The Serbian-American inventor whose alternating-current induction motor and polyphase system won the 'War of Currents' and became central to how the world is wired — a real genius of the electrical age whose later wireless dreams went unrealized, who died broke and alone, and who is now half-buried under a modern internet legend.
Nearly every wall socket on Earth delivers alternating current, and Tesla's induction motor and polyphase patents supplied one of the essential missing pieces of the system that Westinghouse and many engineers then refined and built into the modern grid. That is his real and enormous achievement. The internet legend piled on top of it — that he was a suppressed god who invented everything, that Edison stole it all, that he could have given the world free wireless energy — is mostly false. The true story is stranger: a genuine visionary who electrified the planet, then chased grand projects that failed for lack of money and sound physics, and died nearly penniless in a New York hotel.