Sanctuary Fic Resource Page
Tracy's Sanctuary Fanfiction Research
Nikola Tesla (Written as Personal Research for Decalogue)
Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in the village of Smiljan. At the time, the village was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the modern day Croatia.
Legend has it that Tesla was born on the stroke of midnight between the 10th July and 11th July during an electrical storm (the irony of which leads me to believe it is little more than a fanciful story). His official birthday is celebrated on 10th July and UNESCO celebrated Tesla's 150th Birthday on 10th July 2006
Nikola's father, Milutin Tesla, was the village priest in Smiljan. The family was strictly 
Serbian Orthodox. Nikola's mother was Djuka Tesla (the name is often written with an accented "D" instead of "Dj") and Nikola was the second youngest child. His siblings, in order of age, were Dane (1848), Angelina (1850), Milka (1852) and Marica (1859).
After Dane died in a riding accident when Nikola was six (Dane age 14), the family moved to the larger city of Karlovac, where Nikola went to school and completed a 4 year course in just 3 years.
As a child, Nikola's family had a cat named "Macak", who Tesla later referred to as "The Magnificent Macak". He was incredibly fond of and close to the family pet.
Tesla went to Graz Polytechnic in 1875 to study electrical engineering and left in December 1878, not attending lectures and just disappearing. Sources are divided as to whether the university awarded his degree or not - the university claims not.
In December 1878 he went missing for a short while (in Sanctuary terms, this is when the historical John Druitt started at Oxford). He stopped writing to his family and friends thought he had drowned.
Throughout his life, Tesla worked for Edison, though disliked the man, and he moved to the United States, living for some time in Colorado (the queue for Stargate/Sanctuary crossover fic starts here). He also lived in Hungary and in France for a time.
Tesla's native tongue was Serbian, though he was fluent in Croatian as a necessity of it being the language of his town. He was also fluent in German, French, Italian, Latin, Hungarian, English and Czech. He was passionate about languages and language learning.
He was an animal lover and had a particular fondness for pigeons. He was thrown out of a hotel for taking some of his birds from Central Park (which he fed with special seed) back with him. He claimed to have been visited by one particular pigeon every day who was snowy white with light grey tips on her wings. He said in an interview with O'Neill that he "loved that bird like a man loves a woman". He was also a vegetarian in later life
Tesla suffered from OCD and did everything in threes, refusing to stay in a hotel room unless the number was divisible by three. In addition to that, he had a severe phobia of jewellery, particularly pearls (could this be because of the way they are formed?) and hated germs and other people's hair.
Before he died, he was working on a "death ray"
Nikola Tesla Related Images
Above: The Tesla family home in Smiljan near Gospic, Croatia (left) and the Serbian Orthodox Church where Milutin Tesla (Nikola's father) was the reverand.
Below: Milka Tesla, Angelina Tesla and Marica Tesla, Nikola's three sisters (photo from the Nikola Tesla Memorial Society).
