Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla saw the rotating magnetic field whole, in a Budapest park in 1882, before any apparatus existed to build it, and the same faculty of vivid interior vision that gave him alternating current also gave him a question no century has answered: what happens when the machine begins to act on its own? In 1898 he built the first radio-controlled vehicle, called it a teleautomaton, and described it as the founding member of “a new order of beings”—machines that would one day operate, he believed, from something like judgment of their own. The War of Currents he won technically and lost financially, surrendering the royalties that should have made him the richest man in America in order to keep alternating current alive. His Wardenclyffe tower, built to demonstrate a planetary wireless system he called the world system, was demolished for scrap when J. P. Morgan withdrew the capital that Tesla could not supply himself. He died alone in a New York hotel in 1943, certain of things he could no longer prove,