Nikola Tesla is born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, in the region of Lika, to a Serbian Orthodox priest father, Milutin Tesla, and a mother, Djuka Mandic, who invented her own household devices. The film follows his education at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz and the University of Prague, then his first engineering job at a telephone company in Budapest in 1881. In Paris he joins the Continental Edison Company designing dynamos, and while working in Strassbourg in 1883 he builds a working prototype of the induction motor on his own time, unable to find European backers willing to promote it. That failure sends him to New York to work directly for Thomas Edison, setting up the rivalry and collaboration that will define the rest of his career. The film traces this early arc as the foundation for the inventions that follow, framing Tesla as a case of a radical idea rejected at home before it changes how the world gets its electricity.