Almanac: Nikola Tesla
And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: July 10th, 1856, 160 years ago today ... the day Nikola Tesla was born to a Serbian family in southeastern Europe.
A trained scientist and budding electrical engineer, Tesla moved to the United States in 1884.
He went to work for Thomas Edison, but soon split with him over Edison's support for Direct Current (DC) electric power.
Tesla believed that Alternating Current (AC) was more efficient, and switched sides to work with Edison's arch-rival, George Westinghouse.
Tesla also made breakthroughs in radio ... building a landmark 187-foot-tall radio transmitter on New York's Long Island.
Along the way he also invented the Tesla coil, the spectacular spark machine that -- to this day -- is a sure-fire science museum crowdpleaser.
Tesla once predicted that humans would "telephone the stars," and even graced the cover of Time magazine in 1931.
A better scientist than money manager, he died virtually penniless in a New York City hotel room in 1943 at the age of 86.
He's remembered today on Serbian money ... at the Nikola Tesla Corner in New York City ... and by the Tesla electric automobile, which uses an induction motor of Tesla's own 1882 design (an AC motor, needless to say).
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