The man known to history as Nikola Tesla was
born on the 10th of July 1856 in Smiljan, Lika, which was originally part of the Austro-Hungarian
empire but is now located in Croatia. His father was Milutin Tesla, a priest of
the Serbian Orthodox Church and the son of Nikola Tesla’s grandfather who was also
named Nikola. His grandfather had served as a military officer for the French Empire during
the Napoleonic Wars and had risen to the rank of sergeant, before marrying Tesla’s grandmother
Ana Kalinic, the daughter of a respected colonel. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Nikola Tesla
returned to Lika, which was assimilated into the Austro-Hungarian empire, where he fathered
two sons including Milutin and his brother Josif, as well as 3 daughters named Stanka,
Janja, and another whose name is unknown. Milutin Tesla and his brother were sent to
the Austrian Military Officer’s Training Academy to follow the career path of their
father, and while Josif thrived, eventually becoming a professor of Mathematics at a military
academy in Austria where he authored several standard mathematical textbooks, Milutin decided
instead to choose a devotional path, enrolling in the Orthodox Seminary in Plaski to train
as a priest after being castigated in training for not maintaining the shininess of his brass
buttons. Nikola Tesla’s mother was Djuka Mandic, the daughter of a priest from Gracac
called Nikola Mandic, and the sister to three very successful brothers including Nikolai,
who climbed the ecclesiastical ranks to become the Archbishop of Sarajevo and the Metropolitan
of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Bosnia, Pajo who became a colonel in the general staff
of the Austrian army, and finally Trifun who excelled in the business sphere as a respected
hotelier and landowner. In addition to being a dedicated housewife, Djuka Mandic possessed
a keen intellect and a strong work ethic and was herself an innovator of her household
appliances which she often modified to make more efficient. She was “An inventor of
the first order” according to Tesla and a creative influence on him until her death
in 1892. Milutin Tesla was a gifted student and graduated
with top honors in 1845, marrying the 25-year-old Djuka Mandic in 1847 after being delegated
to oversee the parish of Senj on the Adriatic Coast. Settling into a house perched on top
of a cliff overlooking the ocean, the newlyweds started a family, with Djuka giving birth
to their eldest son Dane in 1848, a firstborn daughter Angelina in 1850, and finally another
daughter Milka in 1852. However due to the poor pay he received and the salty sea air
which caused him health problems, Milutin Tesla was reassigned to the Church of St Apostles
Peter and Paul in Smiljan, which meant “the place of sweet basil”, in Lika province,
where he was provided with a picturesque farmhouse, a parcel of fertile land, and even an Arabian
horse so that he could ride to see his parishioners, it was given to him by a Turkish pasha based
in Bosnia as a reward for assisting some local Muslims. As well as being an extremely smart
man who assembled a vast library packed full of volumes on religion, mathematics, science,
and literary works in many different tongues, Milutin Tesla was also an arduous reformer
of the Serbian people, regularly writing articles for a variety of newspapers and tirelessly
promoting the establishment of language schools where Serbians could learn to read and write. According to his family, Nikola Tesla was
born at midnight sometime between the ninth and tenth of July 1856 in the middle of a
terrific thunderstorm. Three days later Nikola was baptized at his family home, and with
his future seemingly already planned, he was also enlisted as a member of the First Lika
Regiment of the Ninth Medak Company, a squadron he was to join when he was 15 years old by
law. By all accounts, Tesla’s childhood was happy, and one he shared with his older
siblings as well as his younger sister Marica, born in 1859, who would often accompany him
to the churchyard or the farmyard to play with the chickens, geese, sheep and other
livestock which his father kept. Tesla was often joined by his black cat Macak, who first
introduced him to the phenomenon that would define his life’s work after he set off
a loud spark upon stroking him, an event which was explained by his father as a secretion
of electricity. In another formative experience again involving Macak, Tesla noted one day
how a halo of light suddenly surrounded his dear cat, illuminating briefly, the candlelit
room he was sitting in. Inspired by such marvels, Tesla devoted much of his energy as a child
to experimenting and encouraged by his mother’s inventive streak, drew up plans for flying
machines very similar to how a helicopter would later function, he disassembled clocks
to see how they worked, and even designed himself a wooden sword so that he could pretend
to be a valiant Serbian warrior. Behind the fascination however lay a troubled young mind,
as Tesla revealed that as a young boy, he suffered from a strange affliction whereby
he couldn’t distinguish images from reality which troubled him greatly. Tesla’s childhood
trauma was exacerbated by the death of his older brother Dane in 1863, who was killed
in front of Tesla by the family’s Arabian horse in a traumatic experience that would
endlessly haunt him, and which was also the reason why his distraught father moved his
family from the idyllic Croatian countryside to the larger town of Gospić, an unfamiliar
environment where Tesla struggled to adjust to urban living. The untimely passing of Dane cast a long shadow
over Tesla’s own relationship with his father who, mired in grief, always under appreciated
the talents of his youngest son, a neglect that young Nikola tried to compensate for,
by striving to be perfect in everything he did so that he could win back the love of
his parents. Blinded by sorrow, Milutin Tesla treated his young son with contempt, flying
into rages when he caught him reading from his private library, and on one particularly
hurtful occasion, after Nikola had accidentally ruined a local noblewomen’s dress by unintentionally
jumping on it as it trailed down the aisle of a church, he slapped his son across the
face in public as a punishment. As a result of his strained relations, Tesla developed
a series of peculiar phobias as a child, such as a repulsion for women who wore earrings
and pearls, a strong aversion to hair, a loathing for the smell of camphor, as well as a number
of other strange habits, including an obsession with counting his steps and measuring in volume
the contents of his meals, calculations he was only satisfied with if they were divisible
by three. Overwhelmed by a plethora of odd neuroses, Tesla was able to regain some sense
of balance after he came across a novel called Abafi, published in 1836 by Hungarian author
Miklós Jósika, which featured the story of Olivér Abafi, a young impulsive nobleman
and hedonist, recast as a valiant national hero who sacrifices himself for the wellbeing
of the country. Tesla was particularly inspired by the character of the protagonist, seeing
in his desire to better his moral character while ignoring frivolous distractions, a masterful
example of self-restraint, which showed Tesla that it was indeed possible for him to control
his wild emotions. Tesla realized that a good coping strategy was to work with, rather than
against, the nebulous visions that assaulted his consciousness, and delving even deeper
into the make-believe world of his imagining, Tesla began to embark on strange journeys
where he would stumble across fantastical countries, people, and cities that he dreamed
up. As Tesla honed that untamed imagination that
would later serve him so well in his profession, he began theorizing about the nature of reality
itself, coming to the conclusion, that he could trace all of his mental images back
to something he either saw, smelt, or touched, in an early echoe of the mechanistic view
of the world he would later espouse. It was also an idea that had real-life application
for Tesla, who on one occasion was extolled as a hero by a band of firemen after he spotted
a small kink in a fire hose he instinctively knew was preventing water from reaching a
burning building, a problem he quickly fixed by ironing the groove out. Tesla’s ingenuity
would be further fostered at the Real Gymnasium, the grammar school he attended in Gospić,
where he would amaze his mathematics professors by demonstrating a natural ability to calculate
numbers, but while he excelled in scientific pursuits, Tesla was unable to translate his
talents to drawing class, where a preference for undisturbed contemplation distracted Tesla
heavily, leading to grades that were so extremely poor, his father had to speak with the principal,
which instilled in a young Nikola a lifelong aversion to diagrams. During his schooling at the Real Gymnasium
Tesla began to take invention seriously, devising the schematics for a flying machine that would
use the pressure of a vacuum to push air molecules, a concept that a grown-up Tesla would later
go on to disprove. Shortly after he graduated from the Real Gymnasium in 1870 Tesla, perhaps
because of his overactive imagination, became very sick with a range of maladies sufficiently
serious enough for the doctors treating him to nearly give up on his case entirely. Throughout
his recuperation Tesla began voraciously reading, and it was during this period that he was
first introduced to the tales of Mark Twain. It was a story he would later recount to Mark
Twain himself, who burst into tears upon hearing it. After a period of convalescence, Nikola
Tesla was next enrolled at the higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac in 1873 where, in accordance
with his father’s wish for Tesla to continue the family profession, he was enlisted in
classes at the local seminary. However, Tesla’s true desire was to learn everything he could
about electricity, a passion ignited by an inspirational physics teacher who taught him
about the radiometer invented by British scientist William Crookes, a device that powered a vacuum
bulb with energy produced by four rapidly spinning tinfoil vanes, this roused Tesla
to conduct some of his first experiments with batteries, induction coils, and electro-static
generators. Yet Tesla would have to put some of his projects on hold after again falling
seriously ill with cholera upon his return home to Gospić, causing the young prodigy
to be bedridden for over 9 months and to experience several close shaves with death. After one
particularly worrying incident, Tesla supposedly implored his father that if he were to study
engineering instead of entering the priesthood that he may well recover causing Milutin,
desperate to avoid the unbearable pain of losing another son, to solemnly promise that
Nikola would go to the best technical institution in the world. Having finally been heard, Tesla made a miraculous
recovery, but before he could become a student he was sent to the Croatian mountains with
nothing but a bundle of books and some hunting equipment by his father who, worried for his
son’s health, did everything in his power to hide his son from the authorities, as by
law, Tesla would have to serve in the Austrian armed forces for 3 years. For nine months
starting in the early fall of 1874, Tesla wandered the forests and lakes of the eastern
European countryside, becoming stronger physically and mentally as he thought deeply about invention,
reshaping the vividness of his visions from a debilitating weakness into a powerful contemplative
tool that could be used to flesh out the contraptions that flashed across his mind, such as a pipe
installed underwater that could transport letters and packages placed in capsules using
the principles of hydraulic pressure, and a ring constructed around the earth’s equator
that could be used as a high-tech transport network. When Tesla returned, his father had kept his
promise, securing for him a scholarship at the Military Frontier Administration Authority
that would enable him to study for three years at the Polytechnic School in Graz, Austria.
Receiving an embroidered bag made from typical Serbian materials from his mother which he
would always prize, in 1875 Tesla left Gospić to start anew in a completely different culture
and environment, in the same way that his own Serbian relatives had adapted to life
on the Austro-Hungarian border decades prior. During his freshman year, Tesla proved himself
to be a perfect student, never once missing a lecture and supposedly studying from 3am
to 7pm every day, a schedule that was thought so extreme that one professor wrote to Milutin
warning him that unless his son was escorted out of the school, that he might work himself
to death, while others commended him for his zeal, such as the Dean of the Technical Faculty
who informed Milutin Tesla that his son was quote: “a star of first rank.” In fact, Tesla was keeping himself very busy,
administering his earliest experiments with alternating current or ‘AC’ that would
later make his name, but during his sophomore year Tesla would be sidetracked, developing
a destructive gambling habit and wagering away his entire tuition fund in the process.
Near destitute, Tesla had also neglected his studies, scoring extremely poorly in the examinations,
and with no marks registered for his final semester, he was also unable to graduate and
was forced to abandon the university in December 1878, a failure he made sure to keep secret
from his family as well as his classmates, as he was riddled with guilt and embarrassment.
In 1879, Tesla would live for a while in self-imposed exile, first making his way to the city of
Maribor where he became a draughtsman and was paid 60 florins a month, while in his
free time he continued to play cards and wager money on the streets with the locals, yet
Tesla’s Slovenian sojourn would be short-lived, as a couple of months into his stay, he was
seized by the authorities for not possessing a proper residency permit and returned to
Gospić escorted by armed police. Back home Tesla’s father would not get much time to
set his son straight, as only a month later, on the 17th of April 1879, Milutin died, heartbroken
that his son had been labelled as a ‘vagrant’ and had chosen to indulge in a life of vice.
Not content to see their talented nephew waste his abilities, in January 1880 two of Tesla’s
uncles gave him enough money to start courses at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague,
despite Tesla not meeting the language requirement, which specified that students had to be fluent
in both Czech and Greek. However, communication issues aside, he also arrived too late, and
was unable to enroll in classes, and so for the entire time Tesla was only permitted to
attend lectures and received no formal grades. In 1881 Nikola Tesla landed his first job
for a telecommunications firm in Budapest called The American Telephone Company, where
he was drafted in as an electrical engineer by Tivador Puskas, who had previously worked
alongside Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, at the Edison laboratories in Menlo
Park. Making himself a valuable employee and sharing his findings with his work colleague
Anital Szigety, Tesla continued his study of the concept of the alternate current in
his spare time, proposing that a motor driven by circuits that were out of phase could maintain
power levels to supply a constant stream of electricity, but in order to make the system
function, Tesla realized he needed to figure out how to rotate magnetic fields. Strolling
in the park with Anital Szigety in February 1882, Tesla had a sudden stroke of genius
and solved the rotating magnetic field problem, going on to explain the concept of the induction
motor to his friend by drawing its basic blueprints in the sand with a stick, outlining a new
type of engine that unlike its Direct Current or ‘DC’ counterpart, did not need a commutator,
an inefficient cylindrical device segmented with metal that had to be regularly maintained.
Impressed by Tesla’s genius, Tivador Puskas recommended that Tesla move to Paris to work
for his old acquaintance Thomas Edison at his Continental Edison Company, a firm that
specialized in electrical equipment, where he was first assigned by his boss Charles
Batchelor, a manager who had worked for Edison since 1870, with designing dynamos, a contraption
that converted mechanical energy into electrical energy and which was used most commonly in
direct-current circuits. Off the clock however, Tesla continued to advance the AC theory after
he was sent to work on a project in Strasbourg, where he built the first induction motor prototype. However, Tesla was unable to garner any serious
interest in Alternating Currents. This was unfortunate, as alternating current is recognized
today as a better method of electric current delivery than direct current. Direct current,
of the kind which came to dominate electricity delivery systems in the late nineteenth century,
consistently sends electricity in one direction along an electric grid. Alternating current,
by way of contrast, periodically reverses and changes direction along a grid or system
as its magnitude alternately reverses course. Alternating current is considerably more efficient
than direct current. Tesla’s error, if it can be defined as such, is that he was simply
ahead of his time in trying to propose alternating current as the better method of energy generation.
He was correct, but the technology available at the time simply favoured the more crude
direct current method. Tesla soon found himself in another personal finance crisis after spending
all of his wages, yet he had done enough during his stint at the company to impress his overseer
Charles Batchelor, who was convinced that Tesla had the intellectual fortitude to work
alongside Thomas Edison himself. In 1884, after being mistakenly registered
as a migrant from Sweden after the immigration officer misheard him say ‘Smiljan’, Nikola
Tesla arrived in America armed with an introductory letter penned by his mentor Charles Batchelor,
who stated quote: “I know two great men, one is you and the other is this young man.”
Although Tesla fundamentally disagreed with the notion of direct-current, he was put to
work improving the DC motors devised by Edison, who believed that the AC devices that Tesla
envisioned were too dangerous and unfeasible, a divergence of opinion that would become
a lifelong rivalry. Forced to develop an invention he had no belief in, Tesla became disillusioned
and began outlining the weaknesses of DC and championing the advantages of AC, pointing
out the inefficiency of Edison’s direct current which only dimly lit lamps, and proposing
instead that generators should be engineered with what he termed the ‘polyphase principle’,
whereby energy would be constantly recycled, since he believed in the cyclical nature of
electricity. Tesla also insisted that a huge disadvantage of the direct current was its
reliance on costly power stations installed at 2 mile intervals, since it was unable to
maintain high levels of voltage over distance, in contrast arguing that the alternating current,
in which the direction of energy was changed 50 to 60 times per second, was a lot more
effective, since it could flexibly sustain varying levels of high voltage power and minimize
power loss over long distances. This is why today, the power delivered to consumers via
power grids is AC, which sustains power over long distances using transformer substations,
these reduce the AC voltage over a given distance. Once the AC power reaches its destination
such as a home, the AC power is used directly for electrical appliances such as washing
machines but for other smaller appliances it is possible to convert AC power to DC,
via diodes within the appliance’s power supply, these only allow the electrical current
to flow in one direction, thus ensuring the appliance receives a constant stream of power. Disassociating himself from Edison and eager
to spread the AC gospel, Tesla started his own company in 1885 called the Tesla Electric
Light Company with the financial backing of two rich benefactors, Robert Lane and Benjamin
Vail, who were certain that the alternating current was the future. However in a common
issue that would prevent almost all of his later endeavors from succeeding, Tesla asked
for too much money from his patrons, who, increasingly fearful that AC was too risky,
ejected Tesla from his own company that same year, forcing him to eek out a living for
the majority of 1885 as a repairman and even as a manual laborer, a job in which he was
paid just 2 dollars a day to dig ditches. Having learned from his mistakes, in 1886,
with the aid of philanthropists Alfred S. Brown, a Western Union superintendent, and
Charles F. Peck, Tesla established another company, this time called the Tesla Electric
Company based in Manhattan, New York, where he finalized the designs of the polyphase
induction motor, unveiling it to the amazement of the scientific community in 1888, when
he presented a landmark paper to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers entitled
'A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers.’ George Westinghouse, an investor most famous
for inventing the railway air brake and head of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing
Company, was particularly impressed, and his curiosity was piqued in a visit to Tesla’s
lab a few days later where he was shown an early polyphase prototype. Convinced that
Tesla’s groundbreaking invention could power America, Westinghouse purchased all 40 of
Tesla’s trailblazing patents pertaining to the generators, motors, and transformers
necessary to construct a polyphase alternating current circuit and recruited Tesla as an
adviser to serve for 12 months at the Westinghouse plant in Philadelphia where some of the first
commercially available AC devices would be produced. The release of the first AC machine
in 1886 was the harbinger of a bitter conflict that erupted between Westinghouse and Edison
known as the ‘War of the Currents’, which pitted AC against DC from 1888 to 1892. During
the dispute Edison would try to use his resources to sway public opinion in his favor, and despite
the evidence clearly showing that AC was safe and more effective over long distances, he
issued a number of articles in the biggest publications, warning of the dangers of the
alternating current. Edison was unable, however, to convince his largest benefactor of the
superiority of DC, and Wall Street wolf John Pierpoint Morgan, who in 1892 merged Edison
General Electric with the AC-focused Thomas Houston Company, removed Edison’s name to
create ‘General Electric’ and switched entirely to alternating current instruments. With Edison sidelined, the alternating current
emerged as the undisputed victor of ‘War of the Currents’ as Westinghouse increased
his annual turnover from 800,000 dollars in 1887 to 4.2 million in 1890, while Tesla was
paid around 105,000 dollars in royalties by the end of 1891, a period that also witnessed
several other personal and professional triumphs for Tesla, who officially became a US citizen
in July 1891 at the same time as he established two personal laboratories in New York, situated
at South Fifth Avenue and East Houston Street. On the other hand, Tesla’s dividend cheques
would come to an abrupt end after Westinghouse’s finances were left in disarray, their plans
to expand the company by borrowing heavily, falling through in November 1890, after the
collapse of the Baring Brothers brokerage firm compelled panicked creditors to call
in their loans. To cover his losses, Tesla continued to focus his attention on high-frequency
AC experiments, inventing a lamp that required only one wire, an oscillating transformer,
and a high frequency alternator, which he exhibited at a lecture in spring 1891 at Columbia
College in New York on behalf of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to a flabbergasted
crowd, who were amazed at the ways that AC could be implemented into modern lighting
circuits. The Colombia lecture established him as the
leading electricity researcher of his day, and in follow-up experiments, Tesla would
consistently show that electricity for light and power could be transmitted over long distances.
Before long, Tesla was also sketching out the fundamentals of radio technology. In an
1893 lecture at the Franklin Institute, later popularized by Century Magazine, illustrating
the concept of telegraphy without wires, he first underlined the importance of grounding
the transmitter and receiver to astonished onlookers. The same year Tesla’s company
achieved its greatest accomplishment to date, after lighting up the Chicago venue hosting
the World’s Columbian Exposition entirely with alternating current, an honor that Tesla
procured after outbidding General Electric by 1 million dollars. By 1894, Tesla had gained
the admiration of his peers, and was awarded honorary doctoral degrees from Columbia and
Yale Universities as well as the Elliot Cresson Medal by the Franklin Institute. More good
news followed after the Tesla Electric Company was contracted to build the first ever hydroelectric
power-plant at Niagara Falls, a childhood dream of Tesla’s that became a reality in
1895 after the first schematics were unveiled. The Niagara facility was an accomplishment
that represented the ultimate defeat of the direct energy school of thought, and Tesla
was lavished with the highest praise and honors, including even the Order of Danilo from King
Nicolas of Montenegro, as his achievement was celebrated worldwide as an important step
for the future of humanity. Tesla remained unperturbed after a fire in
March 1895 at his laboratory destroyed much of his early research, including hundreds
of models, notes, scientific tools and photographs that had a combined value of 50,000 dollars.
Despite this, in 1896 he demonstrated some of the earliest uses of the x-ray, discovered
around the same time by the German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, and astonished his
contemporaries with the first ever x-ray of a man, published in The Electrical Review,
printed using rudimentary x-ray tubes of his own design. Having revealed some of the most
innovative functions of the x-ray, Tesla next devised the basic elements of the radio transmitter,
and in 1896 built a rudimentary unit that received radio waves. He assessed his new
invention at the Gerlach Hotel located on 27th Street in Manhattan where he was living,
by sending radio waves to it from his New York laboratory on South 5th Avenue. Tesla
presented his insights at an 1898 exhibition at Madison Square Gardens, where he demonstrated
a radio-controlled boat he called a Telautomaton, to stunned audiences, and by 1901 he had been
awarded with a patent clarifying that he had created a system for transmitting electrical
energy. Between 1899 and 1900, after being commissioned
by John Jacob Astor to assemble a new lighting system in a contract worth 100,000 dollars,
Tesla relocated his laboratory at Colorado Springs where, disobeying his patron’s instructions
completely, he decided instead to explore ‘terrestrial stationary waves’, which
he regarded as his greatest discovery. At this rural outpost located far away from the
humdrum of New York City, Tesla started to piece together an enormous transmitter powered
by millions of volts of electricity at an experimental facility built on the outskirts
of the town of Knob Hill, keeping inquisitive onlookers away with an ominous Dante line
nailed to the front entrance which read quote: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”.
It was here that Tesla first discovered that the earth had electric potential, and could
be employed as a finely tuned conductor to transfer electrical energy without wires,
while next noticing that when his experimental Tesla coil was powered, it emitted sparks
as far as 30 feet that could be detected by antennae 10 miles away. Realizing that he
could now wirelessly transmit signals using the electromagnetic frequencies of the planet,
Tesla explored the practical applications, managing to light up 200 lamps fed by a power
source situated 26 miles away. Exploiting the same phenomenon, he was even able to produce
manmade lightning as a result. Tesla noted that the discovery of stationary electromagnetic
waves and how they interacted with the earth, had far-reaching implications. It was a discovery
which Tesla would spend the majority of the rest of his career investigating, as he felt
it had the potential to transmit electrical power across large distances without the need
for wires, indeed he hoped that his work could one day provide the whole world with clean
and free electrical power, however as with so many of Tesla’s ideas, it was funded
by investors, such as J.P Morgan who intended to market his inventions for profit and were
only prepared to fund research which would garner a return on their investments, thus
it would be the all-powerful market forces, that would eventually scupper so many of Tesla’s
imaginings. It was during this fertile period of discovery,
that Tesla also made some more unorthodox assertions, claiming that he had made contact
with extraterrestrial beings, that had triggered a series of ominous beeps that sounded from
one of his receivers. Tesla had first heard this strange combination of noise from the
device in the middle of the night, and interpreted the regularity of the beeps as a sign that
they were being manipulated by an intelligent entity, a theory he publicly advanced in a
letter to the American Red Cross in January 1901. Although Tesla’s story was discounted
by many skeptics there were still some who believed him. Influenced by the notion of
an intergalactic race of Martians, first popularized in 1895 with the release of a book called
‘Mars’ penned by the American astronomer Percival Lowell, Tesla’s supporters pointed
out that he may have established contact with aliens from the Red Planet. Nevertheless,
convinced of the revolutionary potential of terrestrial stationary waves, Tesla returned
to New York in January 1900 eager to secure funding for a major invention that would eclipse
his scientific rivals who were also investigating wireless systems, such as Reginald Fessenden,
Lee de Forest, and in particular Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, an Italian inventor
who became Tesla’s next arch-nemesis after Edison. Eager to keep his May 1899 promise in which
he vowed to wirelessly communicate with Paris by 1900, Tesla hunted for a source of funding
after patenting the magnifying transmitter he had constructed at Colorado Springs. Since
the device he envisioned had to generate enormous volumes of electricity from AC equipment,
Tesla first approached his old ally George Westinghouse who declined to become involved
but loaned him the necessary machinery, while the majority of the project’s funding came
from the coffers of Wall Street whizz J.P. Morgan, who signed a deal with Tesla after
negotiations discussing the purchase of Marconi’s wireless patents broke down. After convincing
him that the wireless transfer of information would make the expensive underwater cables
his company used to send transatlantic messages obsolete, Morgan informed Tesla he was willing
to support him with a 150,000 dollar investment on the condition that he would own a 51% stake
of the inventor’s patents. Between 1901 and 1905, with the backing of
the biggest financial titan in the world, Nikola Tesla constructed the 187-foot-high
transmission tower at Wardenclyffe laboratory, topped with a 68 foot copper dome, which was
the first wireless broadcasting system ever built, and was largely powered by a gigantic
magnifying transmitter designed to channel large concentrations of electricity to any
destination conceivable. Assured that by setting up receivers attached to the ground, he could
pick up the electromagnetic waves emitted by the tower anywhere, Tesla was desperate
to overshadow his rival Marconi, who in December 1901 at St Johns in Newfoundland was hailed
as the inventor of wireless telegraphy by the world’s press, after reporting triumphantly,
that he had successfully received the first transatlantic signal sent by colleagues at
Poldhu in Cornwall, England. With a jaded Tesla making it explicitly clear
in newspaper interviews that he believed Marconi had stolen many of his ideas from the 1890s,
and wishing to keep his benefactor onside, he next announced that he was going to create
a World Telegraphy System, a cutting-edge communication array similar to the World Wide
Web of the 1990s, in which individual receivers would pick up messages and news broadcasted
by transmitting facilities. Tesla pictured several different types of receiver, one that
anticipated the fax machine, by acting as a printer and publishing daily newspapers,
one that was a loudspeaker that could play voice messages, and another that was a handheld
contraption attached to a vertical wire on a short pole, that could decode radio waves,
foreshadowing the modern cellphone. By the summer of 1902, Tesla had moved permanently
to Wardenclyffe laboratory and was focusing exclusively on amping up the power levels.
On the other hand, after setting up a company with Morgan to assist the enterprise, Tesla
found it hard to sell shares to the moneyed New York elite, who believed the investment
was too risky, an appraisal not shared by Tesla, who sold 33,000 dollars of his personal
property and borrowed a further 10,000 dollars to realize his dream. Faced with an additional 30,000 dollar bill
from Westinghouse for the equipment, a lawsuit from the landlord James Warden, who was taking
Tesla to court for not paying property tax, as well as another bill from the phone company
who had installed a special line out of the laboratory, Tesla struggled financially. Tesla’s
promise to extend the coverage of his system so that it could be detected as far away as
Australia failed to persuade Morgan, who in July 1903 let Tesla know that he was unwilling
to invest any more capital, a mortal and unexpected blow to the World Telegraphy System that enraged
Tesla, who in true mad scientist fashion furiously cranked up the voltage of the magnifying transmitter
at Wardenclyffe to the maximum level and hurled lightning bolts into the New York sky. From
a risk perspective Morgan’s decision was quite understandable, since after 2 and a
half years Tesla had failed to fulfill his pledge to provide a transatlantic system in
6 to 8 months and a Pacific branch a year later, yet others have postulated that Morgan
abandoned Wardenclyffe because he was worried that Tesla was going to make the energy completely
free for everyone and thus deprive his firm of a lucrative paycheck, while another interpretation
contests that Morgan was growing increasingly less confident in the wireless industry, which
had been mired in scandal by the actions of Lancelot E. Pike. He was a conman who had
stolen investor money after promising to create a wireless service between Philadelphia and
New York. Moreover, Morgan felt more inclined to invest in Deforest Wireless automobiles,
a company founded by another of Tesla’s rivals that was projected to make 5 million
dollars a year, and which had already secured for itself a major contract with the US Navy
by February 1903 supplying wireless De Forest transmitters. After this, Tesla, no longer the darling of
electrical engineering, continued to have no luck attracting investors as the breakdown
of his Wardenclyffe project had turned academic and public opinion against him, with the once
celebrated genius, now painted as a man who could never quite fulfill his promises. Determined
to restore his credibility to investors by putting out a commercial product, Tesla devised
a scheme to sell small Tesla coils to laboratories around the country, via a company called the
Tesla Electric and Manufacturing Company but this ultimately went under because of a lack
of investment. Downtrodden and defamed in the US, Tesla would learn that even his reputation
in his homeland could not save him, after Serbian bankers declined to fund him, while
his old business partner John Jacob Astor, still annoyed that Tesla had spent his 1899
loan researching terrestrial stationary waves instead of wireless lighting, politely refused
to get involved. By early 1904, Tesla was hiring out his services as a consultant and
had embarked on a new project that aimed to harness the power of Niagara Falls in partnership
with the businessman William B. Rankine, yet Tesla’s real desire was always to restart
his experiments at Wardenclyffe, a prospect that was becoming increasingly unlikely since
investors were discouraged by the fact that Morgan still owned 51% of Tesla’s patents,
meaning that business partners would always have to consult him to reap any financial
benefit from Tesla’s inventions. In response, Tesla bombarded Morgan with impassioned appeals
to take him back on, in a series of letters that could come in many forms, with some carefully
prepared proposals promising Morgan unrealistically high profit margins, while in others Tesla
desperately scribbled emotional outbursts decrying his unfair treatment. Unable to drum up financial backing and still
struggling to get the Wardenclyffe tower functioning, Tesla was in a dark place and began spiraling
into a true nervous breakdown after the untimely death of his business associate Rankine and
the collapse of Canadian Niagara Power in the fall of 1905. A man who was always fascinated
with human psychology, in the 1920s Tesla shared his experience of emotional collapse
with author George Sylvester Viereck in a well-publicized book on Freudian theory, explaining
how in his delirium, he was haunted by images of his deceased brother Dane as well as their
mother. Tesla would recover from his breakdown in 1906, and with a new determination to prove
himself as a valuable asset, he switched his focus from electrical to mechanical engineering,
delving into the science of flight in a bid to raise money so that he could continue his
work at Wardenclyffe, which in 1904, due to lack of funds, he had mortgaged to George
C. Boldt, the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where Tesla lived for many years. The
result was the invention of a turbine that worked without blades, but Tesla’s contraption
was met less than enthusiastically by John James Astor, who refused to invest in the
idea in 1909, yet Tesla still remained highly confident in his design, issuing two patents
for a pump and a turbine in October and even starting a new company, the Tesla Propulsion
Company. However, after Tesla again failed to impress at a demonstration at the Waterside
Power Station in New York, and still daydreaming about restarting his research into wireless
power, he approached the son of J.P Morgan, Jack Morgan, in 1913 about him becoming a
potential investor. More interested in his turbine designs, Jack Morgan allocated Tesla
20,000 dollars, who instead of using the money in the way it was intended, spent it all trying
to persuade Sigmund Bergmann, a German industrialist, to finance his project, which was discontinued
after the outbreak of World War One. Over the next 10 years, as his personal wealth
began to evaporate, Tesla continued to assess his turbine and to work in conjunction with
manufacturers such as Pyle National in Chicago, Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee, and the Budd
company in Philadelphia, but he was unable to fix a recurring problem that ultimately
spelled the project’s doom, as if operated at over 10,000 rpm, the thin disks of the
internal machinery would start to deform, and there were no stronger materials available.
Tesla’s inability to secure funding for any of his pursuits, and his penchant for
overspending, led to the near emptying of his bank accounts and from 1916, he was forced
to file for bankruptcy. Tesla admitted that his monthly income was no more than 350 to
400 dollars after declaring he was unable to pay 935 dollars in taxes to the New York
treasury, and although he was still technically the president and treasurer of the Nikola
Tesla Company, over 90% of the company’s stock was owned by friends, bankers, and creditors,
and many of his patents by then had expired, leaving Tesla virtually penniless. In a bid
to save himself from financial ruin, Tesla launched a lawsuit against Marconi in August
1915, accusing the Italian of illegally patenting radio technology in 1904, but the case went
nowhere and Marconi remained the official owner for the time being, with the decision
later overturned by the Supreme Court in 1943 only a few months after Tesla’s death. Consequently, Tesla was forced to earn a living
by creating minor inventions and registering several improvements in automobile speedometers,
frequency meters, and flow meters which he licensed to Waltham Watch Company in 1918.
The company used Tesla’s name as a marketing ploy to sell ‘scientifically built speedometers’,
as despite Tesla’s changing circumstances, his name still carried a certain gravitas,
and Tesla’s opinions and thoughts still garnered much press interest, such as in 1917
when, presaging the advent of radar technology in the 1930s, he forecast that microwave radiation
could be employed to detect ships. In the midst of his financial troubles, Tesla still
had his admirers, and in 1915 it was reported by the New York Times that he had jointly
won the Nobel Prize for Physics, an honor he was to share with his one-time ally and
now bitter enemy Thomas Edison, but when it was presented at the awards ceremony it was
instead given to William H. Bragg and his son, as Tesla refused to share the award with
his nemesis nor had he forgiven the institute for recognizing Marconi as the pioneer of
radio communication technology after they had awarded him the same accolade in 1909.
Two years later in 1917 however, Tesla’s individual efforts would be recognized when
he accepted the Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the most
prestigious prize in electronic engineering, where his life’s work was praised in an
address by the vice-president of the organization, who said: “Were we to seize and eliminate from our
industrial world the result of Mr. Tesla's work, the wheels of industry would cease to
turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark and our mills would
be idle and dead. His name marks an epoch in the advance of electrical science.” Yet Tesla cared very little for the decoration,
opting to leave the Engineer’s Club where the awards ceremony was taking place shortly
before he was presented with the medallion, forcing his friend and the person who had
nominated him, B.A Behrend to embark on a frantic search that ended in Bryant Park,
across from the venue, where Tesla was busy feeding pigeons. Tesla particularly loathed
the fact that the award was in his rival’s name. Despite being lauded for his work in
electricity, Nikola Tesla remained poor throughout the 1920s, and because he made only a small
income from the royalties he received from licensing his minor inventions he became embroiled
in a string of legal disputes, such as in June 1925 when he was sued by the attorney
Ralph J. Hawkins for failing to pay 913 dollars in fees. It was during this decade that Tesla
started to retreat from the public eye, living hotel to hotel as an eccentric recluse and
spending so much of his time feeding the pigeons in Bryant Park behind the New York Public
Library, that one end of the park, Nikola Tesla Corner, now honors his name. However, on his 75th birthday in 1931 Nikola
Tesla was suddenly back in the spotlight, appearing on the front cover of Time magazine,
and thanks to the efforts of a young science writer called Kenneth Swezey, he received
over 70 letters of congratulation published in a testimonial volume from some of the most
esteemed scientists of the day, including Albert Einstein. Interviewed by Time magazine,
Tesla outlined many of his future plans, and confidently disclosed how he was going to
disprove Einstein’s theory of relativity, how he was unconvinced that energy was released
from a split atom, as well as espousing the possibility of interplanetary communications
in a conversation he enjoyed so much that every year thereafter, Tesla would organize
a press conference on his birthday, usually a 6 hour affair where Tesla would speak to
a number of reporters and update them about his scientific and personal progress. For
example, in 1932, he informed the general public about his desire to build a motor propelled
by cosmic rays, and in 1936 he told journalists that he wiggled his toes hundreds of times
before he went to bed, an exercise he believed would tone his body and enable him to live
until he was 135 years old. The 1934 party was a particular highlight, where Tesla first
revealed he was in the process of creating a particle beam weapon, claiming in the New
York Times that it could: “…send concentrated beams of particles
through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000
enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles from a defending nation’s border and will
cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks.” Anticipating the later doctrine of ‘Mutually
Assured Destruction’ and the concept of nuclear stalemate, Tesla believed his laser
beam could end war completely since it was so devastating that every conceivable defensive
measure would be useless against it. Although Tesla was susceptible to flights of fancy
on occasion, the death beam was a real project, and was the subject of a Tesla study rediscovered
in 1984 entitled ‘The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through
Natural Media’, which laid out the fundamentals of a weapons system that discharged tungsten
and mercury particles at 48 times the speed of sound to produce devastating projectiles. Despite Tesla’s invention being impossible,
it elicited a great deal of publicity, motivating Tesla to recruit Hungarian architect Titus
deBobula to design a new tower to evaluate the death beam, yet the project would never
get off the ground, as by 1935, Tesla was no longer working with deBobula, who had proven
himself a slippery character after attempting to borrow money from Tesla and trying to get
him involved in an illegal arms deal in Paraguay. Nevertheless Tesla, ever wily, was still able
to use the furore that surrounded him to his advantage in some situations, offering up
a working prototype of the laser beam, valued at 10,000 dollars, to the managers of the
Governor Clinton Hotel as compensation for the 400 dollars that he owed them, while warning
them that the box he gave them supposedly containing the weapon would explode if improperly
handled, resulting in terrified staff depositing it at the back end of the hotel vault. The
laser beam also came to the attention of the international community, and Tesla soon found
himself entering negotiations with the League of Nations, the UK government, and even the
Soviet Union, who signed a contract in April 1935 stipulating that Tesla was to supply
them with the information necessary to construct the weapon, although it is unknown if Soviet
scientists actually carried out the research. The project however would start to disintegrate
from January 1938, after the British concluded negotiations with Tesla, while the final nail
in the coffin would occur in 1940, after he was left empty-handed following a desperate
attempt to persuade the US government that the laser beam could be a viable World War
Two weapon. Hampering Tesla in his last ditch attempts
to liaise with international governments, was his declining health, which had started
to deteriorate in 1937 after he was run over by a taxi and refused to get medical treatment
for injuries that he would never recover from. Subsisting on a meager diet of boiled vegetables
and warm milk, and making sure to keep three feet away from everyone to avoid catching
germs, Tesla’s personal health choices led to no improvements, and by 1942 he was spending
the majority of his days confined to his bed where his grip on reality started to loosen,
when in July, for example, Tesla tried to send money to Mark Twain who had died in 1913.
Opting to see only a select few visitors, including the exiled prince of Yugoslavia
Peter II and a young scientist called Bloyce Fitzgerald, the creator of an anti-tank gun
who would come to discuss inventions, Tesla isolated himself from the world as he deteriorated. Nikola Tesla died of a heart attack in his
sleep on the 7th of January 1943 at his executive suite in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker,
where he had been living for the previous 10 years. Inundated with letters of condolence
from major scientific and political figures all over the world, such as Eleanor Roosevelt,
the wife of the US President, the vice-president Henry Wallace, and a host of nobel laureates,
Tesla’s funeral took place at St John the Divine Cathedral in New York City on the 12th
of January, where it was attended by over 2000 people and presided over by members of
the Serbian Orthodox Church. Afterwards Nikola Tesla, who by the end of his life boasted
over 700 patents to his name, was cremated and his ashes were placed inside a golden
sphere, which is still exhibited at the Tesla Museum in Belgrade. Following his death, the US government were
curious as to whether among Tesla’s surviving notes there could be information to help them
in the war effort, and so they investigated his documents but found nothing of profound
importance, and by 1951 they had been repatriated to the Tesla Museum in Belgrade and were accompanied
a few years later in 1957 by Tesla’s ashes. For decades after though, the mystery surrounding
the laser beam gun persisted, as the US government consistently denied they had in their possession
one of Tesla’s microfilms, which according to official records had been intensively reviewed
for over a month sometime after his death - the truth of these claims however remains
unproven. Born to Serbian parents on the Austro-Hungarian
borderlands, Nikola spent his early childhood in pastoral paradise, playing for hours in
the farmyard and the churchyard with his siblings and his cat Macack, who first set in motion
Tesla’s lifelong obsession after showing him the strange ways that electric phenomena
interacted with the material world. As a youngster, Tesla was besieged by a catalogue of perplexing
illnesses, including an oversensitivity to mental images which made the products of his
imagination seem real as well as a fixation with quantifying everything he saw and experienced.
Tesla was a classic eccentric genius, possessing an irrepressible self-belief in his own ability
to devise fresh and original concepts, which he presented with the flamboyance and performance
flair of a showman, as onstage he was equally as electric as his subject matter, coming
across, in the words of New York World reporter Arthur Brisbane, as: “A most radiant creature, with light flaming
at every pore of his skin, from the tips of his fingers and from the end of every hair
on his head” By the middle of the 1890s Tesla was at the
apex of his power and making major contributions to a number of other academic fields, but
Tesla, who prioritized his intellectual pursuits and never took a wife or started a family,
also had his fair share of anxieties, the pressure of his line of work making him particularly
susceptible to emotional outbursts of despair and anger when things were not going his way.
Tesla’s misfortunes often arose because he was overly confident in his outlook, produced
only a few tangible commercial results from his experiments, and had no qualms about irresponsibly
spending all of his investor’s money while still asking for more, a habit that would
irreparably damage his reputation in his later years and transform him into an impoverished
recluse who hid away in New York hotels. As he began to ail in the 1930s, Tesla enjoyed
a renewed wave of international popularity when he revealed that he was planning to assemble
a laser gun that he anticipated would be so powerful that it would end all conflict, yet
like many of his schemes it would never come to fruition, fizzling out by 1940 after his
last effort to interest the US government failed, although many decades after, curiosity
about the death ray would still persist. Following a period of mental and physical deterioration
in 1942, Nikola Tesla died at his room at the Hotel New Yorker on the 7th of January
1943, but was immortalized for his foundational contributions to science. Today one of the world’s most prominent
and valuable companies is called Tesla Inc. It is a company which seeks to revolutionize
transport systems and how energy is delivered across the world and while it has no direct
connections to Nikola Tesla the man, it is fitting that his life’s work has been remembered
in this way. Tesla, an ethnic Serb, hailed from Croatia in the mid-nineteenth century
at a time when the Balkans was very far from the centre of technological and industrial
development and formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a backwards power which did not contribute
greatly to wider societal development at the time. And yet, despite these impediments,
he made enormous breakthroughs during his lifetime in a wide range of different fields.
It was Tesla who first pioneered alternating current, who made major advances in radio
technology and who first devised many of the systems which are used today in renewable
energy systems. Perhaps most impressively, he devised the entire concept of wireless
technology and communication. In this respect he stands in a small line of individuals in
modern history which includes Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein
whose life’s work have transformed our understanding of modern science and how society functions. Given all of this, we might ask why Tesla
was not credited as much as he should have been in his own lifetime for his successes?
The answer to this conundrum is relatively clear. Tesla’s ideas and the systems he
came up with, were simply ahead of their time and he was overshadowed by the innovations
introduced into western society by Thomas Edison, a similar genius whose designs around
electricity were more suitable for the level of technological development which prevailed
in Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century. But while
many of Edison’s inventions and pioneering work around electricity generation are now
viewed as being somewhat archaic and inefficient, Tesla’s designs and ideas are still widely
praised. Perhaps in this respect it should be left to Edison to have the last word on
Tesla. While he dismissed the Serb’s idea of alternating current as being impractical
at the time, in the end Edison concluded that Tesla was one of the truly great figures in
the development of our electric world. Edison was entirely correct in this assessment. While
Edison won the contest to become the leading figure in electrification in North America
at the end of the nineteenth century, when you boil a kettle or use many other electrical
appliances today you are most likely using an alternating current device rather than
the direct current which Edison championed. As such, while Tesla lost the current war
in the nineteenth century, he was a prophet of twentieth and even twenty-first-century
technology and energy efficiency. Although Nikola Tesla did not invent or rather
discover AC power, his genius lies in his ability to find far-reaching real-world applications
to new discoveries and natural phenomena. He possessed a vision which few of his contemporaries
could match, even Thomas Edison, and there is no doubt that he changed the world, just
as much as his former employer, as the light bulb would be next to useless without a reliable
and safe means of power delivery over long distances. Indeed, there are few people whose
work has impacted more on modern day society than Nikola Tesla, with electric power now
being available to the majority of the human race, largely thanks to his work. He even
tried to work out a way in which, power could be delivered freely to consumers, which perhaps
both explains why he is today so highly regarded, but also why, he never managed to monetise
his work in the same manner as people like Edison. Perhaps what most endears us to people
like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein and the breed of latter-day inventors and scientists
who with little or no formal education revolutionised their respective fields, is the image of the
eccentric, mad scientist, working alone on experiments and calculations. In an age in
which the discoveries and achievements of individual scientists are today subsumed by
the multinational corporations they work for, even the one that bears Tesla’s name, there
is something romantic and inspiring about one human being having such a positive impact
on human civilization through their own endeavour. Nikola Tesla is one of these people and despite
the fact that he did not perhaps receive the money or recognition he deserved in his lifetime,
he has since his death been immortalised, as one of the greatest and most important
inventors to have ever lived. What do you think of Nikola Tesla? Do you
believe he was a more brilliant scientist than Einstein? Please let us know in the comment
section and in the meantime thank you very much for watching.
