Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, showman, and full-blown eccentric who helped electrify the modern world — and then largely gave the credit and the money away. He could picture a whole machine spinning in his head, in perfect detail, before he built a single part. He also fell in love with a pigeon. Both of these things are true.

The lasting imprint

Tesla's masterpiece was the alternating-current motor, which spins because a rotating magnetic field drags the rotor around with it — the trick behind most of the electric motors on Earth today. The scientific unit of magnetic field strength, the tesla, is named after him, so every time an MRI machine is rated at "3 tesla" it's quietly quoting his name. His AC system beat out Edison's direct current to become the way we send electricity down power lines.

Tesla and Thomas Edison fought a bitter public feud over whose electricity should power the world — the famous "War of the Currents." Tesla's AC won, but he was hopeless with money and died broke in a New York hotel room, tended by the pigeons he adored. In his prime, though, he was pure spectacle: he built coils that hurled artificial lightning across his lab, lit lamps with no wires attached, and calmly let millions of volts crawl over his own body to prove it was safe. Part genius, part magician — and completely unforgettable.