Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) emerg-ed from a Serbian family in a remote Croatian village to become a world-famous inventor at the age of 32, when he sold his patent rights to a system of alternating-current (AC) dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse. By developing a motor that converted AC into motive power, Tesla laid the groundwork for today's electrical geography. Before his inventions, electric power lingered as an isolated, local utility, available only at great expense through Thomas Edison's direct-current (DC) system. The deal between Tesla and Westinghouse led to a showdown between the DC approach and the AC system-the latter of which eventually won out.

The tale of Tesla's humble beginnings, ingenuity, and early success would appear sufficient to garner him everlasting re-nown. But despite Tesla's impact on electricity, history does not regard him as highly as many of his inventive contemporaries. As Marc J. Seifer, the author of Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla shows, Tesla's later claims of wizardry and his outlandish predictions about technology's future transformed him into a laughable figure during his lifetime. At times inept at handling his own celebrity or courting the press, Tesla waited too long to claim precedent-setting accomplishments in transmitting radio signals over great distances, yet in 1899 he announced publicly that his Colorado Springs laboratory had received signals from Mars. Today, however, the author, among others, champions Tesla as a neglected genius and the father of such later marvels as cellular phones, digital communications, and pixels.