, bread and vegetable juices.

Where did Tesla build its first Roadsters in 2008?

Tesla assembled Roadsters in the service bays behind a former Chevrolet dealership in Menlo Park and used its showroom as a store.

In 2017 Musk promised Tesla would install what within 100 days of signing, or it would be free?

Tesla finished the South Australia grid battery ahead of its December 2017 deadline, so it wasn't free; it was then the world's largest lithium-ion battery.

Which German carmaker bought a stake of under 10% in Tesla in May 2009?

Daimler sold 40% of the stake to Abu Dhabi's Aabar within two months and cashed out the rest in 2014 for a reported $780 million.

Which car did a Tesla crossover overtake as the world's best-selling car in early 2023?

Tesla's crossover beat the Toyota Corolla in the first quarter of 2023, the first electric vehicle ever to top global car sales.

At what share price did Musk's 2018 tweet say he was considering taking Tesla private?

The $420 tweet cost Musk and Tesla $20 million each in SEC penalties, and Musk had to step down as Tesla's chairman.

Tesla's factory near Lathrop, California, builds which product?

The Lathrop plant, which Tesla calls its Megafactory, builds the Megapack, its utility-scale storage battery, inside a former JC Penney distribution center.

What do the numbers in Tesla's 4680 battery cell name refer to?

Tesla unveiled the 46 mm by 80 mm cell at its September 2020 Battery Day, and the name simply gives its diameter and height in millimetres.