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Inventor Nikola Tesla, circa 1915.
Credit: Image donated by Corbis-Bettmann
In 1888, George Westinghouse bought the rights to seven of Croatian inventor Nikola Tesla's electrical patents, then hired Tesla to help develop alternating current(AC) electrical power systems. Westinghouse demonstrated the practicality of Tesla's alternating current motor by generating the electricity that powered the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Widely heralded one of greatest inventors of the modern world, Tesla, as eccentric as he was brilliant, would die in poverty in 1943.