title: Jenna Ortega

text: From 2016 to 2018, Ortega then went on to star in the lead of the Disney Channel sitcom "Stuck in the Middle" as Harley Diaz, the middle child of the seven Diaz siblings who is an aspiring inventor. The show was well received, and Ortega received an Imagen Award for her performance, as well as being nominated for two others. In the same year, she joined the cast on Disney's "Elena of Avalor," as the voice of Princess Isabel, which ended in 2020. The show was well received, and she shared another Imagen Award win with the cast, as well as another nomination in 2019. In 2017, she starred in the music video for Jacob Sartorius' "Chapstick", which also stars the singer. In the video, Ortega played Sartorius' love interest, which gained significant media coverage.


title: Jenna Ortega

text: In 2018, Ortega starred in the film "Saving Flora" as the lead role of Dawn, the daughter of a circus owner. The film received positive reviews from critics, and Ortega received praise for her performance. She received a nomination for Best Lead Actress at the Southampton International Film Festival. Ortega had been cast in the main role of Ellie Alves on the second season of the Netflix thriller series "You", which was released on December 26, 2019. In "You", her character is a smart and meddling girl who likes to act older than her true age. Ortega commented on working with co-stars Penn Badgley and Victoria Pedretti, stating that "I wish I had gotten to shoot with Victoria more, because I think she's really talented. ... Penn is such an eloquent speaker, so well-thought and so respectful and so kind, and just such a pleasure to work with." The season, alike to the show's first season, was praised as well as Ortega's performance.


title: Jenna Ortega

text: In 2019, Ortega was cast as Pheobe in the Netflix horror film "". She said in an segment with Cosmopolitan that she had been "incredibly nervous" when they began filming, stating that "because it was a sequel, all of the other cast members already knew each other ... I went on the set panicking because I didn't know what I was doing." The film was released in September 2020, and received mixed reviews from critics. In 2020, Ortega voiced Brooklyn in the Netflix animated series "Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous". The series was met with mixed reviews, although praise went towards Ortega's voicing and the rest of the cast. The series was renewed for a second season, slated to release in 2021. In 2020, Ortega announced that she would make her writing debut with the book "It's All Love", which was released in January 2021. Ortega subsequently starred as Katie Torres in the Netflix comedy movie "Yes Day." She was cast in 2019, and the film was released in March 2021 to mixed reviews, though her performance was praised.


title: Jenna Ortega

text: In March 2021, the high-school drama film "The Fallout" was released, in which Ortega portrayed the lead role of Vada; it was released on HBO Max on January 27, 2022. Cast in February 2020, filming took place over a month between August and September of that same year. It received a positive response from critics, and Ortega's acting was lauded, with several critics dubbing it her "breakout" film role. "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote: "...Ortega's beautifully nuanced turn understands the nothing-to-look-at-here façade and the chinks in the armor." "Decider" wrote similarly, praising her performance as "raw without going overboard. What could have been cliches along Vada's character path become earnest and real thanks to her commitment to the performance and a thorough understanding of its emotional beats." "Variety" magazine described Vada as her breakthrough film role, writing that "Ortega in particular seems to have found her voice." "CinemaBlend" praised the chemistry between her and her co-star Maddie Ziegler, and stated that the "two girls at the center of it all also look phenomenal, as a true bond can be sensed in the process of bringing this story to life." "Mashable" wrote that she "smoothly shoulders a role, richly written in lovingly messy complexities, and gives it breath as well as staggering sobs."


title: Jenna Ortega

text: Ortega was cast as Tara Carpenter in the slasher film "Scream" in 2020, on which she stated that "I don't even think there are words in the English language to correctly express how happy, excited and nervous I am for this journey." Filming took place in Wilmington, North Carolina from September to November of that same year. On working with co-stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, she stated that "You never know what to expect when you're meeting people of that standard, but they truly were just the most down-to-earth, sweetest people." The film emerged as a critical and commercial success, becoming the 28th-highest grossing film of 2022 and winning her the MTV Movie Award for Most Frightened Performance.


title: Jenna Ortega

text: Ortega starred in the Foo Fighters-led horror film "Studio 666", released in February 2022, and the horror film "X", from filmmaker Ti West, which was released in March. The latter earned critical acclaim, with "Screen Rant" writing that "Ortega, alongside her role-swapping co-star Mia Goth, is in rare form here, with the pair's performances as two horrified wannabe pornstars turned survivalists as shocking as they are compelling." Following her roles in the 2022 horror films "Scream", "Studio 666", "X", and "American Carnage" she was dubbed a scream queen by several media outlets.


title: Jenna Ortega

text: In the Netflix comedy horror series "Wednesday" (2022), Ortega played the titular role of Wednesday Addams, which she called a "new chapter" in her career. To prepare, she underwent "the most physical transformation I've ever done; I cut my hair, and it's black, and mannerism-wise, speaking cadence-wise, expression-wise". She later called production of season one "the most overwhelming job" she had ever had and spoke about being in a constant state of confusion and stress over the direction of the series and character. Ortega's performance in the series garnered her widespread acclaim, with some critics deeming it the best rendition of the character yet. She was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy.


title: Jenna Ortega

text: Ortega will next star in the Paramount+ thriller film "Finestkind" alongside Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Foster and Toby Wallace and reprise the role of Tara Carpenter in "Scream VI". She has joined the cast of Lionsgate and Point Grey's "Miller's Girl", opposite Martin Freeman. Ortega called her character in "Miller's Girl," "the most complex character that I've ever played" and described the material as risky. Ortega is also set to star and executive produce the romantic drama "Winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall."


title: Jenna Ortega

text: Ortega has used her platforms to promote support for immigrants and politics involving them. Ortega is a supporter of "Pride Over Prejudice", a campaign that promotes acceptance towards the LGBT community; she has advocated for the organization since she was the age of 13. She is pro-immigration and anti-discrimination, and told "Teen Vogue": "It's important to embrace your culture today because there are so many different ethnicities in America. At the end of the day, you are you. You've got to stay true to yourself, and you can't change yourself in order to fit in or to make someone else feel comfortable."


title: Jenna Ortega

text: In 2016, Ortega organized a meet and greet for fans to raise money for a young girl with cancer. In 2018, at the Radio Disney Music Awards, Ortega wore a jacket, which displayed the words "I Do Care And U Should Too" in response to first lady Melania Trump's apparel when she went to visit immigrant children who were being housed without their parents, which read "I Really Don't Care. Do U?". The stand gained significant media coverage. On the action, Ortega told "Forbes": "I remember I was going through the news on my phone and I saw what Melania wore on the way to visit the immigrant children. I was so deeply offended and right there at that moment I knew what I wanted my statement to be..." Across 2019, Ortega appeared at numerous WE Day concerts across the United States and Canada to benefit WE Charity.


title: Jenna Ortega

text: In 2020, Ortega was named a brand ambassador for Neutrogena. On becoming an ambassador, she told "¡Hola!": "I could not be more ecstatic. I say it over and over, but it really is such a surreal feeling, especially with such an iconic brand, that I have looked up to for such a long time." The following year, Ortega announced on her Instagram that she was partnering with Neutrogena on "For People with Skin", which is a "team commitment to advance skin health for all consumers, regardless of race, age, ethnicity, skin need, or income."


title: Jenna Ortega

text: Ortega has stated that she feels taking more varied roles in acting is important to her, as to not be typecast; she told "E! Online" in 2021 that she did not want to be "pigeonholed as an actor," and that her desire to "do the most diverse roles that I possibly can and really switch up" made the transition to mature roles easier for her. She has said that horror works are what she feels most comfortable with starring in, telling Rotten Tomatoes in 2022 that she was "pretty comfortable with all the horror stuff".


title: Jenna Ortega

text: In an interview with Collider, Ortega said that she was initially inspired to pursue acting after watching the performance of actress Dakota Fanning in the 2004 thriller film "Man on Fire", stating that "After watching Dakota, who obviously was so talented from such a young age, I decided that I wanted to be the Puerto Rican version of her." She also said that she thought Denzel Washington was "the coolest man I had ever seen in my life." Ortega also cites actress Gina Rodriguez, whom she worked with on the television drama "Jane The Virgin", as one of her major influences. She stated that she admires Rodriguez for her story being similar to hers, and for her efforts and ability.


title: Jenna Ortega

text: Ortega was listed first on PopSugar's "20 Under 20" list in 2020. In 2022, she was dubbed the "Next Big Thing" by "The Hollywood Reporter".


title: Nikola Tesla

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


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without receiving a degree, gaining practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884 he emigrated to the United States, where he became 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 eventually marketed.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: 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 wirelessly controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and demonstrated 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.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943. Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when 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.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Nikola Tesla was born an ethnic Serb in the village of Smiljan, within the Military Frontier, in the Austrian Empire (present day Croatia), on 1856. His father, Milutin Tesla (1819–1879), was a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla's mother, Đuka Mandić (1822–1892), whose father was also an Eastern Orthodox Church priest, had a talent for making home craft tools and mechanical appliances and the ability to memorize Serbian epic poems. Đuka had never received a formal education. Tesla credited his eidetic memory and creative abilities to his mother's genetics and influence. Tesla's progenitors were from western Serbia, near Montenegro.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla was the fourth of five children. He had three sisters, Milka, Angelina, and Marica, and an older brother named Dane, who was killed in a horse riding accident when Tesla was aged five. In 1861, Tesla attended primary school in Smiljan where he studied German, arithmetic, and religion. In 1862, the Tesla family moved to the nearby Gospić, where Tesla's father worked as parish priest. Nikola completed primary school, followed by middle school. In 1870, Tesla moved to Karlovac to attend high school at the Higher Real Gymnasium where the classes were held in German, as it was usual throughout schools within the Austro-Hungarian Military Frontier.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla later wrote that he became interested in demonstrations of electricity by his physics professor. Tesla noted that these demonstrations of this "mysterious phenomena" made him want "to know more of this wonderful force". Tesla was able to perform integral calculus in his head, which prompted his teachers to believe that he was cheating. He finished a four-year term in three years, graduating in 1873.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: After graduating Tesla returned to Smiljan but soon contracted cholera, was bedridden for nine months and was near death multiple times. In a moment of despair, Tesla's father (who had originally wanted him to enter the priesthood), promised to send him to the best engineering school if he recovered from the illness.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: The next year Tesla evaded conscription into the Austro-Hungarian Army in Smiljan by running away southeast of Lika to Tomingaj, near Gračac. There he explored the mountains wearing hunter's garb. Tesla said that this contact with nature made him stronger, both physically and mentally. He read many books while in Tomingaj and later said that Mark Twain's works had helped him to miraculously recover from his earlier illness.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: He enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz in 1875 on a Military Frontier scholarship. In his autobiography Tesla said he worked hard and earned the highest grades possible, passed nine exams (nearly twice as many as required) and received a letter of commendation from the dean of the technical faculty to his father, which stated, "Your son is a star of first rank." At Graz, Tesla noted his fascination with the detailed lectures on electricity presented by Professor Jakob Pöschl and described how he made suggestions on improving the design of an electric motor the professor was demonstrating. But by his third year he was failing in school and never graduated, leaving Graz in December 1878. One biographer suggests Tesla wasn't studying and may have been expelled for gambling and womanizing.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla's family did not hear from him after he left school. There was a rumor amongst his classmates that he had drowned in the nearby Mur River but in January one of them ran into Tesla in the town of Maribor across the border in Slovenia and reported that encounter to Tesla's family. It turned out Tesla had been working there as a draftsman for 60 florins per month. In March 1879, Milutin finally located his son and tried to convince him to return home and take up his education in Prague. Tesla returned to Gospić later that month when he was deported for not having a residence permit. Tesla's father died the next month, on 17 April 1879, at the age of 60 after an unspecified illness. During the rest of the year Tesla taught a large class of students in his old school in Gospić.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In January 1880, two of Tesla's uncles put together enough money to help him leave Gospić for Prague, where he was to study. He arrived too late to enroll at Charles-Ferdinand University; he had never studied Greek, a required subject; and he was illiterate in Czech, another required subject. Tesla did, however, attend lectures in philosophy at the university as an auditor but he did not receive grades for the courses.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, in 1881 to work under Tivadar Puskás at a telegraph company, the Budapest Telephone Exchange. Upon arrival, Tesla realized that the company, then under construction, was not functional, so he worked as a draftsman in the Central Telegraph Office instead. Within a few months, the Budapest Telephone Exchange became functional, and Tesla was allocated the chief electrician position. During his employment, Tesla made many improvements to the Central Station equipment and claimed to have perfected a telephone repeater or amplifier, which was never patented nor publicly described.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1882, Tivadar Puskás got Tesla another job in Paris with the Continental Edison Company. Tesla began working in what was then a brand new industry, installing indoor incandescent lighting citywide in large scale electric power utility. The company had several subdivisions and Tesla worked at the Société Electrique Edison, the division in the Ivry-sur-Seine suburb of Paris in charge of installing the lighting system. There he gained a great deal of practical experience in electrical engineering. Management took notice of his advanced knowledge in engineering and physics and soon had him designing and building improved versions of generating dynamos and motors. They also sent him on to troubleshoot engineering problems at other Edison utilities being built around France and in Germany.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1884, Edison manager Charles Batchelor, who had been overseeing the Paris installation, was brought back to the United States to manage the Edison Machine Works, a manufacturing division situated in New York City, and asked that Tesla be brought to the United States as well. In June 1884, Tesla emigrated and began working almost immediately at the Machine Works on Manhattan's Lower East Side, an overcrowded shop with a workforce of several hundred machinists, laborers, managing staff, and 20 "field engineers" struggling with the task of building the large electric utility in that city. As in Paris, Tesla was working on troubleshooting installations and improving generators. Historian W. Bernard Carlson notes Tesla may have met company founder Thomas Edison only a couple of times. One of those times was noted in Tesla's autobiography where, after staying up all night repairing the damaged dynamos on the ocean liner SS "Oregon", he ran into Batchelor and Edison, who made a quip about their "Parisian" being out all night. After Tesla told them he had been up all night fixing the "Oregon", Edison commented to Batchelor that "this is a damned good man". One of the projects given to Tesla was to develop an arc lamp-based street lighting system. Arc lighting was the most popular type of street lighting but it required high voltages and was incompatible with the Edison low-voltage incandescent system, causing the company to lose contracts in some cities. Tesla's designs were never put into production, possibly because of technical improvements in incandescent street lighting or because of an installation deal that Edison made with an arc lighting company.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla had been working at the Machine Works for a total of six months when he quit. What event precipitated his leaving is unclear. It may have been over a bonus he did not receive, either for redesigning generators or for the arc lighting system that was shelved. Tesla had previous run-ins with the Edison company over unpaid bonuses he believed he had earned. In his autobiography, Tesla stated the manager of the Edison Machine Works offered a $50,000 bonus to design "twenty-four different types of standard machines" "but it turned out to be a practical joke". Later versions of this story have Thomas Edison himself offering and then reneging on the deal, quipping "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor". The size of the bonus in either story has been noted as odd since Machine Works manager Batchelor was stingy with pay and the company did not have that amount of cash (equivalent to $1.4 million in 2021) on hand. Tesla's diary contains just one comment on what happened at the end of his employment, a note he scrawled across the two pages covering 7 December 1884, to 4 January 1885, saying "Good by to the Edison Machine Works".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Soon after leaving the Edison company, Tesla was working on patenting an arc lighting system, possibly the same one he had developed at Edison. In March 1885, he met with patent attorney Lemuel W. Serrell, the same attorney used by Edison, to obtain help with submitting the patents. Serrell introduced Tesla to two businessmen, Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail, who agreed to finance an arc lighting manufacturing and utility company in Tesla's name, the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. Tesla worked for the rest of the year obtaining the patents that included an improved DC generator, the first patents issued to Tesla in the US, and building and installing the system in Rahway, New Jersey. Tesla's new system gained notice in the technical press, which commented on its advanced features.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: The investors showed little interest in Tesla's ideas for new types of alternating current motors and electrical transmission equipment. After the utility was up and running in 1886, they decided that the manufacturing side of the business was too competitive and opted to simply run an electric utility. They formed a new utility company, abandoning Tesla's company and leaving the inventor penniless. Tesla even lost control of the patents he had generated, since he had assigned them to the company in exchange for stock. He had to work at various electrical repair jobs and as a ditch digger for $2 per day. Later in life Tesla recounted that part of 1886 as a time of hardship, writing "My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In late 1886, Tesla met Alfred S. Brown, a Western Union superintendent, and New York attorney Charles Fletcher Peck. The two men were experienced in setting up companies and promoting inventions and patents for financial gain. Based on Tesla's new ideas for electrical equipment, including a thermo-magnetic motor idea, they agreed to back the inventor financially and handle his patents. Together they formed the Tesla Electric Company in April 1887, with an agreement that profits from generated patents would go to Tesla, to Peck and Brown, and to fund development. They set up a laboratory for Tesla at 89 Liberty Street in Manhattan, where he worked on improving and developing new types of electric motors, generators, and other devices.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1887, Tesla developed an induction motor that ran on alternating current (AC), a power system format that was rapidly expanding in Europe and the United States because of its advantages in long-distance, high-voltage transmission. The motor used polyphase current, which generated a rotating magnetic field to turn the motor (a principle that Tesla claimed to have conceived in 1882). This innovative electric motor, patented in May 1888, was a simple self-starting design that did not need a commutator, thus avoiding sparking and the high maintenance of constantly servicing and replacing mechanical brushes.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Along with getting the motor patented, Peck and Brown arranged to get the motor publicized, starting with independent testing to verify it was a functional improvement, followed by press releases sent to technical publications for articles to run concurrently with the issue of the patent. Physicist William Arnold Anthony (who tested the motor) and "Electrical World" magazine editor Thomas Commerford Martin arranged for Tesla to demonstrate his AC motor on 16 May 1888 at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Engineers working for the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company reported to George Westinghouse that Tesla had a viable AC motor and related power system—something Westinghouse needed for the alternating current system he was already marketing. Westinghouse looked into getting a patent on a similar commutator-less, rotating magnetic field-based induction motor developed in 1885 and presented in a paper in March 1888 by Italian physicist Galileo Ferraris, but decided that Tesla's patent would probably control the market.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In July 1888, Brown and Peck negotiated a licensing deal with George Westinghouse for Tesla's polyphase induction motor and transformer designs for $60,000 in cash and stock and a royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower produced by each motor. Westinghouse also hired Tesla for one year for the large fee of $2,000 ($ in today's dollars) per month to be a consultant at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: During that year, Tesla worked in Pittsburgh, helping to create an alternating current system to power the city's streetcars. He found it a frustrating period because of conflicts with the other Westinghouse engineers over how best to implement AC power. Between them, they settled on a 60-cycle AC system that Tesla proposed (to match the working frequency of Tesla's motor), but they soon found that it would not work for streetcars, since Tesla's induction motor could run only at a constant speed. They ended up using a DC traction motor instead.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla's demonstration of his induction motor and Westinghouse's subsequent licensing of the patent, both in 1888, came at the time of extreme competition between electric companies. The three big firms, Westinghouse, Edison, and Thomson-Houston, were trying to grow in a capital-intensive business while financially undercutting each other. There was even a "war of currents" propaganda campaign going on with Edison Electric trying to claim their direct current system was better and safer than the Westinghouse alternating current system. Competing in this market meant Westinghouse would not have the cash or engineering resources to develop Tesla's motor and the related polyphase system right away.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Two years after signing the Tesla contract, Westinghouse Electric was in trouble. The near collapse of Barings Bank in London triggered the financial panic of 1890, causing investors to call in their loans to Westinghouse Electric. The sudden cash shortage forced the company to refinance its debts. The new lenders demanded that Westinghouse cut back on what looked like excessive spending on acquisition of other companies, research, and patents, including the per motor royalty in the Tesla contract. At that point, the Tesla induction motor had been unsuccessful and was stuck in development. Westinghouse was paying a $15,000-a-year guaranteed royalty even though operating examples of the motor were rare and polyphase power systems needed to run it was even rarer. In early 1891, George Westinghouse explained his financial difficulties to Tesla in stark terms, saying that, if he did not meet the demands of his lenders, he would no longer be in control of Westinghouse Electric and Tesla would have to "deal with the bankers" to try to collect future royalties. The advantages of having Westinghouse continue to champion the motor probably seemed obvious to Tesla and he agreed to release the company from the royalty payment clause in the contract. Six years later Westinghouse purchased Tesla's patent for a lump sum payment of $216,000 as part of a patent-sharing agreement signed with General Electric (a company created from the 1892 merger of Edison and Thomson-Houston).


title: Nikola Tesla

text: The money Tesla made from licensing his AC patents made him independently wealthy and gave him the time and funds to pursue his own interests. In 1889, Tesla moved out of the Liberty Street shop Peck and Brown had rented and for the next dozen years working out of a series of workshop/laboratory spaces in Manhattan. These included a lab at 175 Grand Street (1889–1892), the fourth floor of 33–35 South Fifth Avenue (1892–1895), and sixth and seventh floors of 46 & 48 East Houston Street (1895–1902). Tesla and his hired staff conducted some of his most significant work in these workshops.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In the summer of 1889, Tesla traveled to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and learned of Heinrich Hertz's 1886–1888 experiments that proved the existence of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves. Tesla found this new discovery "refreshing" and decided to explore it more fully. In repeating and then expanding on these experiments Tesla tried powering a Ruhmkorff coil with a high speed alternator he had been developing as part of an improved arc lighting system but found that the high-frequency current overheated the iron core and melted the insulation between the primary and secondary windings in the coil. To fix this problem Tesla came up with his "oscillating transformer", with an air gap instead of insulating material between the primary and secondary windings and an iron core that could be moved to different positions in or out of the coil. Later called the Tesla coil, it would be used to produce high-voltage, low-current, high frequency alternating-current electricity. He would use this resonant transformer circuit in his later wireless power work.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: On 30 July 1891, aged 35, Tesla became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In the same year, he patented his Tesla coil.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: After 1890, Tesla experimented with transmitting power by inductive and capacitive coupling using high AC voltages generated with his Tesla coil. He attempted to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field inductive and capacitive coupling and conducted a series of public demonstrations where he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent light bulbs from across a stage. He spent most of the decade working on variations of this new form of lighting with the help of various investors but none of the ventures succeeded in making a commercial product out of his findings.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1893 at St. Louis, Missouri, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, Tesla told onlookers that he was sure a system like his could eventually conduct "intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires" by conducting it through the Earth.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla served as a vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers from 1892 to 1894, the forerunner of the modern-day IEEE (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers).


title: Nikola Tesla

text: By the beginning of 1893, Westinghouse engineer Charles F. Scott and then Benjamin G. Lamme had made progress on an efficient version of Tesla's induction motor. Lamme found a way to make the polyphase system it would need compatible with older single-phase AC and DC systems by developing a rotary converter. Westinghouse Electric now had a way to provide electricity to all potential customers and started branding their polyphase AC system as the "Tesla Polyphase System". They believed that Tesla's patents gave them patent priority over other polyphase AC systems.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Westinghouse Electric asked Tesla to participate in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago where the company had a large space in the "Electricity Building" devoted to electrical exhibits. Westinghouse Electric won the bid to light the Exposition with alternating current and it was a key event in the history of AC power, as the company demonstrated to the American public the safety, reliability, and efficiency of an alternating current system that was polyphase and could also supply the other AC and DC exhibits at the fair.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: A special exhibit space was set up to display various forms and models of Tesla's induction motor. The rotating magnetic field that drove them was explained through a series of demonstrations including an "Egg of Columbus" that used the two-phase coil found in an induction motor to spin a copper egg making it stand on end.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla visited the fair for a week during its six-month run to attend the International Electrical Congress and put on a series of demonstrations at the Westinghouse exhibit. A specially darkened room had been set up where Tesla showed his wireless lighting system, using a demonstration he had previously performed throughout America and Europe; these included using high-voltage, high-frequency alternating current to light wireless gas-discharge lamps.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: During his presentation at the International Electrical Congress in the Columbian Exposition Agriculture Hall, Tesla introduced his steam powered reciprocating electricity generator that he patented that year, something he thought was a better way to generate alternating current. Steam was forced into the oscillator and rushed out through a series of ports, pushing a piston up and down that was attached to an armature. The magnetic armature vibrated up and down at high speed, producing an alternating magnetic field. This induced alternating electric current in the wire coils located adjacent. It did away with the complicated parts of a steam engine/generator, but never caught on as a feasible engineering solution to generate electricity.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1893, Edward Dean Adams, who headed the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company, sought Tesla's opinion on what system would be best to transmit power generated at the falls. Over several years, there had been a series of proposals and open competitions on how best to do it. Among the systems proposed by several US and European companies were two-phase and three-phase AC, high-voltage DC, and compressed air. Adams asked Tesla for information about the current state of all the competing systems. Tesla advised Adams that a two-phased system would be the most reliable and that there was a Westinghouse system to light incandescent bulbs using two-phase alternating current. The company awarded a contract to Westinghouse Electric for building a two-phase AC generating system at the Niagara Falls, based on Tesla's advice and Westinghouse's demonstration at the Columbian Exposition. At the same time, a further contract was awarded to General Electric to build the AC distribution system.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1895, Edward Dean Adams, impressed with what he saw when he toured Tesla's lab, agreed to help found the Nikola Tesla Company, set up to fund, develop, and market a variety of previous Tesla patents and inventions as well as new ones. Alfred Brown signed on, bringing along patents developed under Peck and Brown. The board was filled out with William Birch Rankine and Charles F. Coaney. It found few investors since the mid-1890s were a tough time financially, and the wireless lighting and oscillators patents it was set up to market never panned out. The company handled Tesla's patents for decades to come.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In the early morning hours of 13 March 1895, the South Fifth Avenue building that housed Tesla's lab caught fire. It started in the basement of the building and was so intense Tesla's 4th-floor lab burned and collapsed into the second floor. The fire not only set back Tesla's ongoing projects, but it also destroyed a collection of early notes and research material, models, and demonstration pieces, including many that had been exhibited at the 1893 Worlds Colombian Exposition. Tesla told "The New York Times" "I am in too much grief to talk. What can I say?". After the fire Tesla moved to 46 & 48 East Houston Street and rebuilt his lab on the 6th and 7th floors.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Starting in 1894, Tesla began investigating what he referred to as radiant energy of "invisible" kinds after he had noticed damaged film in his laboratory in previous experiments (later identified as "Roentgen rays" or "X-rays"). His early experiments were with Crookes tubes, a cold cathode electrical discharge tube. Tesla may have inadvertently captured an X-ray image—predating, by a few weeks, Wilhelm Röntgen's December 1895 announcement of the discovery of X-rays—when he tried to photograph Mark Twain illuminated by a Geissler tube, an earlier type of gas discharge tube. The only thing captured in the image was the metal locking screw on the camera lens.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In March 1896, after hearing of Röntgen's discovery of X-ray and X-ray imaging (radiography), Tesla proceeded to do his own experiments in X-ray imaging, developing a high-energy single-terminal vacuum tube of his own design that had no target electrode and that worked from the output of the Tesla coil (the modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is "bremsstrahlung" or "braking radiation"). In his research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will ... enable one to generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla noted the hazards of working with his circuit and single-node X-ray-producing devices. In his many notes on the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. He believed early on that damage to the skin was not caused by the Roentgen rays, but by the ozone generated in contact with the skin, and to a lesser extent, by nitrous acid. Tesla incorrectly believed that X-rays were longitudinal waves, such as those produced in waves in plasmas. These plasma waves can occur in force-free magnetic fields.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: On 11 July 1934, the "New York Herald Tribune" published an article on Tesla, in which he recalled an event that occasionally took place while experimenting with his single-electrode vacuum tubes. A minute particle would break off the cathode, pass out of the tube, and physically strike him:


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla said he could feel a sharp stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out. In comparing these particles with the bits of metal projected by his "electric gun", Tesla said, "The particles in the beam of force ... will travel much faster than such particles ... and they will travel in concentrations".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1898, Tesla demonstrated a boat that used a coherer-based radio control—which he dubbed "telautomaton"—to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. Tesla tried to sell his idea to the US military as a type of radio-controlled torpedo, but they showed little interest. Remote radio control remained a novelty until World War I and afterward, when a number of countries used it in military programs. Tesla took the opportunity to further demonstrate "Teleautomatics" in an address to a meeting of the Commercial Club in Chicago, while he was travelling to Colorado Springs, on 13 May 1899.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: From the 1890s through 1906, Tesla spent a great deal of his time and fortune on a series of projects trying to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires. It was an expansion of his idea of using coils to transmit power that he had been demonstrating in wireless lighting. He saw this as not only a way to transmit large amounts of power around the world but also, as he had pointed out in his earlier lectures, a way to transmit worldwide communications.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: At the time Tesla was formulating his ideas, there was no feasible way to wirelessly transmit communication signals over long distances, let alone large amounts of power. Tesla had studied radio waves early on, and came to the conclusion that part of the existing study on them, by Hertz, was incorrect. Also, this new form of radiation was widely considered at the time to be a short-distance phenomenon that seemed to die out in less than a mile. Tesla noted that, even if theories on radio waves were true, they were totally worthless for his intended purposes since this form of "invisible light" would diminish over a distance just like any other radiation and would travel in straight lines right out into space, becoming "hopelessly lost".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: By the mid-1890s, Tesla was working on the idea that he might be able to conduct electricity long distance through the Earth or the atmosphere, and began working on experiments to test this idea including setting up a large resonance transformer magnifying transmitter in his East Houston Street lab. Seeming to borrow from a common idea at the time that the Earth's atmosphere was conductive, he proposed a system composed of balloons suspending, transmitting, and receiving, electrodes in the air above in altitude, where he thought the lower pressure would allow him to send high voltages (millions of volts) long distances.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: To further study the conductive nature of low-pressure air, Tesla set up an experimental station at high altitude in Colorado Springs during 1899. There he could safely operate much larger coils than in the cramped confines of his New York lab, and an associate had made an arrangement for the El Paso Power Company to supply alternating current free of charge. To fund his experiments, he convinced John Jacob Astor IV to invest $100,000 ($ in today's dollars) to become a majority shareholder in the Nikola Tesla Company. Astor thought he was primarily investing in the new wireless lighting system. Instead, Tesla used the money to fund his Colorado Springs experiments. Upon his arrival, he told reporters that he planned to conduct wireless telegraphy experiments, transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: There, he conducted experiments with a large coil operating in the megavolts range, producing artificial lightning (and thunder) consisting of millions of volts and discharges of up to in length, and, at one point, inadvertently burned out the generator in El Paso, causing a power outage. The observations he made of the electronic noise of lightning strikes led him to (incorrectly) conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: During his time at his laboratory, Tesla observed unusual signals from his receiver which he speculated to be communications from another planet. He mentioned them in a letter to a reporter in December 1899 and to the Red Cross Society in December 1900. Reporters treated it as a sensational story and jumped to the conclusion Tesla was hearing signals from Mars. He expanded on the signals he heard in a 9 February 1901 "Collier's Weekly" article entitled "Talking With Planets", where he said it had not been immediately apparent to him that he was hearing "intelligently controlled signals" and that the signals could have come from Mars, Venus, or other planets. It has been hypothesized that he may have intercepted Guglielmo Marconi's European experiments in July 1899—Marconi may have transmitted the letter S (dot/dot/dot) in a naval demonstration, the same three impulses that Tesla hinted at hearing in Colorado—or signals from another experimenter in wireless transmission.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla had an agreement with the editor of "The Century Magazine" to produce an article on his findings. The magazine sent a photographer to Colorado to photograph the work being done there. The article, titled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy", appeared in the June 1900 edition of the magazine. He explained the superiority of the wireless system he envisioned but the article was more of a lengthy philosophical treatise than an understandable scientific description of his work, illustrated with what were to become iconic images of Tesla and his Colorado Springs experiments.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla made the rounds in New York trying to find investors for what he thought would be a viable system of wireless transmission, wining and dining them at the Waldorf-Astoria's Palm Garden (the hotel where he was living at the time), The Players Club, and Delmonico's. In March 1901, he obtained $150,000 ($ in today's dollars) from J. P. Morgan in return for a 51% share of any generated wireless patents, and began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility to be built in Shoreham, New York, east of the city on the North Shore of Long Island.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: By July 1901, Tesla had expanded his plans to build a more powerful transmitter to leap ahead of Marconi's radio-based system, which Tesla thought was a copy of his own. He approached Morgan to ask for more money to build the larger system, but Morgan refused to supply any further funds. In December 1901, Marconi successfully transmitted the letter S from England to Newfoundland, defeating Tesla in the race to be first to complete such a transmission. A month after Marconi's success, Tesla tried to get Morgan to back an even larger plan to transmit messages and power by controlling "vibrations throughout the globe". Over the next five years, Tesla wrote more than 50 letters to Morgan, pleading for and demanding additional funding to complete the construction of Wardenclyffe. Tesla continued the project for another nine months into 1902. The tower was erected to its full height of . In June 1902, Tesla moved his lab operations from Houston Street to Wardenclyffe.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Investors on Wall Street were putting their money into Marconi's system, and some in the press began turning against Tesla's project, claiming it was a hoax. The project came to a halt in 1905, and in 1906, the financial problems and other events may have led to what Tesla biographer Marc J. Seifer suspects was a nervous breakdown on Tesla's part. Tesla mortgaged the Wardenclyffe property to cover his debts at the Waldorf-Astoria, which eventually amounted to $20,000 ($ in today's dollars). He lost the property in foreclosure in 1915, and in 1917 the Tower was demolished by the new owner to make the land a more viable real estate asset.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: After Wardenclyffe closed, Tesla continued to write to Morgan; after "the great man" died, Tesla wrote to Morgan's son Jack, trying to get further funding for the project. In 1906, Tesla opened offices at 165 Broadway in Manhattan, trying to raise further funds by developing and marketing his patents. He went on to have offices at the Metropolitan Life Tower from 1910 to 1914; rented for a few months at the Woolworth Building, moving out because he could not afford the rent; and then to office space at 8 West 40th Street from 1915 to 1925. After moving to 8 West 40th Street, he was effectively bankrupt. Most of his patents had run out and he was having trouble with the new inventions he was trying to develop.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: On his 50th birthday, in 1906, Tesla demonstrated a 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910–1911, at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100–5,000 hp. Tesla worked with several companies including from 1919 to 1922 in Milwaukee, for Allis-Chalmers. He spent most of his time trying to perfect the Tesla turbine with Hans Dahlstrand, the head engineer at the company, but engineering difficulties meant it was never made into a practical device. Tesla did license the idea to a precision instrument company and it found use in the form of luxury car speedometers and other instruments.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: When World War I broke out, the British cut the transatlantic telegraph cable linking the US to Germany in order to control the flow of information between the two countries. They also tried to shut off German wireless communication to and from the US by having the US Marconi Company sue the German radio company Telefunken for patent infringement. Telefunken brought in the physicists Jonathan Zenneck and Karl Ferdinand Braun for their defense, and hired Tesla as a witness for two years for $1,000 a month. The case stalled and then went moot when the US entered the war against Germany in 1917.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1915, Tesla attempted to sue the Marconi Company for infringement of his wireless tuning patents. Marconi's initial radio patent had been awarded in the US in 1897, but his 1900 patent submission covering improvements to radio transmission had been rejected several times, before it was finally approved in 1904, on the grounds that it infringed on other existing patents including two 1897 Tesla wireless power tuning patents. Tesla's 1915 case went nowhere, but in a related case, where the Marconi Company tried to sue the US government over WWI patent infringements, a Supreme Court of the United States 1943 decision restored the prior patents of Oliver Lodge, John Stone, and Tesla. The court declared that their decision had no bearing on Marconi's claim as the first to achieve radio transmission, just that since Marconi's claim to certain patented improvements were questionable, the company could not claim infringement on those same patents.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: On 6 November 1915, a Reuters news agency report from London had the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla; however, on 15 November, a Reuters story from Stockholm stated the prize that year was being awarded to William Henry Bragg and Lawrence Bragg "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays". There were unsubstantiated rumors at the time that either Tesla or Edison had refused the prize. The Nobel Foundation said, "Any rumor that a person has not been given a Nobel Prize because he has made known his intention to refuse the reward is ridiculous"; a recipient could decline a Nobel Prize only after he is announced a winner.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: There have been subsequent claims by Tesla biographers that Edison and Tesla were the original recipients and that neither was given the award because of their animosity toward each other; that each sought to minimize the other's achievements and right to win the award; that both refused ever to accept the award if the other received it first; that both rejected any possibility of sharing it; and even that a wealthy Edison refused it to keep Tesla from getting the $20,000 prize money.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In the years after these rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won a Nobel prize (although Edison received one of 38 possible bids in 1915 and Tesla received one of 38 possible bids in 1937).


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla attempted to market several devices based on the production of ozone. These included his 1900 Tesla Ozone Company selling an 1896 patented device based on his Tesla Coil, used to bubble ozone through different types of oils to make a therapeutic gel. He also tried to develop a variation of this a few years later as a room sanitizer for hospitals.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla theorized that the application of electricity to the brain enhanced intelligence. In 1912, he crafted "a plan to make dull students bright by saturating them unconsciously with electricity," wiring the walls of a schoolroom and, "saturating [the schoolroom] with infinitesimal electric waves vibrating at high frequency. The whole room will thus, Mr. Tesla claims, be converted into a health-giving and stimulating electromagnetic field or 'bath.'" The plan was, at least provisionally, approved by then superintendent of New York City schools, William H. Maxwell.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Before World War I, Tesla sought overseas investors. After the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his patents in European countries.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In the August 1917 edition of the magazine "Electrical Experimenter", Tesla postulated that electricity could be used to locate submarines via using the reflection of an "electric ray" of "tremendous frequency," with the signal being viewed on a fluorescent screen (a system that has been noted to have a superficial resemblance to modern radar). Tesla was incorrect in his assumption that high-frequency radio waves would penetrate water. Émile Girardeau, who helped develop France's first radar system in the 1930s, noted in 1953 that Tesla's general speculation that a very strong high-frequency signal would be needed was correct. Girardeau said, "(Tesla) was prophesying or dreaming, since he had at his disposal no means of carrying them out, but one must add that if he was dreaming, at least he was dreaming correctly".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1928, Tesla received patent, , for a biplane design capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), which "gradually tilted through manipulation of the elevator devices" in flight until it was flying like a conventional plane. This impractical design was something Tesla thought thought would sell for less than $1,000.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla lived at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City from 1900 and ran up a large bill. He moved to the St. Regis Hotel in 1922 and followed a pattern from then on of moving to a different hotel every few years and leaving unpaid bills behind.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla walked to the park every day to feed the pigeons. He began feeding them at the window of his hotel room and nursed injured birds back to health. He said that he had been visited by a certain injured white pigeon daily. He spent over $2,000 to care for the bird, including a device he built to support her comfortably while her broken wing and leg healed. Tesla stated:


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla's unpaid bills, as well as complaints about the mess made by pigeons, led to his eviction from St. Regis in 1923. He was also forced to leave the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930 and the Hotel Governor Clinton in 1934. At one point he also took rooms at the Hotel Marguery.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla moved to the Hotel New Yorker in 1934. At this time Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company began paying him $125 per month in addition to paying his rent. Accounts of how this came about vary. Several sources claim that Westinghouse was concerned, or possibly warned, about potential bad publicity arising from the impoverished conditions in which their former star inventor was living. The payment has been described as being couched as a "consulting fee" to get around Tesla's aversion to accepting charity. Tesla biographer Marc Seifer described the Westinghouse payments as a type of "unspecified settlement". In any case, Westinghouse provided the funds for Tesla for the rest of his life.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1931, a young journalist whom Tesla befriended, Kenneth M. Swezey, organized a celebration for the inventor's 75th birthday. Tesla received congratulations from figures in science and engineering such as Albert Einstein, and he was also featured on the cover of "Time" magazine. The cover caption "All the world's his power house" noted his contribution to electrical power generation.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: The party went so well that Tesla made it an annual event, an occasion where he would put out a large spread of food and drink—featuring dishes of his own creation. He invited the press in order to see his inventions and hear stories about his past exploits, views on current events, and sometimes baffling claims.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1933 at age 77, Tesla told reporters at the event that, after 35 years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy. He claimed it was a theory of energy that was "violently opposed" to Einsteinian physics and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years. He also told reporters he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, working on breakthroughs in metallurgy, and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: At the 1934 occasion, Tesla told reporters he had designed a superweapon he claimed would end all war. He called it "teleforce", but was usually referred to as his death ray. Tesla described it as a defensive weapon that would be put up along the border of a country and be used against attacking ground-based infantry or aircraft. Tesla never revealed detailed plans of how the weapon worked during his lifetime but, in 1984, they surfaced at the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. The treatise, "The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media", described an open-ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allows particles to exit, a method of charging slugs of tungsten or mercury to millions of volts, and directing them in streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Tesla tried to attract interest of the US War Department, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia in the device.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1935 at his 79th birthday party, Tesla covered many topics. He claimed to have discovered the cosmic ray in 1896 and invented a way to produce direct current by induction, and made many claims about his mechanical oscillator. Describing the device (which he expected would earn him $100 million within two years) he told reporters that a version of his oscillator had caused an earthquake in his 46 East Houston Street lab and neighboring streets in Lower Manhattan in 1898. He went on to tell reporters his oscillator could destroy the Empire State Building with 5 lbs of air pressure. He also explained a new technique he developed using his oscillators he called "Telegeodynamics", using it to transmit vibrations into the ground that he claimed would work over any distance to be used for communication or locating underground mineral deposits.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In his 1937 Grand Ballroom of Hotel New Yorker event, Tesla received the Order of the White Lion from the Czechoslovak ambassador and a medal from the Yugoslav ambassador. On questions concerning the death ray, Tesla stated, "But it is not an experiment ... I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world."


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In the fall of 1937 at the age of 81, after midnight one night, Tesla left the Hotel New Yorker to make his regular commute to the cathedral and library to feed the pigeons. While crossing a street a couple of blocks from the hotel, Tesla was unable to dodge a moving taxicab and was thrown to the ground. His back was severely wrenched and three of his ribs were broken in the accident. The full extent of his injuries was never known; Tesla refused to consult a doctor, an almost lifelong custom, and never fully recovered.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: On 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker. His body was found by maid Alice Monaghan when she entered Tesla's room, ignoring the "do not disturb" sign that Tesla had placed on his door two days earlier. Assistant medical examiner H.W. Wembley examined the body and ruled that the cause of death had been coronary thrombosis (a type of heart attack).


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Two days later the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the Alien Property Custodian to seize Tesla's belongings. John G. Trump, a professor at M.I.T. and a well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee, was called in to analyze the Tesla items. After a three-day investigation, Trump's report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating:


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In a box purported to contain a part of Tesla's "death ray", Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: On 10 January 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a eulogy written by Slovene-American author Louis Adamic live over the WNYC radio while violin pieces "Ave Maria" and "Tamo daleko" were played in the background. On 12 January, two thousand people attended a state funeral for Tesla at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. After the funeral, Tesla's body was taken to the Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York, where it was later cremated. The following day, a second service was conducted by prominent priests in the Trinity Chapel (today's Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sava) in New York City.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1952, following pressure from Tesla's nephew, Sava Kosanović, Tesla's entire estate was shipped to Belgrade in 80 trunks marked N.T. In 1957, Kosanović's secretary Charlotte Muzar transported Tesla's ashes from the United States to Belgrade. The ashes are displayed in a gold-plated sphere on a marble pedestal in the Nikola Tesla Museum.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions. Some of Tesla's patents are not accounted for, and various sources have discovered some that have lain hidden in patent archives. There are a minimum of 278 known patents issued to Tesla in 26 countries. Many of Tesla's patents were in the United States, Britain, and Canada, but many other patents were approved in countries around the globe. Many inventions developed by Tesla were not put into patent protection.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla was tall and weighed , with almost no weight variance from 1888 to about 1926. His appearance was described by newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane as "almost the tallest, almost the thinnest and certainly the most serious man who goes to Delmonico's regularly". He was an elegant, stylish figure in New York City, meticulous in his grooming, clothing, and regimented in his daily activities, an appearance he maintained so as to further his business relationships. He was also described as having light eyes, "very big hands", and "remarkably big" thumbs.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla read many works, memorizing complete books, and supposedly possessed a photographic memory. He was a polyglot, speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was repeatedly stricken with illness. Blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions. Often, the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; at other times they provided the solution to a particular problem he had encountered. Just by hearing the name of an item, he could envision it in realistic detail. Tesla visualized an invention in his mind with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before moving to the construction stage, a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. He typically did not make drawings by hand but worked from memory. Beginning in his childhood, Tesla had frequent flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla was a lifelong bachelor, who had once explained that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. He once said in earlier years that he felt he could never be worthy enough for a woman, considering women superior in every way. His opinion had started to sway in later years when he felt that women were trying to outdo men and make themselves more dominant. This "new woman" was met with much indignation from Tesla, who felt that women were losing their femininity by trying to be in power. In an interview with the "Galveston Daily News" on 10 August 1924 he stated, "In place of the soft-voiced, a gentlewoman of my reverent worship, has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies in making herself as much as possible like man—in dress, voice and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind ... The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me." Although he told a reporter in later years that he sometimes felt that by not marrying, he had made too great a sacrifice to his work, Tesla chose to never pursue or engage in any known relationships, instead finding all the stimulation he needed in his work.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla was asocial and prone to seclude himself with his work. However, when he did engage in social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of Tesla. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force". His secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote: "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul". Tesla's friend, Julian Hawthorne, wrote, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla was a good friend of Francis Marion Crawford, Robert Underwood Johnson, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. In middle age, Tesla became a close friend of Mark Twain; they spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Twain notably described Tesla's induction motor invention as "the most valuable patent since the telephone". At a party thrown by actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1896, Tesla met Indian Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda later wrote that Tesla said he could demonstrate mathematically the relationship between matter and energy, something Vivekananda hoped would give a scientific foundation to Vedantic cosmology. In the late 1920s, Tesla befriended George Sylvester Viereck, a poet, writer, mystic, and later, a Nazi propagandist. Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize clothing; on several occasions, Tesla directed a subordinate to go home and change her dress. When Thomas Edison died, in 1931, Tesla contributed the only negative opinion to "The New York Times", buried in an extensive coverage of Edison's life:


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla claimed never to sleep more than two hours per night. However, he did admit to "dozing" from time to time "to recharge his batteries". During his second year of study at Graz, Tesla developed a passionate proficiency for billiards, chess, and card-playing, sometimes spending more than 48 hours in a stretch at a gaming table. On one occasion at his laboratory, Tesla worked for a period of 84 hours without rest. Kenneth Swezey, a journalist whom Tesla had befriended, confirmed that Tesla rarely slept. Swezey recalled one morning when Tesla called him at 3 a.m.: "I was sleeping in my room like one dead ... Suddenly, the telephone ring awakened me ... [Tesla] spoke animatedly, with pauses, [as he] ... work[ed] out a problem, comparing one theory to another, commenting; and when he felt he had arrived at the solution, he suddenly closed the telephone."


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla worked every day from 9:00a.m. until 6:00p.m. or later, with dinner at exactly 8:10 p.m., at Delmonico's restaurant and later the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Tesla then telephoned his dinner order to the headwaiter, who also could be the only one to serve him. "The meal was required to be ready at eight o'clock ... He dined alone, except on the rare occasions when he would give a dinner to a group to meet his social obligations. Tesla then resumed his work, often until 3:00a.m."


title: Nikola Tesla

text: For exercise, Tesla walked between per day. He curled his toes one hundred times for each foot every night, saying that it stimulated his brain cells.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In an interview with newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane, Tesla said that he did not believe in telepathy, stating, "Suppose I made up my mind to murder you," he said, "In a second you would know it. Now, isn't that wonderful? By what process does the mind get at all this?" In the same interview, Tesla said that he believed that all fundamental laws could be reduced to one.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla became a vegetarian in his later years, living on only milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla disagreed with the theory of atoms being composed of smaller subatomic particles, stating there was no such thing as an electron creating an electric charge. He believed that if electrons existed at all, they were some fourth state of matter or "sub-atom" that could exist only in an experimental vacuum and that they had nothing to do with electricity. Tesla believed that atoms are immutable—they could not change state or be split in any way. He was a believer in the 19th-century concept of an all-pervasive ether that transmitted electrical energy.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla was generally antagonistic towards theories about the conversion of matter into energy. He was also critical of Einstein's theory of relativity, saying:


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1935 he described relativity as "a beggar wrapped in purple whom ignorant people take for a king" and said his own experiments had measured the speed of cosmic rays from Arcturus as fifty times the speed of light.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla claimed to have developed his own physical principle regarding matter and energy that he started working on in 1892, and in 1937, at age 81, claimed in a letter to have completed a "dynamic theory of gravity" that "[would] put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, as that of curved space". He stated that the theory was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Further elucidation of his theory was never found in his writings.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla is widely considered by his biographers to have been a humanist in philosophical outlook. This did not preclude Tesla, like many of his era, from becoming a proponent of an imposed selective breeding version of eugenics.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla expressed the belief that human "pity" had come to interfere with the natural "ruthless workings of nature". Though his argumentation did not depend on a concept of a "master race" or the inherent superiority of one person over another, he advocated for eugenics. In a 1937 interview he stated:


title: Nikola Tesla

text: In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, and indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla made predictions about the relevant issues of a post-World War I environment in a printed article entitled "Science and Discovery are the great Forces which will lead to the Consummation of the War" (20 December 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues.


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla was raised an Orthodox Christian. Later in life he did not consider himself to be a "believer in the orthodox sense", said he opposed religious fanaticism, and said "Buddhism and Christianity are the greatest religions both in number of disciples and in importance." He also said "To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end" and "what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise."


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla wrote a number of books and articles for magazines and journals. Among his books are "", compiled and edited by Ben Johnston in 1983 from a series of 1919 magazine articles by Tesla which were republished in 1977; "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla" (1993), compiled and edited by David Hatcher Childress; and "The Tesla Papers".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Many of Tesla's writings are freely available online, including the article "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy", published in "The Century Magazine" in 1900, and the article "Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency", published in his book "Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla".


title: Nikola Tesla

text: Tesla's legacy has endured in books, films, radio, TV, music, live theater, comics, and video games. The impact of the technologies invented or envisioned by Tesla is a recurring theme in several types of science fiction.


title: Croatia

text: Croatia (, ; , ), officially the Republic of Croatia (, ), is a country at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe. It shares a coastline along the Adriatic Sea. It borders Slovenia to the northwest, Hungary to the northeast, Serbia to the east, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro to the southeast, and shares a maritime border with Italy to the west and southwest. Its capital and largest city, Zagreb, forms one of the country's primary subdivisions, with twenty counties. The country spans , and has a population of nearly 3.9 million.


title: Croatia

text: The Croats arrived in the late 6th century. By the 9th century, they had organized the territory into two duchies. Croatia was first internationally recognized as independent on 7 June 879 during the reign of Duke Branimir. Tomislav became the first king by 925, elevating Croatia to the status of a kingdom. During the succession crisis after the Trpimirović dynasty ended, Croatia entered a personal union with Hungary in 1102. In 1527, faced with Ottoman conquest, the Croatian Parliament elected Ferdinand I of Austria to the Croatian throne. In October 1918, the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, independent from Austria-Hungary, was proclaimed in Zagreb, and in December 1918, merged into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, most of Croatia was incorporated into a Nazi-installed puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia. A resistance movement led to the creation of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, which after the war became a founding member and constituent of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On 25 June 1991, Croatia declared independence, and the War of Independence was successfully fought over the next four years.


title: Croatia

text: Croatia is a republic governed under a parliamentary system. It is a member of the European Union, NATO, the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization, and a founding member of the Union for the Mediterranean. It is set to replace its national currency, the Croatian kuna, with the euro on 1 January 2023, officially becoming the 20th euro area member. On the same day, it will also join the border-free Schengen Area as its 27th member. An active participant in United Nations peacekeeping, Croatia contributed troops to the International Security Assistance Force and filled a nonpermanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for the 2008–2009 term. Since 2000, the Croatian government has invested in infrastructure, especially transport routes and facilities along the Pan-European corridors.


title: Croatia

text: Croatia is classified by the World Bank as a high-income economy and ranks highly on the Human Development Index. Service, industrial sectors, and agriculture dominate the economy, respectively. Tourism is a significant source of revenue for the country, which is ranked among the 20 most popular tourist destinations. The state controls a part of the economy, with substantial government expenditure. The European Union is Croatia's most important trading partner. Croatia provides social security, universal health care, and tuition-free primary and secondary education while supporting culture through public institutions and corporate investments in media and publishing.


title: Croatia

text: Croatia's name derives from Medieval Latin , itself a derivation of North-West Slavic "*Xərwate", by liquid metathesis from Common Slavic period "*Xorvat", from proposed Proto-Slavic "*Xъrvátъ" which possibly comes from the 3rd-century Scytho-Sarmatian form attested in the Tanais Tablets as Χοροάθος ("Khoroáthos", alternate forms comprise "Khoróatos" and "Khoroúathos"). The origin is uncertain, but most probably is from Proto-Ossetian / Alanian *"xurvæt-" or *"xurvāt-", in the meaning of "one who guards" ("guardian, protector"). The oldest preserved record of the Croatian ethnonym "*xъrvatъ" is of the variable stem, attested in the Baška tablet in style zvъnъmirъ kralъ xrъvatъskъ ("Zvonimir, Croatian king"), although it was archaeologically confirmed that the ethnonym "Croatorum" is mentioned in a church inscription found in Bijaći near Trogir dated to the end of the 8th or early 9th century. The presumably oldest preserved stone inscription is the 9th-century Branimir inscription found near Benkovac, where Duke Branimir is styled "Dux Cruatorvm", likely dated between 879 and 892, during his rule. The Latin term "Chroatorum" is attributed to a charter of Duke Trpimir I of Croatia, dated to 852 in a 1568 copy of a lost original, but it is not certain if the original was indeed older than the Branimir inscription.


title: Croatia

text: The area known as Croatia today was inhabited throughout the prehistoric period. Neanderthal fossils dating to the middle Palaeolithic period were unearthed in northern Croatia, best presented at the Krapina site. Remnants of Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures were found in all regions. The largest proportion of sites is in the valleys of northern Croatia. The most significant are Baden, Starčevo, and Vučedol cultures. Iron Age hosted the early Illyrian Hallstatt culture and the Celtic La Tène culture.


title: Croatia

text: Much later, the region was settled by Illyrians and Liburnians, while the first Greek colonies were established on the islands of Hvar, Korčula, and Vis. In 9 AD, the territory of today's Croatia became part of the Roman Empire. Emperor Diocletian was native to the region. He had a large palace built in Split, to which he retired after abdicating in AD 305.


title: Croatia

text: During the 5th century, the last de jure Western Roman Emperor Julius Nepos ruled a small realm from the palace after fleeing Italy in 475. The period ends with Avar and Croat invasions in the first half of the 7th century and the destruction of almost all Roman towns. Roman survivors retreated to more favourable sites on the coast, islands, and mountains. The city of Dubrovnik was founded by such survivors from Epidaurum.


title: Croatia

text: The ethnogenesis of Croats is uncertain. The most accepted theory, the Slavic theory, proposes migration of White Croats from White Croatia during the Migration Period. Conversely, the Iranian theory proposes Iranian origin, based on Tanais Tablets containing Ancient Greek inscriptions of given names "Χορούαθος", "Χοροάθος", and "Χορόαθος" (Khoroúathos, Khoroáthos, and Khoróathos) and their interpretation as anthroponyms of Croatian people.


title: Croatia

text: According to the work "De Administrando Imperio" written by 10th-century Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, Croats arrived in the Roman province of Dalmatia in the first half of the 7th century after they defeated the Avars. However, that claim is disputed, and competing hypotheses date the event between the late 6th-early 7th (mainstream) or the late 8th-early 9th (fringe) centuries, but recent archaeological data established that the migration and settlement of the Slavs/Croats have been in late 6th and early 7th century. Eventually, a dukedom was formed, Duchy of Croatia, ruled by Borna, as attested by chronicles of Einhard starting in 818. The record represents the first document of Croatian realms, vassal states of Francia at the time. Its neighbor to the North was Principality of Lower Pannonia, at the time ruled by duke Ljudevit who ruled the territories between the Drava and Sava rivers, centred from his fort at Sisak. This population and territory throught history was tightly related and connected to Croats and Croatia.


title: Croatia

text: According to Constantine VII Christianisation of Croats began in the 7th century, but the claim is disputed, and generally, Christianisation is associated with the 9th century. It is assumed that initially encompassed only the elite and related people. The Frankish overlordship ended during the reign of Mislav, or his successor Trpimir I. The native Croatian royal dynasty was founded by duke Trpimir I in the mid 9th century, who defeated the Byzantine and Bulgarian forces. The first native Croatian ruler recognised by the Pope was duke Branimir, who received papal recognition from Pope John VIII on 7 June 879.


title: Croatia

text: Tomislav was the first king of Croatia, noted as such in a letter of Pope John X in 925. Tomislav defeated Hungarian and Bulgarian invasions. The medieval Croatian kingdom reached its peak in the 11th century during the reigns of Petar Krešimir IV (1058–1074) and Dmitar Zvonimir (1075–1089). When Stjepan II died in 1091, ending the Trpimirović dynasty, Dmitar Zvonimir's brother-in-law Ladislaus I of Hungary claimed the Croatian crown. This led to a war and personal union with Hungary in 1102 under Coloman.


title: Croatia

text: For the next four centuries, the Kingdom of Croatia was ruled by the Sabor (parliament) and a Ban (viceroy) appointed by the king. This period saw the rise of influential nobility such as the Frankopan and Šubić families to prominence, and ultimately numerous Bans from the two families. An increasing threat of Ottoman conquest and a struggle against the Republic of Venice for control of coastal areas ensued. The Venetians controlled most of Dalmatia by 1428, except the city-state of Dubrovnik, which became independent. Ottoman conquests led to the 1493 Battle of Krbava field and the 1526 Battle of Mohács, both ending in decisive Ottoman victories. King Louis II died at Mohács, and in 1527, the Croatian Parliament met in Cetin and chose Ferdinand I of the House of Habsburg as the new ruler of Croatia, under the condition that he protects Croatia against the Ottoman Empire while respecting its political rights.


title: Croatia

text: Following the decisive Ottoman victories, Croatia was split into civilian and military territories in 1538. The military territories became known as the Croatian Military Frontier and were under direct Habsburg control. Ottoman advances in Croatia continued until the 1593 Battle of Sisak, the first decisive Ottoman defeat, when borders stabilised. During the Great Turkish War (1683–1698), Slavonia was regained, but western Bosnia, which had been part of Croatia before the Ottoman conquest, remained outside Croatian control. The present-day border between the two countries is a remnant of this outcome. Dalmatia, the southern part of the border, was similarly defined by the Fifth and the Seventh Ottoman–Venetian Wars.


title: Croatia

text: The Ottoman wars drove demographic changes. During the 16th century, Croats from western and northern Bosnia, Lika, Krbava, the area between the rivers of Una and Kupa, and especially from western Slavonia, migrated towards Austria. Present-day Burgenland Croats are direct descendants of these settlers. To replace the fleeing population, the Habsburgs encouraged Bosnians to provide military service in the Military Frontier.


title: Croatia

text: The Croatian Parliament supported King Charles III's Pragmatic Sanction and signed their own Pragmatic Sanction in 1712. Subsequently, the emperor pledged to respect all privileges and political rights of the Kingdom of Croatia, and Queen Maria Theresa made significant contributions to Croatian affairs, such as introducing compulsory education.


title: Croatia

text: Between 1797 and 1809, the First French Empire increasingly occupied the eastern Adriatic coastline and its hinterland, ending the Venetian and the Ragusan republics, establishing the Illyrian Provinces. In response, the Royal Navy blockaded the Adriatic Sea, leading to the Battle of Vis in 1811. The Illyrian provinces were captured by the Austrians in 1813 and absorbed by the Austrian Empire following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This led to the formation of the Kingdom of Dalmatia and the restoration of the Croatian Littoral to the Kingdom of Croatia under one crown. The 1830s and 1840s featured romantic nationalism that inspired the Croatian National Revival, a political and cultural campaign advocating the unity of South Slavs within the empire. Its primary focus was establishing a standard language as a counterweight to Hungarian while promoting Croatian literature and culture. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, Croatia sided with Austria. Ban Josip Jelačić helped defeat the Hungarians in 1849 and ushered in a Germanisation policy.


title: Croatia

text: By the 1860s, the failure of the policy became apparent, leading to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The creation of a personal union between the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary followed. The treaty left Croatia's status to Hungary, which was resolved by the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement of 1868 when the kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia were united. The Kingdom of Dalmatia remained under de facto Austrian control, while Rijeka retained the status of "corpus separatum" introduced in 1779.


title: Croatia

text: After Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina following the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, the Military Frontier was abolished. The Croatian and Slavonian sectors of the Frontier returned to Croatia in 1881, under provisions of the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement. Renewed efforts to reform Austria-Hungary, entailing federalisation with Croatia as a federal unit, were stopped by World War I.


title: Croatia

text: On 29 October 1918 the Croatian Parliament ("Sabor") declared independence and decided to join the newly formed State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, which in turn entered into union with the Kingdom of Serbia on 4 December 1918 to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The Croatian Parliament never ratified the union with Serbia and Montenegro. The 1921 constitution defining the country as a unitary state and abolition of Croatian Parliament and historical administrative divisions effectively ended Croatian autonomy.


title: Croatia

text: The new constitution was opposed by the most widely supported national political party—the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) led by Stjepan Radić.


title: Croatia

text: The political situation deteriorated further as Radić was assassinated in the National Assembly in 1928, leading to King Alexander to establish a dictatorship in January 1929. The dictatorship formally ended in 1931 when the king imposed a more unitary constitution. The HSS, now led by Vladko Maček, continued to advocate federalisation, resulting in the Cvetković–Maček Agreement of August 1939 and the autonomous Banovina of Croatia. The Yugoslav government retained control of defence, internal security, foreign affairs, trade, and transport while other matters were left to the Croatian Sabor and a crown-appointed Ban.


title: Croatia

text: In April 1941, Yugoslavia was occupied by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Following the invasion, a German-Italian installed puppet state named the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was established. Most of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the region of Syrmia were incorporated into this state. Parts of Dalmatia were annexed by Italy, Hungary annexed the northern Croatian regions of Baranja and Međimurje. The NDH regime was led by Ante Pavelić and ultranationalist Ustaše, a fringe movement in pre-war Croatia. With German and Italian military and political support, the regime introduced racial laws and launched a genocide campaign against Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Many were imprisoned in concentration camps; the largest was the Jasenovac complex. Anti-fascist Croats were targeted by the regime as well. Several concentration camps (most notably the Rab, Gonars and Molat camps) were established in Italian-occupied territories, mostly for Slovenes and Croats. At the same time, the Yugoslav Royalist and Serbian nationalist Chetniks pursued a genocidal campaign against Croats and Muslims, aided by Italy. Nazi German forces committed crimes and reprisals against civilians in retaliation for Partisan actions, such as in the villages of Kamešnica and Lipa in 1944.


title: Croatia

text: A resistance movement emerged. On 22 June 1941, the 1st Sisak Partisan Detachment was formed near Sisak, the first military unit formed by a resistance movement in occupied Europe. That sparked the beginning of the Yugoslav Partisan movement, a communist, multi-ethnic anti-fascist resistance group led by Josip Broz Tito. In ethnic terms, Croats were the second-largest contributors to the Partisan movement after Serbs. In per capita terms, Croats contributed proportionately to their population within Yugoslavia. By May 1944 (according to Tito), Croats made up 30% of the Partisan's ethnic composition, despite making up 22% of the population. The movement grew fast, and at the Tehran Conference in December 1943, the Partisans gained recognition from the Allies.


title: Croatia

text: With Allied support in logistics, equipment, training and airpower, and with the assistance of Soviet troops taking part in the 1944 Belgrade Offensive, the Partisans gained control of Yugoslavia and the border regions of Italy and Austria by May 1945. Members of the NDH armed forces and other Axis troops, as well as civilians, were in retreat towards Austria. Following their surrender, many were killed in the Yugoslav death march of Nazi collaborators. In the following years, ethnic Germans faced persecution in Yugoslavia, and many were interned.


title: Croatia

text: The political aspirations of the Partisan movement were reflected in the State Anti-fascist Council for the National Liberation of Croatia, which developed in 1943 as the bearer of Croatian statehood and later transformed into the Parliament in 1945, and AVNOJ—its counterpart at the Yugoslav level.


title: Croatia

text: Based on the studies on wartime and post-war casualties by demographer Vladimir Žerjavić and statistician Bogoljub Kočović, a total of 295,000 people from the territory (not including territories ceded from Italy after the war) died, which amounted to 7.3% of the population, among whom were 125–137,000 Serbs, 118–124,000 Croats, 16–17,000 Jews, and 15,000 Roma. In addition, from areas joined to Croatia after the war, a total of 32,000 people died, among whom 16,000 were Italians and 15,000 were Croats. Approximately 200,000 Croats from the entirety of Yugoslavia (including Croatia) and abroad were killed in total throughout the war and its immediate aftermath, approximately 5.4% of the population.


title: Croatia

text: After World War II, Croatia became a single-party socialist federal unit of the SFR Yugoslavia, ruled by the Communists, but having a degree of autonomy within the federation. In 1967, Croatian authors and linguists published a Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Standard Language demanding equal treatment for their language.


title: Croatia

text: The declaration contributed to a national movement seeking greater civil rights and redistribution of the Yugoslav economy, culminating in the Croatian Spring of 1971, which was suppressed by Yugoslav leadership. Still, the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution gave increased autonomy to federal units, basically fulfilling a goal of the Croatian Spring and providing a legal basis for independence of the federative constituents.


title: Croatia

text: Following Tito's death in 1980, the political situation in Yugoslavia deteriorated. National tension was fanned by the 1986 SANU Memorandum and the 1989 coups in Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Montenegro. In January 1990, the Communist Party fragmented along national lines, with the Croatian faction demanding a looser federation. In the same year, the first multi-party elections were held in Croatia, while Franjo Tuđman's win exacerbated nationalist tensions. Some of the Serbs in Croatia left Sabor and declared the autonomy of the unrecognised Republic of Serbian Krajina, intent on achieving independence from Croatia.


title: Croatia

text: As tensions rose, Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991. However, the full implementation of the declaration only came into effect after a three-month moratorium on the decision on 8 October 1991. In the meantime, tensions escalated into overt war when the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and various Serb paramilitary groups attacked Croatia. By the end of 1991, a high-intensity conflict fought along a wide front reduced Croatia's control to about two-thirds of its territory. Serb paramilitary groups then began a campaign of killing, terror, and expulsion of the Croats in the rebel territories, killing thousands of Croat civilians and expelling or displacing as many as 400,000 Croats and other non-Serbs from their homes. Serbs living in Croatian towns, especially those near the front lines, were subjected to various forms of discrimination. Croatian Serbs in Eastern and Western Slavonia and parts of the Krajina were forced to flee or were expelled by Croatian forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. Similar practices were carried out by Croats against Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Croat–Bosniak War, although the Croatian Government publicly deplored these practices and sought to stop them, indicating that they were not a part of the Government's policy.


title: Croatia

text: On 15 January 1992, Croatia gained diplomatic recognition by the European Economic Community, followed by the United Nations. The war effectively ended in August 1995 with a decisive victory by Croatia; the event is commemorated each year on 5 August as Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day and the Day of Croatian Defenders. Following the Croatian victory, about 200,000 Serbs from the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina fled the region and hundreds of mainly elderly Serb civilians were killed in the aftermath of the military operation. Their lands were subsequently settled by Croat refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The remaining occupied areas were restored to Croatia following the Erdut Agreement of November 1995, concluding with the UNTAES mission in January 1998. Most sources number the war deaths at around 20,000.


title: Croatia

text: After the end of the war, Croatia faced the challenges of post-war reconstruction, the return of refugees, establishing democracy, protecting human rights, and general social and economic development. The main law is the Constitution, as adopted on 22 December 1990.


title: Croatia

text: The post-2000 period is characterised by democratisation, economic growth, structural and social reforms, as well as problems such as unemployment, corruption, and the inefficiency of the public administration. In November 2000 and March 2001, the Parliament amended the Constitution, changing its bicameral structure back into its historic unicameral form and reducing presidential powers.


title: Croatia

text: Croatia joined the Partnership for Peace on 25 May 2000 and became a member of the World Trade Organization on 30 November 2000. On 29 October 2001, Croatia signed a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the European Union, submitted a formal application for the EU membership in 2003, was given the status of candidate country in 2004, and began accession negotiations in 2005.


title: Croatia

text: In December 2011, Croatia completed EU accession negotiations and signed an EU accession treaty on 9 December 2011. Croatia joined the European Union on 1 July 2013. A recurring obstacle to the negotiations was Croatia's ICTY co-operation record and Slovenian blocking of the negotiations because of Croatia–Slovenia border disputes.


title: Croatia

text: Although the Croatian economy had enjoyed a significant boom in the early 2000s, the financial crisis in 2008 forced the government to cut spending, thus provoking a public outcry.


title: Croatia

text: Croatia served on the United Nations Security Council for the 2008–2009 term, assuming the presidency in December 2008. On 1 April 2009, Croatia joined NATO.


title: Croatia

text: A wave of anti-government protests in early 2011 reflected a general dissatisfaction with politics and economics.


title: Croatia

text: Croatia completed EU accession negotiations in 2011. A majority of Croatian voters opted in favour of EU membership in a 2012 referendum., Croatia joined the European Union effective 1 July 2013. Croatia was affected by the 2015 European migrant crisis when Hungary's closure of borders with Serbia pushed over 700,000 refugees and migrants to pass through Croatia on their way to other countries.


title: Croatia

text: On 19 October 2016, Andrej Plenković began serving as Croatian Prime Minister. The most recent presidential elections, on 5 January 2020, elected Zoran Milanović as president.