Nikola Tesla

In 1856, Tesla was born into a Serbian family in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire; his father was an Orthodox priest, and his mother, though without formal education, was ingenious with her hands and possessed an astonishing memory. From childhood he displayed a gift beyond the ordinary: an almost photographic visual memory that let him conceive, assemble, and even run a machine complete in his mind—and he was even tormented by uncontrollable, vivid images in his head. This power to 'build machines in the mind' was both the wellspring of his genius and a portent of a life that would move between reality and vision.

He entered the Graz Polytechnic to study engineering, and it was in the classroom, encountering a dynamo, that he became fixated on the flaws of direct-current commutation. Later, for reasons of finance and health, he dropped out and drifted from one livelihood to another; by his own account, it was during a walk in a Budapest park that inspiration struck and he grasped the principle of the rotating magnetic field of alternating current. Carrying this idea that no one yet understood, he first served Edison's company in Paris, then emigrated to America to work directly for Edison, only to soon part ways over disputes about pay and differences in technical direction—falling for a time to digging ditches to survive.

The true stage opened once he struck out on his own. He developed the AC induction motor, secured the key patents for the polyphase AC system, and joined forces with the industrialist Westinghouse to commercialize alternating current. This drew him into the 'War of the Currents' against Edison's direct-current line—his rivals stopped at nothing, using the electric chair and the electrocution of animals to paint AC as dangerous, but alternating current triumphed in the end thanks to its natural advantage in long-distance transmission. At the 1893 Chicago World's Fair he performed high-frequency currents before the public, turning the brilliantly lit fairgrounds into a coronation of AC; and the Niagara hydroelectric station, which adopted his patents, forged that victory into a monument.

Yet Tesla, having reached the summit, turned his gaze toward a vision vaster and more perilous. He invented the Tesla coil, capable of generating high-voltage, high-frequency currents, publicly demonstrated a wirelessly controlled boat, and on a Colorado mountain produced artificial lightning and claimed to have detected mysterious signals. He dreamed of a tower that could carry information across the ocean and transmit power wirelessly to the whole world—this was Wardenclyffe Tower, begun in 1901 with funding from Morgan and others, a grand conception ahead of its time.

But the vision could not, in the end, withstand reality. Marconi achieved transatlantic wireless telegraphy first, shaking investors' confidence, the funding dried up, the Wardenclyffe project was left unfinished, and the tower was finally demolished in 1917 as his fortunes turned from rise to decline. In his later years his patent income ran dry and debts closed in; he lived alone in New York hotels, growing ever more reclusive, keeping company with pigeons and getting by on Westinghouse's quiet assistance, until in 1943 he died alone in his sleep. He held hundreds of patents in his lifetime, and only after his death did the Supreme Court affirm his pioneering claim to the foundational patents of radio. The story of this 'Father of Alternating Current' is a magnificent and desolate mismatch between genius and its age.