“So astounding are the facts in this connection, that it would seem as though the Creator himself had electrically designed this planet.”
“The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires as a Means for Furthering Peace”, Electrical World and Engineer magazine, January 7, 1905, Nikola Tesla
It was a calm, cold Christmas night in 1943, and the world had no idea that that particular January 7th will be remembered as the day it lost one of its greatest minds of all time. The world did find out the next day, when the room attendant Alice Monaghan entered the room 3327, on the 33rd floor of New Yorker hotel in New York, despite “do not disturb” note that was left hanging on the door knob 3 days earlier by Tesla, only to find out that there was no one to disturb there anymore. The last person who saw him alive was Charlotte Muzar, an attorney of his nephew Sava Kosanović, who lended him 50 dollars on January 5. The child of light thus forever left the still very dark world of ours that could never truly understand or appreciate the full scope of a genius.
In contrast to his death, his own birth foreshadowed his destiny as he was born “at the stroke of midnight”, during a summer storm with lightning striking on July 10, 1856, and the midwife commenting that he will be a child of the storm, to which his mother remarked – No, of light.
If you open Tesla Science Foundation website and click on Nikola Tesla section, subsection “Who was Nikola Tesla”, you will hear thunder.
I vividly remember the first time when I as a child saw lightning. It was the happiest day of my life! As well as every day in the future whenever I happened to witness the glorious phenomena. Learning later that Nikola Tesla existed and played with them like toys earned my love and life-long respect. If it wasn’t for him, you wouldn’t have a chance to read this online magazine, as his visionary insight foresaw smartphones, the Internet, video calls, drones and unmaned machines, and wireless communication everywhere over 100 years ago. All the things that modern man often takes for granted.
Nikola Tesla’s inventions are present in almost every area of modern life. His work found applications in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, medicine, and many other fields. Beyond their practical everyday use, Tesla laid the foundations of key technologies that shape the modern world, including alternating current systems, radio, wireless communication, computing, mobile technology, and medical treatments using high-frequency currents.
Through groundbreaking discoveries such as the three-phase AC system, the induction motor, high-frequency currents, high voltages, wireless communication, and even early logical circuits like the “AND” gate, Tesla anticipated technologies long before society was technically ready to build them.
Despite his enormous contribution to human progress, Tesla was treated unfairly. Companies that profited from his discoveries often failed to credit him, presenting his ideas as the result of their own research. As a result, Tesla’s name was frequently overlooked, and he did not receive the recognition or financial reward he truly deserved.
”Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. Past is theirs; future for which I really worked is mine.”
“The Transmission of Electrical Energy without Wires as a Means for Furthering Peace”, Electrical World and Engineer magazine, January 7, 1905, Nikola Tesla
In 1862, the family moved to Gospić, a nearby town from Smiljane village in Croatia (then Austrian Empire), where he was born. He was the fourth out of 5 children. His father received appointment as pastor to a church, and there Tesla finished his primary education.
The following year was the hardest for Tesla and the family as his brother, who was 12 then, died after falling from a horse. In his autobiographical writing “My Inventions”, Tesla wrote that his late brother was even more talented than him, and after his death, everything Tesla did was merely a shadow in his parents’ eyes. Because of that, Tesla’s self-confidence suffered. He actually claimed that it wasn’t until he attained manhood that he became aware of himself as an inventor. Also, his own memory was so painful that even after 56 years, the visual impression of his brother dying before his eyes lost none of its force.
Tesla’s lack of self-confidence in his boyhood was also due to the images that appeared before his eyes, accompanied by flashes of light which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with his thoughts and actions. This made him anxious and uncomfortable as sometimes he couldn’t discern whether what he saw was tangible or not. His late brother experienced the same phenomena. He practiced to fight these images and concluded that it was best done by going with his vision further and further. So he travelled in his mind, visited new places, met people and made friends, and in his own words – they were as dear to him as those in real life, and as intense as the real people in their manifestations. Sometimes he would see the air around him filled with tongues of living flame.
His father was resolute that Nikola becomes a priest, but his son wanted to be an engineer. Tesla describes his father as an erudite, very animated speaker with excellent memory, and educated cleric, which was quite unusual for the time. His style of writing was also admired. He could recite at length from works in several languages, and he had a good sense of humor. He taught his son many exercises like guessing one another’s thoughts, performing mental calculations, or repeating long sentences.
But he wrote that he owed his mother his inventiveness. She alone descended from a family of inventors who originated many implements for the household, agricultural and other uses. His mother also devised and constructed many tools and devices that were useful for the household. Tesla describes her as a brave, firm, fair, and skillful woman.
In 1870, Tesla moved to Karlovac, where he stayed with his aunt while attendign Higher Real Gymnasium. He gradated a year early. When he was about 17, his thoughts turned completely to invention. To his delight, he discovered that he can visualize with the hreatest facility. He didn’t need drawings or experiments – he constructed, changed his construction, made improvements, and operated the device in his mind and his devices worked just the way he imagined.
In 1873, Tesla returned to Gospić, despite his father telling him not to return, and he immediately contracted cholera. He was bedridden for 9 months and almost died, but his father promised him that he would let him go to an engineering school if he recovered. During the time of his illness, Tesla was reading Mark Twain early works and that helped him a lot.
Next year, he went to Tomingaj near Gračac so as to recover and to elude the army service that was mandatory and lasted 3 years. In 1875, as promised, his father sent him to the best university of the time – Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz. He got excellent marks, sleept only 4 hours, and was reading everything that came under his hands. In his writings, he states that he had an obsession to finish everything he started, including 100 volumes of Voltaire’s work! At 24, he knew many books by heart, and Goethe’s “Faust” was very dear to him. Worried professors from the University sent letters to his father, concerned that he would kill himself by overworking.
However, he dropped out at the end of the third year. Despite his excellent accomplishment in studies, his scholarships weren’t extended. He wrote twice to the renowned Matica srpska in Novi Sad, but he was declined. In 1978, he left Graz, aware of financial struggles of his family who tried to provide for him. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, got a job, and started gambling. He was also a smoker and was addicted to coffe, but managed to quit all his addiction by the sheer strenght of his will. He returned to Gospić in 1879, and in the same year his father died, but next year he went to Prague. He wasn’t permitted to enroll in Karl-Ferdinand University because he didn’t speak Greek or Czech. He attended the lectures, but didn’t receive marks.
In 1981, his uncle arranges him a job for Budapest Telephone Exchange in Hungary, where he gradually became Chief Electrician and made numerous improvements to the equipment and developed an amplifier device. Obsessed with making an induction motor that ran on AC (alternating current) he suffered a breakdown. After having recovered, during a walk in Budapest Park with a friend in 1982, looking at sunset he began reciting a passage from Goethe’s “Faust”, and a vision came to him. He drew a diagram of the motor in sand with a stick, which he will patent in America 5 years later. He would describe this experience as one of the happiest memories of his life.
In the same year, Tesla moved to Paris to work at the Continental Edison Company. He submitted a plan to improve Edison dynamos to an administrator of the company. The plan was approved and his automatic regulator was accepted, but prior before he was given payment for this, they sent him to Strasbourg in 1883 to repair a new DC lighting system at the German Railway company. Again, Tesla didn’t receive the compensation for the work. In June of the same year, Tesla demonstrated the new AC induction motor to the then mayor of Strasbourg and several potential investors, but they weren’t interested because they didn’t understand the value of it.
In 1884, Tesla arrived in America, with a recommendation letter from his former boss Charles Batchelor to Thomas Edison, which stated: “I know two great men, and you are one of them. The other is this young man.” Unfortunately, his wallet and luggage was stolen, including the ticket. Luckily, he was able to recall the serial number of it, and managed to get aboard. He arrived to America penniless, but started working for Edison, although he wasn’t interested for his AC power system. Tesla made many improvements in Edison’s company, and reassembled his DC generators redesigning 24 different types of machines that replaced original Edison designs. He was promised a bonus of $50 000, but again, it turned out to be a practical joke. Painfully shocked, he resigned from his position.
Nikola Tesla began his inventive work in the early 1880s while working at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, but there is no evidence that he sought patents for his early ideas. He filed his first patent only after arriving in the United States in 1884, shortly after leaving Thomas Edison’s company and founding his own firm.
Over the next four decades, Tesla patented many of his inventions, securing 112 U.S. patents and at least 196 additional patents in other countries. In total, he held at least 308 patents across 27 countries on five continents, although many of these patents protected the same inventions. That happens because a group of patents which protect the same invention in different countries is known as a “patent family”, and they are territorially limited, that is, valid only in the country where they are granted. Individual patents within the patent family are “analogues”, and the patent for which the first application was filed is called the basic or priority patent.
Tesla’s most widely patented inventions were his pump and turbine, which were protected in more than 20 countries. At the same time, many of his U.S. patents were never registered abroad. He was most active in patenting his work in 1889, when he filed numerous patents related to his revolutionary polyphase alternating-current system.
Despite his extensive patent activity, Tesla also developed many important ideas that he never patented, including the medical use of high-frequency currents. This reflects his focus on discovery and progress rather than solely on legal or financial protection.
His most important inventions include: AC power systems (1887-1888), which included developed polyphase AC, induction motor, and rotating magnetic field for efficient power generation and transmission. This system enabled long-distance electricity distribution, powering cities and industries worldwide, and it is still standard, outcompeting Edison’s Dc; Tesla coil (1891), which is a high-voltage, high-frequency transformer circuit, and which laid foundation for radio technology, wireless experiments, neon/fluorescent lighting, and modern electronics like TVs; Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant (1895), which is a first major AC-powered hydroelectric facility with Westinghouse. It proved AC viability for large-scale hydro power, accelerating worldwide electrification; Radio transmission foundations (1898), which comprise of patents on tuned circuits and wireless signals, predating Marconi; upheld by US Supreme Court only in 1943. They laid groundwork for radio, wireless comms, and remote control tech like drones; and Remote control boat (1898), which was the first wireless remote-controlled device via radio waves, and it pioneered robotics, drones, and modern remote systems.
Despite his genius, Nikola Tesla faced significant financial, professional, and personal challenges that hindered his groundbreaking work. He repeatedly battled poverty and debt due to poor business acumen and unwise investments, often prioritizing innovation over profit. He depended on inconsistent investors like J.P. Morgan, who withdrew support for projects like Wardenclyffe Tower in 1903, leading to its abandonment and unpaid bills. These issues forced him into poverty in his later years, preventing commercialization of many ideas.
Intense competition, especially the “War of Currents” with Thomas Edison, saw Edison smear AC power as dangerous through public electrocutions of animals and backing the first electric chair using AC to associate it with death. Edison’s campaigns aimed to protect his DC investments, but AC’s superior long-distance transmission won out, powering Niagara Falls in 1895.
Tesla had no direct personal feud with Westinghouse; instead, they allied closely starting in 1888 when Westinghouse licensed Tesla’s AC motor and polyphase patents for $60,000 plus royalties, enabling Westinghouse to challenge Edison. Tensions arose indirectly during financial crises: Westinghouse nearly went bankrupt buying patents amid the War of the Currents, prompting Tesla to tear up his royalty contract in 1891 to save the company, forgoing millions. Later strains emerged when Westinghouse balked at funding Tesla’s ambitious Wardenclyffe wireless tower, though this stemmed from business caution rather than hostility. In the same year, Tesla noticed the Kirlian photography phenomenon, by using high-voltage electricity to generate electrical discharges around objects.
Nikola Tesla’s vision for large-scale wireless power transmission faced insurmountable technical hurdles in his era, primarily due to inefficiencies in energy propagation and resonance limitations.
Power transmitted through electromagnetic waves or ground conduction dissipates rapidly with distance, following the inverse square law for radiated fields—meaning intensity drops exponentially beyond short ranges. Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower experiments (1901–1904) relied on Earth-ionosphere resonance, but unproven assumptions about low-loss global conduction proved unrealistic without precise tuning and massive energy input. Early methods used omnidirectional low-frequency waves that spread in all directions, delivering minimal usable power to distant receivers without modern high-frequency microwaves, klystrons, or parabolic antennas developed post-WWII. Resonant inductive coupling worked only over very short distances (meters), inadequate for Tesla’s global ambitions.
Tesla’s reluctance to collaborate and his eccentric personality alienated potential partners, while rivals like Marconi capitalized on his wireless patents. This rivalry delayed recognition and funding for his AC system. Severe obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms, including germ phobias, hand-washing rituals, aversion to physical contact, and fixation on the number 3 (e.g., circling buildings thrice before entering), consumed his time and energy. These rituals intensified around 1917, disrupting lab work and daily life, while his insistence on overly precise conditions alienated assistants. Tesla survived on 2 hours of sleep nightly, often collapsing mid-experiment from exhaustion, which exacerbated nervous breakdowns. A major breakdown in 1901–1902 during Colorado Springs experiments left him bedridden, halting wireless power progress and foreshadowing reduced output.
Ambitious visions like wireless global power transmission at Wardenclyffe failed due to lack of funding and technical scalability doubts. Public skepticism toward unproven concepts, combined with industrial interests favoring short-term profits, sidelined his transformative ideas, but in the end – he was a human.
“Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.”
“The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”,
Tesla’s article in Century Magazine, June, 1900
He loved birds, and one night in 1937, when he left his hotel to feed pigeons in the park, he was hit by a taxi and he returned, but he called courier service and paid them to feed them in the months while he was recovering, refusing treatment. He cared deeply for his family and sent them money and letters. He had a humanist and utopian outlook for humanity. In 1926, he commented on the miserable position of women in society and remarked that the humanity’s future would be run by Queen Bees. He met Swami Vivekananda in 1896. The meeting stimulated his interest in Hindu and Vedic philosophy for years, and later, in his article “Man’s Greatest Achievement” used Sanskrit terms akasha and prana to describe the relationship between matter and energy.
He has been awarded many times, but his highest recognition came in 1960, at the Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures (CGPM) in Paris, when his name was honored with an International Unit. The Tesla symbol (T) is the SI derived unit of magnetic flux density. He is one of three Americans to be given such an honor.
Nikola Tesla is often surrounded by mythology that portrays him as a mysterious, almost otherworldly genius whose inventions were suppressed or misunderstood by the world. While these stories exaggerate reality, they reflect a deeper truth: Tesla’s ideas were so far ahead of his time that they continue to inspire speculation, wonder, and symbolic meaning beyond his documented scientific work. So many details from his life were fabricated or altered, as if anyone who wrote about him could possibly know the true man behind what he decided to show to the world, because man is for man the greatest mystery.
Tesla is not merely a name written into the history of science—he is a reminder that genius is born at the point where reason and intuition meet. A man who thought in images, who experienced electricity as the rhythm of nature, and who, in every formula, sought the pulse of something greater than humanity.
In his world, science was not opposed to the spirit. On the contrary—it was a bridge. He said that his mind was a receiver, not a source. By this, he did not mean magic, but a deep conviction that ideas do not belong to us; they pass through us when we are quiet enough to hear them. Creation, for him, was an act of listening rather than forcing.
Tesla believed in energy as a universal language—not as an abstract force, but as a thread connecting everything: thought, matter, humanity, and the cosmos. For him, inspiration was the same as discovery—the moment when one senses having touched a law that has always existed, but had never before been recognized.
His thinking carried mystical undertones, yet he never retreated from scientific precision. His spirituality was philosophical, almost ascetic—rooted in awe of nature, trust in an unseen order, and the belief that truth is not invented, but revealed. Perhaps this is why he worked so tirelessly: not to impress the world, but to answer a calling he felt within.
At a time when everything was accelerating, he taught that the greatest strength lies in the frequency of a heart that does not rush, and a mind that does not doubt its purpose. He was not driven by fame, but by an inner spark of curiosity and responsibility toward the future. His vision was humane—technology in service of humanity, not humanity in service of technology.
Tesla inspires us because he lived above mediocrity without the need to be worshipped. He was great, yet not untouchable. Mysterious, yet not unreal. Spiritual, yet not mythologized. A genius, but above all, a man who believed that every new idea is a small proof that the universe is full of whispers still waiting to be heard.
In the end, out of hundreds, possibly thousands of books about Tesla, one particular reference deserves a mention. “The Book of Law”, a channeled material from 1980s, really unique and the most precise up to date, mentioned Tesla as a Wanderer (being from higher dimensions who descended to Earth to aid it), and his pursuit of bringing light to Earth in the literal sense. Also, they mention the Philadelpia experiment in context with Tesla, as an experiment with potential to destruction, due to some other forces in power, but this deserves a separate and more detailed word, hopefully for my next blog.
– Sandra Šabotić