tesla

Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man from Serbia, who was possessed of an edietic memory, and an incredible mind for calculus.

Tesla's youth consisted of some various events. He greatly admired a math teacher in his equivalent of high school. His father wanted him to become a priest, but when he got deathly ill with Cholera, his father relented and said he'd send him to the best Engineering school he could afford if he lived.

Young Adult Tesla went innawoods to evade a draft, and he said that his time hiding in the woods made him physically and mentally strong.

Anyways, Tesla's freshman year at an Austrian University was stellar. Never missed a lecture. Passed 9 exams(you only needed 5). Tesla's professors were afraid he was going to work himself to death....though some others were highly offended when he suggested that their work could be improved on.

His sophomore year, he discovered gambling. He gambled away all his inheritance from his father's death, as well as tuition, and rent....won it back, and said that he got over it. He flunked out. In shame, Tesla never spoke to his family again because he couldn't bear to tell them the news.

Anyways, he gambled for a bit and went through another sort of bohemian phase, before getting a job teaching.

After a while, he works at a telecommunications company and gets a lot of engineering experience, and makes a lot of advances in telegraphs and has enough spare time to do personal projects, as well.

For one reason or another, he comes to America with a letter of recommendation from one of Thomas Edison's friends, and gets a job working under Edison.

Tesla boasts how he can make massive improvements to Edison's systems (even though he's a junior employee and electrical engineer), Edison says that there's a $50k bonus (more than his company was even fucking worth), and Tesla REVOLUTIONIZES Edison's DC generators. Tesla asks for payment, Edison says "You don't understand hyperbole", offers him a raise that would increase his salary by 2/3, and Tesla quits on the spot.

So Tesla starts up his own company with some investors, and Tesla has revolutionary ideas....that the investors don't give a shit about so they boot him out and take his share and leave him penniless. Which is understandable, because Tesla was bad at business. He just wanted to make newer, more advanced generator systems, and wasn't interested in setting up an actual utility business.

Afterwards, Tesla tries starting up another company, and this one's pretty successful. He develops AC, and collaborates with George Westinghouse, who buys rights to Tesla's AC generator and pays large and respectable royalty fees for its use, and also hires on Tesla as a consultant for good pay.

Tesla's own account says that he disliked working with Westinghouse's engineers, mostly because he always worked well by himself, and not among others.

For a long time, the war of the currents happens, smear campaigns between Westinghouse and Edison are conducted, Tesla occasionally goes back to work for Edison surprisingly, and continues to perfect AC systems as the brains behind Tesla Electric, and thus, Westinghouse Electric.

Anyways, Tesla becomes a US citizen, becomes very well-known and respected, and continues his personal projects with his newfound cash, blowing MASSIVE amounts of both company personal funds on experiments with no money to be gained from them at all. His company and ab were under constant threat of foreclosure.

He blows so much money, that he runs out of money to do his actual job, and his investors are FURIOUS. Tesla responds in the most ass way possible, by telling his investors that the money went away because they caused a stock market crash....which while partially true, is not a very endearing thing to say.

They give his ass the boot due to breach of contract, and Tesla proceeds to send fifty billion letters begging for money.

Tesla continues to do more experiments....on borrowed money. He seeks international investors before WWI. WWI begins, the money vanishes. All his European patents are seized. He basically owns very little of his inventions, and receives barely anything from royalties.

He ends up selling his lab, while simultaneously receiving recognition as being one of the foremost authorities on electrical engineering in the US, getting the Edison Medal.

Anyways, Tesla, being destitute, continues to do work on the goodwill of a few investors, and experiments in even more stuff. This is when he does his highly-speculated Directed Energy Weapon experiments.

Finally, Tesla is getting so old, and is continuing to beg for money, and the Westinghouse company is kind enough to give him a pension, and puts him up in a hotel for the remainder of his life .

Tesla does some experimentation and theorization, but all of it is mostly useless. He withdraws into himself, and mostly just befriends pigeons on daily walks. After he falls and breaks his hip but has no money for medical care, and just sort of lies in pain in his hotel room until he heals, the pigeons stop coming because he was in too much pain to feed him.

Eventually, Tesla dies, and someone in the FBI sends out an order to illegally seize his shit. Nobody cares enough to stop them, because it was going to be thrown out anyway. None of his notes are considered important or revolutionary, so they sit on a shelf. Eventually his niece gets the documents.

A few notes:

Tesla was pretty asocial, but when he did talk to others, he was said to be a pretty nice guy.....unless you were ugly or your clothing offended him, in which case he got really nasty quick. His edietic memory did a good job of giving him many quotes and anecdotes in order to entertain people. He was a voracious reader, and consumed lots of literature and religious texts, among other things. He was a great fan of Mark Twain from young adulthood, and later became friends with Twain.

He harbored animosity towards Edison for most of his life.

Tesla claimed himself to sleep only 2 hours a day, but then relented and said that he dozed off a lot. He still had a habit of working for days on end without sleep.

Tesla was friends with a lot of Nazi sympathizers and propagandists, particularly those that had a mystical/theosophical bent. He was an ardent believer in eugenics, and also seemed to dabble in left-hand path philosophy, which was becoming popular in American theosophical circles (such as the ones that for instance, Anton LaVey would become inspired by).

Tesla's later work doesn't really make a lot of sense, because he was a student of classical physics, and his work predates the atomic age. It's mostly garbage.