Nikola Tesla — "I was educated in a monastery, and I read everything that came into my hands."
I was educated in a monastery, and I read everything that came into my hands.
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About Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer whose alternating-current designs powered the modern electrical grid; died poor and largely forgotten. Closely associated with George Westinghouse (his AC-power business partner) and Mihajlo Pupin (fellow Serbian-American physicist at Columbia). For an intellectual contrast, see Thomas Edison, American inventor and direct-current advocate — Edison's direct-current power-distribution scheme was displaced by Tesla-Westinghouse AC in the 1890s 'War of Currents'. Edison ran a public-relations campaign electrocuting animals to discredit AC — the most famous engineering-ethics rivalry in American history. Tesla's AC won and powers nearly every electrical grid on Earth.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The speaker credits broad, voracious reading as central to their education, suggesting self-directed learning across all available subjects shaped their mind more than formal instruction alone. It conveys intellectual hunger and discipline instilled by a rigorous early environment, implying that true education comes from consuming every idea within reach, not merely what a curriculum prescribes.
Relevance to Nikola Tesla
Tesla attended the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac and studied at Graz Polytechnic, but his early formation included strong religious and classical schooling. His father was an Orthodox priest, deeply influencing his disciplined upbringing. Tesla was famously autodidactic, memorizing entire books, mastering multiple languages, and drawing on physics, poetry, and philosophy equally when developing his electrical theories.
The era
In 19th-century Eastern Europe, formal scientific education was scarce outside major cities. Monastic and classical institutions preserved literacy and learning. Tesla grew up in Serbia during Ottoman decline and Austro-Hungarian expansion, when access to scientific literature was limited and self-education through whatever books existed was the primary path for intellectually ambitious young men outside elite urban centers.
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