Always Fixing Things
By the time Tesla turned 19, he was living in Austria, studying electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, where he quickly rose to the top of his class. His professors had never seen a student like Tesla. He was able to perform high-level calculus in his head, which led them to believe that he was cheating on tests.
Nikola Tesla circa early 1900s. Photo by Everett Collection / Shutterstock
Like all inventors, Tesla was obsessed with fixing things that weren’t broken. So when he began learning about direct currents (DC) motors in one of his classes, he realized there were some serious design flaws. For starters, DC motors weren’t very efficient. If you wanted to use this type of current to power houses, let’s say, then you would need a power plant every square mile. Tesla needed to figure out a different design.