Story of Tesla Told

Kansas City Times.

Nikola Tesla, electrician and inventor, was born in 1857 in what was then Austria-Hungary; the son of a distinguished Greek clergyman and orator, and of Georgiana Mandic, a famous woman inventor, whose father also was an inventor. He began his education in the elementary school of his native town, Smiljan, Lika, continued four years in the public school in Gospic, four years in the Lower Real school there and three years in the Higher Real school, Carlstadt, Croatia, where he was graduated in 1873, Originally destined for the clergy, he prevailed upon his parents to send him to the Polytechnic school in Gratz, where, for four years, he studied mathematics, physics and mechanics, following with two years of philosophic studies at the University of Prague, Bohemia.

He started on his practical career in 1891, in Budapest, where he made his first electrical invention, a telephone repeater, and conceived the idea of his rotating magnetic field. Thence he went to France and Germany, where he was successively engaged in various branches of engineering and manufacture. In 1884 he came to the United States, of which he is a naturalized citizen, and here his subsequent inventions originated.

Among Mr. Tesla's inventions and discoveries are the system of arc lighting, the Tesla motor and system of alternating current power transmission, the Tesla coil, or transformer, mechanical oscillators and generators of electrical oscillations, and researches and discoveries in radiations, material streams and emanations, and also has given many other valuable contributions to the science of telegraphy and telephony, especially in connection with the system of wireless transmission.