Lindsey Graham

In response, Tesla grabbed a shovel and jumped into the canal to join the digging crew.

Impressed, the foreman relented, and Tesla kept digging until he earned his wage for the day.

Still, ditch digging could only carry him so far.

By the spring of 1887, Tesla was growing frustrated.

The low pay and rigor of manual labor meant that he didn't have time or resources to further experiment with his alternating current system.

But finally, Tesla got a break when a labor crew foreman took note of his engineering skills and introduced him to a friend at the Western Union Telegraph Company.

This friend was immediately impressed with Tesla's knowledge of electricity and brought him to an influential lawyer and investor named Charles F. Peck.

Peck listened to the young inventor's description of his new electrical system that promised to beat out the competition currently on the market.

Intrigued, Peck set up a meeting with potential investors to gauge their interest.

After months of back-breaking labor, Tesla knew this was a big opportunity, so he came up with an attention-getting trick.

In the meeting, he promised he could make an egg stand on its end using only the power of electricity.

Sufficiently intrigued, the potential investors agreed to come back the following day.

Tesla then got a blacksmith to coat a hard-boiled egg with copper and installed a device that generated a rotating magnetic field on the underside of a wooden table.

When the investors returned, they walked in astonished as the egg stood upright on its pointed end and began spinning rapidly in place, held there by some invisible force.

This visual demonstration made the abstract science of Tesla's AC motor easier to grasp, and impressed by the inventor's creativity, the man agreed to fund the development of his new AC power system.

With this funding and the help of Charles Peck, Tesla set up the Tesla Electric Company at 89 Liberty Street in Manhattan.

There, at last, he could devote all his time to refining his AC system.

But after losing everything to unscrupulous partners once before, Tesla decided this time he needed help from someone he trusted.

So he wrote to his old friend Anthony Seghetti, who years earlier had taken him to the Budapest Park, where he had his epiphany about an alternating current system.

He urged Seghetti to join him in New York to help turn that dream into a reality.