NEW YORK — With Nikola Tesla's sweeping legacy of innovation, many wonder why today the prolific inventor and electrical engineer is not canonized along with his 19th-century peers such as Edison and Marconi. "Often he would say his mind was constantly bombarded with new ideas, and he simply did not have time to write them all down," said Bogdan Kosanovic, a DSP engineer at Telogy Network (Germantown, Md.).

For instance, during the dizzying race to patent myriad ac innovations, Tesla failed to secure the important coil that bears his name today. And while working for Edison in the 1870s, Tesla re-engineered the legend's carbon disk speaker, found in the mouthpiece of every phone today.

By giving the carbon disk a conical shape, Tesla had fashioned an amplifier, inventing the precursor to the loudspeaker. But he never stopped to patent it. To him, it was nothing more than a mere engineering problem solved.

And often times, Tesla simply was too far ahead of his time. His remote-controlled boat, which he demonstrated in 1898, was met with indifference, but a few years later, Marconi garnered world fame with similar technology.

"It cannot be disputed that many fruits of Tesla's intellectual labor were stolen," said Tesla historian Gary Peterson. "Take the case of radio — Marconi's famous trans-Atlantic transmission in 1901, which by his own admission incorporated Tesla's apparatus, had a tremendous psychological effect, drawing investors' attention away from Tesla's work."

Cliff Pickover, a staff member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, and author of Strange Brains and Genius, which chronicles Tesla's life, said the inventor's personal habits gave him a negative reputation as well. "Tesla's obsessive-compulsive disorder may have caused his contemporaries to take his valid ideas less seriously," Pickover said. "He exhibited bizarre habits: pathophobia [a fear of germs] and triphilia [obsession with the number 3], and had hallucinations."

At some point, Tesla began to make outlandish claims in an effort to market himself. The most famous photograph of Tesla (from 1899) — depicting the inventor sitting calmly reading in the midst of an explosive lightning storm — was faked; the photographer used multiple exposures to create the illusion.

Finally, while Tesla did succeed in finessing the venture capital he needed by establishing relationships with the world's richest and most powerful men at the time (Edison, Westinghouse and Morgan), these relationships ultimately ended in bitterness and unfinished technology, due to bad business arrangements up front.

Edison reneged on a promise to Tesla of a $50,000 bonus during the early stages of a partnership. Tesla allowed Westinghouse to back out of a $2.50/watt royalty clause in their contract that would have set him up for life. And he gave Morgan the upper hand in a 51 percent/49 percent deal that straightjacketed the inventor for years.