You have a point, though I tend to give more credit to Faraday and Maxwell for discovering electromagnetism. We hype the early industrial revolution and the later information revolution, but electric power and the internal combustion engine may have determined the way we live as much as any other single technological breakthrough. Aside from writing, I might guess.
I don’t know who gets credit for the latter, in particular. Lenoir, Daimler, Diesel, etc.
I think one has to rank the fractional horsepower induction motor among them...probably before the IC engine. Without Tesla, that might not have happened as soon as it did, or at all....Edison was certainly trying to prevent it from happening. It isn't small IC engines that power our appliances. Pretty much everything that MOVES in our houses today uses them, as does much of industry.
Certainly the theorists deserve a great deal of credit...but I don't think the experimentalists get their due share.
Kind of like the guy who actually did the first PC (and no, that wasn't Wozniak).
"It is who is the most important scientist since Darwin. I don’t think anything Tesla invented, or all his inventions put together, can stand for significance in our understanding of the natural world, alongside the establishment of relativity, quantum theory, the standard model of particle physics, etc."
Well, I wouldn't put Darwin at that spot anyway. And as I recall, D wasn't actually the first to put forth the "theory of evolution"....he just was the one who got the credit.