His ideas were ahead of their time, and some believe the man himself to have been some kind of superhero. Jacek Świdziński presents an electrifying profile of one of the greatest inventors of all time.

It was a dark, stormy night. Just after the stroke of midnight on 10th July 1856, a child was born.

“A child of darkness,” said the midwife, holding up the baby boy illuminated by flashes of lightning.

“No, a child of light,” replied his mother.

Just a few years later, using a wire, two stones and a stick, the boy made his first fishing rod for catching frogs. By the age of six, he had constructed a motor driven by four beetles glued to a wooden cross, and a starting pistol made from a hollowed-out stalk, a piston and a hemp plug. The boy’s name was Nikola Tesla.

Most stories about Tesla’s life are a mix of the same old motifs drawn from popular culture. Here, I have reconstructed the history of the great inventor from his autobiography, biographies and online sources.

Tesla: Beginnings

The famous Serbian scientist was born in the Austrian Empire in the village of Smiljan (in present-day Croatia). His father was an Orthodox priest and expected his son to follow the same path. But young Tesla had other plans, and when he fell ill with cholera at the age of 17, he told his father that he would try to survive as long as he was allowed to study engineering. His father agreed in desperation and Tesla made a miraculous recovery nine months later. Before realizing his ambitions, he spent over a year in the Dinaric Mountains, where he regained his strength and avoided military service. While walking in the mountains, the teenager devised a design for a ring constructed above the equator that would hang in the sky once the scaffolding was removed. The plan relied on the discovery of a force that would hold the colossal satellite motionless relative to the spinning planet. When a passenger entered