Nikola Tesla

(1856 - 1943)

Nikola Tesla was born into a Serbian family in what is now Croatia; his father was an Orthodox priest. In 1884 Tesla emigrated to the United States and began working at Thomas Edison’s Machine Works, then headquartered in New York City’s Lower East Side. His Tesla coil, used to produce electricity in wireless radio and medical devices, was patented in 1891, the same year he became a U.S. citizen.