Nikola Tesla
An Inventor Beyond his Time
Contributions:
- 1856 - Born in the Austrian Empire, present day Croatia
- 1881 - Moved to Budapest, Hungary to work at the Budapest Telephone Exchange. He claimed to have perfected a telephone repeater or amplifier, which was never patented nor publicly described.
- 1882 - Got another job in Paris with the Continental Edison Company where he designed and build improved versions of generating dynamos and motors.
- 1884 - Emigrated to the United States and worked at the Edison Macine Works manufacturing division on Manhattan's Lower East side. One of the projects given to Tesla was to develop an arc lamp-based street lighting system.
- 1885 - Left the Edison company and started working on patenting the arc lighting system. His patents included an improved DC generator which was the first patents issued to Tesla in the US.
- 1887 - Formed the Tesla Electric Company. He developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current (AC) and it was patented in 1888.
- 1889 - Tesla was inspired by the experiments of Heinrich Hertz and started expanding on the experiments from which he invented the Tesla coil which was patented in 1891.
- 1892 - Tesla served as a vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers from 1892 to 1894, the forerunner of the modern-day IEEE (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers).
- 1906 - Demonstarted a 200 horsepower (150 kilowatts)16,000 rpm bladeless turbine on his 50th birthday.
- 1943 - Dies at the age of 86.
"Tesla obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions. Some of Tesla's patents are not accounted for, and various sources have discovered some that have lain hidden in patent archives. There are a minimum of 278 known patents issued to Tesla in 26 countries. Many of Tesla's patents were in the United States, Britain, and Canada, but many other patents were approved in countries around the globe. Many inventions developed by Tesla were not put into patent protection."