Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in a Serbian village in what is now Croatia, the son of a priest. He was a brilliant, strange student, prone to visions and obsessions, who left the polytechnic at Graz without finishing and worked as a telephone engineer in Budapest and Paris. Walking in a park in Budapest in 1882 he saw in his mind a motor driven by a rotating magnetic field, and drew it in the sand with a stick.

In 1884 he arrived in New York with a few cents and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison. Edison hired him, and within a year Tesla had quit after a dispute over a promised bonus. He spent the next winter digging ditches. Backers came and went before George Westinghouse bought his patents for alternating current motors and transformers in 1888.

Edison's direct current could not be sent more than a mile or two. Tesla's alternating current could be transformed to high voltage and sent across a country. The bitter war between the two systems ended with Westinghouse lighting the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and building the generators at Niagara Falls. AC won, and it is what comes out of every socket today.

Tesla went on to work on radio, remote control and wireless power, and poured his money into a giant transmitting tower on Long Island that was never finished. He lived his last years in hotel rooms, feeding pigeons, and died alone in 1943.