Nikola Tesla's alternating-current system — the polyphase motor, the transformer-based long-distance transmission architecture, and the associated generation equipment — is the substrate on which industrial electrification was built. He filed hundreds of patents, lit the 1893 World's Fair, and engineered the first large hydroelectric station at Niagara Falls. He also died broke in a New York hotel in 1943, with his later wireless-power and radio work largely dismissed or appropriated by others.
Why it was unfashionable
Tesla's insistence on alternating current put him on the losing side, for a time, of the so-called 'War of the Currents' against Edison's direct-current interests — despite AC's technical superiority for long-distance transmission. His later bets on wireless energy transmission, ionospheric research, and what he called 'world systems' drew ridicule from a financial press that preferred predictable incremental inventions over architectural ones. He was, in modern language, a system-scale thinker in a venture market that funded products.
What the Age of Abundance inherited
Every kilowatt-hour of cheap solar electricity that reaches a household moves across infrastructure whose design lineage begins with Tesla. Polyphase AC induction motors remain the workhorse of industrial automation; the transformer-coupled grid is why generation does not need to be co-located with load. These are boring-sounding primitives that quietly determine what Energy Abundance can actually deliver.
The pattern
Tesla's late obscurity — and his posthumous rehabilitation — is the canonical example of the Age of Abundance wiki's claim that civilizational infrastructure is often built by people the surrounding market under-rewards in real time. Vindication arrives, but usually too late to help the individual.