Nicola Tesla

            Imagine electricity so powerful it can shoot through the air 130 feet, yet safe enough to travel through a person and light a bulb in his hand. It's not fiction with modern electronics. Most of today's modern electronic discoveries have their roots in the writings and patents of one genius who very few people know. Radios, blenders, fans, neon lighting, hair dryers, X-rays, fluorescent bulbs, speedometers, the automobile ignition system, and the basics behind cellular phones, radar, electron microscopes, and the microwave oven all seem to have listed inventors like Marconi, Roentgen, or Edison, but visions of all of these and many more inventions were in the mind of a man named Nicola Tesla long before any of them had otherwise been heard of. Tesla was man deemed as eccentric for the wild claims he made for his time, and public image marred by bad propaganda circulated by individuals who were to say the least jealous of his talents and as a result is not commonly known or accredited for his great accomplishments.
             His story begins in 1856 when he was born into a Serbian family in a mountainous area of the Balkan Peninsula. Tesla's mother was a gifted inventor herself commonly devising new and easier ways of doing common household chores, while his father was a skillful writer and poet. In his youth he studied in Croatia where he learned of the great Niagara Falls, and imagined great things that could come of it. Tesla became very passionate about mathematics and science, and went on to study engineering at the renowned Austrian Polytechnic School at Graz. It was here that Tesla saw the problems with current electronics, specifically the Direct Current motor. Later while living in Budapest, Tesla devised his idea for the Alternating Current motor, an advance in technology that would change the world. Tesla was employed by companies throughout Europe to improve their DC generation facilities, but was interested in gaining investor attention in his idea.