Before alternating current made him famous, Tesla dropped out, vanished and was deported
Nikola Tesla's classmates in Graz heard he had drowned in the river Mur. In fact the college dropout was drawing plans in Maribor for 60 florins a month, and was soon deported home for lacking a residence permit. Within a decade, his induction motor patents would anchor the Westinghouse alternating current system.
Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 to an ethnic Serb family in Smiljan, a village of the Austrian Military Frontier that now lies in Croatia. His father Milutin was an Orthodox priest; his mother Đuka, who never went to school, built household tools and could recite Serbian epics from memory, and Tesla credited her for his own vivid recall. At high school in Karlovac he did integral calculus in his head so easily that teachers suspected cheating.
At seventeen he caught cholera and lay in bed for nine months, reading Mark Twain, while his father, who had wanted a priest, promised him the best engineering school if he lived. He then dodged army conscription by hiding in the Lika mountains dressed as a hunter. At the technical college in Graz he passed nine exams in his first year, almost double the requirement, yet by his third year he was failing and left in December 1878 without a degree. His father died in April 1879.
Work came through Tivadar Puskás, first at the new Budapest Telephone Exchange in 1881, where Tesla became chief electrician, and then with Continental Edison near Paris, installing lighting and redesigning dynamos. In June 1884 manager Charles Batchelor brought him to the Edison Machine Works in New York. After an all-night repair of the dynamos on the liner SS Oregon, Edison reportedly praised him to Batchelor. Six months later Tesla quit, probably over an unpaid bonus, and his diary simply bids the Machine Works goodbye.
Backers Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail funded an arc lighting company in his name, which earned him his first American patents and a system installed in Rahway, New Jersey. Westinghouse licensed his polyphase motor patents in 1888. Tesla later built one of the earliest radio-controlled boats and chased wireless power at Wardenclyffe Tower, which ran out of money. He died in a New York hotel in January 1943, and in 1960 the SI unit of magnetic flux density was named the tesla.
Source: Nikola Tesla
