Who could have imagined that a man who spent his days feeding pigeons in a park
near the New York Public Library was one of the most brilliant minds in the world.
Nikola Tesla was so smart that he could picture all his ideas and
the designs for them in his head. He didn’t need models or drawings.
But although the Serbian-American was a famous inventor, he died penniless after
his most ambitious project came crashing down.
How dramatic a turn his life took.
At one point, he could have easily been the richest person on the planet.
Royalty payments on his alternating current power system were worth an absolute fortune,
hundreds of millions of dollars adjusted for inflation.
Today, our world is still predominantly powered by AC in
which the flow of electricity changes direction periodically. As a result,
it suffers less energy loss when transmitted over long distances.
On the other hand, Thomas Edison’s direct current - DC - travels in
only one direction and is tough to transmit over long distances.
AC is the type of electric current generated by most power plants,
including Tesla’s plant at Niagara Falls.
Niagara Falls started the electrification of the world.
Tesla and American industrialist George Westinghouse built the world’s first
hydroelectric power plant here in 1895, using AC to harness the power of the falls.
After such a great success, Tesla could have retired very comfortably,
but instead, he was determined to outdo himself by achieving a new form…of global communication.
Trouble is…he had no money to turn his latest dream into reality.
How can that be? Considering his AC system made him very wealthy.
Westinghouse purchased Tesla’s AC patents for $60,000 in the form of
$5,000 cash and 150 shares in Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company.
Westinghouse also agreed to pay Tesla royalties based on how much electricity he could sell,
amounting to $2.50 per horsepower of electrical capacity sold.
Tesla should have been rich. But he wasn’t. Because…of his kind heart.
But Westinghouse's company suffered greatly as it battled Edison’s company,
in which Edison tried to show how dangerous Tesla’s AC was,
even electrocuting an elephant named Topsy to prove his point.
By 1897, Westinghouse was nearly bankrupt.
And industrialist J.P. Morgan intended to starve out Westinghouse’s company and buy
up Tesla’s patents in an effort to dominate the energy market.
Westinghouse begged Tesla for relief from having to pay the
promised royalties to try to save his company.
In response, in what can only be described as a gesture of pure selflessness,
Tesla tore up his contract…he was so moved by his friend’s pleas.
Nikola Tesla single-handedly saved the Westinghouse company.
He was grateful to George Westinghouse, his friend who believed in him, who never swindled him.
And besides, Tesla had even bigger ideas to pursue.
Yet walking away from the royalties would come back to haunt him.
Because it left him struggling financially…to the point where it dashed his ultimate dream.
After the success of Niagara Falls,
Tesla returned to his lab. There was nothing he loved more than experimenting.
Even the fire that gutted his New York laboratory couldn’t
stop him. We don’t know why it caught fire.
In 1891, he had invented the remarkable Tesla coil, which produced high-voltage,
high-frequency alternating current electricity.
With high frequencies, he pioneered the use of
x-rays for medical purposes. This is an x-ray Tesla took of his own hand.
But that paled in comparison to the time he waved vacuum tubes around like a Jedi,
illuminating them wirelessly after having transmitted energy through the air!
The wireless transmission of energy became his lifelong obsession.
He imagined a wireless globe - transmitting free electricity across the Atlantic with
no wires…and took his idea to the wealthy American banker J.P. Morgan.
Morgan put up $150,000 to build a giant transmission
tower at Wardenclyffe on Long Island, New York.
Tesla imagined that it would be the first of a network of
towers worldwide. He believed that these towers would allow him to send electricity
through the atmosphere which anyone with the correct equipment could then tap into.
This image is an artistic impression kindly supplied to me by Alan Bellows
of Damn Interesting; the real tower never crackled with electricity.
Tesla explained at the time: “…it will be possible for a businessman in New York to dictate
instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere”.
He was well ahead of his time. It was incredibly prescient of him to
imagine a global wireless communication system similar to what the internet offers us today.
But not long after construction began in 1901, Tesla started to run out of money.
He appealed to J.P. Morgan for more financing without any luck.
Investors were instead throwing their support behind a young Italian inventor.
In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi successfully sent a radio signal from England to Newfoundland, Canada.
He used Tesla’s radio patents to do it.
Tesla realized his coils could transmit and receive powerful radio signals and he
applied for radio patents which the U.S. Patent Office granted in 1900.
So Marconi’s feat didn’t bother Tesla, who remarked to one of his engineers:
"Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents."
Marconi tried to file radio patents himself in the U.S., but the Patent
Office turned down repeated applications as it argued they were too similar to Tesla’s.
However, as Tesla found out the hard way, things can change.
In 1904, the Patent Office reversed its earlier decisions and awarded
Marconi a patent for the invention of the radio.
The reason behind the reversal has never been explained.
Some suspect the powerful backing Marconi received in the United States,
including that by Edison, played a role.
Marconi was credited as the inventor of the radio…and became rich.
He even won the Nobel Prize in Physics as a result!
Tesla was furious and sued the Marconi Company for
patent infringement yet couldn’t afford to litigate a case against a big corporation.
He also couldn’t find anyone interested in investing more money in his tower of dreams.
In 1917, Tesla’s tower was dismantled to pay off his creditors.
Tesla was in debt to the heirs of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel where he had been staying.
When his friend and wealthy investor John Jacob Astor died on the Titanic,
Astor’s heirs demanded that Tesla pay his debt.
He did so by demolishing his tower and selling the scrap metal.
When his greatest dream was out of reach, Tesla lamented:
”It is not a dream. It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering,
only expensive—blind, faint-hearted, doubting world!”
Tesla began to withdraw from that world.
He showed signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
He was obsessed with the number 3 and would walk
around a block three times before entering a building.
He’d count his steps wherever he walked.
He compulsively counted the cubic content of bowls of soup or cups of coffee,
otherwise, his meals were not enjoyable.
Near the end of his life, he became obsessed with pigeons.
Especially a white female pigeon.
He is believed to have said:
“…I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman,
and she loved me...As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.”
Tesla never married.
The pigeon apparently died in his arms, and, at that point, he knew his life’s work was finished.
Nikola Tesla would live out the last ten years of his life at the New Yorker Hotel,
paid for by the Westinghouse Corporation which also gave him a “consulting fee” of
$125 a month. This is the company that was in debt to him for having given
up royalties worth millions of dollars for the sake of his friend George Westinghouse.
He began to fade away into history, one of the few
exceptions being the time he turned 75 and made the cover of Time Magazine.
Tesla died in his hotel room alone on January 7, 1943…without a penny to his name.
He was 86 years old.
A few months after his death, the U.S.
Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s radio patent in favor of Tesla’s.
But the Court had a selfish reason for doing so; the Marconi Company
was suing the U.S. government for use of its patents in World War I.
So, the Court avoided the lawsuit by simply restoring Tesla’s patent.
When I worked on an earlier video about Nikola Tesla some pointed
out that The Forgotten Genius was not an apt thumbnail title.
Personally, I grew up in Canada learning much more about Thomas Edison, an American,
than Nikola Tesla, an immigrant who was born in present-day Croatia.
But perhaps viewers have a point, and he really isn’t forgotten.
Today, Tesla is once again capturing the public’s
imagination. Because an electric car company bears his name.
Elon Musk’s company paid homage to Nikola Tesla with a dazzling
display of drones earlier this year that formed a visage of the brilliant engineer.
Tesla is undoubtedly one of the most famous figures in STEM,
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Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom.