Nikola Tesla

Tesla landed in New York in 1884 with four cents and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison. He worked for Edison briefly, fell out over money, and within a few years had taken his alternating-current motor designs to George Westinghouse. The current war that followed — Edison's direct current against the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating current — was decided at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which the AC system illuminated, and at Niagara Falls, where the first large-scale AC power station went online in 1896. Tesla's later patents covered radio transmission and wireless power, and the U.S. Supreme Court vindicated his radio priority over Guglielmo Marconi in 1943, months after Tesla's death in a New York hotel room. He died nearly destitute. His name is now everywhere.