Tesla, Inc is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Tesla designs and manufactures electric vehicles (cars and trucks), stationary battery energy storage devices from home to grid-scale, solar panels and solar roof tiles, and related products and services.
Tesla was founded in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors. The company’s name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. In February 2004, Elon Musk became the company’s largest shareholder and in 2008 he became CEO.
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla was born in the village of Smiljan, in the Austrian Empire (present day Croatia), on 10 July 1856. His father, Milutin Tesla (1819–1879), was a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the family were of Serbian extraction.
In 1875 he enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz where he developed a fascination with the detailed lectures on electricity presented by Professor Jakob Pöschl. Tesla even made suggestions on improving the design of an electric motor the professor was demonstrating.
In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás at the Budapest Telephone Exchange. Tesla was allocated the chief electrician position. While working there, Tesla made many improvements to the equipment and claimed to have perfected a telephone repeater or amplifier, which however, was never patented.
In 1882, Tivadar Puskás got Tesla a different job with the Continental Edison Company, in Paris. Tesla began working in what was then a brand new industry, installing indoor incandescent lighting throughout the city.
In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the USA. Here he gained employment working at the Edison Machine Works, on troubleshooting installations and improving generators. It wasn’t long however until he left the Edison company, to begin work on patenting an arc lighting system, possibly probably one he had developed at Edison.
In April 1887, with the financial backing and business acumen of Alfred S. Brown and Charles Fletcher Peck, Nikola formed the Tesla Electric Company. Tesla soon successfully developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current (AC). The advantages of this power system format that was rapidly expanding in Europe and the United States was in long-distance, high-voltage transmission. The motor was turned by a rotating magnetic field by using a polyphase current, (a principle that Tesla claimed to have discovered in 1882).
Tesla became a naturalized citizen of the United States on 30 July 1891, aged 35. That same year, he patented his Tesla coil which would be used to produce high-voltage, low-current, high frequency alternating-current electricity. He would use this technology in his later wireless power work.
From this point up to 1906, Tesla spent a great deal of his time and fortune on a series of projects trying to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires. In 1898, Tesla demonstrated a boat that used radio control—which he christened “telautomaton”. The U.S. Navy, however, was not interested.
Towards the end of his life Tesla continued to concentrate on experimenting in the fields of wireless communication and what he called “teleforce”, though what the press, in their typical style, referred to as “Tesla’s Death Ray.”
Tesla’s cage of death.
Death
In 1937 at the age of 81, Tesla left the Hotel New Yorker in the middle of one night to feed the pigeons at the library as usual. While crossing a street not far from the hotel Tesla was hit by a taxi and thrown to the ground. He injured his back and broke three of his ribs. Typically, Tesla refused to consult a doctor, so the full extent of his injuries was never known; and he never really recovered. On 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker. His effects were later sent to Serbia where the Nikola Tesla Museum was opened in his honour. One of the finest and most extraordinary minds the world has ever seen.
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