The Serbian-American scientist was a brilliant and eccentric genius whose inventions enabled modern-day power and mass communication systems. <br /> <br />His nemesis and former boss, Thomas Edison, was the iconic American inventor of the light bulb, the phonograph and the moving picture. The two feuding geniuses waged a "War of Currents" in the 1880s over whose electrical system would power the world — Tesla's alternating-current (AC) system or Edison's rival direct-current (DC) electric power. <br /> <br />Amongst science nerds, few debates get more heated than the ones that compare Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. So, who was the better inventor? <br /> <br />"They're different inventors, but you can't really say one is greater, because American society needs some Edisons and it needs some Teslas" said W. Bernard Carlson, the author of "Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age" (Princeton Press, 2013).
