Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla

File:Nikola Tesla.png

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

Real World

Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla received an advanced education in engineering and physics in the 1870s and gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. He emigrated to the United States in 1884, where he would become a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His alternating current (AC) induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company would eventually market.

Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless-controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and would demonstrate his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures.

Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.

After Wardenclyffe, Tesla went on to try to develop a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, he lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. Tesla died in New York City in January 1943. His work fell into relative obscurity following his death, but in 1960, the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s.

Frostpunk

In Frostpunk, Tesla founded Tesla City which is an area that can be scouted in the scenario A New Home. The city's main virtues were productivity and efficiency as Tesla's company, Tesla Manufacturing, had taken control of the city as it was the only company left in Britain (And possibly the world). It therefore took control of buildings and the government of the city and installed a system of productivity and extreme capitalism.

All those that couldn't work in the city were disregarded and exiled as they had no use to the society of Tesla City which is evident of the sign established by exiles from Tesla city detailing Tesla's brutal disowning of useless citizens in the city. Tesla supposedly worked on machines and technology that would assist humanity in its fragile position and begun the manufacturing of Steam Cores which Tesla may have invented.

Although the fate of Tesla is unknown, it is extremely likely that he was killed by his own invention; an electric dome surrounding Tesla City which was intended to prevent snowfall from lining the city. Although it was successful in doing this, the electricity from the dome also vaporised the inhabitants of the city, turning them into unrecognisable charred corpses. It isn't unlikely to believe that Tesla was perhaps one of these charred people, whom met his demise marvelling at his achievement. Ultimately, it was the ego and carelessness of Tesla that led to the murder of Tesla City's people. Tesla met his end at a group of refugees--living on the edge after being banished per his policies--after he was exiled from his own city.