Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was a Serbian-born inventor, largely known for his immense contributions to the study of electricity and magnetism. Perhaps his most important contribution was alternating current, as AC power is the worldwide standard for energy transmission.

Tesla held patents for roughly 300 inventions, and is generally regarded as one of the greatest physicists and geniuses. Unfortunately for Tesla, despite his intellectual success, he lacked proper financial tact and was often in debt. He also had developed a rivalry with Thomas Edison, another genius inventor.

During his later years, Tesla began to make more and more outlandish claims, including that he had invented an earthquake machine and was planning on building an unstoppable death ray. This behaviour caused him to earn the reputation as a mad scientist. Tesla died of heart failure in New York.

A safe in his hotel room, that supposedly contained schematics for many of his 'mad scientist' devices, was broken into by men, believed to be NKVD agents, shortly before the FBI seized the contents.

During the Great World War II, Soviet forces fielded a wide array of technology that seemed to border on impossible, including their tesla coil base defenses (which were, in a way, the alleged unstoppable death ray), and the Iron Curtain invincibility system. Albert Einstein himself confirmed to Allied leaders that these devices seemed to have been based upon Tesla's work.