How did Nikola Tesla change the way we use energy?
When you flip a switch and a lamp bathes the room in light, you probably don’t give much thought to how it works — or to the people who made it all possible. If you were forced to acknowledge the genius behind the lamp, you might name Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the incandescent light bulb. But just as influential — perhaps more so — was a visionary named Nikola Tesla. Tesla arrived in the United States in 1884, at the age of 28, and by 1887 had filed for a series of patents that described everything necessary to generate electricity using alternating current, or AC. To understand the significance of these inventions, you have to understand what the field of electrical generation was like at the end of the 19th century. It was a war of currents — with Tesla acting as one general and Edison acting as the opposing general. The State of Electricity in 1885
