This text has been entered by John R.H. Penner from a small booklet found in a used bookstore for $2.50. The only form of date identi\ufb01cation is the name of the original purchaser, Arthua Daine (?), dated April 29, 1978.

The book appears to be considerably older, made with typewriters, and then photocopied and stapled. The only other signi\ufb01cant features of the booklet is that it contains four photocopied photographs of Tesla, and was originally forty pages long. I must apologise for the qualitty of the scans, but the originals were of very poor quality, and this is the best that could be obtained after touching-up in Photoshop.

The book has no Copyright identification, nor any means of contacting the publishers. As far as I am aware, this autobiography is no longer available in printed form anywhere.

In the interest of making this important text available to the wider public, I have retyped the entire text word-for-word as it originally appears into this electronic format. The only words which appear in this \ufb01le, that are not in the original book are this Editors Note, and the Introduction. I have exactly maintained page numbers as they appear in the original \u2013 including the somewhat odd artifact of Chapter 1 starting on page two.

John Roland Hans Penner
464 Scott Street
St. Catharines, Ontario
L2M 3W7, Canada
Phone: 905.646.3551
eMail: J.Penner@GEnie.GEIS.com

This \ufb01le may be freely redistributed as long as it\u2019s content is not modi\ufb01ed in any way. It may not be sold or published for pro\ufb01t unless speci\ufb01cally authorised prior to publication by the express permission of Kolmogorov- Smirnov Publishing, or John R.H. Penner. Unless otherwise noti\ufb01ed, this work is Copyright \u00a91995 by John R.H. Penner.

Nikola Tesla was born in Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary) on July 9, 1856, and died January 7, 1943. He was the electrical engineer who invented the AC (alternating current) induction motor, which made the universal transmission and distribution of electricity possible. Tesla began his studies in physics and mathematics at Graz Polytechnic, and then took philosophy at the University of Prague. He worked as an electrical engineer in Budapest, Hungary, and subsequently in France and Germany. In 1888 his discovery that a magnetic \ufb01eld could be made to rotate if two coils at right angles are supplied with AC current 90\u00b0 out of phase made possible the invention of the AC induction motor. The major advantage of this motor being its brushless operation, which many at the time believed impossible.

Tesla moved to the United States in 1884, where he worked for Thomas Edison who quickly became a rival \u2013 Edison being an advocate of the inferior DC power transmission system. During this time, Tesla was commissioned with the design of the AC generators installed at Niagara Falls. George Westinghouse purchased the patents to his induction motor, and made it the basis of the Westinghouse power system which still underlies the modern electrical power industry today.

He also did notable research on high-voltage electricity and wireless communication; at one point creating an earthquake which shook the ground for several miles around his New York laboratory. He also devised a system which anticipated world-wide wireless communications, fax machines, radar, radio-guided missiles and aircraft.