Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a Serbian American inventor and engineer, born in Smiljan to a Serbian family and educated at Graz and Prague. He discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field and developed the polyphase alternating-current system that George Westinghouse bought in 1888 — the system that lit the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and carried Niagara's power to Buffalo in 1896. He invented the Tesla coil (1891), held the radio patents that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld over Marconi in 1943, demonstrated the world's first radio-controlled vessel (1898), and conducted the Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe experiments on wireless power. He died in New York in debt, and his archive — 163,911 call numbers — is preserved in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, inscribed by UNESCO in the Memory of the World Register in 2003.