Nikola Tesla — AC Power, Radio, Visionary Genius

**Nikola Tesla** was the purest inventor the Industrial Revolution produced — and the most tragic. Born in 1856 in Smiljan, in the Austrian Empire (modern Croatia), to a Serbian Orthodox priest and a mother who invented household tools despite being illiterate, Tesla possessed an extraordinary mind that could visualize complete machines in three-dimensional detail, rotate them mentally, test them in his imagination, and then build them — often without drawings. He studied engineering in Graz and physics in Prague, worked briefly for Edison in Paris and New York, and then spent the rest of his life inventing things that were decades ahead of their time, failing to profit from most of them, and dying alone in a New York hotel room in 1943 with a net worth close to zero.