He attended grammar school in Gospić and Karlovac, and studied electrical engineering in Graz and Prague. For the period of four years he was employed as and engineer in Budapest and Paris, and during that period he discovered the principle of the rotating magnetic field effect, and in Strasbourg he demonstrated the operation of the first alternating current motor without a switch.
In 1884 he left Europe and settled in USA. Three years later he established his own laboratory where he worked on numerous inventions. The most important ones related to the multiphase alternating current system that soon caused enormous changes in the electrical industry. In 1887 he had already registered a patent on dynamo, and applied for patents on induction motor, multiphase system of electrical power transfer. During that time, he also worked both on a generator and a transformer inventions. A year later, he sold his patents to George Westinghouse.
His most fruitful creative period dated from 1889 onwards, and was marked with experiments concerning high-frequency currents and their applications. In that period, he registered patents related to the electrical lightening. Almost at the same time, he stared with experiments in the area of radio-engineering and on methods of wireless electrical power transfer.
Out of some 700 inventions attributed to Nikola Tesla, several dozens have been widely applied in practice. Thus today, the high-frequency resonance transformers we call Tesla transformer, as well as currents resulting from its work bear his name.
The history remembers him as the author of the first alternating current hydro-power plant erected at the Niagara Falls, as well as he was the first to demonstrate a ship wireless distance control. Nikola Tesla explored the Earth electromagnetic field, and is also linked to the X-Rays discovery, to the possibility of breaking of an atomic nucleus by means of electrostatic high-voltage generators and with many other, still insufficiently revealed, accomplishments.
In his memory, on the occasion of his 100th birth anniversary, the unit for magnetic induction (magnetic flow density) was named tesla (T).
Communications Ericsson Nikola Tesla
