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The life of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was a physicist and electrical engineer. He was born in Croatia in 1856.
His father was Milutin Tesla, a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and his mother
Đuka Mandić, a housewife.
He was the most of his childhood in Gospic, a Croatian city to which his family moved
in 1862. In his childhood he demonstrated an exceptional talent for mathematics and
while studying at the Royal Gymnasium of Gospic, teachers distrusting his genius,
forced him to pass tests to prove that he had not copied his theories.
In 1875 he started studying electrical engineering at the University of Graz. Later in
1878, he obtained his first job as an engineering assistant in Slovenia. After he
moved to Budapest where he worked in the National Telephone Company. In 1882
he started working as an engineer in the Continental Edison Company. In 1884 he
arrived in New York and started working at Edison Machine Works because a former
boss of him recommended it. Finally, he founded his own company to be able to
work on his projects with alternating current.
At this moment in Croatia life was very difficult because this country participated in
the First World War. Croatia belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the war
started because a Serbian assassinated an important ruler of this empire. Also,
before the war the empire did not respect the rights of the Croatian people.
Nikola Tesla had always wished that electric power reaches the whole world. He
thought that alternating current was the best option to achieve this goal. He first
became interested in science when he designed a practical system to generate and
transmit alternating current for electric power systems in 1888. This invention was
the induction motor and was very important at that time, so the rights of this invention
were bought by the businessman George Westinghouse. In 1895 the induction
motors, created by Tesla, were installed in the electrical energy design of the
Niagara Falls.
In the last years of Tesla's life, he only hoped to live long enough to at least place a
device in a room that could be activated by the energy around him. In his twilight,
Tesla died alone, abandoned. He died in New York in 1943. Nowadays he is very
remembered because his advances in alternating current allowed that the electricity
will reach the common people. Also his advances in electromagnetism made
possible the creation of the radio.
I admire Nikola Tesla very much because he worked to improve the quality of life of
people, that is, he gave practical use to the science that he created. Undoubtedly his
greatest invention was the induction motor because it was the one that allowed
electricity to reach all people at affordable prices.
Bibliography
1. Yurchey, Doug. Missing Utopia: The end of Wardenclyffe (2004). World-
Mysteries. Recovered from: http://www.world-mysteries.com/
2. Pozas, Pedro. ¿Qué es lo que descubrió Nikola Tesla? (2009). El Proyecto
matriz. Recovered from: https://elproyectomatriz.wordpress.com/
3. Nace Nikola Tesla. History Channel. Recovered from:
https://mx.tuhistory.com/hoy-en-la-historia/nace-nikola-tesla

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