Why did Elon Musk decide to use the surname of such an eccentric physicist for his company? The myth of Nikola Tesla
A LITTLE KNOWN STORY...
- Tesla, queen of the electric
- Nikola Tesla, exiled genius
- The ''war'' of currents between Edison and Tesla
- The sad end of Nikola Tesla
TESLA, QUEEN OF ELECTRIC
With 1 million electric cars produced, Tesla Inc. is by far the most successful and competitive manufacturer in the electric mobility sector. Founded in July 2003 as Tesla Motors by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, in defiance of the withdrawal from the market of the EV1 by General Motors - branded as uneconomical by the Detroit leaders. In 2004, the eccentric and controversial South African entrepreneur Elon Musk entered the capital of the company, and from that moment on things began to change. In 2008 the first model of the group left the Palo Alto plants: the Tesla Roadster, followed in March 2009 by the Model S sedan. Today Tesla Inc. is one of the most quoted brands in the world, with a capitalization that sees it third behind Toyota and Volkswagen. By virtue of its global success, the Californian brand seems to have definitively overshadowed, at least in terms of popularity, the man whose initial is engraved on all the Group's cars: Nikola Tesla. A scientist whose name has little or nothing to do with the automotive world. Or not?
NIKOLA TESLA, EXILE GENIUS
The concept of electricity is inextricably linked to a series of famous people: Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Thomas A. Edison and Guglielmo Marconi, just to name a few. Each of them distinguished himself with honor in the study of electric currents. Among these famous scientists, however, the name of Nikola Tesla is missing. So who was this mysterious character, whom history seems to have forgotten? Born to a Serbian family in 1856 in Smiljan, a small village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nikola was passionate about the study of natural phenomena connected to electricity from an early age. This great passion led him to study engineering, to graduate and to find employment in Budapest in a telegraph company. In 1882 he moved to Paris to work as an engineer at the Continental Edison Company: a prolific period, which allowed him to deepen his studies on alternating current, rejected by most of the scientific community in favor of direct current. In 1884, broke and with only her plans as her pass, she crossed the Atlantic and moved to New York, USA.
Nikola Tesla in his laboratory
THE ''WAR'' OF THE CURRENTS BETWEEN EDISON AND TESLA
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