[nwallin]

He was definitely not a charlatan; he could barely enough get people to pay him for his good ideas which other people got rich off of. Charlatan implies that he knew his ideas were bunk and tried to sell them anyway; many (most?) of his ideas were not bunk and Westinghouse among others got filthy rich off of his three phase patent, induction motor/generator patents, etc.

Regarding his wireless power transmission ideas, I think it's clear that he thought it was a good idea, and a workable idea, and an idea that needed just a little more time and investment and would shortly be working very well. He was wrong, of course, but I think he thought it would work.

IMHO Tesla was a genius whose spark was rooted in his intuition rather than a solid fundamental understanding of physics and math. His intuition was "weird" and sometimes wrong, but also sometimes very, very right.

[mr_toad]

Many geniuses got things seriously wrong sometimes. Lord Kelvin was very wrong about the age of the Sun. Newton had some crazy ideas about alchemy. Einstein was famously wrong about quantum mechanics.