The father of modern-day electricity and considered by some to be the
ultimate mad scientist, Nikola Tesla filed nearly 300 patents in his
lifetime. Many of these patents resulted in functioning inventions;
others were little more than wide-eyed dreams--or still await possible
development. Tesla For Beginners examines the man behind the
alternating current and wireless technologies who traveled from Serbia
by steamship to arrive in the United States with only four cents in his
pocket. It was in the early 1880s, at the tail end of the Industrial
Revolution and the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution, that
America beckoned him.
Nikola Tesla--a poet of invention--left behind a vast and intriguing
legacy. He was a scientist, physicist, mathematician, electrical
engineer, and extensively published author who spent his last decades
scraping for funding for celestial projects and living out his final
days in penurious solitude with a pigeon.