Lindsey Graham

Tesla's father and grandfather were both priests in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and it was expected that young Tesla would eventually join the clergy.

But as he grew, his interest in science only deepened.

In school, Tesla's teachers complimented his intelligence, but warned his parents that he often strayed from his lessons and neglected his homework.

And while he appeared to have a photographic memory, he also demonstrated an extreme sensitivity to sound and light, which was so intense that it often provoked anxiety and visions that haunted him at night.

At the age of 18, Tesla contracted cholera and was confined to his bed for nine months, at times hovering near death.

When he recovered, his parents relented in their expectation that he enter the priesthood and allowed him to take a military scholarship and enroll at a polytechnic university in Graz, Austria.

Once there, he delighted in his physics and engineering classes.

But even as a young university student, Tesla was not satisfied with learning what had already been discovered.

He later recalled, I longed for experiment and investigation.

One day in 1877, Tesla entered his physics classroom and saw an oddly-shaped machine on the table.

It was a new dynamo, or electric generator, invented by the Belgian engineer Zenob Gram.

Gram's generator was the latest development in European electrical innovation.

For years, rudimentary electric motors had run on batteries, which provided only limited power.

But Graham's new dynamo system demonstrated that motors could also be powered by a continuous generator.

And this meant that the power source could be located far away from the motor and then connected by wiring, an innovation which opened up the possibility that electricity could someday be used more widely in factories, businesses, and even homes.

In his classroom, Tesla watched with fascination as his physics teacher demonstrated Graham's machine.

But he noticed that his teacher had trouble with a part of the machine called a commutator.

Graham's system, and all others like it, relied on a commutator, which was a rotary electrical switch that helped conduct the flow of electricity.

But this component frequently broke down and wasted electrical power due to friction.

Tesla recognized the inefficiency of the design right away.