Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary) in 1856. He studied engineering in Prague and moved to Budapest, then Paris, where he worked for Edison's company. In 1885, he moved to New York. Tesla believed in alternating current—electricity that reversed direction many times per second. Thomas Edison believed in direct current, which flowed in one direction. Edison owned the electrical infrastructure of America.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Tesla designed transformers and motors that made AC practical. He partnered with George Westinghouse, and together they demonstrated AC's advantages at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. AC could be transmitted over long distances using transformers; DC could not. Within a decade, AC had won. Edison's DC empire was obsolete.

Tesla continued inventing: wireless transmission of power, the rotating magnetic field that still powers industrial motors, X-ray technology, and the polyphase system that underlies modern electrical grids. In 1891, he gave a public demonstration at Columbia College where he powered light bulbs wirelessly using his coil. He filed dozens of patents. He was a celebrity in his time.

By the 1920s, Tesla had fallen from favor. His wireless power experiments were never fully commercialized. He became increasingly reclusive and eccentric. He died in New York in 1943, nearly penniless, alone in a hotel room. In 1960, the SI unit of magnetic flux density was named the tesla. The man who should have been remembered as the father of modern electricity was instead remembered mostly in physics units and science fiction stories.