The Young Inventor

     It was at a young age that Nikola Tesla was exposed to very inventive minds. When he was but a small child, his mother was constantly creating new tools to help with her everyday tasks around the household (Jonnes 90). One can clearly see how this aspect would help develop the mind of a young child, with him watching his mother create new objects that no one has ever seen before. In his early twenties, he lived in the vibrant city of Paris, France while he was in the employment of one of the great minds involving electricity at the time, Thomas Edison (Jonnes 88).

     This renowned inventor has achieved many accomplishments in his career, yet he never obtained much wealth or even got credit for some of his most profound inventions. Throughout his life he worked with electrical and radio frequencies, but one of his major accomplishments was his invention that we all use still in the modern era, the radio. Tesla did not receive credit for this great device though, shown in a 1895 issue of the San Francisco newspaper that stated an Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, demonstrated the first radio voice broadcast. But the fact of the matter is, Tesla had demonstrated this technology in Philadelphia, a whole two years earlier (Ikenson 254-255).


Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York, New York: Random House, 2003.

Ikenson, Ben. Patents: Ingenious Inventions- How They Work and How They Came to Be. New York, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc. 2004.