Nikola Tesla
A Serb from a Croatian village who arrived in America with four cents and a letter of introduction to Edison. The two parted quickly: Edison stood for direct current, Tesla for alternating, which a transformer can step up and send hundreds of miles. The “war of the currents” ended in alternating current’s favour — Tesla’s system lit the World’s Fair of 1893 and started the power station at Niagara. The induction motor, the rotating magnetic field, the coil that bears his name, the experiments in wireless power at Colorado Springs and the tower at Wardenclyffe that ran out of money. He died in 1943 alone in a New York hotel, with three hundred patents and no fortune.
He was born at Smiljan at midnight between 9 and 10 July 1856 — an hour that comes from the family story of a birth during a thunderstorm, not from a register. A chart reckoned from midnight is exactly as sound as the story is.