Inventor. He received world-wide recognition as a Serbian-American inventor and engineer who discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field, which is the basis for most alternating current machinery. In May of 1888 he sold the 40 patent rights to his system of alternating current dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse. He also developed a three phase system of electric power transmission. A sickly child, he was born to an Eastern Orthodox priest and poet and a mother, who invented an egg beater and other kitchen apparatuses. While in high school he was diagnosed with cholera and was on his deathbed for nine months. He was educated for an engineering career at Polytechnical Institute in Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague in the Czech Republic. At Graz he became interested in the electrical motor and conceived alternating current. After two years in college his father died, leaving him no tuition funds to finish college, hence he began to learn from practical experiences. Traveling to Budapest, Hungary, he continued his quest of utilizing alternating current while working with the telephone company. In 1882 he traveled to Paris, France, for an engineering position with Continental Edison Company, and after proving his talents, he was sent on assignment to Strasbourg a year later. Working on his own time, he constructed his first motor. Unable to interest anyone in Europe with his ideas, he came to the United States in 1884, penniless, with poems he had written and calculations for a flying machine. He found employment with Thomas Edison but left claiming not being paid for his work and his ideas were not in line with Edison's. In 1888 Tesla introduced his motors and electrical system in a paper, "A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Tran," which he presented before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This led to him selling his patents to Westinghouse and so began "The Battle of the Currents" between Edison's direct current (D.C.) and Tesla-Westinghouse's alternating current (A.C.), with the alternating current eventually winning. In 1891 he became a naturalized American citizen and invented the Tesla coil, which is used today in radios, televisions and other electronic equipment. In 1893 he and Westinghouse gained world-wide acclaim with the demonstration of the alternating current electricity at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Later, he and Westinghouse partnered with General Electric to install AC generators at Niagara Falls, creating the first modern power station. At this point, Westinghouse built a laboratory for him to began various projects such as Wilhelm Rontgen's X-ray machine. Westinghouse managed his professional life and at times his personal life, as although Tesla was thought to be a genius, he would fail in his attempts when acting on his own, becoming penniless and homeless. He suffered haphephobia, the fear of touching other people, which led to poor relationships, especially with women. In 1893 he published an article on discoveries found in the X-ray machine in "The Electrical Review." On March 13, 1895, the building that housed his laboratory burned to the ground, destroying all his papers and projects, but another laboratory was built at another location. In 1899, after leaving Westinghouse, he built a laboratory for testing in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and was there for a year before returning penniless to work with Westinghouse. In 1904 he was sued by the city for unpaid debts, his laboratory was demolished, and the contents sold two years later at auction to satisfy his debt. In 1917 he was awarded the Edison Medal, the most coveted electrical prize in the United States. On July 4, 1917, in Shoreham, New York, the 197-foot Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower was destroyed and he was sued for debts; this was his failed attempt to produce electricity for the world. In 1943 he was credited posthumously with another invention when the United States Supreme Court overturned Guglielmo Marconi's patent No. 7777 stating that Tesla, along with two other pioneers of the radio invention,Joseph Lodge and John Stone, had developed the radio-tuning apparatus at least two years sooner than Marconi. He patented the basic system of radio in 1896, and published diagrams describing the basic elements of the radio transmitters, which were later used by Marconi. On his 75th birthday in 1931, his photograph appeared on the cover of "Time Magazine". Seventy birthday congratulation letters from various scientists, including Albert Einstein, were bound in a volume for him. According numerous sources, he battled mental health problems all his life, and as his physical health declined with aging, so did his mental health, with some calling him the "mad scientist." In his final years, he enjoyed feeding the pigeons in the city's parks. Through the years, he moved from hotel to hotel leaving unpaid bills at each. Finally, the wealthy Westinghouse paid for him to live for the last ten years of his life at The New Yorker Hotel, where he died in his two-room suite. After a funeral with 2,000 attendees, including several Nobel Prize recipients, his body was cremated, with his ashes interred in a golden sphere for display along with his death mask at the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. He was inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame in 1975 and starting the following year, the Nikola Tesla Award, an annual prestigious honor, was presented by the Institute of Electric Engineers. Although many thought he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize, he received only one nomination, which was in 1937. The United States Postal Service honored Tesla with a commemorative stamp in 1983.