Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 with a few coins, a head full of equations, and a vision of the world wired with invisible power. The son of a Serbian priest, he could hold an entire machine in his mind, turning it, testing it, perfecting it before he ever touched a tool. When he finally built his inventions, they often worked on the first try.

His alternating-current system — the polyphase motor, the transformers, the great generators at Niagara Falls — is the reason light still answers the flick of a switch tonight. He dreamed further than his century could follow: wireless transmission, remote control, radio, the rough outline of the smartphone in your pocket. He held some three hundred patents and gave away royalties that would have made him one of the richest men alive.

He died alone in a Manhattan hotel room at eighty-six, more fond of pigeons than of money, his greatest visions still unbuilt. We honor him as the lightning-minded dreamer who electrified the modern age and then quietly handed it to us, asking little in return but the freedom to keep imagining.