Nikola Tesla invented the radio, robots and remote control. When his first breakthrough ― alternating current ― pitted him against Thomas Edison’s direct-current empire, Tesla’s superior technology prevailed. Although penniless later in life, he never stopped imagining. In the early 1900s, he designed plans for cell phones, the Internet, death-ray weapons and interstellar communications. Drawing on letters, technical notebooks and other primary sources, Munson pieces together the magnificently bizarre personal life and mental habits of this farsighted and underappreciated mastermind. Strikingly handsome and impeccably dressed, Tesla spoke eight languages and could recite entire books from memory. Yet his most famous inventions were not the product of fastidiousness or linear thought, but of a mind fueled by both the humanities and sciences. He conceived the induction motor while walking through a park, reciting Goethe’s Faust, and then worked tirelessly to offer electric power to the world, to introduce automatons that would reduce life’s drudgery, and to develop machines that might one day abolish war.