The Tragic Story of Nikola Tesla

When you think of the greatest inventors of all time, a few names come to mind. Henry Ford. The Wright brothers. Thomas Edison. But there is one name that is not so recognizable. When you plug in your phone, turn on the lights, or use the refrigerator, you have Nikola Tesla to thank. This is the

story

of the forgotten genius and the

story

begins at the end. On January 7, 1943, a maid working at the New Yorker Hotel entered room 3327, where she found the body of an 86-year-old man who had called the hotel her home for the past decade. Tesla died alone and bankrupt.

He lived on hot milk and crackers and was obsessed with feeding pigeons outdoors. One of the greatest inventors of all time disappeared into obscurity and died penniless. There is a reason why this happened that will become clear at the end of this story. Tesla was born in the town of Smiljan, in present-day Croatia, on July 10, 1856. He was born during a thunderstorm. According to family legend, the midwife said in the middle of delivery: this child will be a child of darkness to which his mother responded, no, he will be a child of light. He didn't know how prophetic those words would be.

When Tesla was five years old, he saw his older brother fall from a horse and then die. This would haunt him for the rest of his life. Since he was a child he began to have visions accompanied by flashes of light, confusing what was real and what was imaginary. This never went away. The vision stimulated his ability to conceive inventions in his head in such detail that he didn't even need to draw them out. He explained how the designs were perfected in his mind in a 1919 article. "Invariably my device works as I conceived it and the experiment goes exactly as I planned.

In 20 years there has not been a single exception." Tesla credits his mother for her interest in the invention. Đuka Mandić invented small household appliances in his spare time. He had an eidetic memory: the ability to remember an image with great precision and he passed it on to his son. Tesla's father was a priest and wanted him to be one too, but Tesla was interested in engineering. When he contracted cholera as a teenager and nearly died, his father promised to send him to engineering school if he survived, and miraculously, he did. He went to study in Austria at the Higher Technical School of Graz, where it is said that he worked from 3 in the morning until 11 p.m. every day.

The teachers worried that he would die of exhaustion. Tesla had a beautiful mind. He could perform mental calculations and spoke eight languages. He was a good student at first but he didn't finish school. He dropped out of school after becoming addicted to gambling and cut ties with his family so they wouldn't find out. His friends didn't know what happened to him either. They thought he had drowned in a river. Tesla moved around Europe and eventually ended up in Budapest working as an electrician at a telephone company. One day, while walking through a city park, he had an epiphany about developing a new way to generate electricity using alternating current.

It would be his greatest invention and it would change the world. I'll explain more about AC a little later. In 1882 he settled in Paris to work in the French branch of Thomas Edison's electrical company. He started out installing interior lighting, but managers noticed his talent and commissioned him to do more complicated jobs, designing and building dynamos and motors. He soon traveled throughout Europe troubleshooting problems at other Edison branches. Two years later, in 1884, Tesla's manager offered him a job at the Edison Machine Works in New York City. He agreed and arrived in the United States with only four cents in his pocket because his money was stolen on the boat trip.

At first, Tesla had a good impression of Edison. Edison was also impressed with Tesla, later saying, "I've had many hard-working assistants, but you take the cake." This mutual admiration did not last. They would become bitter rivals. The two men disagreed on how the electricity should be contained and distributed. Edison preferred direct current, which is a system where electrical charge only flows in one direction. Tesla was a fan of alternating current in which the electrical charge changes direction periodically. Changing direction is crucial to maintaining a constant supply of electricity because it does not overload the outlets. This means it can provide more power and transmit it over longer distances.

It's why AC powers our homes and other large appliances, while DC powers smaller items like flashlights. But Edison didn't care about AC because it could have hurt DC sales since he owned all the DC patents. According to Tesla, a manager at Edison's company offered him a $50,000 bonus if he could improve some DC-powered machines. When he did, the manager refused to pay. In another telling of the story, Edison tells Tesla, "You don't understand our American humor." Regardless of how it developed, Tesla resigned and set out to form his own electric company the following year, in 1885. But his investors showed little interest and decided to keep the company and all of Tesla's patents, which they were able to do because Tesla had assigned the patents to the company in exchange for shares that were now worthless.

After losing his company, Tesla had to take a job digging ditches for two dollars a day just to survive. But his luck would change. In 1887, Tesla invented an induction motor that ran on alternating current. The motor was the most efficient way to convert electricity into mechanical energy. The aversion to it drives Tesla vehicles, which took their name from the inventor. He patented the motor and demonstrated it the following year at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, which caught the attention of George Westinghouse, a major player in the electrical market who realized that Tesla's AC motor could be just what he wanted. needed to complete his AC system. and compete against Edison's DC system.

So Tesla licensed the AC motor patents to Westinghouse for $60,000 and also received stock and royalties. Westinghouse hired him as a consultant for $2,000 a month, which is equivalent to more than $50,000 a month today. The war of the currents began. Edison went out of his way to try to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla. He secretly financed the electric chair that used alternating current to demonstrate how dangerous alternating current was. Edison's company also publicly tortured animals to prove his point. In 1903, they electrocuted a circus elephant named Topsy and produced a film about it called Electrocuting an Elephant. Despite Edison's plans, good things were happening for Westinghouse and Tesla.

They offered less to Edison and his newly formed General Electric company to light the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The first all-electric fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America. It was clear to the 27 million people who attended that air conditioning would power the future. Their success continued when they again beat Edison's General Electric to build the world's first alternating current power plant at Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric plant was a huge success and helped light up Buffalo, New York. The construction of the plant also meant that Tesla became a pioneer in renewable energy.

The statue of him can be found today in Niagara Falls. Westinghouse and Tesla won the current war and direct current was being phased out. But there were problems. Westinghouse's company was running out of money and eventually fell $10 million into debt. In 1897, he went to Tesla and asked if his royalties could be reduced in a desperate attempt to save the company. Tesla was so driven by compassion for his friend that he broke his contract. He was grateful to Westinghouse for believing in him when no one else would. Tesla voluntarily walked away from $12 million in royalties that, in today's terms, would be worth more than $300 million.

If he had kept those royalties over time, he would likely have become the richest person on the planet and the first person with a net worth of $1 billion. That act of compassion for his friend to break his contract saved Westinghouse. In exchange, Westinghouse paid Tesla $216,000 for the rights to use them as CA patents forever. This is equivalent to about 60 million current dollars. With that money, Tesla became financially independent and established a series of laboratories in New York for new projects, where he was visited by the rich and famous, including his close friend and one of the greatest American writers of all time, Mark Twain.

This was the period of many inventions of his. He had over 300 patents throughout his life. He created one of the first versions of neon lighting, the Tesla turbine, a bladeless turbine for vehicles. He pioneered x-ray technology by experimenting with radiation. This is an x-ray of his own hand. Another notable invention was one of the first remote controls. In 1898, he controlled a miniature ship in New York's Madison Square Garden. He was so far ahead of his time that the crowd thought he was using magic to make him move. That would be the ancestor of today's remote-controlled drones.

One of his best-known inventions is the Tesla coil, a device that can produce large amounts of high-voltage electricity. Thanks to the coils, he discovered that he could send and receive powerful radio signals when they resonated at the same frequency. Tesla was preparing to transmit the first radio signal from him, but disaster struck. A fire destroyed his laboratory in 1895. He lost years of research and equipment. Tesla did not apply for a patent for the radio until two years later. The fire would be the turning point in his life that would send him on a downward spiral. At the same time he was working in radio, an Italian businessman, Guglielmo Marconi, was also working in radio in England.

He attempted to acquire patent rights in the United States, but was rejected because it was too similar to Tesla's. However, things changed when Marconi was able to send the world's first transatlantic radio message in 1901 using 17 of Tesla's patents. Edison later provided financial support from him to Marconi. Tesla had no problem with Marconi's achievements, but in 1904, the United States Patent Office suddenly changed its mind and granted Marconi a patent for the invention of the radio. A reason for this decision has never been given, but the powerful financial backing Marconi received could explain it. Marconi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1911, which was only possible thanks to Tesla's work.

Tesla became enraged and sued Marconi. The case dragged on in court for years and was only resolved in Tesla's favor after his death. That radio incident negatively impacted the rest of Tesla's career. For example, Tesla was obsessed with bringing wireless communication to the world and built a huge wireless transmission station on Long Island, New York, called Wardenclyffe Tower. He envisioned a world where we could send and receive messages wirelessly. Once again, he was way ahead of his time. But financial backers did not have enough faith in his project. They retired and bet on Marconi's invention of the radio.

This left Tesla in financial ruin. He had no choice but to abandon the project of his dreams in 1905 and eventually lost the Wardenclyffe Tower in foreclosure. Tesla's mental health deteriorated. He lived his last decade at the New Yorker Hotel beginning in 1933. The Westinghouse Corporation hired him as a consultant and paid for his room. He lived rent-free but died in debt. So why did one of the greatest inventors of all time disappear into obscurity and die penniless? You could say that Tesla was unlucky at times like when the fire burned down his New York laboratory. But the main reason is that Tesla was not a capitalist.

He made decisions that those with more business acumen would not have made, such as giving up his royalties for the AC motor. He didn't care about money. He was concerned with the pursuit of science for the betterment of humanity. He wanted to change the world and he did. Thanks in part to Elon Musk's company, people are starting to learn more about the man who inspired the company, a man whose inventions would power our entire planet. It is thanks to Tesla that modern society works the way it does. Tesla's mother called him a son of light and he was absolutely right.

Thanks for watching the story of Nikola Tesla, I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Cindy Pom. If you like what you saw, subscribe to my new channel. I also started a Patreon where you can make a monthly contribution and this will go a long way in helping this channel grow. See you soon.