Who Was Nikola Tesla?

1. Smiljan, Graz and the vision of the rotating field

Nikola Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, a village in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire, now in Croatia. He was the fourth of five children of Milutin Tesla, a Serbian Orthodox priest, and Đuka Mandić, a woman who, by Tesla's own account, had a remarkable memory and an inventive mind, and who made household tools and devices. He was a Serb by ethnicity, born in a part of the empire where Serbs and Croats lived side by side, and the question of his national identity — Serbian, Croatian, or both — has been debated ever since, a debate that says more about modern politics than about Tesla himself, who regarded himself as a citizen of the world.

He was educated in Karlovac and then at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, where he studied electrical engineering, and then at the University of Prague, which he left without taking a degree. At Graz he became obsessed with a problem: the direct-current motors of the time used commutators, devices that reversed the current mechanically, and they sparked, wore out and were inefficient. Tesla became convinced that an alternating-current motor, with no commutator, was possible, and in February 1882, while walking in a park in Budapest with a friend, he had the insight that made his career: a rotating magnetic field, produced by two alternating currents out of phase with each other, could turn a rotor without any mechanical connection. He drew the diagram in the dust with a stick, and he spent the next years turning the idea into a working machine.

The insight was the foundation of everything that followed. The rotating magnetic field was the principle of the alternating-current induction motor, and it was also the principle of the alternating-current power system: the same idea, applied to generation, to transmission and to use. Tesla's genius was not in discovering a new law of nature — the laws had been known since Faraday — but in seeing how they could be put together into a system, and in having the mathematical and practical ability to build it. That combination of vision and engineering is what makes him a great inventor, and it is what distinguishes him from the many others who worked on the same problems.

2. America, Edison and the break

In 1884 Tesla arrived in New York, with four cents in his pocket, by his own account, and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison. Edison, then the most famous inventor in the world, hired him to work on his direct-current electrical systems, and Tesla worked for him for about a year. The relationship ended badly, and the story of why has become a legend. According to Tesla, Edison promised him a large sum of money if he improved the efficiency of Edison's generators, and when Tesla did so, Edison laughed and said that he had not understood American humour, and that there was no money. Edison's supporters have disputed the story, and the truth is probably that the two men, who were very different in temperament and in their approach to invention, could not work together.

The break mattered because it set up the great rivalry of Tesla's life: the War of the Currents, the contest between Edison's direct current and Tesla's alternating current for the future of electric power. Edison's system had a fundamental limitation: direct current could not be transmitted over long distances without losing power, which meant that a generating station had to be built every mile or so. Alternating current, by contrast, could be stepped up to high voltage with a transformer, transmitted over long distances with little loss, and stepped down again for use. The physics was on Tesla's side, and the economics followed the physics, but Edison fought the battle with all the resources at his command, including a public campaign in which he electrocuted animals with alternating current to show that it was dangerous.

Tesla, meanwhile, found a new patron in George Westinghouse, the industrialist who had bought Tesla's patents for the alternating-current motor and for the polyphase system, in 1888, for a substantial sum and a royalty. Westinghouse's company became the champion of alternating current, and the contest between Westinghouse and Edison's General Electric became one of the great industrial battles of the nineteenth century. Tesla worked for Westinghouse, and then independently, and his patents — more than three hundred in the United States and other countries — covered the motor, the generator, the transformer and the system as a whole.

3. The War of the Currents and Niagara Falls

The War of the Currents was decided, in the end, by two demonstrations. The first was the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition, for which Westinghouse won the contract to light the fair with alternating current, underbidding Edison's company. Tesla, who was present at the fair, gave demonstrations of his inventions, including the lighting of lamps without wires, and the fair became a showcase for the new system: visitors saw, for the first time, a whole city lit by alternating current, and the impression was decisive. The second was Niagara Falls. In 1893 the Niagara Falls Power Company chose the Westinghouse-Tesla system for its hydroelectric plant, and in 1896 the plant began supplying power to Buffalo, twenty-six miles away — a distance that direct current could not have covered. The success of Niagara proved that alternating current could power a city from a distant source, and it settled the question: the power grids of the world would be alternating current.

Tesla's contribution to the victory was central, but it was not solitary. The system was built by Westinghouse's engineers, by the financiers who backed them, and by the many inventors whose work Tesla built upon, including Faraday, who had discovered electromagnetic induction, and the Hungarian, German and American engineers who had developed the transformer. Tesla's role was to supply the motor, the generator and the vision of a complete system, and to do so with a clarity and a completeness that no one else had achieved. The War of the Currents is therefore a story about a system, not about a single man, and Tesla's greatness lies in his understanding of the system as a whole.

The victory did not make Tesla rich. In the financial crisis of the 1890s, Westinghouse's company was in difficulty, and Tesla, in a gesture that has become legendary, tore up his royalty contract with Westinghouse, giving up a fortune in future royalties in order to save the company. Whether the story is literally true is debated by historians — the contract was renegotiated, and Tesla was paid a substantial sum — but the substance is not in doubt: Tesla gave up a great deal of money, and he did so because he believed in the system and in Westinghouse. It was a generous act, and it was also, in retrospect, a fateful one: it left him without the income that would have funded his later work.

4. The Tesla coil, radio and the Colorado Springs experiments

In 1891 Tesla invented the Tesla coil, a transformer that produces high-voltage, high-frequency alternating current. The coil was a spectacular device: it produced long, crackling sparks, it lit lamps without wires, and it became the centrepiece of Tesla's public demonstrations. It was also a serious scientific instrument: it was used in early radio experiments, in the study of high-frequency currents, and in the development of the vacuum tube. The coil is still used today, in radio technology, in demonstrations, and in entertainment, and it is the invention that most people associate with Tesla's name, because it is the most visible and the most dramatic.

Tesla's work on radio is the most contested part of his career. He filed patents for a wireless system in 1897, before Marconi's first patent, and he demonstrated wireless communication in his laboratory. Marconi, the Italian inventor, was the first to build a practical wireless telegraphy system, to transmit signals across the Atlantic in 1901, and to commercialise radio. The two men were rivals, and their supporters have argued ever since about who invented radio. The truth, as the site's article on Marconi explains, is that radio was the work of many people: Heinrich Hertz demonstrated electromagnetic waves, Oliver Lodge developed the tuned circuit, Tesla contributed the tuned circuit and the idea of wireless power, and Marconi put the pieces together into a working system and made it a commercial reality. No one of them invented radio alone.

The question came before the United States Supreme Court in 1943, the year Tesla died. In a case between the Marconi Company and the United States government, the Court ruled that Marconi's 1904 patent for a tuned circuit was invalid, because the invention had been anticipated by Tesla and by Lodge. The ruling is often cited as proof that Tesla invented radio, but that is a misunderstanding of what the Court decided. The Court ruled on a patent claim — on whether Marconi's 1904 patent was valid — and not on the question of who invented radio. The ruling is important, and it is a recognition of Tesla's contribution, but it does not settle the larger question, which is a question about the history of technology, not about the law. This article follows the same position as the site's Marconi article: the credit for radio is shared, and Tesla's share is real and significant.

In 1899 Tesla moved his experiments to Colorado Springs, where he built a large laboratory and conducted experiments with high-voltage electricity, including the generation of artificial lightning. The Colorado Springs period is the source of many of the legends about Tesla: the stories of his attempts to transmit power wirelessly, of his claims to have received signals from Mars, and of his experiments with the Earth itself as a conductor. Some of the stories are true, some are exaggerated, and some are inventions of later writers. What is documented is that Tesla believed, by the end of his life, that electrical power could be transmitted without wires, and that he spent his remaining years and his remaining money trying to prove it.

5. Wardenclyffe, the fall and the long decline

Tesla's last great project was Wardenclyffe, a tower on Long Island, New York, built with the backing of the financier J. P. Morgan, which was intended to be the first station in a worldwide system of wireless communication and wireless power transmission. Construction began in 1901, and Tesla believed that the tower would allow him to transmit messages and power across the Atlantic, and eventually around the world. The project failed. Morgan withdrew his support, partly because Marconi had already demonstrated transatlantic wireless communication, and partly because Tesla could not explain, in commercial terms, what Wardenclyffe would do. The tower was never completed, it was demolished in 1917, and Tesla never recovered, financially or professionally, from its failure.

The decades that followed were a long decline. Tesla lived in hotels in New York, moving from one to another as his money ran out, and he continued to work, filing patents, giving interviews, and proposing inventions — a bladeless turbine, a new kind of aircraft, a death ray, as the press called it — none of which came to fruition. He became increasingly eccentric, feeding pigeons in the parks of New York, and he became increasingly isolated, out of touch with the scientific community that had once celebrated him. He received honours in his later years — the Edison Medal in 1917, which he accepted with reluctance, and honorary degrees — but he died, on 7 January 1943, in the Hotel New Yorker, poor, alone, and largely forgotten by the public.

The reasons for the decline are debated. Some argue that Tesla was a poor businessman, who gave away his royalties and who could not turn his ideas into products. Some argue that he was a victim of the financiers and the industrialists who profited from his work. Some argue that his later ideas — wireless power, the transmission of energy through the Earth — were simply wrong, and that no amount of money could have made them work. All three explanations contain some truth. Tesla was a great inventor and a poor businessman, and the two facts are related: the same imagination that made him see the rotating field also made him see possibilities that did not exist, and the same independence that made him leave Edison also made him unable to work within the institutions that could have funded him.

6. The revival: how Tesla became a cult figure

Tesla's reputation was revived in the late twentieth century, and the revival has grown into something close to a cult. The reasons are several. The first is the romance of the story: the genius who died poor, the inventor who was robbed by the great men of his age, the prophet who saw the future and was ignored. The second is the internet, which has made Tesla a hero of a certain kind of popular science, in which he is presented as a lone genius who was suppressed by a conspiracy of corporations and governments. The third is the naming of the electric car company Tesla, founded in 2003, which has made his name familiar to millions of people who have never heard of alternating current.

The cult has produced a great deal of misinformation. Tesla is credited, in popular accounts, with inventions he did not make — the radio, the fluorescent light, the laser, the internet, free energy — and with predictions he did not make. The claims are usually based on a misunderstanding of his patents, or on a selective reading of his interviews, or on pure invention. Serious historians of technology have pushed back against the exaggerations, while acknowledging the reality of his achievements: the alternating-current system, the induction motor, the Tesla coil, and the hundreds of patents that made the electrical age possible. The distinction matters, because it is the difference between admiring a great inventor and believing in a myth.

The revival has also had a positive effect: it has brought Tesla's work back into the public consciousness, it has led to the preservation of his laboratory at Wardenclyffe, which is now the Tesla Science Center, and it has led to a more serious study of his papers and his patents. The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, and the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, which holds his archives, are the two centres for the study of his life, and they have done much to separate the fact from the legend. The task for the reader is to hold both in mind: the real Tesla, who was a great inventor, and the mythical Tesla, who is a product of the internet age.

7. Why he matters: the man who electrified the world

Nikola Tesla matters because the world runs on his system. Every time a light is switched on, every time a motor turns, every time power is transmitted from a distant power station to a home, the alternating-current system that Tesla developed is at work. The scale of that achievement is hard to overstate: it is one of the few inventions that changed the daily life of every person on the planet, and it is the foundation of the modern industrial world. Tesla's name is not as well known as Edison's, but his system is more widely used, and his influence on the modern world is, in that sense, greater.

He also matters as a reminder of how invention works. The popular image of the lone genius, working in isolation, is misleading: Tesla built on Faraday, on the engineers who developed the transformer, on Westinghouse's company, and on the financiers who funded him. His genius was in seeing the system, in having the mathematical ability to design it, and in having the persistence to build it. That is a different kind of genius from the genius of the pure scientist, and it is a kind that is often undervalued. The history of technology is a history of systems, and Tesla was one of the great system-builders.

The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life. The best way to understand him is to remember both the achievement and the failure: the man who electrified the world, and the man who died poor in a hotel room, still dreaming of wireless power. Both are true, and both are part of the same story — a story of a great mind, a generous temperament, and a career that, like the alternating current he championed, rose and fell in cycles, and that left the world, in the end, permanently changed.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Nikola Tesla
• Wikipedia — Nikola Tesla
• US Department of Energy — War of the Currents: AC vs. DC Power
• Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe — About Nikola Tesla

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• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.