Nikola Tesla, Master of Lightning: a report (part 1)

Nikola Tesla was born on June 28th, 1856 in the Austrian Empire to Milutin Tesla, an Orthodox priest, and Djuka Tesla, the daughter of another Orthodox priest and informal inventress of numerous around-the-house-and-farmyard aids, such as the mechanical eggbeater. Legend has it that he was born at midnight precisely at the height of a lightning storm. His genius was obvious at an early age - he could do calculus in his head as a schoolchild, and at one point, after seeing an engraving of Niagara Falls, he imagined an enormous wheel capturing the natural energy of the waterfall. Thirty years later, he accomplished this vision. He was always interested in physics and complex mathematics; his photographic memory made him an ideal student, and he began to dream of being an engineer. However, he felt enormous pressure from his father to enter the church. When he contracted cholera at the age of seventeen and was thought to be on his deathbed, he extracted a promise from his father; if he recovered, he would attend the Austrian Polytechnic School at Graz to study engineering. Obviously, he did both.

Nikola Tesla's obsession with alternating current, a safer and more efficient energy source than Edison's candidate, direct current, began when a professor challenged him to find a better way to power a Gramme dynamo, a machine that can be used as both a motor and a generator when direct current is applied. Tesla thought about it for years, until the answer came to him while walking in a park in Budapest and considering the following Faust passage:
The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
As he spoke these words, a fully-formed image of the induction motor, an invention that would change the world when Tesla presented it to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers six years later, appeared in his mind. This was how Tesla saw his inventions; they appeared to him, complete, in flashes of inspiration, and he built what he had seen and then presented them to the world, fully functional.