Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла; 10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. He was an important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity, and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries building on the theories of electromagnetic technology discovered by Michael Faraday and used in direct current (DC) applications. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor.

Born an ethnic Serb in the village of Smiljan (now part of Gospić), in the Croatian Military Frontier[1] of the Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia), Tesla was a subject of the Austrian Empire by birth and later became an American citizen.[2] Because of his 1894 demonstration of wireless communication through r