Childhood
Nikola Tesla was born in the village of Smiljan on July 10, 1856. It was midnight when he came into the world, and the night sky was illuminated up by lightning, which later on became his life-long preoccupation.
His father, Milutin, was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and his mother, Đuka, née Mandić. She was a housewife, daughter of an Orthodox priest, uneducated but of keen intelligence.
Here in Croatia people often quote Tesla's words, “I am proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland.” Those same words were sued by Vladko Maček in his message of congratulation, which Tesla answered with the same words.
To wit, in 1936 the President of HSS (Croatian Peasant Party), Vladko Maček, sent Tesla a congratulatory telegram (some sources say that it was on the occasion of his birthday, others that it was prompted by one of Tesla's discoveries), in which he addressed Tesla as “a son of Serbian stock and of the Croatian homeland.”
In his return telegram Tesla thanked him warmly and answered that he was equally proud of his Serbian stock and Croatian homeland.
According to Tesla himself, his family was once called Draganić. One speculation is that the Teslas were named after the Roman settlement of Tesleum, which is located close to Raduč – the birthplace of Tesla's father. Another is the tradition handed down in the family whereby members of one branch of the family was nicknamed “Tesla” due to the hereditary feature possessed by almost all of them – very wide, prominent front teeth which looked very much like the cutting edge of an adze – known as a tesla.
Rather famous is one of his first experiments which almost ended tragically – he jumped off the roof of his home with an umbrella (a parachute!). He spent his time making toys of technical character. On the Vaganac stream running through the village he constructed a mill-wheel and a fire-fighter's hose, i.e. a feeding pipe which jetted water from the stream.
His first invention of an engine: “...16 May bugs rotating a paper propeller!” Tesla explains how it all came about: “...It was as if I was following my first instinctive impulse, which later on came to absorb me totally: to use natural energy, to make it serve man. I did it by taking May bugs – which were a real pest in our parts – as the medium... I'd attach four May bugs to a small cross... and got quite some power.”
|