If it weren’t for electricity, our regular everyday lives would come screeching to a halt. The power is Tesla’s bequest. Here was this genius immigrant who created the electric systems we use today.

Tesla was not like most businessmen; his focus lay more in helping people than making money. He wished to bestow infinite energy upon the world. Alas, though he had made the future, he died poor and alone. He was a bona fide genius with an anguished biography.

A Story of Light and Dark

Nikola Tesla was born during a scary thunderstorm. The midwife called him a "child of darkness," but his mother firmly said, "No, he will be a child of light."

She was right. As a boy, Tesla was amazed by electricity, especially seeing sparks when he petted his cat. He spent his whole life chasing that power. He owed his genius to his mother; just like her, he could picture and build entire machines inside his mind.

Tesla V/S Edison

In 1884, a 28-year-old Tesla arrived in New York City. He had four cents in his pocket and a letter of recommendation for the most famous inventor on Earth: Thomas Edison.

History links them, but they were opposites in every meaningful sense.

• Edison was the ultimate pragmatist. He believed in the grind, testing thousands of materials until he found one that didn't fail. He ran a business focused on what could be sold today.

• Tesla was a futurist. He used complex mathematics and physics to perfect his designs before he even picked up a tool. He wasn't chasing profit; he was chasing discovery.

Tesla went to work for Edison, tasked with fixing the company's DC (direct current) generators. The story goes that Edison promised a massive bonus—$50,000—if he could pull it off. Tesla worked feverishly and succeeded. But when he went to collect, Edison reportedly laughed. "Tesla," he said, "you don't understand our American humor."

Tesla couldn't forgive the slight. He quit immediately. Despite his brilliance, the man who would light the world found himself digging ditches in New York streets for $2 a day just to survive. It was a brutal lesson in American capitalism.

The War of the Currents

The late 1800s hosted a battle for the planet's nervous system—the "War of the Currents."

Edison was betting on Direct Current (DC) This was a secure, straightforward system, but it had a critical weakness: it was immobile. For DC city power you needed a coal-burning, loud power plant every few blocks.

Tesla, who had worked with the industrialist George Westinghouse, had a better idea: Alternating Current (AC). His system enabled electricity to reverse direction rapidly, thus making it capable of being blasted across skinny wires for hundreds of miles without losing any of its power.

Edison, seeing his empire tremble, played dirty. He launched a smear campaign to terrify the public, claiming Tesla’s system was a killer. He even staged public demonstrations where he used AC power to electrocute animals, hoping to scare people away from the future.

The Decisive Victory

But you can not frighten men away from better engineering forever. It was at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893 that the war ended.

Tesla and Westinghouse secured the contract to illuminate the fair. When they turned a switch, the “City of Light” blazed even brighter with hundreds of thousands of bulbs. Visitors had never experienced anything quite like it. It was our first real look at the modern world.

Tesla was the man of the hour, thrilling an audience that included J. P. Morgan by running high-voltage electricity through his body to illuminate a bulb cradled in his hand—demonstrating once and for all that AC wasn’t dangerous.

After that, the dominoes fell. Tesla and Westinghouse harnessed Niagara Falls, building a massive hydroelectric plant that sent power 26 miles to Buffalo. That was the final proof. AC became the global standard. Every time you plug a toaster or a laptop into a wall today, you are using the system Tesla fought for.

The Dream of Wireless Power

Winning the current war didn't earn Tesla a vacation. He set his sights on something that sounds impossible even today: wireless power.

He believed the Earth itself was a conductor. He thought he could beam energy through the ground and air, allowing anyone, anywhere, to have free power.

He convinced the titan of finance, J.P. Morgan, to fund a massive transmission tower on Long Island called Wardenclyffe. He told Morgan it was for radio. But Tesla’s secret ambition was a "World Wireless System" to send not just news, but energy, to the entire globe.

When Morgan realized the game, he pulled the plug. The reasoning was cold business logic: if anyone can draw energy from the air, how do you put a meter on it? You can't charge for what you can't measure. The funding vanished. The tower was torn down for scrap. It was the heartbreak of Tesla's life.

The Silent Years

The 20th century raced forward on Tesla's engines, but the inventor himself was left on the platform. Unlike Edison or Westinghouse, Tesla never protected his money. He tore up royalty contracts to help his friends; he poured his own cash into failed experiments.

He spent his last years wandering between the hotels of New York, moving on when he could no longer foot his bill. He was known less for his science than for his eccentricities. He became preoccupied with the number three, and was paralyzed by a phobia of germs.

In the end, his closest companions were the pigeons in Bryant Park. He went there daily to feed them, treating the birds with a tenderness he rarely found in humans. He wrote about one specific white pigeon with heartbreaking affection: "I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life."

It is a stinging irony: the man who connected the world died almost entirely alone.

A Legacy Restored

On January 7, 1943, Tesla's body was found by maid Alice Monaghan after she had entered Tesla's room, ignoring the "do not disturb" sign that Tesla had placed on his door two days earlier. He was 86.

Even dead, he was dangerous. The F.B.I. quickly swept in and confiscated his papers, concerned that his theories of a “death ray” might be real and could end up in the hands of enemy powers during World War II.

He had been sidelined by history textbooks for decades. But the rest of the world has finally begun to catch up with Tesla in recent years. We now know that he was the father of the induction motor, the real inventor of radio (a distinction restored to him by a unanimous Supreme Court more than 75 years after his death), and a futurist who anticipated smartphones and Wi-Fi decades before they existed.

Tesla once said, "The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine."

He was right. We are living in Tesla's future. The "Child of Light" may be gone, but the world he built is still shining.