They tell me there is a carriage of the future bearing my name — a swift, silent machine that runs not on the fumes of burned oil but on the very currents I spent my life taming. I cannot see this vehicle, of course; it lies beyond the horizon of my years, and I have long held that a man of science should not pretend to knowledge he does not possess. But I will tell you this: if such a machine exists and moves without the clatter and stench of combustion, then it moves on principles I staked my life's work upon, and I take a quiet, fierce satisfaction in that.

From my earliest days I despised the wastefulness of the engines around me — the grinding pistons, the belching smoke, the brute inefficiency of burning matter to produce motion. Alternating current was never merely a scheme for lighting cities; it was my answer to a grander question: how might man harness the invisible forces of nature and deliver them, clean and abundant, to every corner of civilization? When I proved that AC could be generated at Niagara and sent coursing over wires to Buffalo, I was not thinking only of factories and streetlamps. I was thinking of a century in which power itself would become weightless, transmitted without friction, without soot, without the tyranny of the coal cart.

My rival Edison insisted that direct current was the only safe and sensible path, and he fought me bitterly, even staging cruel demonstrations to frighten the public against my system. History, I am told, has vindicated me — the world runs on alternating current now, as I always knew it must. But beyond the war of currents lay a deeper dream, one the newspapers rarely understood: that electricity, properly commanded, might free mankind from every crude and dirty engine, might let a carriage glide through a city street drawing its strength from the same vast ocean of energy that lights a parlor lamp. I spoke of transmitting power through the air itself, without wires at all, imagining a day when a vehicle might draw its vitality from the ether as a ship draws wind into its sails. The world thought me a dreamer. Perhaps I was. But every dreamer who is also an engineer eventually forces his dreams into copper and iron.

I built motors that ran on alternating current with a smoothness no steam piston could match, and I always believed the carriage — then still drawn by horses or choking on gasoline — would one day surrender to the electric motor's quiet authority. A motor need not explode fuel in violent little detonations to produce motion; it need only accept a current and convert it, cleanly, into force. This is the essence of what I gave the world, and if men have now built a swift and elegant automobile upon that essence, then they have simply walked further down a road I surveyed in the laboratories of my youth.

I will confess some pride that they chose my name for it, though I never sought monuments — only progress. What matters to me is not the badge upon the vehicle but the current coursing beneath it, the same invisible river of force I once sent leaping across Niagara's gorge. If the children of this new century ride in silence, free of smoke, drawing their power from dynamos spinning on falling water or distant wind, then the twentieth century's great argument has been settled in favor of the future I always insisted was coming — a future electric, clean, and borderless, exactly as I foresaw it from the beginning.