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50 free Nikola Tesla trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Nikola Tesla was born during a lightning storm in a Serbian village, did integral calculus in his head, walked out on Thomas Edison, licensed the AC induction motor to Westinghouse, lit bulbs from across a stage without wires, built artificial lightning in Colorado and died broke in a New York hotel room with a white pigeon for a friend. Few lives in science offer so much quiz material, and few are so wrapped in myth. These 50 questions stick to the documented record: the priest father and the mother who built her own tools, the cholera that nearly killed him, the Graz scholarship and the gambling rumours, the Budapest telephone exchange, Continental Edison in Paris, the disputed $50,000 bonus, the ditch-digging year, the 1888 Westinghouse licence and the royalty he tore up, the Columbian Exposition, Niagara, the lab fire, the radio-controlled boat, the Colorado Springs signals he thought came from Mars, J. P. Morgan and Wardenclyffe, the bladeless turbine, the birthday press conferences, the Teleforce weapon, the FBI and John G. Trump, and the SI unit named for him in 1960. The easy tier asks what AC stands for; the expert tier wants the Czech order he received in 1937 and the name of the journalist who started the birthday parties. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation. Play it solo or print it for a science night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to which electricity supply system?
Alternating current
His polyphase AC patents became the cornerstone of the system Westinghouse marketed.
Q 02In which village was Tesla born in 1856?
Smiljan
The village was then in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire and is now in Croatia.
Q 03Tesla's birthplace lies in which present-day country?
Croatia
His family were ethnic Serbs living under the Austrian Empire.
Q 04What was the profession of Tesla's father, Milutin?
Orthodox priest
He originally wanted his son to enter the priesthood too.
Q 05To whom did Tesla credit his eidetic memory and creativity?
His mother
Duka Mandic had a talent for making home craft tools and could memorise Serbian epic poems.
Q 06Why did Tesla's teachers suspect him of cheating at school?
He did integral calculus in his head
He graduated from the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac in 1873, aged 17.
Q 07Which disease left the teenage Tesla bedridden and near death in 1873?
Cholera
His father promised to send him to the best engineering school if he recovered.
Q 08Whose books did Tesla say he read while recovering from his illness?
Mark Twain
Decades later the two became close friends in New York.
Q 09At which city's technical college did Tesla enrol in 1875?
Graz
He passed nine exams in his first year but left in 1878 without graduating.
Q 10What did classmates rumour had happened to Tesla after he vanished from college?
He had drowned in the river Mur
He was actually working as a draftsman in Maribor for 60 florins a month.
Q 11In which city did Tesla become chief electrician of a new telephone exchange in 1881?
Budapest
He worked under Tivadar Puskas and later claimed to have improved a telephone repeater there.
Q 12For which company did Tesla install lighting systems in Paris from 1882?
Continental Edison
He worked at its Ivry-sur-Seine division and was soon redesigning dynamos.
Q 13In which year did Tesla emigrate to the United States?
1884
Edison manager Charles Batchelor asked that he be brought over to the Edison Machine Works.
Which ocean liner's dynamos did Tesla stay up all night repairing?
Q 21What monthly fee did Westinghouse pay Tesla as a consultant in Pittsburgh?
$2,000
He found the year frustrating and his motor could not run the city's streetcars.
Q 22Which Italian physicist had built a similar rotating-field machine Westinghouse weighed up?
Galileo Ferraris
Westinghouse decided Tesla's patent would probably control the market.
Q 23For how much did Westinghouse buy Tesla's patent outright in 1897?
$216,000
It was part of a patent-sharing agreement with the newly formed General Electric.
What did Tesla call the device later known as the Tesla coil?
SS Oregon
Edison reportedly told Batchelor afterwards that this was a damned good man.
Q 15How big was the bonus Tesla said the Edison Machine Works promised and never paid?
$50,000
The sum was odd, since the company did not have that much cash on hand.
Q 16In which New Jersey town did Tesla's first company install its arc lighting system?
Rahway
The investors then dropped him, and he lost control of his own patents.
Q 17What manual job did Tesla take for $2 a day during his 1886 hardship?
Ditch digger
He wrote that his high education seemed to him like a mockery.
Q 18Which two backers formed the Tesla Electric Company with him in 1887?
Alfred Brown and Charles Peck
Profits were split a third each to Tesla, to the backers, and to development.
Q 19What did Tesla develop in 1887 that ran on polyphase current and needed no commutator?
An induction motor
Its rotating magnetic field came from polyphase current, an idea Tesla said he had in 1882.
Q 20Which company licensed Tesla's polyphase patents in 1888?
Westinghouse Electric
The deal was $60,000 in cash and stock plus a royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower.
Oscillating transformer
It used an air gap instead of insulation between the windings and produced high-voltage, high-frequency AC.
Q 25Which 1893 fair did Westinghouse light with AC, with Tesla demonstrating at its exhibit?
World's Columbian Exposition
Tesla spent a week in Chicago showing wireless lighting in a darkened room.
Q 26Which power system did Tesla recommend for Niagara Falls?
Two-phase AC
Westinghouse won the generating contract and General Electric built the distribution system.
Q 27What destroyed Tesla's South Fifth Avenue laboratory in March 1895?
A fire
Early notes, models and exhibits from the Columbian Exposition were lost.
Q 28Whom was Tesla trying to photograph when he may have captured an early X-ray image?
Mark Twain
The only thing captured was the metal locking screw of the camera lens.
Q 29What did Tesla demonstrate at Madison Square Garden in 1898?
A radio-controlled boat
He called it a telautomaton and tried to sell the idea to the military as a torpedo.
Q 30Where did Tesla set up his high-altitude experimental station in 1899?
Colorado Springs
The El Paso Electric Light Company supplied his power free of charge.