Nikola Tesla is one of the most famous inventors who ever lived, and one of the most mythologized. Some people remember him as the misunderstood genius who gave the world alternating current and was robbed of credit by greedier men. Others know him from films, video games and a car company that borrowed his name. The real Tesla was stranger and more interesting than either picture: a brilliant engineer whose most important work changed daily life for billions of people, and a visionary whose largest dreams never worked. This course follows his life from beginning to end, and tries to separate the man from the legend.

Smiljan

Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, a village in the region of Lika, in what is now Croatia. At the time the area belonged to the Austrian Empire and lay in the Military Frontier, a borderland zone where families owed military service in return for land, as a defense against the Ottoman Empire. Tesla's family were ethnic Serbs of the Orthodox Christian faith. Today both Serbia and Croatia claim him with pride, and he himself once described himself as proud of both his Serbian origin and his Croatian homeland.

His father, Milutin Tesla, was an Orthodox priest who wrote poetry and kept a large library. His father hoped Nikola would also become a priest. His mother, Đuka Mandić, came from a family of priests too. She could not read, but Tesla later credited her with his inventive talent: she invented household tools, including a mechanical eggbeater, and could recite long epic poems from memory. Tesla wrote that she was an inventor of the first order.

A tragedy and a strange mind

When Nikola was a small child, his older brother Dane, whom the family considered especially gifted, was killed in a riding accident. The loss haunted the family, and Tesla later wrote that nothing he achieved could make up for it in his parents' eyes.

From childhood Tesla reported unusual mental experiences. In his autobiography, My Inventions, published in 1919, he described seeing vivid images, sometimes accompanied by flashes of light, that he struggled to tell apart from reality. He learned to control them, and later claimed he could build and test machines entirely in his imagination, running them in his mind for weeks before drawing a single plan. Many inventors visualize their work; Tesla's claims about the precision of his mental testing are hard to verify, but they became a central part of his legend.

School and illness

Tesla attended school in the town of Karlovac, where a physics teacher's demonstrations of electricity fascinated him. When he finished, he fell gravely ill, probably with cholera. According to his own account, he told his father he might recover if he were allowed to study engineering instead of becoming a priest. His father agreed, and Tesla recovered. To avoid being drafted into the army, he then spent most of a year wandering in the mountains.

Graz and a lost path

In 1875 Tesla enrolled at the Polytechnic School in Graz, Austria, on a military frontier scholarship. In his first year he studied with ferocious intensity and earned top marks. In a lecture, a professor demonstrated a Gramme dynamo, a direct current machine that could act as a motor or a generator. The machine sparked badly at its commutator, the part that reverses the current's direction. Tesla suggested that the commutator could be done away with. The professor declared this impossible, comparing it to a perpetual motion machine. The problem stayed in Tesla's mind for years.

His second year went badly. He lost his scholarship, took up gambling at cards and billiards, and never completed his degree. In 1878 he left Graz without telling his family. His father died in 1879. Tesla briefly attended lectures in Prague, then took a job in Budapest in 1881, at a new telephone exchange.

Worked example: what makes an inventor?

Look at the young Tesla's life so far and ask which factors seem to have mattered in shaping an inventor. Weigh each one.

• Family. A mother who invented tools and a father who loved books gave him both practical and intellectual models.
• Imagination. His unusual power of visualization, whatever its exact nature, let him think through machines before building them.
• A problem that would not let go. The sparking commutator at Graz gave him a specific challenge, and a professor's dismissal may have made him more determined.
• Setbacks. He lost his scholarship and left without a degree. Formal success was not a requirement for later achievement, but the lack of a degree and money would make his early career harder.
• Timing. He came of age just as electricity was turning from a laboratory curiosity into an industry. Talent needs a moment ready for it.

Notice that no single factor explains Tesla. Popular stories about geniuses often focus on a flash of inspiration. Real creative lives usually combine many ingredients, including luck, failure and the state of the world around them. Keeping that in mind will help as we sort the facts of Tesla's life from the myths that later grew around it.