OVERVIEW

When a young Serbian immigrant stepped off the boat at Ellis Island in New York Harbor in 1884, he is said to have arrived with four cents in his pocket, a book of poems he had written, and his plans for a remotely controlled unmanned airplane. Nikola Tesla at age 28 was making a fresh start in life, and he had a career choice to make: pursue the life of a romantic poet or continue his rather unorthodox start in electrical engineering. Fortunately for unmanned aviation, he chose the latter.

Born in 1856 in Smiljan, a village in present-day Croatia, Tesla entered Austria's Graz Polytechnic School in 1876, despite his father's preference that he follow in his footsteps and become an Orthodox priest. There, under the encouragement of his mathematics teacher, Professor Alle, he began developing his concept for a mechanical flying machine. However, when another of his professors ridiculed his idea for transmitting electricity over long distances by alternating current, he abandoned college (and his gambling debts to classmates) and lived as a hermit in the mountainous woods near his home for some months. Emerging from his self-imposed isolation, he drifted and gambled until he learned about Thomas Edison opening a European office for his electrical products in Paris. While working there, he was rapidly educated in the leading-edge developments of the dawning new field of electrical engineering. It also introduced him to key workers in this field, American business methods, and the English language. It was this...