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Article snippet: A Tesla is an electric car. Just about everybody knows that. But it is less widely known that the car was named for Nikola Tesla, an electrical engineer who was once renowned as the prototype of a genius inventor. While Tesla’s star began to fade long ago, Elon Musk has contributed to something of a Nikola Tesla revival. In the age of Edison, Westinghouse, Marconi and J. P. Morgan, Tesla was a giant of innovation because of his contributions in the fields of electricity, radio and robotics. “It’s a sociological fact that Elon Musk took the Tesla name and launched Nikola Tesla into the stratosphere,” says Marc Seifer, the author of “Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla.” “Tesla’s risen to the surface again, and now he’s getting his due.” Tesla was on the cover of Time magazine in 1931 but died a poor man in 1943 after years devoted to projects that did not receive adequate financing. Yet his most significant inventions resonate today. In 1884, Tesla came to New York to work for Thomas Edison with the hope that Edison would help finance and develop a Tesla invention, an alternating-current motor and electrical system. But Edison was instead investing in highly inefficient direct-current (D.C.) systems, and he had Tesla re-engineer a D.C. power plant on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan. The men soon parted company over a financial dispute. But George Westinghouse provided funding for Tesla’s A.C. induction motors and devices, which soon came to dominate manufac... Link to the full article to read more