Thomas Edison
The laboratory, the team, the patents and the money were part of the invention.
The Tesla and Edison story usually arrives as a morality play, complete with an assigned hero and villain. I wanted to know why one man kept commercial control and the other did not.
Edison built an invention factory. Menlo Park brought skilled people, equipment, investors and repeated experimentation into one place. The laboratory itself was an invention: a machine designed to keep producing useful machines.
He understood demand, manufacturing, patents, distribution and public attention. An idea had to survive the journey into ordinary life. That required far more than getting the physics right.
This was the missing half of the Tesla question for me. Edison cultivated technical ability and commercial execution as parts of the same system. His career contains plenty to argue about; the operating machinery around the work is difficult to ignore.
From there, I began treating money as infrastructure for serious work. I kept reading.