Nikola Tesla would have celebrated his 158th birthday today (July 10).

The Serbian-American scientist was a brilliant and eccentric genius whose inventions enabled modern-day power and mass communication systems.

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.