If he could realize his dreams, we would be living in a completely different world: Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in the village of Smiljan in the Lika region of Croatia, between the Velebit Mountains of Yugoslavia and the Adriatic Sea, at midnight connecting the 9th of July 1856 to the 10th of July.

Their house was right next door to the Serbian Orthodox Church under his father, Pastor Milutin Tesla. His father occasionally published articles under the pseudonym "The Fair Man". Tesla always said that his photographic memory and creative genius was inherited from his mother. He also always regretted that his mother had not lived in a country and time where women's talents were considered fairly. His mother could not go to school. But despite this, she had an incredible memory, able to recite volumes of native and classical European poetry by heart. Nikola was the fourth child in a family of five children.

Tesla had already started his inventions as a child. At the age of five, he invented a waterwheel. He was smooth and running smoothly in the current. Years later, he remembered them while creating his ingenious propellerless turbine. His older brother Daniel, who was seven years older than Nikola, died in an accident at the age of twelve. According to Tesla's autobiography, Daniel had died of wounds caused by an Arabian horse given to him by one of his friends. According to another claim, his brother accused Nikola of pushing him down the stairs while he was lying on the floor semi-consciously. Next to the memory of his dead brother, all of Nikola's deeds faded, his successes making his parents feel their loss more deeply: “Therefore, I grew up as a child who was insecure about myself. But I certainly wasn't a stupid child…” This incident affected Tesla psychologically and increased his shyness and introversion, which later became an important problem in social life.

Nikola Tesla began writing poetry in his youth. However, he thought these poems were very private, so he never allowed them to be published. He took great pleasure in astonishing people he had just met at friends' meetings by reading poems written in their own language. He continued to write poetry occasionally throughout his life. The book that would change Tesla's timid nature was a famous Hungarian author's novel Abafi or Aba's Son. “It awakened my dormant will and prompted me to work on self-control,” he said of this novel. He would later attribute his successes as a scientist to the strict self-discipline he had developed.

An important problem Tesla had from an early age was the flashes of light in his mind. “It is an emotion caused by images that interrupt my thoughts and actions, distorting the appearance of real objects, often accompanied by bursts of light. These are all things I've seen before, scenes I've witnessed, they're definitely not imaginary. When I heard a word, the object it meant to me appeared before my eyes with all its vitality, and I could not be sure whether I would be able to touch it if I extended my hand. This caused me great uneasiness and anxiety. No psychologist or physiologist I consulted could fully explain this situation…”

He was twelve years old when he was able to erase the dreadful images from his mind, but he would never recover from the inevitable bursts of light that appeared in dangerous or stressful situations or when he was very happy. Tesla's feelings were also quite strong. Many times he had awakened from his slumber as soon as the flames began to crackle, saving his neighbors from blazing fires in their own homes.

During a heavy cholera, Nikola's father, who said to his father, "Maybe if you let me study engineering, I can feel better," thought that he should be a clergyman no matter what, his father would give in to his request.

Nikola Tesla unofficially attended lectures at a university in Prague, where he spent two years. But he was not enrolled in any of the four universities in Czechoslovakia, according to the records of the Czechoslovak government. Probably Tesla became his own teacher, which does not detract from his worth.

During this period, out of money, he gambled. He was not good at card games but worked wonders at billiards. “Sitting and playing cards was an excellent source of pleasure for me. My father was an exemplary life figure and would never have put up with wasting money and time like I did… I used to say to him: 'I can give up on this whenever I want, but why should I give up this game that will allow me to buy the blessings of heaven?' At times he would get angry and insult me. However, my mother was different. ‘Go enjoy yourself. Pretty soon you'll lose everything we've got, and that will be all the better. I know you can handle this,' he said. As a matter of fact, it was so, Tesla quit his excessive passion for cigarettes and coffee by using his own will.

In 1880 he got a job at the Hungarian Government Central Telegraph Office in Budapest. During this period, he suffered from what doctors called a nervous disorder. During his illness, he could even hear the ticking of a clock several rooms away. The buzzing of a fly in his room seemed to burst his eardrums. A carriage passing a few kilometers away made him tremble almost all over his body. The whistle of a train passing fifty kilometers away made his chair vibrate so much that the pain he felt was unbearable. His sensitivity to sounds would always continue.

His friend Szigety convinced him of the benefits of constant exercise to overcome his illness, and the two often went on city tours together. One afternoon, he and his friend Szigety were walking into the sunset in the city park, and Tesla was reading passages from Goethe's Faust.

The red sun is drawn..

The end of the grueling day has come..

A wing that will take me away...

Following your glide.

“In that moment, the idea flashed like lightning, and suddenly the truth began to shine in all its nakedness before me.” Tesla's long fluttering arms stretched forward as if he was having a seizure. As soon as he sat down, he began to draw a diagram on the ground. This diagram, which he scribbled on the dust, was to be shown in his lecture at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers six years later and presented to the world as a brand new simple and useful scientific principle. Its applications would literally revolutionize the world of technology.

Tesla had in mind not just a new engine, but an entirely new system. Because he had discovered the principle of a magnetic field rotating about a fixed axis, produced by two or more alternating currents oscillating irregularly. Thanks to this whirlwind created by the harmonious currents, both the commutator (the device used to change the direction of an electric current) and the luminaires that served as a path to the current were disabled. This induction motor was the artery of a whole new system and was a huge step forward for the world of science and technology.

Thanks to a family friend, Tesla started working in one of Edison's Paris companies in 1882. At the height of his interest was promoting the potential benefits of alternating current in the company. But Tesla was deeply disappointed when he learned that Edison hated talking about it.

“Seeing America and being able to meet the famous Thomas Edison was my biggest passion and my wish to come true. After losing my money and tickets, a series of misfortunes and a rebellion in which I was in danger of losing my life, I finally set foot on this holy land with 4 cents in my pocket. I reached New York on June 6, 1884. I was a 28-year-old immigrant. I was full of dreams of being successful in this new land that I was a stranger to. I carried in my pocket the letter of reference from Charles Batchelor, one of Edison's colleagues in Europe: “Dear Edison, I know two great geniuses. One of them is you. The other is this young man.”

Edison would soon appreciate Tesla's abilities. However, personality differences between the two had doomed their relationship from the very beginning. Edison disliked Tesla because he was a theorist and cultured. He thought that ninety percent of genius was knowing things that didn't work. Tesla, on the other hand, said: “Edison loved to search for a needle in a haystack, with the perseverance and diligence that can only be found in a bee, and he searched under each litter one by one. I have witnessed this type of effort many times. However, with a little theory and a few calculations, one could get rid of ninety percent of this chore.”

Parting ways with Edison, Tesla struggled for a year in New York with no money. A company owner, whom he met through a friend, financed him to set up the laboratory. He sold patents for his inventions on alternating current generators, transformers and motors to George Westinghouse in 1885. Thus, Westinghouse and Tesla, trying to propagate alternating current, became direct competitors with Edison, who insisted on direct current systems. This rivalry soon turned into a great commercial war. This period was even referred to as the "Current Wars". Over time, alternating current was considered reliable, inexpensive, and successful, and direct current systems were gradually abandoned. So Tesla's mind beat Edison.

Alternating current was also used in the power plants established in Niagara Falls in 1896, and the systems developed by Tesla were used to transmit the electricity produced here to the city of Buffalo.

Tesla later focused his work on wireless energy. In 1891, he succeeded in transmitting energy wirelessly over a short distance with the Tesla coil. The Tesla coil, based on a step-up transformer, made it possible to obtain very high voltages. Tesla used these induction coils, which he named after himself, in his experiments in fields such as electrical illumination, high-frequency alternating current, and especially wireless electricity transmission.

In 1893, two years before Guglielmo Marconi's invention, Tesla concentrated on communication with radio waves, with sufficient technical equipment and scientific knowledge. But he focused his findings on the wireless transmission of electricity instead of communication. In 1898, he became the first person to establish communication between a receiver and transmitter by moving a small boat with radio waves in a pond in Madison Square Garden in New York. In simpler language, he invented the remote control. Tesla moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1899, to continue his research in high voltage/high frequency and wireless energy. Tesla believed that the Earth could carry electricity globally using itself and its atmosphere. Indeed, he could turn on lamps many meters away without using wires.

In 1901 he began the Wardenclyffe Tower Project in New York, which would be the biggest failure of his career. Tesla's purpose was to transmit telegraphic messages, sound, even visual and electricity, from the tower in New York to England and to ships in the Atlantic Ocean. The project, which envisages the construction of towers with heights ranging from 90 to 180 meters, would make the region the world's communication center if successful. Tesla, though not literally, is the famous businessman J.P. He convinced Morgan to support the project. But the project was abandoned because of the ever-increasing cost, Marconi's ability to transmit telegraph messages much cheaper, and Tesla's credibility over time.

Tesla's last major project was a very powerful and long-range weapon that could be used for military purposes. Nikola Tesla publicly unveiled his weapon in 1934, which can be summed up as an electric weapon capable of directing a concentrated and compressed beam of electricity at very distant targets. Tesla presented this weapon proposal to many countries by letter. He never found the support to complete his work, and no weapons were produced.

On November 6, 1915, the New York Times announced that Tesla and Edison would share the Nobel Prize in Physics, with a front-page news based on the London Reuters News Agency. Tesla was speculating that the reason for the award might be his work on wireless energy transmission. When asked why Edison had been awarded the Nobel Prize, he would say that this gentleman deserved a dozen Nobel Prizes. Edison, on the other hand, when asked for his opinion on this matter, would say that he had not received an official notification and would refrain from commenting further on this matter. However, the Nobel Committee announced that the British scientist Professor W. H. Bragg and his son were awarded the prize for their work in using X-rays to understand the crystalline structure.

A biographer would argue years later that Tesla, a scientist who made important discoveries, refused to share the prize with Edison, a simple inventor. Another biographer would take this theory further, writing that Edison sadistically and diabolically refused to accept the prize in order to deprive Tesla of $20,000, which he knew was in urgent need of money. But there is no concrete evidence that neither Tesla nor Edison refused the award. The Nobel Foundation commented, “The idea that the award should be withheld because of a rumor that someone is inclined to refuse to receive the award cannot be a plausible explanation.” But the foundation did not reject the view that Edison and Tesla were their first choice for awarding the prize.

Tesla's passion for pigeons was obsessive, even enough to say that he fell in love with a female pigeon. “I used to take great pleasure in feeding our pigeons, our chickens; tucking them under my arm, hugging and caressing them seemed to me the most beautiful thing in the world.” In the dark park in the middle of the night, silent and contemplative, with pigeons pecking bait from his hand or lips, Tesla could spot it right away.

Dr. Jule Eisenbud, in an article published in the American Journal of Psychical Research, would associate the bird symbol with Tesla's neuroses and his childhood relationship with his mother. The psychologist stated that the bird symbolized the mother and her feeding breast since ancient times.

Although Tesla was enchanted by the sparkle of jewels such as crystals or diamonds, he hated the earrings women wore, especially pearls. If he smelled the slightest smell of camphor anywhere in the house, he would experience severe discomfort. While doing research, if a sheet of paper fell into a sink full of water, an unbearable taste formed in his mouth. He was counting his steps as he walked, calculating the cubic particles of the soup bowl, the coffee cup, the food. When he couldn't do this, his appetite was gone. The most serious in terms of his physical relationships was his inability to touch other people's hair.

Although it is said that Tesla was in a relationship with pianist Marguerite Merington and a young girl named Anne Morgan, there is no evidence to suggest that they had a relationship other than friendship. The inventor's indifference towards women gave rise to rumors that he had different sexual preferences. In another time or country it wouldn't have had much of an impact on his career, but in Victorian America, it would have been a disaster that could have brought him down. When asked why he didn't get married even though he didn't care about the rumors, he felt compelled to use his busy schedule as an excuse.

Tesla boasted that his weight had barely changed since his college years. Rumors circulated that he was as agile as a cat. There were some who claimed to have witnessed that when he lost his balance while walking on an icy road on a cold winter day, he flew into a somersault, landed on his two feet again and continued on his way. In the winter of 1942, the inventor was thoroughly weakened. His meticulousness towards germs had become so obsessive that he asked even his closest friends to stay far away from him. (The microbes in the pigeons did not bother him at all.) His heart was pounding, and the recurrent diseases were tying his hands and feet. He could no longer afford to feed his beloved pigeons.

In January 1943, Tesla hired the postman, Mr. He tasked him with delivering a sealed envelope to Samuel Clemens. The postman looked for the given address, but realized that it was the building where Tesla's old laboratory was located, and that there was no one named Clemens here. Tesla says that Clemens is his favorite writer, Mark Twain, and everyone knows that. He sent Kerrigan back again, this time asking him to take a look at the pigeons. After feeding the confused pigeons, he reported the situation to his chief and learned that Mark Twain had died twenty-five years ago. When the postman explained the situation, Tesla was very resentful and said: “We were together only last night, he was sitting in that chair over there, we chatted for an hour. He had financial problems and needed my help. That's why you don't come back here without returning the envelope in your hand."

When the cleaner entered his hotel room on January 8, 1943, he realized that the 86-year-old inventor was dead. Later, experts prepared the report that the death occurred on January 7, at 22.30, due to a blood clot in the heart. Tesla died in his sleep. Tesla's body was taken to Ferncliffe Cemetery on a cold winter evening and cremated, and his ashes were later sent back to his native land.