An extraordinary life dealing with inventions and technologies far beyond his time. He is a person whose value will be appreciated years after his death. Today, we owe many advances in electric current, radio waves and wireless communication technology to him. We will tell you about the life, successes and failures of Nikola Tesla, one of the most important inventors of history, and his rivalry with Thomas Edison.

Childhood and Youth Years

Nikola Tesla was born in July 1856 in a village called Smiljan, which is now part of Croatia (at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). He was the 4th of 5 children of his father, Serbian Orthodox Church priest Milutin Tesla, and his mother, Duka Mandic Tesla. Although the family lived in the Croatian region, they were of Serbian origin and strictly adhered to their traditions.

When Nikola Tesla was 5 years old, his older brother (Daniel) died in an accident and this made a huge impact on Tesla. Tesla, who tried to make small inventions as a child, was attracting the attention of his environment.

When he started school, he became interested in the way machines work. After graduating high school, his family wanted him to join the army. But he was very keen to study engineering. In 1875, with the support of a scholarship, he was able to enter the Graz Polytechnic Institute (Polytechnic of Gratz) in the Czech Republic today. Although he had to leave the school after a year because his scholarship was cut off, what he saw about electricity and motors in the short time he spent here increased his interest in these subjects.

He moved to Budapest in 1881 to find work. Here he got a job at a telegraph firm called "Budapest Telephone Exchange". Its manager, "Tivadar Puskás", understood very quickly Nikola Tesla's skill in this matter.

Tivadar Puskás, who also had inventions on various subjects, was in talks with Thomas Edison about these inventions. He moved here in 1882 when he received a job offer for the Paris office of Edison's "Continental Edison Company".

Impressed by Nikola Tesla's skill in these matters, Puskás found him a job at "Société Electrique Edison", one of Edison's subsidiaries, and had him brought to Paris.

With his skill, Tesla gained a great deal of experience in electrical engineering while working here. It did not take long for the company to see this skill and experience of Tesla, who was sent to company jobs in Germany outside of France.

In 1884, Edison's director of European affairs, Charles Batchelor, was recalled to the United States to manage Edison Machine Works, a manufacturing division located in New York City. Batchelor, impressed by Tesla's success in the company, wanted Nikola Tesla to be brought to the USA.

America Years

Tesla moved to the USA in 1884 when he was only 24 years old. Edison, at that time, advocated the "Direct Current" (DC - Direct current) based system in order to popularize the use of electricity in the country and wanted the use of this model as a standard. The most important factor in this was that the infrastructure of all its products was designed accordingly.

Tesla, on the other hand, believed that this model (DC) was inefficient after a certain point. Therefore, he defended the "Alternating Current" (AC) model and believed that the engines Edison made would work much more efficiently with this model.

After failing to convince Edison about this, he left this company, where he worked for only 6 months.

Believing in the AC model until the end, Tesla managed to find financing from investors for the "Tesla Electric Light Company", the company he would establish in 1885.

But his first company experience ended in failure. Investors began to look at the "Alternating Stream" model with suspicion after a certain period of time and stopped their investments. The company ended its activities a year later, in 1886.

Tesla, who worked in various jobs for a certain time, managed to obtain some patents on electricity during this time.

Having met Alfred Brown and Charles Fletcher in 1887, Tesla convinced these people to finance the company he would open, with the ideas he believed in and the patents he received. Thus, his second company, "Tesla Electric Company" was founded.

The company developed an induction motor powered by "Alternating Current" in 1888. This was much more advantageous than the engines Edison designed with his "Direct Current" model. Having patented this, Tesla attracted his attention in other companies.

The spread and success of the engine crossed the paths of Westinghouse, which already advocated the "Alternating Current" model, and Tesla. The company agreed to pay him a large amount at that time to use Tesla's patent and to receive consultancy services.

This situation put Edison's Company and Westinghouse company, which took Tesla on its side, into a competition known today as the "AC/DC current war".

In 1892, "General Electric" was established with the merger of Thomas Edison and Thomson-Houston, the owners of two large companies in the sector. As Edison saw the "Alternating Current" model become widespread, he increased the negative campaigns about AC even more. Around this time, Westinghouse bought Tesla's patent by paying him a large sum.

In 1895, the AC current that Tesla advocated was used for the first time in a hydroelectric power plant established in Niagara Falls. This had a huge impact because the lighting would come to New York City from here.

Having gained fame and money, Tesla began to concentrate on other works in his mind. He introduced a toy boat that could be remotely controlled by radio waves to everyone in 1898. One year later, he gained experience with his experiments on wireless electricity transmission in his own laboratory in "Colorado Springs".

By 1901, he convinced investors to build a special power plant to distribute power wirelessly. This project was very costly. Shortly after the project started, doubts began to rise about the viability of the project. Investors withdrew from the project one by one, and the plant had to close. Meanwhile, Tesla was beginning to experience significant financial difficulties.

Last Years

In the years that followed, Tesla continued to make many new discoveries. It has succeeded in being at the cutting edge of technology in many areas. But out of money, he was living at the New Yorker Hotel with money he had given to cover the overheads of the Westinghouse firm, which he had previously worked with and owed a great deal to him. Tesla, who had problems with his heart, was found dead in his bed in January 1943.

Although unconfirmed, the US Secret Service is said to have collected all of his study notes immediately after his death.

Nikola Tesla, who made many discoveries throughout his life, has hundreds of patents. The inventor, who was far ahead of his time, is the person who laid the foundations for many of the technologies we are using now.