The world of physics is an argumentative place – must be all the fumes from the lab. For instance, given the sheer number of people that are heralded as having invented the radio, you would have hoped that they would have been able to come up with a better use for it than filling it with morons who play terrible music?

An almost equal weight of confusion seems to envelop Nikola Tesla. Around these parts the story is that he was a Croatian that invented radio. As with most claims concerning pioneers, the truth is actually a turnoff from the straight and narrow road of wishful thinking. Tesla was born in Smiljan on the stroke of midnight on the 9-10th  July, 1856. His parents were Croatian of Serbian descent, his father was an Orthodox priest. In 1862 the family moved to Gospić where the young Tesla began his education at the local schools before going on to graduate from the Karlovac gymnasium in 1873. After brief spell hiding from conscription into the imperial forcesn Tesla left Croatia in 1875 to begin engineering studies that took him to Graz, Prague and Budapest – where he first visualised the rotating magnetic field.

Tesla sailed for America in 1884, arriving in New York, with four cents in his pocket, a few of his own poems, and calculations for a flying machine. He first found employment with Thomas Edison, but the two inventors were far apart in background and methods. Shortly after this a power struggle developed between Edison's direct-current systems and Tesla’s alternating-current approach, which eventually became the standard. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is widely used today in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment. That year also marked the date of Tesla's United States citizenship. By 1896, Tesla’s generating machinery was installed at Niagra Falls.

In 1915 he was severely disappointed to discover that the rumours that he was to share the Nobel Prize with Edison was not true. In 1943 on 7th  Jan, Tesla died aged 86 in the New Yorker Hotel. His remains were sent to Belgrade in 1958, three years after the Tesla Museum had been set up there and two years after the erection of a memorial to him in Smiljan. There are also statues and dedications to him at Niagra Falls, Gospic, Yale University and the hotel in which he died. However, he is best known as having given his name to the unit of magnetic induction – an honour bestowed in 1960.