As a follow up, IF Tesla is as brilliant as they say he is, what happened after the War of Currents that made him fade into obscurity?
When electrical generation/transmission technology was first emerging in the late 19th century the main driving force was powering industrial machinery. With that in context, the main drawback to AC current was that there was no working AC motor in the 1880's, while for DC there were many established motors already in use. The first indication of the possibility of an AC motor was when a design for a polyphase motor was patented by Tesla in April 1888 [1]. This was Tesla's major contribution, before this AC was not even a viable option. Though DC was less efficient, it was efficient enough for short distance industrial areas.
I believe we don't hear enough about him as his patent was purchased by George Westinghouse's company (Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company) in June 1888. Westinghouse would be the one to actually implement this in 1890, when he created a 4 mile AC power system in Telluride, Colorado [1]. The real breakthrough for AC was when Westinghouse powered the Frankfurt Exposition in 1891, and the Columbian Exposition in 1893. He had a transmission line carrying power over 100 miles at 12kV to the Frankfurt Expo which showcased it could transmit power over long distances. For the Columbian Exposition he showcased how AC power could be converted from AC to DC and stepped up and down from higher/lower voltages [2].
[1] A good read elaborating on the background of the "War of Currents" would be "Transmitting the Power of Niagara: Scientific, Technological, and Cultural Contexts of an Engineering Decision" published by Steven Lubar in the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine of March 1989.
[2] Ibid., p. 282. The advantages of the system Westinghouse displayed at Chicago are examined in Hughes, Networks of Power, pp. 122-125.
It is not true that Tesla is or was obscure or forgotten. He was a very well known figure from the early 20th century to his death, at least in the U.S. where he lived most of his life. Both the "mad scientist" and the "forgotten" myths are inventions of the popular media, created to sell stories. Even a cursory search for his name will turn up dozens of publications, including several book-length biographies, and dozens of articles and other shorter pieces, films, plays, fictionalized accounts, etc. Unfortunately, virtually none of the literature on Tesla was produced by trained historians, and some of what has been written is grossly distorted to the point of absurdity, such as Margaret Storm's 1937 Return of the Dove, which claims Tesla was from Venus. Numerous authors have claimed that his poorly documented later inventions (his "death ray," wireless power transmission, earthquake machine, etc.) were real and actually worked as described, but nobody has been able to recreate those designs (as he described them, without the benefit of decades of subsequent development by others). Instead of concluding that his later, wilder inventions didn't work, Tesla enthusiasts have instead claimed that Tesla was so far "ahead of his time" that we simply don't yet understand his inventions. I can't think of another inventor whose life and work has been interpreted in such a bizarre way. Part of the reason that his life is so poorly represented stems from the novelty of his proposals, and part is that actual historical records about Tesla are relatively sparse. Much of the information about his later inventions comes from a very small number of incomplete or sensationalist sources such as tabloid newspapers or fact-bending "Amazing Stories" type magazines. There are few surviving artifacts that he invented, and he did not produce a large number of patents that would explain his ideas. Bernie Carlson's Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age is the only full-length book on Tesla written by a competent, professional historian.
Biographies of Tesla written by journalists/popularizers (not recommended): Mark Seifer, Wizard The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla Margaret Cheney: Tesla: Man out of Time
The Time Magazine Article Tesla at 75 published in 1931 shines light on his drift to obscurity. He got stuck on the problem of wireless power, which he never managed to solve in any feasible proven way. He became very asocial and kept to himself. He rejected the concept of achieving energy from atomic fission, and claimed to have split the atom himself, but at least in the Time article, does not bother to offer proof of how he knows this to be true.
In the end, Tesla died somewhere between poverty and in-debt, and he left behind no loved ones. (This is a pretty good way to fall into obscurity.)
Edison on the other hand, had his name on many consumer products up until Edison General Electric and other Edison holdings merged under JP Morgan to form the newly named "General Electric". Edison died wealthy. Edison employed a number of people who went on to greatness, including Henry Ford who had an estate next to his in Florida and who had Edison's laboratory brought to Michigan to preserve as historic heratage. In the Spring of 1940, MGM made two back-to-back biopics about Edison, Young Tom Edison and Edison, the man both of which highly fictionalized to make him a hero.
As far as what Tesla invented, that's pretty easy to look up yourself. As far as it being "better" than Edison's inventions, invention doesn't work that way.
You might be confused because of depictions of the "war of the currents" that declare AC the winner. AC "won" because high-voltage AC allows power to be transmitted over long distances with less loss than DC. But that doesn't make one "better" than the other. It just means that AC is good for long distance transmission, and DC is good for other applications. The general narrative is that Edison only supported DC for reasons of patent-rights and because he preferred the business model involving lots of small power stations spaced every few blocks in the cities, instead of the model using massive power-plants, such as the one proposed and eventually built to harness hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls; and then routing that power to energize entire cities. But I haven't done my research on this. So as far as I know, parts of this could be history-fable.
Bonus fact: You may sometimes hear that Tesla "invented" radio, and that The US Supreme Court ruled in favor that he did over the traditionally attributed inventor: Marconi. Neither claim is particularly accurate. Tesla would use wireless current induction to remotely drive things like fluorescent light tubes and model boats. And while that involves frequencies in the RF spectrum, he was not dealing with the transmission of information over radio. Tesla rejected the concept of Radio, arguing that it was a misunderstanding of other phenomena. The Supreme court ruling was in regards to a lawsuit against the US government for infringing on radio patents for the sake of the war effort in WWI. In one specific case of a particular tuning circuit, it was determined that invention did not go to Marconi as first thought, since a man named John Stone Stone had a patent predating it. Writeup on this
In the past, I've tried to find write-ups from a modern Electrical-Engineering perspective about the theory behind Tesla's Wardenclyff experiments on wireless global power. There's a ton of layperson misinformation out there. It's often laced with ideas like "it didn't pan out because it couldn't be regulated, and The Man didn't want everyone to have access to free electricity", but that completely fails to address why there wasn't so much as a proof of concept. Translating Tesla's writings on the matter can be difficult, because he had his own entire set of theories about how things work that, as mentioned, reject traditional electromagnetic/RF theory. So I've yet to find anything like that from a proper educator or academic.
People use hyperbole in their arguments, such as the notion that "Edison is in fact super-overrated and Tesla is the most awesome guy ever and waaay-better than edison!" Such as in that one comic from The Oatmeal, because superlatives get people's attention. In truth, it's all a little more boring a little more complicated, and a whole bunch of shades of grey.