The father of modern-day electricity and considered by some to be the ultimate mad scientist, Nikola Tesla filed nearly 300 patents in his lifetime. Many of these patents resulted in functioning inventions; others were little more than wide-eyed dreams#8212or still await possible development. Tesla For Beginners examines the man behind the alternating current and wireless technologies who traveled from Serbia by steamship to arrive in the United States with only four cents in his pocket. It was in the early 1880s, at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution, that America beckoned him. Nikola Tesla#8212a poet of invention#8212left behind a vast and intriguing legacy. He was a scientist, physicist, mathematician, electrical engineer, and extensively published author who spent his last decades scraping for funding for celestial projects and living out his final days in penurious solitude with a pigeon.