Who was Nikola Tesla?
Every light you switch on is his. Nikola Tesla's alternating current runs the world's grids, his coil still crackles in laboratories, and his name rides on electric cars — yet he died alone and nearly penniless in a New York hotel room, feeding pigeons in the park across the street. No inventor in history has given so much and kept so little.
Last updated: October 2026
Toroid — high-voltage terminalSecondary coilPrimary coilSpark gapEarth ground The Tesla coil — lightning from resonance The breakthrough Tesla's breakthrough was a vision — literally. As a student in Graz he watched a direct-current dynamo spark and stutter, and saw in a flash the solution: a rotating magnetic field produced by alternating currents, driving a motor with no brushes, no commutator, no sparks. The induction motor. In 1888 he laid out the complete polyphase system — generation, transmission, motors — the full architecture of the modern power grid, in a burst of forty-odd patents.