Nikola Tesla, physicist, engineer, and inventor of alternating current, in the early 1900s A new statue of Nikola Tesla now graces New York's Long Island, the latest homage to the celebrated visionary. At the statue's unveiling last week, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic told the dedication crowd at Tesla's former Wardenclyffe laboratory that the scientist and inventor had been a man whose "ideas were larger than his time.