The man, of course, was the self-taught genius inventor Nikola Tesla – whose name (both first and last) has been used to market very conventional battery-powered devices (cars and big-rigs) that depend upon the very controllable infrastructure he had devoted himself to eliminating.

Many people associate Tesla – the man – with electricity, which is accurate in a general sense and why the use of his name to hawk electrically-powered devices makes sense, superficially.

But Tesla – the man – wanted to unplug everything.

He wanted to figure out how to transmit electricity wirelessly, anywhere – and for free. Or very close to that.

He may have figured it out, too – which of course would have been extremely dangerous. For Tesla. No one (except perhaps for Scully and Mulder of the X Files) knows whether he succeeded. What is known is that he died alone and poor in 1943 in his New York City apartment, which was subsequently ransacked by FBI agents who – apparently – made off with chests full of his papers, never to be seen again.

At least, so far.