biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1856–1943)
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| biography:
| Electrical engineer and inventor, born in Smiljan Lika, Croatia. He studied in Austria and Czechoslovakia, and worked as an electrical engineer in Paris before arriving in the USA (1884) to seek support for one of his inventions. He went to work for Thomas Edison, but resigned (1885) and set up his own laboratory. Never good at personal relations or business, he was forced out of his firm, but he started another (1887), and finally succeeded with his original invention, an electro-magnetic motor that would be the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He sold the patents to Westinghouse (1888) but, after working with that company for a year, he left and thereafter worked on his own. He continued to produce some important inventions involving high-frequency electricity, including the Tesla coil, a resonant air-core transformer, and in 1893 his alternating-current system illuminated the Chicago World's Fair and led to the construction of the Niagara Falls hydroelectric generating plant (1896). His reputation among both scientists and the public was now at its peak, but he became increasingly more reclusive and eccentric. He continued to come up with new inventions, including those for wireless transmission of electricity and for radio-controlled craft, and also anticipated pulsed radar, harnessing solar power, and radio communication with other planets, but his eccentricities prevented him from getting either a fair hearing or profits. Although he could well have used the money, in 1912 he refused the Nobel Prize for Physics because he claimed that co-recipient Thomas Edison was not a true scientist. He spent his final years feeding and housing pigeons and living mainly off an annual honorarium from his homeland. The tesla, a unit of magnetic flow density, is named after him. |
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