NIKOLA TESLA: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

     Nikola Tesla, who discovered the rotating magnetic field, which is the
     basis of practically all alternating-current machinery, has been
     called the genius who ushered in the power age.

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     Nikola Tesla was born at precisely midnight between July 9/10, 1856,
     in the village of Smiljan, province of Lika (Austria-Hungary, now
     Croatia). His father, the Reverend Milutin Tesla, was a
     Serbian-Orthodox priest; his mother, Djuka (Mandich), was unschooled
     but highly intelligent. Both families came originally from western
     Serbia and for generations had sent their sons to serve Church or Army
     and their daughters to marry ministers or officers. A dreamer with a
     poetic touch, as he matured, Tesla added to these earlier qualities
     those of self-discipline and a desire for precision.

     Training for an engineering career, he attended the Technical
     University of Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague (1879-1880).
     At Graz he first saw the Gramme dynamo, which operated as a generator
     and, when reversed, became an electric motor; and he conceived a way
     to use alternating current to advantage. His first employment was in a
     government telegraph engineering office in Budapest, where he made his
     first invention, a telephone repeater. Later, he visualized the
     principle of the rotating magnetic field and developed plans for an
     induction motor, that would become his first step toward the
     successful utilization of alternating current. In 1882 Tesla went to
     work in Paris for the Continental Edison Company, and while on
     assignment to Strasbourg in 1883, he constructed, in after-work hours,
     his first induction motor. Tesla sailed to America in 1884, arriving
     in New York City with four cents in his pocket, a few of his own
     poems, and calculations for a flying machine. He first found
     employment with Thomas Edison in New Jersey, but the two inventors,
     were far apart in background and methods, and their separation was
     inevitable.

     In May 1885, George Westinghouse, head of the Westinghouse Electric
     Company in Pittsburgh, bought the patent rights to Tesla's polyphase
     system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors. The
     transaction precipitated a titanic power struggle between Edison's
     direct-current systems and the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating-current
     approach, which eventually won out.

     After a difficult period, during which Tesla invented but lost his
     rights to an arc-lighting system, he established his own laboratory in
     New York City in 1887, where his inventive mind could be given free
     rein. He experimented with shadowgraphs similar to those that later