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The early years
Tesla was born at midnight on July 10th 1856 in the small village of Smiljan, which is in the Lika province of what is now Croatia. His father was a reverend minister and his mother was known for her inventiveness. The family moved to the nearby city of Gospic in 1862, where Nikola attended school, and then continued his education at Karlstadt in Croatia. In his childhood he had a very inquisitive nature and a practical mechanical sense which earned him respect. In 1875 he enrolled to study Electrical Engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz, where he first saw the Gramme DC motor in action, and questioned the arcing of its inefficient commutator. After financial struggles prevented him from completing the course, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, in 1881 and worked as a draftsman in the Central Telegraph Office. His skills in electrical matters were soon recognised, and he was placed in charge of the new telephone exchange. About this time he experienced a visualisation of the invention which would soon make him known all over the world, the Polyphase Alternating Current motor, which used a rotating magnetic field and had no commutator. In 1882 he moved to Paris to take a job with the Continental Edison Company as a junior engineer. In his spare time, he constructed AC motors and dynamos and developed the idea.
The Edison encounter
In the summer of 1884 he decided to migrate to the United States of America, with the offer of a job to work for Thomas Edison in New York. Tesla worked hard and impressed Edison, but resigned after less than a year over the non-payment of a bonus which Tesla expected. Edison also was a strong proponent of the Direct Current system, which Tesla did not agree with. Tesla managed to gain financial backing to form a company to develop arc lights, and opened his first laboratory in New York. The lights were a commercial success, securing him 7 patents. In 1885, he was forced out by a market slump and depression and was unable to find another engineering position. Tesla was reduced to working as a labourer, digging trenches for a year, until he again obtained financial backing of $500,000 to start a new company. In his new laboratory in 1887 he had the opportunity to completely develop his Alternating Current Polyphase system, which eventually revolutionised industrial and domestic electric generation, distribution and consumption. Useful motors had already been developed to use Direct Current, but they were less efficient, and the distribution of DC electricity on an industrial scale was impractical, despite the strong (and sometimes underhand) effort which Edison was making.
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Nikola Tesla 
