Tesla

NPC Description

Type: Craft

Beyond Atlantica, history and legend:

Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10, 1856 – January 7, 1943) was a world-renowned Serbian-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. He is best known for his revolutionary work in and numerous contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work form the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

In the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture. After his demonstration of wireless communication in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents," he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Never putting much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished and forgotten at the age of 86.

His contribution was recognized and the derived SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field, ), the tesla, was named in his honor (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960).

Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the fields of robotics, ballistics, computer science, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In his later years, Tesla was regarded as a mad scientist and became noted for making bizarre claims about possible scientific developments. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and New Age occultism. Contemporary admirers of Tesla have deemed him the man who invented the twentieth century.

Source: New World Encyclopedia