Before you read any further, take a few moments to note all of the devices that are powered by electricity within a 10-foot radius of your body. The number will astonish you. Imagine how this number grows exponentially as you broaden the circle beyond the room, throughout the building, around the block and out across the world. It is hard to imagine that one man - Nikola Tesla - was responsible for inventing the process, the machinery and the distribution network that delivers the alternating current (AC) to power all these devices. Tesla filed nearly 300 patents in his lifetime. Many of these patents resulted in functioning inventions - others were little more than wide-eyed dreams or still await possible development. TESLA FOR BEGINNERS examines the man behind the AC and wireless technologies who travelled 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 - a poet of invention - left 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.