tiny Nikola Tesla1. Tesla's childhood home in Croatia, which was damaged in the Yugoslav Wars, was restored in 2006.
2. Tesla's famous rivalry with Edison began after Edison denied Tesla the $50k he had promised for redesigning the Edison Company's direct current generators.
3. Tesla didn't become an American citizen until age 35.
4. While Tesla did not believe in the paranormal, he claimed to have dreams that alerted him to his mother's failing health and, later, to her death.
5. While in New York, Tesla lived at the Waldorf-Astoria.
6. Tesla was good friends with author Mark Twain. What a wonderful combination of scientific and literary genius their meetings must have been!
7. Tesla was rumored to have turned down the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics, but biographers today still cannot determine the true reason for his denial of the prize.
8. Tesla's favorite geometrical object was a sphere. His ashes lay in a spherical urn at the Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade.
9. The last living person to have met Nikola Tesla is his grandnephew, William Terbo. William serves on the board of the Tesla Memorial Society.
10. Tesla's laboratory in Shoreham, NY, Wardenclyffe, was almost sold to a private developer in 2012 to be turned into retail space. However, a crowdfunding campaign run by cartoonist Matthew Inman and a donation from Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla Motors) saved the property. It is currently being turned into a Tesla museum.