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Throughout history, there have been many remarkable people whose true life stories have been eclipsed by as much fiction as fact. Visionaries and revolutionaries, pioneers and geniuses have seen their legacies morphed into unrecognizable caricatures, overshadowed by those who came after them, or ignored for generations after their deaths. But no person has ever been quite as brilliant or as misunderstood as this one.

A Brilliant Inventor

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Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American engineer, futurist, and inventor who contributed to the invention of modern electrical power. Born in the Austrian Empire, Tesla studied physics and engineering in the 1870s but never finished a degree, instead opting to learn through practice. In the early 1880s, he held several jobs in telephony and at Continental Edison, learning the inner workings of the burgeoning electrical industry.

In 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen. After working briefly for the Edison Machine Works in New York City, he went independent with ideas that were light years ahead of the industry’s state-of-the-art. Tesla started his own laboratories and companies in various locations around New York. He developed numerous electrical and mechanical devices, including his famous AC induction motor. Tesla’s polyphase AC patents were licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888 and formed the basis of the company’s AC power system, the same system that powers our lives today.

And yet, for all these achievements, Tesla’s legacy has been one of confusion, distortion, and long periods of obscurity.

A Difficult Life

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But Tesla was more than a brilliant inventor of electrical engineering devices. He was a man propelled by ideas, and by ideas far in advance of his own time. He was a man whose ideas could not be understood by most of the people who heard of them. And he was a man whose ideas could not be believed by investors.

Tesla experimented with mechanical oscillators, electrical discharge tubes, and even primitive X-ray imaging years before any of these were commonplace. He created one of the earliest radio-controlled devices, a boat he operated without wires for distance demonstrations that mixed scientific advancement and vaudevillian showmanship. In the 1890s, he worked toward wireless lighting, and eventually wireless power on a global scale with a series of high-voltage experiments in New York and Colorado Springs.

Next was the Wardenclyffe Tower, his greatest and most misunderstood project. Tesla imagined a system to transmit messages, information, and even power wirelessly throughout the world. He ran out of money before the tower was completed, and his vision of world-changing technology fell apart. Tesla’s luck never recovered. In the 1910s and 1920s, he pursued a number of other inventions with little success. Lacking a regular income, Tesla bounced from hotel to hotel in New York, racking up large debts he could not pay. In 1943, he passed away alone and, at the time, unknown to the public.

Interest in Tesla did return, though, decades later. The more so after 1960, when the SI unit of magnetic flux density was officially named after him. The more so through the 1990s, when Tesla’s image became that of a cultural icon. In 2013, Time named Tesla as one of the 100 most important people in history.

A Legacy Overshadowed

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Misunderstood, in part, because so many of his ideas were rejected or outright stolen by Thomas Edison, the more commercially minded inventor. Where Edison saw profit and power, Tesla dreamed of free energy and information moving at the speed of light for the good of all mankind. Investors with money to lose were not thrilled by the idea of giving away electricity.

Tesla wanted to provide free power, unbound by wires, limitations, or price tags. Edison wanted customers. This struggle defined Tesla during his life and helped to obscure his legacy for decades.

Today, Tesla is honored not simply as an inventor but as a dreamer whose ideas were too big, too revolutionary, for the age he lived in. And in many ways, that’s exactly why he’s the most misunderstood man in the world, a genius whose mind ran far ahead of his time, and whose legacy we are only just beginning to understand.