BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS CANCER: NIKOLA TESLA

Electrical engineer and inventor, born in Smiljan Lika, Croatia. He went to work for Thomas Edison, but resigned (1885) and set up his own laboratory, and succeeded with his original invention, an electro-magnetic motor that would be the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He invented other electric systems, such as the Tesla coil. In 1912 he refused the Nobel Prize for Physics because he claimed that co-recipient Thomas Edison was not a true scientist. He spent his final years feeding and housing pigeons and living mainly off an annual honorarium from his homeland. The tesla, a unit of magnetic flow density, is named after him.