Nikola Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, Lika. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian Orthodox priest and his mother Djuka Mandic was an inventor of her own line of household appliances. Tesla studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt in 1873, at the Polytechnic University of Graz, Austria and at the University of Prague. He initially intended to specialize in physics and mathematics, but soon became fascinated with electricity. He began his career as an electrical engineer at a telephone company in Budapest in 1881. It was there, while Tesla was walking with a friend in the city park, that the elusive solution to the rotating magnetic field flashed in his mind. With a stick he traced a diagram in the sand explaining to his friend the principle of the induction motor. Before going to America, Tesla joined the Continental Edison Company in Paris, where he designed dynamos. While in Strasbourg in 1883, he privately built a prototype of the induction motor and successfully ran it. Soon after, Tesla accepted a job offer for Thomas Edison in New York. One of his childhood dreams was to come to America to harness the power of Niagara Falls. Young Nikola Tesla arrived in the United States in 1884. He spent the next 59 years of his life living in New York. Tesla began improving Edison's line of dynamos while working in Edison's laboratory in New Jersey. he presented his motors and electrical systems in a classic paper, "A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers," which he delivered before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1888. One of the most impressed was the industrialist and inventor George Westinghouse. One day he visited Tesla's laboratory and was amazed by what he saw. Tesla had built a model polyphase system consisting of an alternating current dynamo, step-up and step-down transformers, and an AC motor at the other end. The perfect partnership between Tesla and Westinghouse for America's national use of electricity had begun. In February 1882, Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field, a fundamental principle of physics and the basis of almost all devices that use alternating current. Tesla brilliantly adapted the principle of the rotating magnetic field for the construction of the alternating current induction motor and the polyphase system for the generation, transmission, distribution and use of electrical energy. Tesla's AC induction motor is widely used around the world in industry and home appliances.