Marquis, age 13, of Dubuque, Iowa, for his question:

WHO WAS NIKOLA TESLA?

Nikola Tesla was an American electrical engineer and inventor who is recognized as one of the outstanding pioneers in the electric power field.

Born in Yugoslavia in 1856 and educated in Graz, Austria, and at the University of Prague, he immigrated to the United States in 1884 where he later became a naturalized citizen. For a brief period he was employed by Thomas Edison but left to devote himself to research.

In 1888 Tesla designed the first practical system of generating and transmitting alternating current for electric power. The American rights to this epoch making invention were bought by the American inventor George Westinghouse, who demonstrated the system for the first time at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Two years later Tesla's alternating current motors were installed at the Niagara Falls power plant.

Tesla's many inventions include high frequency generators (1890) and the Tesla coil (1891), a transformer with important applications in the field of radio communications.