Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in the Austrian Empire, in present-day Croatia, and emigrated to the United States, where he briefly worked for Thomas Edison before they fell out. His alternating-current system, backed by George Westinghouse, defeated Edison's direct current in the so-called war of the currents and became the basis of modern power grids. He held key patents used in radio, and the courts later recognised his priority over some of Guglielmo Marconi's claims. A brilliant but unworldly inventor, he pursued grand and sometimes impractical schemes, and he died poor and largely forgotten in a New York hotel.