In 1888, the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla demonstrated his alternating current (AC) induction motor before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Tesla's motor, developed at his laboratory in New York, used rotating magnetic fields to drive a rotor without electrical contacts or commutators, making it far more reliable and efficient than existing direct current motors. The AC motor was the key missing component in George Westinghouse's AC electrical system, which would ultimately triumph over Edison's DC system.

The "War of the Currents" between Tesla's AC and Edison's DC systems became one of the great technological dramas of the Gilded Age, entering American literary culture as a narrative of genius versus corporate power. Tesla himself became a romantic figure in American literature, the brilliant, solitary inventor whose ideas were ahead of his time, an archetype that appears in works from John O'Hara's stories to contemporary poetry. The AC motor's principle of invisible rotating fields also provided modernist poets with a metaphor for the hidden, dynamic forces that shape visible reality.