Hyderabad: Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American who emigrated to New York City in 1884, received U.S. citizenship in 1891. Tesla held approximately 300 patents. Not just AC power that Tesla worked on. Motors, radios, Xrays, neon signs, and other technology were advanced by his extraordinary mind.
Tesla came to the United States in 1884 and briefly worked with Thomas Edison before the two parted ways. He sold several patent rights, including those to his AC machinery, to George Westinghouse.
- Tesla was one of five children, including siblings Dane, Angelina, Milka and Marica.
- Tesla's interest in electrical invention was spurred by his mother, Djuka Mandic, who
- invented small household appliances in her spare time while her son was growing up.
- Tesla's father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian orthodox priest and a writer, and he pushed for his son to join the priesthood. But Nikola's interests lay squarely in the sciences.
- After studying at the Realschule, Karlstadt (later renamed the Johann-Rudolph-Glauber Realschule Karlstadt) in Germany; the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria; and The University of Prague during the 1870s, Tesla moved to Budapest, where for a time he worked at the Central Telephone Exchange.
- It was while in Budapest that the idea for the induction motor first came to Tesla, but after several years of trying to gain interest in his invention, at age 28 Tesla decided to leave Europe for America.
- Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually returned to work as a consultant primarily. But as time passed, his ideas progressively became more unusual and impractical.
- He also grew increasingly eccentric and devoted much of his time in caring for wold
- pigeons in New York City's parks.
- He even drew FBI's attention for his talk of building a powerful "death beam", which had also received some interest from the Soviet Union during World War II.
