Education
Going to school
Tesla began his schooling in his native Smiljan, in a German elementary school, continued it in Gospić where he completed his elementary schooling, and then went on to lower secondary school, a general programme Gymnasium, in Rakovac near Karlovac.
From 1870 to 1873 he attended a higher secondary school in Karlovac.
After Gymnasium he returned home and fell gravely ill with cholera, a disease caused by dirty water and a general lack of cleanliness. For nine months he was seriously ill, often hovering between life and death. This sickness was to define his life. First and foremost, it convinced his father that Nikola should not be a priest, and he agreed to send his son to a technical school. And second, revulsion toward squalor and the fear of falling ill again remained with Tesla throughout his life.
Tesla began his schooling in his native Smiljan, in a German elementary school, continued it in Gospić where he completed his elementary schooling, and then went on to lower secondary school, a general programme Gymnasium, in Rakovac near Karlovac.
From 1870 to 1873 he attended a higher secondary school in Karlovac.
After Gymnasium he returned home and fell gravely ill with cholera, a disease caused by dirty water and a general lack of cleanliness. For nine months he was seriously ill, often hovering between life and death. This sickness was to define his life. First and foremost, it convinced his father that Nikola should not be a priest, and he agreed to send his son to a technical school. And second, revulsion toward squalor and the fear of falling ill again remained with Tesla throughout his life.
Studies
Tesla studied technical sciences at the Technical University in Graz, but left before taking third-year examinations, and never completed this course of studies. According to some sources, in 1880 Tesla attended lectures at the Charles University in Prague, but no mention of his name can be found in the official registers.
Interesting aspects related to schooling
He studied at the Technical University in Graz at the same time as Antun Lučić, another great Croatian inventor – the man who made the commercial exploitation of oil possible, thus initiating the industrial revolution. Both have been included in the list of 200 most important Americans of all time, compiled by the American government – Tesla lit up America and Lučić industrialized it.
Tesla's spark of a genius was already evident while he was still in school. When encountering a problem that interested him he would devote all his time to it until he had solved it, and only then would he turn his attention to some other matter.
His thoroughness and attention to detail can also be perceived through his approach to Voltaire. Notably, during his studies he decided to read everything that Voltaire had ever written, and although he soon realized that the task involved several dozen volumes, he did so. But the effort – as he himself said – nearly killed him. And not only did he read it all, he learned it by heart!
Tesla described himself not as an inventor but as a discoverer of things that exist around us in nature, attributing his success in discovering such things to his innate ability to perfectly visualize things, processes and events.
All his experiments would first be completely developed and finalized in his mind, and only after their successful “completion” would he conduct them in “our” world.
Tesla often said that this ability had been with him since his very earliest years, and at times he could not differentiate between his imagination and reality – so much so that he had to draw his hand before his eyes to see whether something was real or merely his imagination.
The investigative and inventive trait he inherited from his mother, but the education given to him by his father was of enormous help. It comprised a variety of exercises - like guessing other people's thoughts, identifying mistakes in a style of expression, repeating long sentences or calculating mentally.
Those daily assignments were designed to improve memory and power of assessment and in particular to develop a critical and analytical approach.
He arrived in New York with four cents in his pocket (having lost the rest playing cards on the boat), a few of his poems, calculations for a flying machine, and a letter of recommendation from Edison's business partner, Charles Batchelor, in Paris.
Those four cents would today be worth about 85 cents. Back then, as is the case today, that sum was insufficient for even the most modest of meals.
And in the letter of recommendation it was written: “Mr. Edison, I know two great men. One is yourself, and the other is the young man standing before you.”
Curiosities related to inventions
X-rays
Tesla discovered X-rays before Röntgen did, but in 1895 fire destroyed his entire laboratory, which prevented him from fully developing his discovery.
The electron
It would appear that the discovery of electron, one of the most important discoveries in the history of science as a whole, also belongs to Tesla, although this has been attributed to J.J. Thomson.
In an article entitled “Electric discharge in vacuum tube” published in The Electrical Engineer, Tesla described his experiment with electrical discharge in a vacuum tube as a consequence of electrostatic interaction, i.e. the activity of charged particles.
J.J. Thomson reacted to Tesla's paper with his own article Note, claiming that such effects can be achieved even without the effect of electrostatics.
Tesla responded with an article Reply to J.J. Thomson's Note, in which he disputed Thomson's claim, pointing out the significance of the effects of electrostatics. He explicitly stated that the observed phenomenon is the result of “small, charged particles” moving at high velocity and colliding with molecules of rarefied gas. In other words, Tesla was clearly claiming that his experiment proved the existence of charged particles, while J.J. Thomson disputed this.
Five years later Thomson conducted a different experiment and proved the existence of electrons.
It is not clear how much his disagreement with Tesla in 1891 influenced his findings.
Radio
Tesla was the first to successfully, and publicly experiment with radiotelegraphy. But his assistant (apprentice), G. Marconi, left and began to conduct experiments with radiotelegraphy on his own, based on the knowledge he had gained while working with Tesla.
But when Marconi succeeded in establishing a link between Europe and America, the discovery was attributed to him. When he heard that Marconi had been awarded a Nobel Prize, Tesla commented on it in his own inimitable style: “Leave Marconi be; he is good chap; he's using at least 16 of my patents in his work.”
Tesla did win a court case against Marconi, but it was Marconi who (just like Röntgen and Thomson) received the Nobel Prize.
The famous contract between Tesla and Westinghouse regarding the production of electrical energy was worth US$1 million, plus 2.5 cents for each HP installed. When the company came to the verge of bankruptcy because they were unable to pay him, Tesla simply tore up the contract and released the company from any commitment to him.
Today, that contract would be worth at least an agreed US$22 million, and about US$140 million on the basis of installed power.
Tesla registered 272 patents in 25 countries, 112 of them in the USA alone.
His written legacy amounts to between 70,000 and 100,000 pagers. Regrettably, part of this (for reasons of national security) is being is retained by the FBI as being strictly confidential.
Tesla had a very small circle of close friends, including the writer Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain and Francis Marion Crawford.
Tesla spent the last years of his life feeding pigeons and living mostly from the annual annuity he received from his homeland (patent rights in the USA being valid only for 16 years, and that country not providing any form of merited or privileged pensions).
It is owing to Tesla that alternating current became widely used. His inventions based on alternating current laid the foundations for further advances in electrical engineering. He produced around 1000 inventions and patents, among them being the induction motor, three-phase system for electric energy transfer, generator and transformer for high frequency electric energy (Tesla coil) and others. Tesla was also one of the pioneers of radio technology: he discovered the system of remote control and signalling, discovered a new system of lighting, constructed high frequency alternators, discovered and patented the resonance principle for radio links, presented the concept of interplanetary telecommunications utilising ultra-short waves, and conceived the radar system in its entirety.
Tesla is, in fact, the father of the Internet, of remote control, of cruise missiles; his discoveries are within the roots of the American “Star Wars” programme, he envisaged trains “floating” on electromagnetic fields, television, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft...
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