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.
