nikola tesla biography national geographic

Nikola Tesla

Serbian American scientist Nikola Tesla invented the Tesla coil and alternating-current (AC) electricity, in addition to discovering the rotating magnetic field.

Quick Facts

When was nikola tesla born, nikola tesla and thomas edison, solo venture, how did nikola tesla die, legacy: movies, electric car, and wardenclyffe tower renovation, who was nikola tesla.

Engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla designed the alternating-current (AC) electric system, which is the predominant electrical system used across the world today. He also created the “Tesla coil” that is still used in radio technology. Born in modern-day Croatia, Tesla immigrated to the United States in 1884 and briefly worked with Thomas Edison before the two parted ways. The Serbian American sold several patent rights, including those to his AC machinery, to George Westinghouse . Tesla died at age 86 in January 1943, but his legacy lives on through his inventions and the electric car company Tesla that’s named in his honor.

FULL NAME: Nikola Tesla BORN: July 10, 1856 DIED: January 7, 1943 BIRTHPLACE: Smiljan, Croatia ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer

Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the Austrian Empire town of Smiljan that is now part of Croatia.

He was one of five children, including siblings Dane, Angelina, Milka, and Marica. Nikola’s interest in electrical invention was spurred by his mother, Djuka Mandic, who invented small household appliances in her spare time while her son was growing up.

Tesla’s father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian orthodox priest and a writer, and he pushed for his son to join the priesthood. But Nikola’s interests lay squarely in the sciences.

Tesla received quite a bit of education. He studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt (later renamed the Johann-Rudolph-Glauber Realschule Karlstadt) in Germany; the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria; and the University of Prague during the 1870s.

After university, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, where for a time he worked at the Central Telephone Exchange. It was while in Budapest that the idea for the induction motor first came to Tesla, but after several years of trying to gain interest in his invention, at age 28, Tesla decided to leave Europe for America.

In 1884, Tesla arrived in the United States with little more than the clothes on his back and a letter of introduction to famed inventor and business mogul Thomas Edison , whose DC-based electrical works were fast becoming the standard in the country. Edison hired Tesla, and the two men were soon working tirelessly alongside each other, making improvements to Edison’s inventions.

Several months later, the two parted ways due to a conflicting business-scientific relationship , attributed by historians to their incredibly different personalities. While Edison was a power figure who focused on marketing and financial success, Tesla was commercially out-of-touch and somewhat vulnerable. Their feud would continue to affect Tesla’s career.

In 1885, Tesla received funding for the Tesla Electric Light Company and was tasked by his investors to develop improved arc lighting. After successfully doing so, however, Tesla was forced out of the venture and, for a time, had to work as a manual laborer in order to survive. His luck changed two years later when he received funding for his new Tesla Electric Company.

Throughout his career, Tesla discovered, designed, and developed ideas for a number of important inventions—most of which were officially patented by other inventors—including dynamos (electrical generators similar to batteries) and the induction motor.

He was also a pioneer in the discovery of radar technology, X-ray technology, remote control, and the rotating magnetic field—the basis of most AC machinery. Tesla is most well-known for his contributions in AC electricity and for the Tesla coil.

AC Electrical System

Tesla designed the alternating-current (AC) electrical system, which quickly became the preeminent power system of the 20 th century and has remained the worldwide standard ever since. In 1887, Tesla found funding for his new Tesla Electric Company, and by the end of the year, he had successfully filed several patents for AC-based inventions.

Tesla’s AC system soon caught the attention of American engineer and businessman George Westinghouse , who was seeking a solution to supplying the nation with long-distance power. Convinced that Tesla’s inventions would help him achieve this, in 1888, he purchased his patents for $60,000 in cash and stock in the Westinghouse Corporation.

As interest in an AC system grew, Tesla and Westinghouse were put in direct competition with Thomas Edison , who was intent on selling his direct-current (DC) system to the nation. A negative press campaign was soon waged by Edison, in an attempt to undermine interest in AC power.

Unfortunately for Edison, the Westinghouse Corporation was chosen to supply the lighting at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Tesla conducted demonstrations of his AC system there.

Hydroelectric Power Plant

In 1895, Tesla designed what was among the first AC hydroelectric power plants in the United States, at Niagara Falls. The following year, it was used to power the city of Buffalo, New York—a feat that was highly publicized throughout the world and helped further AC electricity’s path to becoming the world’s power system.

In the late 19 th century, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, which laid the foundation for wireless technologies and is still used in radio technology today. The heart of an electrical circuit, the Tesla coil is an inductor used in many early radio transmission antennas.

The coil works with a capacitor to resonate current and voltage from a power source across the circuit. Tesla used his coil to study fluorescence, x-rays, radio, wireless power, and electromagnetism in the earth and its atmosphere.

Wireless Power and Wardenclyffe Tower

Having become obsessed with the wireless transmission of energy, around 1900, Tesla set to work on his boldest project yet: to build a global, wireless communication system transmitted through a large electrical tower that would enable information sharing and provide free energy throughout the world.

With funding from a group of investors that included financial giant J. P. Morgan , Tesla began work on the free energy project in earnest in 1901. He designed and built a lab with a power plant and a massive transmission tower on a site on Long Island, New York, that became known as Wardenclyffe.

However, doubts arose among his investors about the plausibility of Tesla’s system. As his rival, Guglielmo Marconi —with the financial support of Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison —continued to make great advances with his own radio technologies, Tesla had no choice but to abandon the project.

The Wardenclyffe staff was laid off in 1906, and by 1915, the site had fallen into foreclosure. Two years later, Tesla declared bankruptcy, and the tower was dismantled and sold for scrap to help pay the debts he had accrued.

After suffering a nervous breakdown following the closure of his wireless power project, Tesla eventually returned to work, primarily as a consultant. But as time went on, his ideas became progressively more outlandish and impractical. He grew increasingly eccentric, devoting much of his time to the care of wild pigeons in the parks of New York City . Tesla even drew the attention of the FBI with his talk of building a powerful “death ray,” which had received some interest from the Soviet Union during World War II.

Poor and reclusive, Tesla died of coronary thrombosis on January 7, 1943, at the age of 86 in New York City, where he had lived for nearly 60 years.

The legacy of Tesla’s work lives on to this day. In 1994, a street sign identifying “Nikola Tesla Corner” was installed near the site of his former New York City laboratory, at the intersection of 40 th Street and 6 th Avenue.

Several movies have highlighted Tesla’s life and famous works, most notably:

• The Secret of Nikola Tesla , a 1980 biographical film starring Orson Welles as J. P. Morgan .
• Nikola Tesla, The Genius Who Lit the World , a 1994 documentary produced by the Tesla Memorial Society and the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.
• The Prestige , a 2006 fictional film about two magicians directed by Christopher Nolan , with rock star David Bowie portraying Tesla.

In 2003, a group of engineers founded Tesla Motors, a car company named after Tesla dedicated to building the first fully electric-powered car. Entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk contributed over $30 million to Tesla in 2004 and serves as the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Tesla Motors unveiled its first electric car, the Roadster, in 2008. A high-performance sports vehicle, the Roadster helped changed the perception of what electric cars could be. In 2014, Tesla launched the Model S, a lower-priced model that, in 2017, set the MotorTrend world record for 0 to 60 miles per hour acceleration at 2.28 seconds. The company’s designs showed that an electric car could have the same performance as gasoline-powered sports car brands like Porsche and Lamborghini.

Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe

Since Tesla’s original forfeiture of his free energy project, ownership of the Wardenclyffe property has passed through numerous hands. Several attempts have been made to preserve it, but efforts to declare it a national historic site failed in 1967, 1976, and 1994.

Then, in 2008, a group called the Tesla Science Center (TSC) was formed with the intention of purchasing the property and turning it into a museum dedicated to the inventor’s work. In 2009, the Wardenclyffe site went on the market for nearly $1.6 million, and for the next several years, the TSC worked diligently to raise funds for its purchase. In 2012, public interest in the project peaked when Matthew Inman of TheOatmeal.com collaborated with the TSC in an Internet fundraising effort, ultimately receiving enough contributions to acquire the site in May 2013.

Wardenclyffe Tower finally joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. Work on its restoration is still in progress. A $20 million redevelopment broke ground in April 2023, but those efforts were complicated by large fire that November. The site is closed to the public “for the foreseeable future” for reasons of safety and preservation, according to the Tesla Science Center.

• Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
• I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.
• The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Famous Inventors

Frederick Jones

Lonnie Johnson

11 Famous Black Inventors Who Changed Your Life

Lewis Howard Latimer

Nikola Tesla's Secrets to Longevity

Garrett Morgan

Sarah Boone

Henry Blair

Alfred Nobel

Johannes Gutenberg

The Best Books About Inventors

Premium Content

• HISTORY MAGAZINE

Edison and Tesla's cutthroat 'Current War' ushered in the electric age

A technological battle burned hot between these two geniuses and their competing visions for the future of electricity.

In 1891 a tall, dark, and handsome man strode onto the stage in the lecture hall at Columbia University in New York City. Grasping a brass ball in each hand, the man touched the terminals of a high-voltage, high-frequency transformer (what is today called a Tesla coil). For a moment, 250,000 volts raced across the surface of his body, causing him to be surrounded by what one newspaper called “the Effulgent Glory of Myriad Tongues of Electric Flame.”

Yet after a few moments, the man stepped away from the apparatus, the electrical aura dissipated, and to the delight of the audience, he was unharmed. Who was this man and why did he take this risk?

The man was Nikola Tesla, inventor of the alternating current (AC) motor. Tesla took the risk to demonstrate the safety of AC. For the past several years, the Edison Electric Light Company had been waging a campaign against AC. Its direct current (DC) systems had been losing market share to Tesla’s friends at the Westinghouse Electric Company, and in response, the Edison group had decided to challenge the safety of AC through sensational stories in the newspapers. Tesla hoped, through his dramatic demonstration, to disarm the negative publicity. In the late 1880s, when electricity was the“Wild West”of technology, no one knew what kind of system was going to succeed.

In 1876, tired of arguing with Newark landlords, Edison decided to build his own laboratory in the tiny village of Menlo Park, New Jersey, located 25 miles southwest of New York City. Working with craftsmen and scientists, Edison turned out “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” Among the big things coming out of tiny Menlo Park were an improved telephone transmitter, the phonograph, and, of course, the incandescent lamp. Even though his years in Menlo Park were productive, Edison moved to New York City in 1882 to manage his new lighting enterprise, and Menlo Park was abandoned.

Frequently, technological controversies—the race between two inventions vying for widespread acceptance—are resolved through rational means: one invention might be cheaper than the other, another could be accepted because it’s safer than the alternative, and still other inventions succeed because of standards set by engineers or government regulators.

Yet every so often, controversies don’t work out so neatly, and that’s what happened when Tesla and Edison fought over the future of electric power distribution. It was a battle that involved gruesome demonstrations, juvenile name-calling, and attempts to outlaw AC. In the end, though, cooler engineering heads prevailed, and, because of its ability to distribute electric power widely and cheaply, AC won the day.

Let there be light

The common belief that Thomas Edison singlehandedly invented electric lighting in 1879 isn’t true. The first electric light was the arc light, invented by Sir Humphry Davy in 1807. Inspired by the electric battery invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800, Davy had built a huge electric battery in the basement of the Royal Institution in London. To demonstrate the power of his battery, Davy connected the battery terminals to two carbon rods. When he separated the carbons by a tiny distance, the current jumped the gap and gave off a bright light. Over the next 50 years (1810s-1860s), inventors worked to develop arc lamps with electromechanical regulators that maintained the exact gap needed between the carbons to create the bright light. But their efforts were limited as long as they had to rely on batteries; to expand, they needed a new source of electric current.

That new source was the dynamo or generator. In 1831 Michael Faraday (who had started his career as Davy’s lab assistant) showed that if you moved a conductor through a magnetic field where the motion was at right angles to the magnetic field, then a current would be induced in the conductor. Seizing on Faraday’s principle of electromagnetic induction, ingenious instrument makers began fashioning new machines that could be cranked by hand or powered by a steam engine to produce a strong electric current. (See also: Where do new ideas come from? )

For Hungry Minds

The possibility of using arc lights to illuminate streets and large buildings spurred other electricians to improve the generator, and in 1876, Charles Brush in Cleveland designed a DC generator that powered four arc lights in a series circuit. Brush’s powerful lights were used to illuminate streets, factories, and shops, including Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia.

Arc lighting was great for illuminating streets and large buildings. Indeed, it’s still used today in the powerful searchlights that are beamed skyward to announce the opening of a new store or movie.

Edison and incandescent lighting

But arc lighting was not useful if one wanted a smaller, softer electric light. Recognizing that customers would buy an electric light similar to existing gas lights, Edison decided in 1878 to drop his work at Menlo Park on the telephone and phonograph and plunge into a field he knew nothing about—electric lighting. ( See which of Thomas Edison's predictions about the future came true. )

To create a smaller lamp, Edison decided to rely on incandescence—an object’s ability to glow when heated. Once it reaches a critical temperature, the object not only glows but can emit bright light. To take advantage of incandescence, Edison experimented initially with platinum. Because this metal has a high melting point, Edison assumed that he could pass a current through a platinum filament, and the heat would cause the filament to incandesce. However, he discovered that oxygen attacked and weakened the platinum when it was heated. To overcome this problem, Edison placed the metal filament in a vacuum bulb.

While the vacuum improved the performance of his lamps, platinum was still too costly and also had a low electrical resistance, which meant his future system would need large and expensive copper cables. Fortunately, Edison realized that he could overcome the need for large copper distribution mains by increasing the resistance of each lamp and putting them in parallel circuits.

The challenge now became finding a high-resistance filament. For several months in 1879, Edison and his team tried dozens of materials, only to find that the lampblack carbon Edison had been using in his telephone transmitters was the ideal material. As one newspaper report described the Eureka moment:

Sitting one night in his laboratory reflecting on some of the unfinished details, Edison began abstractedly rolling between his fingers a piece of compressed lampblack until it had become a slender thread. Happening to glance at it, the idea occurred to him that it might give good results as a burner if made incandescent. A few minutes later the experiment was tried, and to the inventor’s gratification, satisfactory, although not surprising results were obtained. Further experiments were made, with altered forms and composition of the substance, each experiment demonstrating that the inventor was upon the right track.

In October 1879 Edison and his staff conducted their first successful experiments by putting a carbon filament in a vacuum, and they were able to bring it to incandescence since there was no oxygen to cause the filament to burn. By New Year’s Eve, Edison was demonstrating lamps using carbonized cardboard filaments to large crowds at his Menlo Park laboratory. ( Watch Thomas Edison reflect on the concept of genius and Nikola Tesla in Nat Geo's 2015 documentary. )

But to commercialize his incandescent lamp, Edison now had to design an entire electrical system to power it, which he modeled after the gas lighting systems used in large cities. Gas systems included central stations, underground conductors, meters, and lamp fixtures. Edison built his first central station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan in 1882. The area included the Wall Street financial district and the offices of New York’s newspapers, ensuring that Edison had access to both financiers and the media.

Before installing the station, he had his men survey the district to find out how many gas and kerosene lamps were used that might be replaced by his new lights. To offset the high costs of the copper mains needed to carry power to his lights, Edison designed his DC system for densely populated urban centers, and it was most efficient serving customers within a mile of the central station.

THE BIG BUSINESS OF INVENTION

To manufacture and market his incandescent lamp, Edison knew he needed the infrastructure to support it. He designed an entire system to power the light bulb, but he didn’t stop there. A savvy businessman, Edison founded companies to manufacture all the parts needed for his DC system in the early 1880s; he established the Edison Lamp Works, which was renamed the Edison Electric Lamp Company, Edison Machine Works, and several other companies to produce lamps, generators, conductors, and meters. Despite losing the battle of the currents over the next few years, Edison’s companies endured. In 1889 they combined to form Edison General Electric, which subsequently became General Electric.

Rise of alternating current

Edison was right that there was a huge market for smaller electric lights that could take the place of gas lamps, and he enjoyed significant profits from his incandescent system through the 1880s. Although Edison pioneered the development of incandescent lighting, he was unable in the early 1880s to keep rival inventors from entering this lucrative market. But the biggest challenge facing Edison was the fact that his system was only economical in towns and cities where there was a densely populated downtown—in those situations, there were enough customers who could offset the cost of laying the copper mains required for his system.

Yet in America, there were numerous towns that had the money for electric lighting but the population was too spread out to warrant installing an Edison system. Whoever could tap into this larger market was sure to make a fortune!

Recognizing this, George Westinghouse decided to develop an alternating current (AC) lighting system. Westinghouse reckoned that if he raised the voltage (say to 1,000 volts) used to transmit the current, he could reduce the size of the copper mains. However, since bringing 1,000 volts into people’s houses could be dangerous, Westinghouse had his engineers borrow a device invented in Europe, the transformer, which could step down the voltage from 1,000 to 110 V.

But transformers only worked with alternating current, meaning that Westinghouse’s new system would be a radical departure from Edison’s prevailing DC system. In Edison’s DC system, the voltage was constant (typically 110 V), which was relatively safe for consumers. Installation of DC systems was straightforward because linemen could rely on the practices commonly used in DC telephone and telegraph systems.

In the new Westinghouse AC system, however, the voltage on the transmission lines would alternate between a maximum of a positive 1,000 and negative 1,000 volts, meaning that there was greater danger of electrocution for linemen stringing the new power lines. The higher voltages also demanded that Westinghouse Electric engineers needed to develop better insulation and new safety measures. And because AC could transmit power economically over longer distances, it was worthwhile to address these safety issues.

So, circa 1887, AC looked very promising to electrical engineers. Yet they soon realized that they had an economic problem on their hands. Ideally, an AC system should cover an entire city but that meant that the power plant and network would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and to offset that investment, it would be good if the plant could deliver electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To do that, engineers realized they would need a motor that would consume power during the day—a motor that could be used in streetcars, factories, elevators, and all sorts of applications.

Tesla and the AC motor

At this critical juncture—1887—a tall, dark, and handsome man turned up with just the right invention, an AC motor. His name was Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was born in 1856 to a Serbian family living in what is today Croatia. Tesla’s father was a Serbian Orthodox priest who hoped his son would follow in his footsteps. As a teenager, however, Nikola was stirred by a faith in science and instead studied engineering at the Joanneum Polytechnic School in Graz, Austria. ( Here are five surprising facts about Nikola Tesla. )

At Graz, Tesla became interested in developing a new electric motor. All motors have two sets of electromagnets. One set is stationary (called the stator) and the other is mounted on a rotating shaft (called the rotor). Adjusting the current fed to each set can create similar magnetic poles facing each other in the stator and rotor. When that happens, the two sets of magnets repel each other, and the shaft of the motor will turn.

While watching how a DC motor sparked during a demonstration in his physics class, Tesla suggested that the commutator (the rotating switch feeding electricity to the rotor in the motor) should be eliminated. His physics professor thought he was crazy to propose such a motor, but Tesla persisted. Over the next few years, Tesla puzzled about how to make a sparkfree motor. Rather than build an actual motor, Tesla pictured everything in his mind. In 1882, while living in Budapest, Tesla hit upon the perfect idea during a walk in a city park. Rather than changing the magnetic poles in the rotor, he envisioned the idea of using a rotating magnetic field in his motor.

Before Tesla, inventors had always designed electric motors so that the magnetic field of the stator was kept constant and the magnetic field in the rotor was changed by means of a commutator. Tesla’s insight was a reverse of standard practice. In his motor, Tesla got exactly the right sequence by switching the current on and off in the individual electromagnets in the stator, thus creating a rotating magnetic field. As the magnetic field in the stator rotated, it would induce an opposing electric field in the rotor, thus causing it to turn. Tesla surmised in Budapest that the rotating magnetic field could be created using AC instead of DC, but at the time he did not know how to accomplish this.

TESLA’S WORLD POWER PLAN

Tesla's most famous lab, Wardenclyffe, was located on Long Island. In 1901 J. P. Morgan loaned Tesla $150,000 to fund a plan for broadcasting power around the world. Famous architect Stanford White designed the main brick building, in which electric current waves would be generated before traveling via cables to a nearby tower and underground shaft. There, the tower functioned as a gigantic Tesla coil, increasing the current to millions of volts and sending it down the shaft to propagate through the Earth’s crust. Tesla believed that consumers would tap these subterranean currents in order to power lights and motors. He was also confident that everyone would carry a small receiver, “no bigger than a pocket watch,” which could receive news and telephone calls. Unfortunately, Tesla couldn’t secure more funding to continue his work. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1905 and was forced to give Wardenclyffe to his creditors. Today it is being restored with the support of thousands of Tesla fans, including Elon Musk.

Over the next five years, Tesla struggled to acquire the practical knowledge needed to perfect his motor. After helping install a telephone exchange in Budapest, he moved to Paris to work for the Continental Edison Company installing lighting systems in major European cities. In 1884 Tesla was transferred to the Edison Machine Works in New York. There, he had little personal contact with Edison and was assigned the task of designing an arc lighting system. After a payment dispute over his designs, Tesla quit in disgust.

You May Also Like

This ancient society helped build the modern world.

Meet the inventor of the Bloodmobile

IVF revolutionized fertility. Will these new methods do the same?

Working with backers from Rahway, New Jersey, Tesla introduced his own arc lighting system, but the company soon folded and Tesla was forced to work as a ditchdigger. In the midst of hardship, though, he mustered the energy needed to file a patent for a thermomagnetic motor. This invention attracted the attention of Charles F. Peck and Alfred S. Brown, who had made a fortune on Wall Street. Intrigued by Tesla’s inventions, Peck and Brown rented a laboratory for Tesla in downtown Manhattan in 1886. ( Can you put names to the faces of these 13 titans of the arts and sciences? )

Tesla devoted himself to perfecting the thermomagnetic motor, but when it proved unworkable, Peck encouraged him to return to his AC motor. Building on his vision in Budapest, Tesla now experimented with using several alternating currents in his motor. In doing so, he was a maverick since engineers at Westinghouse Electric and elsewhere used only one alternating current in their systems. In 1887 Tesla discovered that he could produce a rotating magnetic field by using two separate alternating currents fed to pairs of coils on opposing sides of the stator. Modern engineers would say that Tesla’s motor was running on“two-phase current.” Elated that he was finally able to make his rotating magnetic field work, Tesla filed patents broadly covering AC motors as well as the idea that multiphase AC could transmit power over long distances.

As it became clear that Tesla had come up with a promising AC motor, his patrons began to think about how to promote it. For Peck and Brown, the name of the game was not to manufacture Tesla’s motor but rather to sell the patents to the highest bidder. To get the right “buzz” going about Tesla’s motor, Peck and Brown arranged for Tesla to give a lecture in 1888 at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Their plan worked. Following this lecture, George Westinghouse purchased Tesla’s patents for $200,000; in today’s dollars, this deal would be worth $5 million.

Battle of the currents

Now equipped with an AC system that could power lamps and motors, Westinghouse eagerly took on his major rival, the Edison Electric Light Company. In particular, Westinghouse went after contracts for the very places that the Edison DC system could not serve—the towns and cities where the population was spread out over a wide area. Drawing on the fortune he had made manufacturing railroad air brakes and signal systems, Westinghouse underbid Edison in competing for contracts. Indeed, determined to catch up with Edison, Westinghouse frequently offered to build new power stations below cost.

The Westinghouse tactics appalled Edison. Born and raised in the Midwest, he had a simple view of business deals: A customer should be charged what it actually cost to make the equipment plus a modest profit. Intentionally losing money to undercut a rival seemed unfair. In 1888, after losing major contracts for lighting Denver and Minneapolis, one of Edison’s managers, Francis Hastings, decided to retaliate by attacking the safety of the Westinghouse Electric AC system.

As the first AC systems were installed, there were inevitably accidents in which linemen were electrocuted by the higher voltages used in these new systems. With a little encouragement from Hastings and the Edison company, newspapers quickly picked up these grisly AC accidents. To accelerate the process, however, Hastings found a willing ally in Harold P. Brown. A consulting engineer who had somehow been double-crossed by Westinghouse Electric, Brown was eager for revenge. With the blessing of the Edison managers, Brown organized demonstrations for reporters at Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, in which stray dogs were electrocuted using Westinghouse Electric AC equipment.

Beginning in the 18th century, legal thinkers in Europe and America came to believe that execution for crimes should be more humane, if possible. In the United States a series of botched hangings in the 1880s prompted reformers to seek a new form of capital punishment. In Buffalo, New York, Dr. Alfred P. Southwick, a dentist, undertook a study of how much electricity was required to kill stray dogs and then designed a system to electrocute criminals. An initial jolt of electricity was passed through the head to cause unconsciousness and brain death and a second jolt caused fatal damage to the vital organs. Southwick’s electric chair was first used for capital punishment in 1890.

Brown’s biggest publicity coup was to arrange for AC to be used for capital punishment. In New York State physicians and reformers had become concerned that hanging was a cruel form of punishment and were seeking an alternate method of execution. Brown convinced them that electrocution by AC was more humane than hanging, and surreptitiously he purchased a used Westinghouse Electric AC generator. Installed at Auburn prison, this Westinghouse machine was used to execute a convicted murderer, William Kemmler, in 1890. Naturally, Brown and the Edison company made sure the headlines read that Kemmler had been“Westinghoused.”

Brown personally dared George Westinghouse to take shocks from his AC generator at increasing voltages while Brown took shocks from an Edison DC machine. Perhaps worried that his friend Westinghouse might take up this challenge, Tesla decided during his 1891 lecture to demonstrate the safety of AC by taking 250,000 volts across his body. Because of the high frequency of the current generated by his newly invented Tesla coil, the current traveled across the surface of Tesla’s body and did not harm his internal organs.

Complementing this publicity campaign, the Edison company also fought Westinghouse on a legislative front. Representatives of the Edison group lobbied several state legislatures to limit the maximum voltage of electrical systems to 300 volts, and they came very close to getting laws passed in Virginia and Ohio.

AC prevails

But while the Edison organization fought in the court of public opinion, Westinghouse and Tesla prevailed in the realm of engineering and business. First, the Westinghouse company decided to dramatically demonstrate its AC system by providing power to tens of thousands of lights at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Visitors not only were enthralled by the beauty of the nighttime illumination but also grew convinced that AC was the future.

Second, in parallel with the World’s Fair, Tesla worked behind the scenes to convince the Wall Street financiers of a giant hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls that they should use AC to transmit power to cities across New York State. Through a series of letters and meetings, Tesla persuaded the bankers that AC would allow them to provide electricity to a wider geographic area. At the same time, Tesla kept Westinghouse informed of how the Niagara project was progressing so that Westinghouse could bid on the contract for designing and equipping the power station. In recognition of his contributions to Niagara, the bankers asked Tesla to speak at the banquet celebrating the opening of the power plant in 1896.

Powering the White City

The World's Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. Its 200 buildings attracted 27 million visitors who came to ride on the first Ferris wheel, travel on a moving sidewalk, and watch movies on Edison’s kinetoscope. Known as the White City, the fair’s gleaming buildings prompted city planners across America to beautify their cities with elaborate city halls, boulevards, and parks during the progressive era. Westinghouse Electric succeeded in getting the contract to light the fair and designed their own ingenious lamp for the fair’s pavilions. To power the lights, Westinghouse installed twenty-four 500-horsepower generators along with the transformers and equipment to demonstrate the versatility and efficiency of its system.

After Niagara, the basic pattern of the American electrical industry was established. For much of the 20th century, AC power has been generated and distributed on a massive scale by investor-owned utilities for use by businesses and residential customers. Because the capital costs of building new plants is so high and the marginal profits in selling power is so low, utilities have generally sought to build ever larger networks—first across cities, then entire states, and eventually regions covering multiple states. In doing so, they continue to rely on the multiphase AC technology pioneered by Tesla and Westinghouse.

Related Topics

• HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION

The Viking origins of your Bluetooth devices

The window into Leonardo da Vinci's creativity? His sketchbooks

Your daily life is probably shaped by these 12 people—do you know their names?

Do earthquake warning apps really work?

The strange histories of the stuff we put in—and on—our bodies

• Environment
• Perpetual Planet

History & Culture

• History & Culture
• History Magazine
• Mind, Body, Wonder
• Paid Content
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Nat Geo Home
• Attend a Live Event
• Book a Trip
• Inspire Your Kids
• Shop Nat Geo
• Visit the D.C. Museum
• Learn About Our Impact
• Support Our Mission
• Advertise With Us
• Customer Service
• Renew Subscription
• Manage Your Subscription
• Work at Nat Geo
• Sign Up for Our Newsletters
• Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

Nikola Tesla – The Genius Who Lit the World and Saw the Future

• by history tools
• November 19, 2023

Nikola Tesla was one of the most forward-thinking inventors and engineers in history whose pioneering work with electricity literally lit up the modern world. Though underappreciated in his own time, Tesla created hundreds of groundbreaking innovations that fundamentally advanced technology and changed the course of history. This complete biography explores Tesla’s storied life, brilliant vision, and lasting impact.

Introduction to the Master of Electricity

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia and displayed astonishing mental abilities and imagination from an early age. His lifelong passion for energy and electricity was evident even as a child when he created his own tiny waterwheels and turbines. Tesla went on to study math, physics, and mechanics in his teen years at advanced schools in Austria and Germany, showing great promise. After graduating, he worked with Thomas Edison on DC power projects for a period but soon struck out on his own to champion AC electricity instead.

Tesla constructed his first AC motors in the late 1880s and partnered with George Westinghouse to commercialize AC power. This set the stage for an epic technology battle against Edison called the “War of the Currents” which Tesla and Westinghouse ultimately won, ensuring AC became the global standard. Throughout his life, Tesla discovered groundbreaking electrical innovations that form the basis of modern power and communication systems. Though he died in obscurity, Tesla‘s inventionsUNDOUBTEDLY constituted some of the most important technological advances in history.

Early Life and Education – The Making of a Genius

Childhood of creativity and tragedy.

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10th, 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother Djuka Mandic was a homemaker and amateur inventor who created household appliances to help with daily tasks. Tesla inherited much of his inventive spirit from his mother. Tesla was one of five children, though his older brother died tragically in an accident when Nikola was five years old. The loss deeply impacted him and shaped his obsessive and eccentric personality later in life.

As a child, Tesla displayed astonishing creativity and visualization abilities. He could supposedly perform complex mathematical equations entirely in his mind without writing them down. Young Tesla was also captivated by thunderstorms and lightning. He made sketches of inventions like turbines and engines, even constructing a tiny waterwheel as a boy by observing the local river. His interests foreshadowed his future passion for electricity and engineering.

Immersive Education Shapes a Visionary Mind

In 1870, Tesla attended the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz on an academic scholarship where he studied physics, mechanics, and mathematics. There, Tesla became fascinated with the Gramme dynamo which generated direct current electricity while also exploring fields like electrical engineering before they were widely taught. In his second year, Tesla stopped attending lectures and studied independently instead, astonishing professors with his brilliance but also worrying them with his unusual study habits and solitary nature.

After leaving Graz without a degree in 1878, Tesla contracted cholera and seemingly had intense visions during his recovery where he claimed to have unlocked the secrets of alternating current in a moment of insight. The following year, he attended the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague deepening his education even further and receiving a degree in physics in 1882. Tesla’s academic efforts clearly shaped his boundary-pushing innovations down the line.

Early Career – Harnessing the Magic of Electricity

Fresh out of school in 1882, Tesla began working for the Continental Edison Company in Paris. He focused on improving direct current generators and motors. At the time, Edison’s DC system was the only existing power system. After two years, Tesla departed for America to meet Edison himself and share his ideas.

Working With his Hero-turned-Rival, Edison

In 1884, Tesla arrived in New York and was hired to work directly for Thomas Edison. The two inventors got along well initially, and Edison was impressed by Tesla‘s skill. But things began deteriorating as Tesla pushed for more pay and Edison denied him. Edison reportedly offered $50,000 if Tesla could improve his inefficient direct current dynamos. Tesla succeeded but Edison dismissed the offer as a joke, causing bad blood between them.

Tesla left Edison‘s company after just one year of service. But this marked the start of Tesla’s pioneering research into alternating current electricity which would become his claim to fame. The messy split also sparked an intense rivalry with Edison that would culminate in the War of the Currents.

Discovering Alternating Current

In 1885, Tesla secured funding for his own startup focused on arc lighting systems and began developing his own AC motors and transformers. While working with high frequency alternators, he rediscovered the rotating magnetic field principle that essentially forms the basis of AC machinery today.

Tesla acquired several patents for AC motors, generators, and transformers in 1887-1888. His innovations relied on polyphase alternating currents rather than direct currents to distribute power more efficiently over long distances. Tesla gave acclaimed lectures to engineers describing the advantages of AC over DC. His ideas quickly caught the attention of American entrepreneur George Westinghouse.

Winning the War of the Currents – AC vs DC

George Westinghouse recognized the merits of Tesla’s AC approach and purchased his polyphase system patents in 1888 which included AC motors and transformers. This decision set the stage for a battle over the future of electricity between Westinghouse backing AC and Thomas Edison promoting DC. The stakes were enormous given the two incompatible electrical standards.

Edison wielded his broad patents and influence to block adoption of AC as much as possible, even staging public stunts to portray AC as dangerous. But thanks to Tesla’s innovations, Westinghouse prevailed when AC was chosen to power the Chicago World Fair of 1893 illuminating over 200,000 lightbulbs. Niagara Falls also chose AC to generate their groundbreaking hydroelectric plant in 1895. AC proved capable of transmitting power over vastly greater distances than DC which required power stations every mile.

This victory by Westinghouse demonstrated the superiority of AC power which was quickly adopted as the standard. To this day, our homes and cities are powered by Tesla‘s polyphase AC system showing its profound impact. Tesla‘s innovations literally electrified the modern world.

Trailblazing Inventions – Fueling the Future

In addition to revolutionizing electric power, Tesla discovered countless groundbreaking inventions over his lifetime that changed the future of technology and paved the way for modern wireless communication.

Radio and Wireless Communication

Tesla is credited by many to have been the first person to transmit and receive radio signals when he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat in 1898. While Guglielmo Marconi won the Nobel Prize for radio in 1909, Tesla had developed the underlying principles two years earlier. Tesla predicted the coming age of wireless communication, stating:

“As I review the events of my past life I realize how subtle are the influences that shape our destinies…we can never fathom the marvellous complexity of the causes behind the daily incidents that pass before our eyes and their altered relationships.” (Tesla 1926)

Tesla also patented various fundamental radio circuits between 1896-1900 that formed the basis for modern radio engineering. Though Marconi is often viewed as the inventor of radio, clearly Tesla‘s groundwork was pivotal.

Remote Control

In 1898 at Madison Square Garden, Tesla demonstrated a boat controlled wirelessly using radio-like technology to the amazement of crowds. This was one of the earliest implementations of remote control technology. Tesla described the system as being wireless like “invisible waves” and foresaw remote control being used in all kinds of mechanical devices and vehicles in the future.

Working with high voltage electricity and vacuum tubes, Tesla created some of the first X-ray images in 1895. They were produced earlier than Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays which garnered him the first Nobel Prize in Physics. Though Tesla did not win that prize, his innovations contributed to the field.

Electric Motors

Tesla invented the first AC induction motor in 1883 exploiting rotating magnetic fields generated by alternating current. Induction motors are brushless motors that provide high efficiency and operational speeds. They are the most common type of AC motors in use today powering appliances, tools, conveyors, and more.

Neon Lights

While investigating gases, Tesla created fluorescent light bulbs that lit up when electricity passed through them. This discovery led to the development of neon signs and lighting. Tesla‘s innovations literally brightened up the world.

Laser Vision

Tesla proposed using high voltage electricity and tiny metal particles to produce beams of concentrated light. Essentially, he had envisioned laser technology before the first working laser was invented in 1960. This showed Tesla’s thinking was decades ahead of his time.

A Futurist Stalled by Business Failures

In addition to his AC system and visionary inventions, Tesla conceived of even more ambitious plans that were simply impossible with the technology of his era. He envisioned worldwide wireless transmission of electricity essentially turning the earth into a giant conductor. In 1901, he began constructing his Wardenclyffe Tower facility on Long Island to demonstrate wireless power transmission on a large scale and provide telecommunications. But unable to secure adequate funding from industrialists like J.P Morgan, Tesla had to abandon the unfinished project in 1905.

Tesla articulated many forward-thinking concepts like wireless networks, self-driving vehicles, smart homes, and AI. But his poor business skills and inability to gain investors meant many of these revolutionary technologies could only be realized later by others. While a brilliant scientist, Tesla lacked the entrepreneurial abilities of businessmen like Edison or Westinghouse to commercialize his ideas. Tesla lived the final decade of his life in poverty relying on the kindness of friends until passing in 1943.

Legacy – Illuminating the Modern Age

Though Tesla‘s pioneering technologies were not always recognized during his lifetime, his inventions legitimately transformed the world and remain integral to our electrical infrastructure today. He was a pivotal figure whose work ranks among the most important innovations in history. Tesla undisputably provided the key infrastructure enabling modern society to flourish. He electrified the world and saw the future more clearly than almost anyone.

Related posts:

• Who is Ben Horowitz, Silicon Valley‘s Billionaire Rainmaker?
• Robert Noyce – Complete Biography, History and Inventions
• What Does RGB Stand For? – A Complete History
• John Patterson — Complete Biography, History and Inventions
• Hello There! Let‘s Explore How Jabez Burns‘ Addometer Paved the Way for Modern Computing
• Samuel Kelso: Complete Biography, History, and Inventions
• Friedrich Kaufmann and the Trumpet Player: A Complete History
• The Integrated Circuit Revolution – How Jack Kilby‘s Microchip Changed the World

Nikola Tesla: Biography, Inventions & Quotes

Nikola Tesla is often called one of history’s most important inventors, one whose discoveries in the field of electricity were way ahead of his time and continue to influence technology today. Despite his accomplishments, however, Tesla died penniless and without the accolades that would he would ultimately earn over a century later.

The “genius who lit the world” is now commemorated with an electrical unit called the Tesla, has a place in the inventor’s hall of fame, streets, statues, and a prestigious engineer’s award in his name, but in life he wasn’t always so successful.

Brilliant scientist, terrible businessman

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in a town called Smiljan, today part of Croatia but then located within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest and his mother, despite not having any formal education, tinkered in machinery and was known for having a spectacular memory.

Tesla’s career as an inventor began early; while working at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, at the age of just 26, he is reported to have first sketched out the principles for a rotating magnetic field — an important idea still used in many electromechanical devices. This major achievement laid the groundwork for many of his future inventions, including the alternating current motor and ultimately led him to New York City in 1884, lured by Thomas Edison and his groundbreaking engineering factory, Edison Machine Works.

It is often said that as brilliant a scientist as Tesla was, he was an equally terrible businessman, unable (or possibly unwilling) to see the commercial value behind his ideas. Thomas Edison was both an inventor and a business mogul focused on the bottom line, and he often clashed with Tesla over methods and ideology. It was also unlikely, perhaps, that two minds so brilliant could coexist in peace for very long and, indeed, Tesla quit Edison Machine Works only a year later.

Tesla’s creativity was given free rein at the new laboratory he established, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing, where he experimented with early X-ray technology, electrical resonance, arc lamps and other ideas. Moves to Colorado and then back to New York coincided with other great scientific feats, including advances in turbine science, the installation of the first hydroelectric power station at Niagara Falls and, most importantly, the perfection of his alternating current system.

Through it all, the compulsive, eccentric and often sensational Tesla provided terrific sound bites for reporters, speaking frequently to the press about new, futuristic ideas up to a few years before his death, when he became a recluse. Tesla died in 1943, broke and alone in a New York City hotel room.

Tesla’s legacy has experienced a resurgence of sorts in recent years, thanks to a handful of supporters who have popularized his work in the media, in the hopes of having a Nikola Tesla science museum built on the grounds of a former laboratory on Long Island, New York.

Innumerable patents

The exact number of patents held by Tesla is disputed, as some likely remain undiscovered, historians believe. He is thought to be responsible for at least 300 inventions (many related to each other), in addition to countless unpatented ideas that he developed over the course of his career.

Alternating current

Perhaps Tesla’s most famous and important idea, alternating current (AC), was an answer to his old boss Edison’s inefficient — as Tesla put it — use of direct current (DC) in the new electric age. While DC power stations sent electricity flowing in one direction in a straight line, alternating currents change direction quickly, and could do so at a much higher voltage.

Indeed, Edison’s power lines that crisscrossed the Atlantic seaboard were short and weak due to DC, while AC was able to send electricity much farther afield. Though Thomas Edison had more resources and an established reputation, Tesla’s AC power grids eventually became the norm. Several dozen of Tesla’s patents were related to alternating current science.

The Tesla Coil

Since named for its inventor, this impressive machine transforms energy into extremely high voltage charges, creating powerful electrical fields capable of producing spectacular electrical arcs. Besides the lightning-bolt shows they can put on, Tesla Coils had very practical applications in wireless radio technology and some medical devices. Tesla experimented with his coils in the last years of the 19th century.

The true father of radio

Tesla tinkered with radio waves as early as 1892, debuting a radio wave-controlled boat in 1898 with great fanfare at an electrical exhibition at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Expanding on the technology, he patented more than a dozen ideas related to radio communication, before Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi leapt ahead of a financially unstable Tesla and completed the first transatlantic radio transmission (a bit of Morse code, sent from England to Newfoundland) on the back of Tesla’s science. Marconi and Tesla’s battle for intellectual recognition waged for decades before the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately revoked some of Marconi’s patents in 1943, restoring Tesla as the father of radio, at least legally.

Tesla quotes

“Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.” — "A Visit to Nikola Tesla" by Dragislav L. Petković in Politika (April 1927)

“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.” — “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” — “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

Further reading:

• Tesla Memorial Society

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

Giant 'rogue waves' of invisible matter might be disrupting the orbits of stars, new study hints

Can mirrors facing each other create infinite reflections?

'Quantum-inspired' laser computing is more effective than both supercomputing and quantum computing, startup claims

Most Popular

• 2 'The most critically harmful fungi to humans': How the rise of C. auris was inevitable
• 3 EV batteries could last much longer thanks to new capacitor with 19-times higher energy density that scientists created by mistake
• 4 Can mirrors facing each other create infinite reflections?
• 5 Space photo of the week: 'God's Hand' leaves astronomers scratching their heads
• 2 Space photo of the week: 'God's Hand' leaves astronomers scratching their heads
• 3 Why can't we see the far side of the moon?
• 4 Papua New Guineans, genetically isolated for 50,000 years, carry Denisovan genes that help their immune system, study suggests
• 5 Massive study of 8,000 cats reveals which breeds live longest

Biography Online

Nikola Tesla Biography

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was one of the greatest and most enigmatic scientists who played a key role in the development of electromagnetism and other scientific discoveries of his time. Despite his breathtaking number of patents and discoveries, his achievements were often underplayed during his lifetime.

Short Biography Nikola Tesla

Tesla was a bright student and in 1875 went to the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz. However, he left to gain employment in Marburg in Slovenia. Evidence of his difficult temperament sometimes manifested and after an estrangement from his family, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He later enrolled in the Charles Ferdinand University in Prague, but again he left before completing his degree.

During his early life, he experienced many periods of illness and periods of startling inspiration. Accompanied by blinding flashes of light, he would often visualise mechanical and theoretical inventions spontaneously. He had a unique capacity to visualise images in his head. When working on projects, he would rarely write down plans or scale drawings, but rely on the images in his mind.

In 1880, he moved to Budapest where he worked for a telegraph company. During this time, he became acquainted with twin turbines and helped develop a device that provided amplification for when using the telephone.

In 1882, he moved to Paris, where he worked for the Continental Edison Company. Here he improved various devices used by the Edison company. He also conceived the induction motor and devices that used rotating magnetic fields.

With a strong letter of recommendation, Tesla went to the United States in 1884 to work for the Edison Machine Works company. Here he became one of the chief engineers and designers. Tesla was given a task to improve the electrical system of direct current generators. Tesla claimed he was offered $50,000 if he could significantly improve the motor generators. However, after completing his task, Tesla received no reward. This was one of several factors that led to a deep rivalry and bitterness between Tesla and Thomas Edison . It was to become a defining feature of Tesla’s life and impacted his financial situation and prestige. This deep rivalry was also seen as a reason why neither Tesla or Edison was awarded a Nobel prize for their electrical discoveries.

Disgusted that he did not ever receive a pay rise, Tesla resigned, and for a short while, found himself having to gain employment digging ditches for the Edison telephone company.

In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, but it wasn’t a success as his backers didn’t support his faith in AC current.

In 1887, Tesla worked on a form of X-Rays. He was able to photograph the bones in his hand; he also became aware of the side-effects of using radiation. However, his work in this area gained little coverage, and much of his research was later lost in a fire at a New York warehouse.

“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up… His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.”

– Nikola Tesla,  Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)

In 1891, Tesla became an American citizen. This was also a period of great advances in electrical knowledge. Tesla demonstrated the potential for wireless energy transfer and the capacity for AC power generation. Tesla’s promotion of AC current placed him in opposition to Edison who sought to promote his Direct Current DC for electric power. Shortly before his death, Edison said his biggest mistake was spending so much time on DC current rather than the AC current Tesla had promoted.

In 1899, Tesla moved to Colorado Springs where he had the space to develop high voltage experiments. This included a variety of radio and electrical transmission experiments. He left after a year in Colorado Springs, and the buildings were later sold to pay off debts.

In 1900, Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. This was an ambitious project costing $150,000, a fortune at the time.

In 1904, the US patent office reversed his earlier patent for the radio, giving it instead to G. Marconi . This infuriated Tesla who felt he was the rightful inventor. He began a long, expensive and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to fight the decision. Marconi went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909. This seemed to be a repeating theme in Tesla’s life: a great invention that he failed to personally profit from.

Nikola Tesla also displayed fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs.

Tesla was in many ways an eccentric and genius. His discoveries and inventions were unprecedented. Yet, he was often ostracised for his erratic behaviour (during his later years, he developed a form of obsessive-compulsive behaviour). He was not frightened of suggesting unorthodox ideas such as radio waves from extraterrestrial beings. His ideas, lack of personal finance and unorthodox behaviour put him outside the scientific establishment and because of this, his ideas were sometimes slow to be accepted or used.

“All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.”

– Nikola Tesla, A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Outside of science, he had many artistic and literary friends; in later life he became friendly with Mark Twain , inviting him to his laboratory. He also took an interest in poetry, literature and modern Vedic thought, in particular being interested in the teachings and vision of the modern Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda . Tesla was brought up an Orthodox Christian, although he later didn’t consider himself a believer in the true sense. He retained an admiration for Christianity and Buddhism.

“For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one.”

– Nikola Tesla,  The Problem of Increasing Human Energy (1900)

As well as considering scientific issues, Tesla was thoughtful about greater problems of war and conflict, and he wrote a book on the subject called   A Means for Furthering Peace (1905).  This expressed his views on how conflict may be avoided and humanity learn to live in harmony.

“What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.”

– Nikola Tesla,  My Inventions (1919)

Personal life

Tesla was famous for working hard and throwing himself into his work. He ate alone and rarely slept, sleeping as little as two hours a day.  He remained unmarried and claimed that his chastity was helpful to his scientific abilities. In later years, he became a vegetarian, living on only milk, bread, honey, and vegetable juices.

Tesla passed away on 7 January 1943, in a New York hotel room.  He was 86 years old.

After his death, in 1960 the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic field strength the Tesla in his honour.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Nikola Tesla” , Oxford, UK – www.biographyonline.net . Last updated 25th September 2017

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age at Amazon

Tesla: The Man who invented the Twentieth Century

Key Inventions of Nikola Tesla

• Development in electromagnetism
• Theoretical work on Alternating Current (AC)
• Tesla Coil – magnifying transmitter
• Polyphase system of electrical distribution
• Patent for an early form of radio
• Wireless electrical transfer
• Devices for lightning protection
• Concepts for electrical vehicles

Important contributions in

• Early models of radar
• Remote control
• Nuclear physics

Related pages

Inventions that changed the world  – Famous inventions that made a great difference to the progress of the world, including aluminium, the telephone and the printing press.

External pages

• Tesla Museum

Biography of Nikola Tesla, Serbian-American Inventor

Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

• People & Events
• Fads & Fashions
• Early 20th Century
• American History
• African American History
• African History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
• Latin American History
• Medieval & Renaissance History
• Military History
• Women's History
• B.S., Texas A&M University

Nikola Tesla (July 10, 1856–January 7, 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, and futurist. As the holder of nearly 300 patents, Tesla is best known for his role in developing the modern three-phase alternating current (AC) electric power supply system and for his invention of the Tesla coil, an early advancement in the field of radio transmission.

During the 1880s, Tesla and Thomas Edison , inventor and champion of direct electrical current (DC), would become embattled in the “War of the Currents” over whether Tesla’s AC or Edison’s DC would become the standard current used in long-distance transmission of electrical power.

Fast Facts: Nikola Tesla

• Known For: Development of alternating current (AC) electrical power
• Born: July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia)
• Parents: Milutin Tesla and Đuka Tesla
• Died: January 7, 1943 in New York City, New York
• Education: Austrian Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria (1875)
• Patents: US381968A —Electro-magnetic motor, US512,340A —coil for electro-magnets
• Awards and Honors : Edison Medal (1917), Inventor’s Hall of Fame (1975)
• Notable Quote : “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

Early Life and Education

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan in the Austrian Empire (now Croatia) to his Serbian father Milutin Tesla, an Eastern Orthodox priest, and his mother Đuka Tesla, who invented small household appliances and had the ability to memorize lengthy Serbian epic poems. Tesla credited his mother for his own interest in inventing and photographic memory. He had four siblings, a brother Dane, and sisters Angelina, Milka, and Marica. 

In 1870, Tesla started high school at the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac, Austria. He recalled that his physics teacher’s demonstrations of electricity made him want “to know more of this wonderful force.” Able to do integral calculus in his head, Tesla completed high school in just three years, graduating in 1873.

Determined to pursue a career in engineering, Tesla enrolled at the Austrian Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, in 1875. It was here that Tesla studied a Gramme dynamo, an electrical generator that produces direct current. Observing that the dynamo functioned like an electric motor when the direction of its current was reversed, Tesla began thinking of ways this alternating current could be used in industrial applications. Though he never graduated—as was not uncommon then—Tesla posted excellent grades and was even given a letter from the dean of the technical faculty addressed to his father stating, “Your son is a star of first rank.”

Feeling that chastity would help him focus on his career, Tesla never married or had any known romantic relationships. In her 2001 book, “ Tesla: Man Out of Time ,” biographer Margaret Cheney writes that Tesla felt himself to be unworthy of women, considering them to be superior to him in every way. Later in life, however, he publicly expressed strong dislike what he called the “new woman,” women he felt were abandoning their femininity in an attempt to dominate men.

The Path to Alternating Current

In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he gained practical experience as the chief electrician at the Central Telephone Exchange. In 1882, Tesla was hired by the Continental Edison Company in Paris where he worked in the emerging industry of installing the direct current-powered indoor incandescent lighting system patented by Thomas Edison in 1879. Impressed by Tesla’s mastery of engineering and physics, the company’s management soon had him designing improved versions of generating dynamos and motors and fixing problems at other Edison facilities throughout France and Germany.

When the manager of the Continental Edison facility in Paris was transferred back to the United States in 1884, he asked that Tesla be brought to the U.S. as well. In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States and went to work at the Edison Machine Works in New York City, where Edison’s DC-based electrical lighting system was fast becoming the standard. Just six months later, Tesla quit Edison after a heated dispute over unpaid wages and bonuses. In his diary, Notebook from the Edison Machine Works: 1884-1885 , Tesla marked the end of the amicable relationship between the two great inventors. Across two pages, Tesla wrote in large letters, “Good By to the Edison Machine Works.”

By March 1885, Tesla, with the financial backing of businessmen Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail, started his own lighting utility company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. Instead of Edison’s incandescent lamp bulbs, Tesla’s company installed a DC-powered arc lighting system he had designed while working at Edison Machine Works. While Tesla’s arc light system was praised for its advanced features, his investors, Lane and Vail, had little interest in his ideas for perfecting and harnessing alternating current. In 1886, they abandoned Tesla’s company to start their own company. The move left Tesla penniless, forcing him to survive by taking electrical repair jobs and digging ditches for $2.00 per day. Of this period of hardship, Tesla would later recall, “My high education in various branches of science, mechanics, and literature seemed to me like a mockery.”

During his time of near destitution, Tesla’s resolve to prove the superiority of alternating current over Edison’s direct current grew even stronger.

Alternating Current and the Induction Motor

In April 1887, Tesla, along with his investors, Western Union telegraph superintendent Alfred S. Brown and attorney Charles F. Peck, founded the Tesla Electric Company in New York City for the purpose of developing new types of electric motors and generators.

Tesla soon developed a new type of electromagnetic induction motor that ran on alternating current. Patented in May 1888, Tesla’s motor proved to be simple, dependable, and not subject to the constant need for repairs that plagued direct current-driven motors at the time.

In July 1888, Tesla sold his patent for AC-powered motors to Westinghouse Electric Corporation, owned by electrical industry pioneer George Westinghouse. In the deal, which proved financially lucrative for Tesla, Westinghouse Electric got the rights to market Tesla’s AC motor and agreed to hire Tesla as a consultant.

With Westinghouse now backing AC and Edison backing DC, the stage was set for what would become known as “The War of the Currents.”

The War of the Currents: Tesla vs. Edison

Recognizing the economic and technical superiority of alternating current to his direct current for long-distance power distribution, Edison undertook an unprecedently aggressive public relations campaign to discredit AC as posing a deadly threat to the public—a force should never allow in their homes. Edison and his associates toured the U.S. presenting grizzly public demonstrations of animals being electrocuted with AC electricity. When New York State sought a faster, “more humane” alternative to hanging for executing condemned prisoners, Edison, though once a vocal opponent of capital punishment, recommended using AC-powered electrocution. In 1890, murderer William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in a Westinghouse AC generator-powered electric chair that had been secretly designed by one of Edison’s salesmen.

Despite his best efforts, Edison failed to discredit alternating current. In 1892, Westinghouse and Edison’s new company General Electric, competed head-to-head for the contract to supply electricity to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. When Westinghouse ultimately won the contract, the fair served as a dazzling public display of Tesla’s AC system.

On the tails of their success at the World’s Fair, Tesla and Westinghouse won a historic contract to build the generators for a new hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls. In 1896, the power plant began delivering AC electricity to Buffalo, New York, 26 miles away. In his speech at the opening ceremony of the power plant, Tesla said of the accomplishment, “It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.”

The success of the Niagara Falls power plant firmly established Tesla’s AC as the standard for the electric power industry, effectively ending the War of the Currents.

The Tesla Coil

In 1891, Tesla patented the Tesla coil, an electrical transformer circuit capable of producing high-voltage, low-current AC electricity. Though best-known today for its use in spectacular, lightening-spitting demonstrations of electricity, the Tesla coil was fundamental to the development of wireless communications. Still used in modern radio technology, the Tesla coil inductor was an essential part of many early radio transmission antennas.

Tesla would go on to use his Tesla coil in experiments with radio remote control, fluorescent lighting , x-rays , electromagnetism , and universal wireless power transmission. 

On July 30, 1891, the same year he patented his coil, the 35-year-old Tesla was sworn in as a naturalized United States citizen.

Radio Remote Control

At the 1898 Electrical Exposition in Boston’s Madison Square Gardens, Tesla demonstrated an invention he called a “telautomaton,” a three-foot-long, radio-controlled boat propelled by a small battery-powered motor and rudder. Members of the amazed crowd accused Tesla of using telepathy, a trained monkey, or pure magic to steer the boat.

Finding little consumer interest in radio-controlled devices, Tesla tried unsuccessfully to sell his “Teleautomatics” idea to the US Navy as a type of radio-controlled torpedo. However, during and after World War I (1914-1918), the militaries of many countries, including the United States incorporated it.

Wireless Power Transmission

From 1901 through 1906, Tesla spent most of his time and savings working on arguably his most ambitious, if a far-fetched, project—an electrical transmission system he believed could provide free energy and communications throughout the world without the need for wires. 

In 1901, with the backing of investors headed by financial giant J. P. Morgan, Tesla began building a power plant and massive power transmission tower at his

Wardenclyffe laboratory on Long Island, New York. Seizing on the then commonly-held belief that the Earth’s atmosphere conducted electricity, Tesla envisioned a globe-spanning network of power transmitting and receiving antennas suspended by balloons 30,000 feet (9,100 m) in the air. 

However, as Tesla’s project drug on, its sheer enormity caused his investors to doubt its plausibility and withdraw their support. With his rival, Guglielmo Marconi—enjoying the substantial financial support of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison—was making great advances in his own radio transmission developments, Tesla was forced to abandon his wireless power project in 1906.

Later Life and Death

In 1922, Tesla, deeply in debt from his failed wireless power project, was forced to leave the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City where he had been living since 1900, and move into the more-affordable St. Regis Hotel. While living at the St. Regis, Tesla took to feeding pigeons on the windowsill of his room, often bringing weak or injured birds into his room to nurse them back to health.

Of his love for one particular injured pigeon, Tesla would write, “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”

By late 1923, the St. Regis evicted Tesla because of unpaid bills and complaints about the smell from keeping pigeons in his room. For the next decade, he would live in a series of hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills at each. Finally, in 1934, his former employer, Westinghouse Electric Company, began paying Tesla $125 per month as a “consulting fee,” as well as paying his rent at the Hotel New Yorker.

In 1937, at age 81, Tesla was knocked to the ground by a taxicab while crossing a street a few blocks from the New Yorker. Though he suffered a severely wrenched back and broken ribs, Tesla characteristically refused extended medical attention. While he survived the incident, the full extent of his injuries, from which he never fully recovered, was never known.

On January 7, 1943, Tesla died alone in his room at the New Yorker Hotel at the age of 86. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as coronary thrombosis, a heart attack.

On January 10, 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivered a eulogy to Tesla broadcast live over WNYC radio. On January 12, over 2,000 people attended Tesla’s funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Following the funeral, Tesla’s body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York.

With the United States then fully engaged in World War II ., fears that the Austrian-born inventor might have been in possession of devices or designs helpful to Nazi Germany , drove the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seize Tesla’s possessions after his death. However, the FBI reported finding nothing of interest, concluding that since about 1928, Tesla’s work had been “primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

In his 1944 book, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla , journalist, and historian John Joseph O’Neill wrote that Tesla claimed to have never slept more than two hours per night, “dozing” during the day instead to “recharge his batteries.” He was reported to have once spent 84 straight hours without sleep working in his laboratory.

It is believed that Tesla was granted around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions during his lifetime. While several of his patents remain unaccounted for or archived, he holds at least 278 known patents in 26 countries, mostly in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Tesla never attempted to patent many of his other inventions and ideas.

Today, Tesla’s legacy can be seen in multiple forms of popular culture, including movies, TV, video games and several genres of science fiction. For example, in the 2006 movie The Prestige, David Bowie portrays Tesla developing an amazing electro-replicating device for a magician. In Disney’s 2015 film Tomorrowland: A World Beyond, Tesla helps Thomas Edison, Gustave Eiffel , and Jules Verne discover a better future in an alternate dimension. And in the 2019 film The Current War, Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult, squares off with Thomas Edison, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, in a history-based depiction of the war of the currents.

In 1917, Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal, the most coveted electrical prize in the United States, and in 1975, Tesla was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. In 1983, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Tesla. Most recently, in 2003, a group of investors headed by engineer and futurist Elon Musk founded Tesla Motors, a company dedicated to producing the first car fittingly powered totally by Tesla’s obsession—electricity.

• Carlson, W. Bernard. “Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age.” Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Cheney, Margaret. “Tesla: Man Out of Time.” Simon & Schuster, 2001.
• O'Neill, John J. (1944). “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla.” Cosimo Classics, 2006.
• Gunderman, Richard. “The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla.” Smithsonian.com , January 5, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/extraordinary-life-nikola-tesla-180967758/ .
• Tesla, Nikola. “Notebook from the Edison Machine Works: 1884-1885.” Tesla Universe, https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/books/nikola-tesla-notebook-edison-machine-works-1884-1885 .
• “The War of the Currents: AC vs. DC Power.” U.S. Department of Energy , https://www.energy.gov/articles/war-currents-ac-vs-dc-power .
• Cheney, Margaret. “Tesla: Master of Lightning.” MetroBooks, 2001.
• Dickerson, Kelly.“Wireless Electricity? How the Tesla Coil Works.” LiveScience , July 10, 2014, https://www.livescience.com/46745-how-tesla-coil-works.html .
• “About Nikola Tesla.” Tesla Society , https://web.archive.org/web/20120525133151/http:/www.teslasociety.org/about.html .
• O’Neill, John J. “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla.” Cosimo Classics, 2006.
• All About Wireless Electricity
• Notable American Inventors of the Industrial Revolution
• George Westinghouse's Influence on Electricity
• Timeline of Electronics
• History's 15 Most Popular Inventors
• Reginald Fessenden and the First Radio Broadcast
• Significant Eras of the American Industrial Revolution
• Death, Money, and the History of the Electric Chair
• What Is an Electrical Current?
• Biography of Guglielmo Marconi, Italian Inventor and Electrical Engineer
• The History of Radio Technology
• Thomas Edison's Greatest Inventions
• History of Electric Christmas Tree Lights
• Biography of Granville T. Woods, American Inventor
• History of Electricity
• Biography of Thomas Edison, American Inventor

Nikola Tesla’s Struggle to Remain Relevant

An offbeat Belgrade museum reveals the many mysteries of the prolific, late-19th-century inventor

Of the exhibits in Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Museum , perhaps the most telling contains Mr. Tesla’s brown suit, which hangs in a glass case in the front room. With its natty, old-fashioned styling punctuated by the dapper brown trilby hovering over the space where his head ought to be, the disembodied ensemble recalls an illustration for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . It’s a slightly unsettling but apt metaphor for the brilliant Serbian inventor and futurist who arguably did more to shape and foretell the 20th century than anyone, yet who remains a largely forgotten historical footnote.

Nikola Tesla did not always labor in obscurity. For a fleeting decade or so around the turn of the century, he was the toast of America, the country to which he’d emigrated in 1884. Feted by the press and showered with gold medals and awards from learned institutions and universities, he threw dinner parties at Delmonico’s in New York, entertained crowds with showy electricity demonstrations, and counted J.P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor, and Mark Twain among his many famous acquaintances.

For it was Tesla’s genius that solved the problem of how to distribute electricity safely and efficiently to homes, shops, and factories—something that had defeated Thomas Edison. With that innovation, he helped usher in a whole new industrial age. He additionally gave the world its first, functional electric motor: Whenever a vacuum cleaner clatters to life, a laptop powers up, or an overhead light is turned on, the technology used can be traced back to Tesla.

In one golden decade beginning in 1893, he pioneered radio technology some two years ahead of  Guglielmo Marconi, created the world’s first x-ray images, and conceived the idea of radar. While the late 19th-century world became enthralled with the wondrous new age of hydroelectric dams, power lines, and electric lighting available at the flick of a switch, Tesla continued to leapfrog ahead. He invented the bladeless turbines used in modern jet engines and imagined a wireless future in which information, music, pictures, and limitless renewable energy could be beamed around the globe instantly, free, and available for all.

Tesla was already powering fluorescent lamps—another of his inventions—using wireless technology by the early 1890s. In his laboratory, he also designed the antennae that would be used in mobile phones a century later. His showy demonstration of a radio-controlled boat at New York’s Madison Square Garden wowed the crowd with a taste of what the wireless future would hold.

So how did such a brilliant, successful inventor end up, many years later, an obscure figure feeding pigeons in a park, dying destitute and alone in a New York City hotel room in 1943?  “Tesla was simply too far ahead of his time,” says Branimir Jovanovic, the director of the Nikola Tesla Museum. “And although he was a brilliant inventor, a genius, he was a naive businessman who was hopelessly out of step with commerce and 19th-century American capitalism.”

Tesla never married nor had children. His nephew, the only relation with whom he maintained any form of contact, shipped his late uncle’s immense collection of papers, drawings, letters, and photographs to Belgrade in 1952. Only too happy to celebrate a home-grown hero, Yugoslavia’s communist authorities opened the Tesla museum inside a handsome villa soon after. There the collection and museum remain, easily the largest repository of Tesla memorabilia in the world. “For decades his legacy was sealed away behind the Iron Curtain,” says Jovanovic. “Western historians had virtually no opportunity to research Tesla or gain any deeper understanding of his work. As the years passed he became almost forgotten.” But now, as the Cold War recedes into distant memory, that is changing.

If Tesla was largely forgotten by his adopted country, Serbia remembers him as one of their own. His name adorns Belgrade’s airport, while Nikola Tesla Boulevard hugs the Danube in the new part of the city. His portrait graces postage stamps and the Serbian 100-dinar note. His likeness in bronze stands outside the University of Belgrade’s School of Electrical Engineering. Tesla-themed T-shirts, postcards, fridge magnets, lapel pins, and coffee mugs crowd the souvenir kiosks along the Knez Mihailova, the shopping precinct in the old quarter of the city.

The rather idiosyncratic Nikola Tesla Museum at Krunska 51, an address on a quiet side street in the heart of Belgrade, has become a popular draw for science history buffs, geeks, and electrical engineers. Increasingly it also attracts the broad spectrum of tourists for whom the Tesla name rings a bell, more often than not in association with PayPal billionaire Elon Musk’s electric smart car, just the sort of invention that Tesla himself would have loved. The museum contains more than 160,000 original documents, ranging from detailed plans Tesla made of various electrical apparatus and instruments to Christmas cards he received from his many fans and admirers. Even the man himself is present—or rather his ashes are, sealed in a gold-plated orb and displayed, rather eerily, in a small chapel-like side room, draped in black, just off the main gallery.

For non-technical visitors and those unfamiliar with the Tesla story, the museum offers a short film in English as well as guides that explain the concepts behind various models of Tesla’s inventions, including the 500,000-volt Tesla coil with which he created lightning bolts in his Colorado laboratory. (Plans are afoot to build a much larger 12-million-volt Tesla coil, which he used to generate the largest human-made electrical charge ever seen on the planet until modern times.) Both of these instruments were part of Tesla’s research into the possibility of using the Earth itself as a giant conductor to produce unlimited amounts of renewable energy—a concept theoreticians still debate today.

Born during a fierce electrical storm in what is now Croatia, in June 1856, Tesla had his interest in electricity sparked (so to speak) as a child by the little shocks of static he experienced while stroking his pet cat, Macak. Comparing in his mind the prickly little sparks that sprang from Macak’s fur, and the great bolts of summer lightning that criss-crossed the sky, he wondered, as he put it in his autobiography many years later, “if nature was like a giant cat.”

Curiosity and a boyhood love of invention led him to engineering schools in Austria and Czechoslovakia. His peripatetic professional career began in Budapest, where he worked as chief electrician for a fledgling telephone company. He then moved to Paris to take a job with Edison’s European operations. In June 1884, he arrived in New York City, clutching a letter of introduction to Edison himself. “I know two great men,” wrote Edison’s long-time associate and talent spotter, Charles Batchelor. “You are one. This young man is the other.”

The two men proved polar opposites. Their relationship soon soured, with Edison allegedly reneging on a promise to pay Tesla $50,000 for some dramatic, hard-won technical improvements that the young engineer had made to the designs for Edison’s dynamos. It would not be the last time that Tesla came off second best in a business deal. “Being an honest man himself, Tesla trusted nearly everyone he met,” says his biographer Robert Lomas. “And almost all of them ripped him off.”

“How quickly will I get my investment back was a question Tesla was not even prepared to consider,” Lomas explains. “He was working for the betterment of mankind—who could put a price on that?” Many others had no problem contemplating rich rewards for their work, among them Edison and the entrepreneurial inventor George Westinghouse, as well as the billionaire financier J.P. Morgan, all of whom figure prominently in the Tesla story.

In the 1890s Edison’s and Westinghouse’s companies became bitter rivals in the “War of the Currents,” a multi-million-dollar race to electrify America. Edison backed the use of direct current, or DC, in which electricity flows only in one direction within a circuit. Direct current could power lights and run machines, but could not be easily converted to higher or lower voltages, necessitating low-voltage transmissions that didn’t reach more than a mile. This meant power stations would need to exist every few blocks throughout a city. Westinghouse supported alternating current, or AC, in which electrical current periodically changes direction in a circuit. High-voltage AC could travel long distances, but difficulties remained about how to step high voltages down to levels useable in homes and businesses once it arrived. Into this bitter contest strolled Tesla, who had spent years trying to interest investors in his ingenious designs for AC transformers, electrical devices that could increase or decrease voltages.

Westinghouse embraced the Serb’s ideas, eventually parlaying Tesla’s expertise into a contract to electrify the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Two years later, Westinghouse built a hydroelectric plant of gargantuan proportions, harnessing the power of the Niagara River to light up Buffalo, New York. “Of the thirteen patents involved in the design, nine were Tesla’s,” says Jovanovic.

Such innovations might have made Tesla rich, but they merely made him comfortable, able to host his dinner parties at Delmonico’s, dress stylishly, and invest in new research. Needing cash to develop the next big thing—wireless technology and renewable energy from the Earth itself—he sold for a modest sum the patents, rights, and royalties for his AC motor to the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. “He lived in a world of ideas,” says Lomas. “He loved to build mental models of his inventions and imagine them working. If you asked him how much it cost to make, he’d point to the elegance of its rotating magnetic field; if you asked how many people would want to buy it, he would demonstrate how efficient it was.”

At a secluded site in Colorado, he launched a series of experiments, then announced plans to build a huge transmitting tower at a site called Wardenclyffe on Long Island. Rather naively, he approached J.P. Morgan for additional investment capital, excitedly painting a picture of a nation powered by free, abundant, and wireless electricity. One can only wonder what Morgan must have been thinking as he listened to Tesla’s pitch. The hard-nosed businessman had already sunk millions into networks of expensive copper wires to carry electricity. Nonetheless, Morgan gave Tesla $150,000.

“It sounds like a lot of money, and indeed it was—to Tesla,” says Jovanovic, “but not to Morgan. He spent that much the following week on a painting. He was just protecting his investments by making sure he was in control of whatever Tesla came up with.” In return for the cash, Tesla signed over rights to any patents that resulted from his new wireless research.

Believing he was on the threshold of great things, Tesla began building his Long Island tower. But he soon burned through the money, returning to Morgan for more. This time the financier refused him outright. And no, Morgan would not relinquish rights to Tesla’s future wireless patents. In addition, Morgan told others in merchant banking circles that he considered Tesla a bad investment. Tesla’s prospects for raising capital dried up virtually overnight. “It took a while to sink in, but Tesla eventually realised he had made a big mistake,” says Jovanovic.

The museum chronicles Tesla’s flirtation with wireless technology at the pinnacle of his career. Displays explain how the enormous coils he built generated huge quantities of electricity, along with images of the enormous mushroom-shaped telecommunications tower he was building on Long Island. But by 1905, Tesla was a changed man. “It is as though there were two Tesla’s—the eager young emigrant who, for a while at least, lived the American dream, and the embittered older Tesla who had learned life’s lessons the hard way,” says Jovanovic, himself an aeronautical engineer, who has spent years studying the inventor and recently wrote a book about him in Serbian.

The museum’s gallery of photos shows both of Tesla’s personas, the mesmerizing young man with a touch of mischief in his eye and the humorless 61 year-old. By the time he received the Edison Medal in 1916 for his electrical engineering achievements, his fame rested as much on his sensationalist claims and predictions in the tabloid press as it did on his legitimate engineering feats.

In a desperate bid to remain relevant, he wrote increasingly bizarre articles on almost any subject. He still turned out clever inventions, shifting to the field of mechanical engineering, and giving the world the speedometer and tachometer, but his glory days were over.

Today, there are signs of growing interest in Tesla. More and more academics have been tapping into the museum’s rich trove of material. For its part, the museum has plans to launch a new website later this year, detailing its holdings so that researchers can apply for access. Museum curators mounted an exhibition that traveled to Spain and Mexico over the past year; another exhibition will soon open in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and yet another will debut in Belgrade in July to mark the 160th anniversary of Tesla’s birth. The latter will feature 50 new interactive exhibits based on Tesla’s original patents and designs. There is talk about building a much larger Tesla museum complex along the Danube, which would not only house the museum’s entire archive, but also interactive exhibits and 300 models of his inventions.

But his life and work are still swept up in a sci-fi fantasy that was present even during his lifetime, thanks to his showmanship and willingness to play the mad scientist to gain attention and column inches in the press. Legends of the immigrant abound—from the KGB’s supposed interest in spiriting away Tesla’s top secret research regarding a “death ray” after his death, to the FBI’s suppression of his papers to prevent his “secret” inventions from being blurted out to the world. In a 2006 fantasy thriller, The Prestige , David Bowie plays the role of Tesla depicted as a genius Victorian inventor who creates a Star Trek-style teleporter for a sinister magician. “It is important to remember the real Tesla,” says Jovanovic, “and to celebrate what he accomplished.” The museum at Krunska 51, in Belgrade, with its old Christmas cards and family photos goes a long way towards fleshing out the figure in the empty brown suit.

Get the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.

Roff Smith | READ MORE

Roff Smith is an award-winning author who has written for Time , National Geographic and Nature , among other magazines. His books include Cold Beer and Crocodiles: A Bicycle Journey into Australia and Life on the Ice: No One Goes To Antarctica Alone .

temas / Inventos

Una mente privilegiada

Nikola Tesla, el genio de la electricidad

Especialista en actualidad histórica

Actualizado a 15 de diciembre de 2022 · 13:13 · Lectura:

nikola tesla

"La ciencia no es más que perversión en sí misma a menos que tenga como objetivo último mejorar la humanidad". Estas palabras resumen la visión de Nikola Tesla, un hombre de figura enigmática, y un controvertido y comprometido visionario e inventor que se adelantó a su tiempo.

Nikola Tesla nació en Smiljan, la actual Croacia, el 10 de julio de 1856. Cuando contaba tres años vivió un episodio que marcaría la dirección de su vida: mientras acariciaba el lomo de su gato, el roce de su mano produjo una lluvia de chispas y quiso averiguar cuál era el motivo. Se lo preguntó a su padre y este, un sacerdote ortodoxo, le explicó que se trataba del mismo fenómeno que ocurría en los árboles durante una tormenta: la electricidad. Desde aquel momento y hasta el día de su muerte, Nikola Tesla dedicaría su vida a resolver aquel misterio.

A los tres años, mientras acariciaba a su gato, a Tesla le sorprendió una lluvia de chispas y quiso saber cuál era el motivo

Con sólo 17 años, el joven Nikola enfermó gravemente de cólera y estuvo a punto de no recuperarse. Su padre le prometió que una vez restablecido le enviaría a la mejor escuela de ingeniería que hubiera, el deseo más fervoroso del joven. Tras recuperarse y entrar en el ejército, en 1875, Tesla comenzó sus estudios en la Universidad Politécnica de Graz, en Austria.

Artículo recomendado

La historia del código Morse y su creador

Leer artículo

La eterna lucha de Tesla y Edison

En su época de estudiante comenzó a gestar el propósito que le acompañaría para siempre: idear el modo en que la energía gratuita pudiese llegar a todo el mundo. En 1881 viajó a Viena, donde trabajó en la Compañía Nacional Telefónica. Finalmente, Tesla se trasladó a París, donde encontró trabajo en la Compañía Edison. Desde la capital francesa viajó hasta Nueva York en 1884 –el mismo año en que llegó también desde París la Estatua de la Libertad–. Una vez en la ciudad, Tesla acudió directamente a las oficinas del hombre que influiría definitivamente en su vida: Thomas Alva Edison. A él iba dirigida una carta de recomendación de Charles Batchelor, su último jefe en Europa, que rezaba: "Conozco a dos grandes hombres, y usted es uno de ellos. El otro es el joven portador de esta carta".

Edison defendió su propia teoría a toda costa y de ninguna manera iba a permitir que un joven extranjero que acababa de llegar a la ciudad le arrebatase la fama e hiciese peligrar su imperio. Tesla se topó entonces con una salvaje campaña de difamación.

Tras leer la misiva, Edison le contrató ese mismo día. Pero su relación distó mucho de ser plácida. Entre ambos existieron diferencias que fueron acrecentándose con el paso del tiempo. Estas diferencias se plasmaron en la forma de plantear y ver los resultados de su trabajo. Mientras Edison fue el primer introductor y un firme defensor de la corriente continua, Tesla estaba convencido de que la corriente alterna era una solución mejor –corriente que seguimos usando en nuestros hogares más de ciento cincuenta años después–. Esta disputa se conoce como "la guerra de las corrientes".

Tesla y Edison mantuvieron profundas diferencias. Edison era partidario de la corriente continua y Tesla, de la corriente alterna. Edison no quería poner en riesgo su fortuna por culpa de un "recién llegado".

La "Guerra de las corrientes"

De hecho, la idea de Tesla era mejor, pero necesitaba a Edison para ponerla en práctica. Edison defendió su propia teoría a toda costa y de ninguna manera iba a permitir que un joven extranjero que acababa de llegar a la ciudad le arrebatase la fama e hiciese peligrar su imperio. Tesla se topó entonces con una salvaje campaña de difamación.

Edison no quería poner en riesgo su fortuna por culpa de un "recién llegado". Por ello, el veterano inventor llegó a recorrer Estados Unidos con la intención de demostrar la peligrosidad de la corriente alterna, para lo cual no dudó en electrocutar animales (desde perros y gatos hasta un elefante) para desacreditar la propuesta de Tesla. También le negó el pago de los 50.000 dólares comprometidos en un primer momento con un comentario burlesco y esperpéntico: "Cuando llegues a ser un norteamericano cabal, estarás en condiciones de apreciar una buena broma yanqui".

Marconi y la primera transmisión por radio

Colaboración con westinghouse.

En 1886, Tesla fundó su propia compañía, la Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing . Los primeros inversores no estuvieron de acuerdo con sus planes para el desarrollo de un motor de corriente alterna y finalmente lo acabaron relevando de su puesto en la compañía. Pero Tesla no se dio por vencido y trabajó como obrero en Nueva York de 1886 a 1887 para poder sobrevivir y ganar dinero para su próximo proyecto. En 1887, construyó un motor de inducción sin escobillas, alimentado con corriente alterna,​ que presentó en el American Institute of Electrical Engineers (Instituto Americano de Ingenieros Eléctricos) en 1888. Ese mismo año desarrolló el principio de su bobina, y comenzó a trabajar con George Westinghouse en la Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's en los laboratorios de Pittsburgh. Westinghouse escuchó con atención sus ideas sobre sistemas polifásicos, que podrían permitir la trasmisión de corriente alterna a larga distancia, y apostó por él.

En 1893, Tesla trabajó con Westinghouse en el desarrollo de un proyecto para conseguir el suministro eléctrico a la ciudad de Bufalo aprovechando la fuerza de las aguas de las cataratas del río Niágara. En 1895, un incendio en el laboratorio de Tesla en Nueva York causó pérdidas incalculables a la ciencia, pues además del edificio se destruyeron todos sus proyectos. Pero nada podía con Tesla. En 1898, se presentó a la primera Exhibición Eléctrica que se realizó en el Madison Square Garden de Nueva York con un invento llamado "Teleautomaton". Se trataba de un bote en miniatura, controlado a distancia por radio. Tesla intentó vender su idea al ejército estadounidense, pero en aquel entonces la marina mostró poco interés. Tampoco constó como inventor del aparato. Este mérito se lo llevó el ingeniero español Leonardo Torres Quevedo, quien patentó en 1903 el "Telekino", que se consideró el primer aparato de radiocontrol de la Historia.

Tesla presentó en 1898 un invento llamado "Teleautomaton", un bote en miniatura controlado a distancia por radio

Problemas de patentes y muerte

Tesla también tuvo problemas con Marconi , a quien se atribuye el invento de la radio. Marconi ganó el premio Nobel en 1909 por este invento, aunque Tesla había patentado la idea en 1896. Pero la oficina de patentes dio marcha atrás y acabó otorgando a Marconi la patente del invento. Se habló mucho en la época sobre dicho cambio, que algunos atribuyeron a presiones económicas por parte de Marconi. Finalmente, en 1943 la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos reconoció a Nikola Tesla poco antes de su muerte como el inventor de la radio y le devolvió la patente, que había estado en poder de Marconi hasta ese momento.

13 inventos que cambiaron la historia

Nikola Tesla murió solo el 7 de enero de 1943, en una habitación de hotel en Nueva York, a la edad de 86 años, de un infarto de miocardio. A su funeral, que se celebró en la catedral de San Juan el Divino, asistieron más de 2.000 personas que lloraron la pérdida de un auténtico genio. El gobierno de Estados Unidos, una vez que Nikola Tesla fue enterrado, intervino su despacho y requisó todos los documentos que contenían sus estudios e investigaciones, sin embargo, algunos no pudieron ser comprendidos ni descifrados puesto que Tesla guardaba la mayoría de sus ideas en su mente. Años más tarde, la familia de Nikola Tesla, a través de la embajada de Yugoslavia, logró recuperar parte del material incautado .

Tras la muerte de Tesla, el gobierno de Estados Unidos requisó todos los documentos de su despacho

Tesla es considerado por muchos como el mejor inventor del siglo XX. Su figura, un tanto maltratada por la historia, fue reivindicada posteriormente por movimientos contraculturales que descubrieron el legado de un hombre que se opuso a las normas establecidas y que vivió en un mundo que aún no estaba preparado para sus inventos. Desde el "rayo de la muerte", arma capaz de disparar haces de partículas, al "teslascopio", un invento que permitiría la comunicación con seres de otras galaxias, ya que Tesla estaba convencido de la existencia de seres inteligentes en otras dimensiones...

Hoy en día, la vida y la obra de Nikola Tesla se dan a conocer en el museo que lleva su nombre en Belgrado. Un lugar curioso e interesantísimo donde entender mejor la importancia de uno de los inventores más importantes de la historia.

Para saber más

The Prestige

• This Day In History

The Tesla Files

• Episode Guide
• History Classics
• HISTORY Podcasts
• HISTORY Vault
• Link HISTORY on facebook
• Link HISTORY on twitter
• Link HISTORY on youtube
• Link HISTORY on instagram
• Link HISTORY on tiktok

A new investigation driven by declassified CIA documents suggests a secret history of bitter rivalries and amazing achievements of a truly gifted man – Nikola Tesla.

Related content.

6 Brilliant Tesla Inventions That Never Got Built

9 Things You May Not Know About Nikola Tesla

About the show.

Why were trunks belonging to genius inventor Nikola Tesla confiscated in 1943? Did they contain the plans for nearly free worldwide electricity, massive death rays, and other inventions out of the future? A new investigation driven by declassified CIA documents suggests a secret history of bitter rivalries, government conspiracies, Cold War and WW2 spycraft, extra-terrestrial communication, and amazing achievements of a truly gifted man – Nikola Tesla.

Watch Select Episodes Without Signing In

Get Instant Access to Free Updates

Don’t Miss Out on HISTORY news, behind the scenes content, and more.

• Privacy Notice
• Terms of Use

Need help with the site?

Create a profile to add this show to your list.

American Experience

Film Description

Meet Nikola Tesla, the genius engineer and tireless inventor whose technology revolutionized the electrical age of the 20th century. Regarded by many historians as an eccentric genius, Tesla gained international fame for his invention of a system of alternating current that made possible the distribution of electricity over vast distances and is the basis for the electrical grid that powers 21 st century life. But the visionary Tesla imagined much more — robots, radio, radar, remote control, the wireless transmission of messages and pictures, and harnessing the wind and sun to provide free energy to all. A showman, he dazzled his scientific peers who flocked to see him demonstrate his inventions and send thousands of volts of electricity pulsing through his body. His fertile but undisciplined imagination was the source of his genius but also his downfall, as the image of Tesla as a “mad scientist” came to overshadow his reputation as a brilliant innovator. Even before his death in 1943, he was largely forgotten, his name obscured by Thomas Edison — his hero, one-time employer, and rival. But it is his exhilarating sense of the future that has inspired renewed interest in the man, as his once scoffed-at vision of a world connected by wireless technology has become a reality.

Written and Produced by David Grubin

Editor Jay Keuper

Narrated by Michael Murphy

Director of Photography James Callanan

Original Music Michael Bacon

Consulting Producer Chana Gazit

Coordinating Producer Kristina Cafarella

Associate Producer Oliver Dunne

Post Production Supervisor Kathryn Lord

Sound Recording Roger Phenix

Assistant Editor Oliver Dunne

Production Assistant Brandt Rentel

Animation Studio Ace & Son Moving Picture Co., Llc

Animation   Richard O'connor Taisiya Zaretskaya Isabelle Aspin Elliot Cowan Morgan Miller Mitchell Wood

Photo Animation Studio G.R.O.W.

Photo Animation Alisa Placas Frutman John M. Nee

On-Line Editor Blerti Murataj

Assistant On-Line Editor James Casteel Liza Renzulli

Audio Post Production Facility Sync Sound Inc.

Re-Recording Mixer Ken Hahn

Supervising Sound Editor Ken Hahn

Sound Editors Neil Cedar Dedrick Sarzaba Kurt Cruz

Musicians Tom Chiu, Violin Dan Peck, Tuba Michael Bacon, Cello

Contractor Pauline Kim Harris

Transcription Ginger Wilmont

Archival Materials Courtesy of Bridgeman Images Chronicle/Alamy Colorado Springs Convention & Visitors Bureau Thomas J. Watson Library of Business and Economics, Columbia University in The City of New York The Creative Company Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Getty Images The Granger Collection, New York Historic Films Archive, Llc Library of Congress Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) For Federal Art Project/Museum of The City of New York. 43.131.1.38 Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution NYC Municipal Archives © Collection of The New-York Historical Society, USA/Bridgeman Images Photo By Walter Silver © Photography Collection, The New York Public Library

Archival Materials Courtesy of © Nikola Tesla Museum, Belgrade Photograph by F. P. Stevens, Special Collections, Pikes Peak Library District, 257-6394 Special Collections, Pikes Peak Library District, 001-5141 Pond5 The Print Collector/Alamy Westinghouse Electric Corporation Photographs, Senator John Heinz History Center Shutterstock The Tesla Collection Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe U.S. Dept. of The Interior, National Park Service,  Thomas Edison National Historical Park Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Advisors Peter Fisher Jill Jonnes Samantha Hunt

Special Thanks Liberty Science Center Joeseph Galbo Bobby Johnson Joseph Kinney Mary Meluso William Terbo

For David Grubin Productions

Head of Production Chris Wolf

Production Accountant Nancy L. Adams

Technical Consultant Oliver Grubin

Office Production Assistant Richard Gross

LegaL Loeb & Loeb Llp

For American Experience

Post Production Supervisor Vanessa Ruiz

Editor Glenn Fukushima

Assistant Editor Lauren Noyes

Business Manager Mary Sullivan

Contracts & Rights Manager Susana Fernandes

Administrative Coordinator Bina Ravaliya

Legal Jay Fialkov Janice Flood

Director of Audience Development Carrie Phillips

Marketing Manager Chika Offurum

Audience Engagement Editor Katharine Duffy Tarvainen

Publicity Mary Lugo Cara White

Post Production Spencer Gentry John Jenkins

Series Theme Joel Goodman

Coordinating Producer Nancy Sherman

Managing Editor, Digital Content Lauren Prestileo

Senior Producer Susan Bellows

Managing Director James E. Dunford

Executive Producer Mark Samels

A David Grubin Productions Film for American Experience.

American Experience is a production of WGBH, which is solely responsible for its content.

© 2016 WGBH Educational Foundation All rights reserved.

Narrator:  In 1891, a Serbian scientist demonstrated his latest inventions before an awestruck audience at Columbia University.

"Tubes… held in the hand of Mr. Tesla," a reporter wrote, "appeared like a luminous sword in the hand of an archangel representing justice."

Nikola Tesla was already famous – the scientist whose experiments with electricity were destined to transform daily life in the 20th century.

Marc Seifer, Biographer:  We live in an electrical world. We take it all for granted. We have light bulbs, we run our refrigerators, our air conditioners, our electrical motors. All of that is all directly back to Tesla.

Narrator:  A hundred years ago, he pointed the way toward robots, radio, radar, remote control, the wireless transmission of messages and pictures. He dreamed of harnessing the wind and the sun to make free energy available for everyone.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  When you think about electricity you think of Edison. But Tesla was just more of an original American than Edison.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Tesla had a lot of obsessions and odd phobias and yet he was enormously popular and celebrated. They did not stop him.

Narrator:  At the turn of the 20th century, Tesla was acclaimed, millions of Americans knew his name. But only decades later, he was forgotten by all but a few.

John Staudenmaier, Historian:  He doesn’t have a disciplined imagination. He has a fertile imagination. And so he gets kind of crazy. Oh, he is a genius, no doubt about it. But he’s an idiosyncratic genius.

Narrator:  His luxuriant imagination was the source of his genius, and the cause of his downfall.

On June 6th, 1884, 28-year-old Nikola Tesla arrived in New York City, one of the millions of immigrants who had begun to transform the fabric of American society during the final decades of the 19th century.

The young immigrant knew no one.

Six feet 2 inches tall, he spoke with a heavy Serbian accent and weighed little more than 140 pounds.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  He’s very tall, gangly, handsome. Looks like a vampire a little bit.

Narrator:  "What I saw was… rough, and unattractive," Tesla wrote. "‘Is this America?’ I asked myself in painful surprise.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Everything about him is fastidious and courtly. He’s very elegant looking. He’s got these amazing blue eyes that people notice.

Narrator:  Tesla had only four cents in his pocket along with some of his favorite poems, but he carried with him a recommendation to the man he admired more than any other. Thirty-five year old Thomas Edison was already a celebrated inventor, an American folk hero.

The incandescent light bulb he had patented 5 years before had captured the imagination of people all over the world.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Light was always associated with flame. And Edison, by inventing a light bulb was going to shift the country away from natural gas and gas lighting to a world in which there would be electricity and electric light bulbs in every household. And this was very astonishing to people. It was a miracle.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  Electricity was very mysterious at the time.

My grandmother, born in 1900 maybe, insisted that we always have those child proof things in the plugs because she thought the electricity was dripping out and it would collect on the floor and you’d step in it.

Narrator:  Tesla meandered down the lanes of lower Manhattan heading toward Edison’s office with a revolutionary idea he was certain the celebrated inventor would be grateful for.

Beneath the ground ran 80,000 feet of copper conductors - the world’s first electric grid, Thomas Edison’s creation - lighting homes and powering factories on the lower tip of Manhattan. But Edison’s system generated direct current – DC – and DC had severe limitations.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Direct current couldn’t go very far. You would have had to have a generating station every mile. It was a very limited form of power. So this was a real problem. And Tesla had the solution, a brilliant solution.

Narrator:  With Direct Current, a generator produces electricity – a stream of electrons – that flows along a wire to a light bulb, or a motor, and then returns to the generator in one long continuous loop. But as the electrons travel, energy is lost to the resistance of the wire. Like a long river whose energy is spent the farther the current travels. The alternative to DC is AC, alternating current.

With alternating current, the electrons don’t flow in a single direction. Instead they vibrate back and forth, like an ocean tide, surging with power that could send electricity long distances. But no one had designed a motor that could run efficiently on AC.  Even Thomas Edison himself was baffled.

But in a waking vision, Nikola Tesla had imagined an AC motor when he was 26, two years before he met Edison - as if he had been waiting for that astonishing revelation since he was a small boy in Croatia.

He was born in the tiny Croatian village of Smiljan in 1856 - as family stories have it, on the stroke of midnight while a thunderstorm raged around him.

"He’ll be a child of the storm," the midwife said. His mother responded, "No. Of light."

His father was a Greek Orthodox priest who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. But he took after his mother, who invented a variety of ingenious devices for farming and housekeeping and encouraged the boy’s precocious gifts.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Tesla takes his lifelong obsession with electricity back to when he was three years old and he is petting the family cat, Macak. And he begins to create sort of this sheet of sparks. And it makes this crackling noise like thunder. And he says to his father, "What is that?" And his father said, "Well, it’s electricity such as you get during thunderstorms. And stop that because you’re, you know, electrifying the cat."

Narrator:  For the rest of his life, Tesla would be awestruck by the wonders of electricity.

As a child, he spent hours playing beside a tumbling stream that ran beside his home. His very first invention – a hook designed to catch frogs – made him the envy of his friends. Before he was six, he had invented a motor consisting of a rotating spindle powered by June bugs.

"I wanted to harness the energies of nature to the service of man," he wrote later.

Marc Seifer, Biographer:  You can see the seeds of a number of his inventions when he was a child. But he sometimes had difficulty separating reality from his own imagination.

Narrator:  "Sometimes," he wrote, "I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not."

From an early age, he was afflicted by spontaneous, inexplicable visions that confused his picture of reality, yet empowered his preternatural gift for invention.

When he was 12, in an extraordinary feat of mind-control, he banished the images that haunted him by willing himself to live in a visual world of his own invention.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  He could travel in his own visions, travel to foreign countries, understand foreign languages, and having control over these visions spurred on his creative energy in later life.

Narrator:  By the time Tesla was seventeen, he had honed a keen visual facility.

"When I get an idea," he wrote. "I do not rush into actual work. I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind."

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  Early in his life he developed this really magnificent way of visualizing physical things. By the time it came for him to build them they came almost fully formed.

Narrator:  When he was 21, Tesla won a scholarship to a Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria. He studied with a fierce determination - sometimes 20 hours a day.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  Tesla couldn’t stop learning, he couldn’t stop reading. He memorized all of Faust. His memory was photographic and unassailable. He would see something once, he would hear something once and it never left him.

Marc Seifer, Biographer:  He was obsessive so once he started to read Voltaire he had to read every single thing that Voltaire ever wrote.

Narrator:  As Tesla immersed himself in the study of mathematics and science, the mysteries of electricity were waiting to be unraveled.

When a professor told his class that it was impossible to construct a motor that could run on alternating current, Tesla objected.

"Mr. Tesla may accomplish great things," the professor told the class, "but he certainly never will do this." Tesla disagreed.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  He’s pushing it with the professor. He’s saying ‘I see.’ And this is visionary. He’s saying, "I can do this."

Narrator:  At first, he didn’t see the solution, but he saw the problem. DC motors waste energy.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  … there’s metal surfaces moving over each other and they kind of do this and there’s… there’s sparks, it smells, it breaks, it wears out. It’s a clunky, inelegant way to do it. He’s thinking that really wants to be AC. And he almost kills himself trying to make it work.

Narrator:  "Day and night, year after year, I worked incessantly," he wrote later.

"I could visualize motors and generators, the images I saw were to me perfectly real and tangible. Solving the problem of alternating current was a matter of life and death. I knew that I would perish if I failed."

Obsessed, he stopped studying, lost his scholarship, dropped out of school, and drifted. He was falling into a hallucinatory, mind-shattered space, and suffered, in his own words, "a complete nervous breakdown."

For 4 years, Tesla’s imagination tormented him. And then, it saved him.

In 1882, walking in a Budapest park as the sun was setting, the solution, he wrote, "came like a flash of lightning." "I cannot describe my emotions."

"A thousand secrets of nature I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her at all odds and at the peril of my existence."

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  I think he sees some kind of intrinsic beauty to an AC motor.

I think that’s where you really see this… this famous Tesla insight and intuition.

Narrator:  Tesla’s genius was to take a DC motor and reimagine it.

He eliminated the mechanical parts where metal rubbed against metal, replaced the inner cylinder with one made of copper, and sent an electric current through the outer ring, turning the outer ring and the cylinder into magnets.

The interaction of the two magnets made the inner cylinder spin without any parts touching.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  Imagine a merry go round, okay? So and you want to spin your kid around and there’s a pole sticking up from the merry go round so you grab the pole here and you push it across like that. And the merry go round goes around and you wait until the pole comes and then you grab it and push it again, okay?

So you can think of the pole as the electromagnet on the cylinder and you are the magnet on the outside and you’re timing your grab. Because if you just… if you grabbed it here, you know you wouldn’t be able to push, you’ve got to grab it like that...So that’s the way an AC motor works. No sparking, no smell, nothing wearing out. He really just saw the whole thing in an instant.

Narrator:  Tesla was a 26-year-old with an idea he was convinced would change the world.

He went to work as an engineer for a branch of Thomas Edison’s company in Paris, but decided his main chance lay in NY with the great man himself.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  He has a design in his head and he’s actually made a prototype which works. He is a huge admirer of Thomas Edison. He feels, if Edison is presented with better technology he will embrace it as something that he could develop in his own company, presumably with the help of his very junior employee, Nikola Tesla.

Narrator:  In the spring of 1884, Nikola Tesla brought his invention to America to share with his hero - Thomas Edison.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  This is late 19th century America in New York City. There’s a tremendous sense of possibility and it’s an age of incredible invention and technological change. And he totally expects to be part of that.

Narrator:  Tesla walked confidently into Edison’s office in lower Manhattan the very day he arrived, and flashed a letter of introduction from Edison’s Paris office.

Meeting Edison, Tesla said, "thrilled me to the marrow."

Edison hired him on the spot.

But they were cut from two different molds.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Edison was a completely practical man and inventor. He wanted to make things work and sell them. Tesla really just wanted to understand how the mysteries of electricity worked.

Harold Clark, Scientist:  Tesla was a very well educated engineer. He understood both theory and mathematics. Edison did a lot by trial and error. He was able to work well with things when he could see the cause and effect immediately. He wasn’t nearly as well educated. He didn’t even go to college

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Edison, as he gets to know Tesla, refers to him, and this is not particularly a complement, as a poet of science.

Narrator:  Tesla worked for Edison redesigning generators, 20 hours a day, 7 days a week.

"I have had many hard-working assistants, Edison told him, "but you take the cake."

Encouraged, Tesla worked even harder. He desperately wanted Edison’s blessing as an inventor - and needed his savvy as a businessman.

But when he described his AC motor to his boss, Edison told him bluntly he was wasting his time. There was no future in alternating current.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Edison had a lot of experience in how incredibly difficult it was to go from the idea to the reality. And so he was very skeptical of people who just said, "Ah, well I have this idea and this is going to be the solution." And it also would have meant that he had to retrofit and redo the entire system that he was so emotionally wedded to.

Narrator:  Disillusioned by Edison’s rejection, after six months, Tesla abruptly quit, and struck out on his own.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  He’s very naïve and doesn’t know how the world works and he thinks that he will be welcomed and well-funded because he wants to elucidate the mysteries of electricity.

Narrator:  He spent a year patenting designs for arc lights for two New Jersey businessmen, who cheated him out of patents, and left him penniless. When it came to business, Tesla would always be naïve.

He spent the next winter digging ditches for two dollars a day. "There were many days," he said, "when I did not know where my next meal was coming from."

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  When he leaves Edison’s lab his heart is broken. This man who he thought was going to be a mentor to him in some kind of dark, opposite way ends up mentoring him, right? Just by teaching him maybe what he didn’t want to be.

Narrator:  Tesla was alone, without family or friends. He had been in America for nearly two years, and had nothing to show for it.

"My high education in science, mechanics and literature, "he wrote, "seemed to me like a mockery."

Then, that spring, his luck turned around.

Two investors who learned that Tesla had worked for Edison took a chance on the Serbian inventor. They made him their partner and rented him a laboratory where he could perfect his invention. If it worked, it was worth millions.

During the last part of the 19th century, as the railroad bound the nation together with steel tracks and made a handful of Americans fabulously rich, 22 year old George Westinghouse had invented the railroad air brake, and parlayed his invention into a formidable fortune.

Now a wealthy man who knew how to bring inventions into the marketplace, Westinghouse was looking to the future, and the future was electricity.

John Staudenmaier, Historian:  There were a lot of people saying there’s money to be made here. And Westinghouse comes across Tesla. And he thinks this man is a jewel and he may even have nailed the toughest technical problem in the middle of this emerging, potentially immensely profitable game changer, alternating current.

Narrator:  In 1888, Westinghouse bought Tesla’s patents for tens of thousands of dollars, making Tesla a rich man. The contract specified paying Tesla, as the inventor, a bonus: $2.50 for every horsepower of alternating current sold.

John Staudenmaier, Historian:  Tesla is someone who has the key technological, creative insight, and what he needs is someone to coach him and someone to fund him.

Narrator:  Tesla headed to Pittsburgh, where Westinghouse began building Tesla’s motor along with the dynamos and transformers that would make the long distance transmission of electricity possible. But the struggle to make Tesla’s invention a commercial success was far from over.

Westinghouse was competing for the market with Edison, and he was in trouble. Electricity was a capital-intensive business, and his company was overextended. His investors were worried.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  Westinghouse goes to Tesla and says, "In order for your dream, your alternating current motor to succeed, I have to – I can’t pay you what I promised you in the contract. I’ll go out of business.

Narrator:  Westinghouse asked Tesla to rescind the royalty clause in the contract. Without consulting a lawyer, without hesitating, Tesla agreed.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  Tesla does not try to negotiate, you know. "Okay we’ll move it down from $2.50, I’ll take 10 cents on the dollar." No, he doesn’t negotiate at all; he simply tears up the contract. Their contract was really very, very generous. $2.50 for every horsepower of electricity produced. It would have made Tesla one of the richest men in history.

John Staudenmaier, Historian:  He was naïve and also tended to think he could break the state of the art any morning before breakfast.

Narrator:  Just months after relinquishing his royalties, Tesla appeared at Columbia University to demonstrate his new wonders, determined to astonish an audience of engineers along with a few influential investors.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  A lot of the reason for the demonstration was to get patronage. It was really what scientists were doing in the time. In the air was this American sensibility of show me.

Yeah you can write your fancy European words, you can write equations, you can publish in some journal that nobody reads. I want to see it. Show me.

Narrator:  Tesla had begun to explore the possibility of transmitting energy without wires.

"Here is a simple glass tube," he told his astonished audience. "Wherever I move it in space, its soft, pleasing light persists with undiminished brightness."

Harold Clark, Scientist:  People were used to incandescent lamps, lamps with filaments, but this idea of a light bulb with no filament that could turn on with absolutely no connection to wire or to a battery?

Narrator:  The lamps were Tesla’s own invention, the forerunners of today’s fluorescent tubes. Incandescent bulbs glowed hot. Tesla called his tubes "cold light."

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Cold light is a bulb with gasses in it and when electricity is nearby it lights up. It’s also wireless. You don’t have to have all kinds of wiring to make it work. You just have to have ambient electricity.

Narrator:  Ambient electricity – an electric field was created by another Tesla invention.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  He invented this device called the Tesla coil, which enabled him to generate enormously high voltage. It could take low AC voltage and build up inside the coil an enormous amount of energy and then through a spark discharge release all of that energy very, very quickly.

Narrator:  As one reporter put it, Tesla acted "the part of a veritable magician."

Narrator:  Like a good showman, Tesla wanted to leave his audience dumbfounded. He stretched out his hand, and took hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity directly through his body.

Harold Clark, Scientist:  Tesla was apparently unhurt by the whole thing that was pretty amazing to people. Of course, he knew the secret. It’s called the skin effect. His body was taking the electricity and it was literally running through his skin from his hand down to the ground and not entering the internal parts of his body where it really could do some… some real damage.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  I’ve done things like that, and it hurts like hell. Maybe Tesla was just hurting like crazy, but the real danger with electricity is if you grab something that’s at a high voltage it causes your muscles to contract and in particular your heart and so your heart can stop.

John Staudenmaier, Historian:  The boundary between gee whiz, gosh, bang, I can make magic happen, and the careful laboratory verification of results was not all that cleanly defined. At that time electricity is still somewhere between magic, science and business.

Narrator:  Tesla concluded his three-hour lecture with a paean to electric energy, and its beneficent future as a servant of mankind.

"Everywhere is energy," he said. With the power derived from it, humanity will advance with great strides. The magnificent possibilities expand our minds, strengthen our hopes, and fill our hearts with supreme delight."

Harold Clark, Scientist:  Tesla was motivated by wonder and awe at nature. He really wasn’t in this to make money. He really felt that there should be a way, given how powerful nature is, to harness that power and then use it to relieve human suffering and toil.

Narrator:  On May 1, 1893, as a great choir broke into song, President Grover Cleveland flicked a switch and 160,000 light bulbs lit up the evening sky over Chicago, opening the Columbian Exposition.

The Exposition signaled the coming triumph of alternating current over direct current.

Westinghouse had outfoxed Edison, winning the contract to wire the Exposition with alternating current. Twelve, seventy-five ton dynamos generated three times more energy than the entire city of Chicago.

Six months later, Westinghouse went on to win a greater prize. The contract to harness Niagara Falls to generate alternating current electricity.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Tesla worked with the engineers, perfected all of these dynamos and motors and helped design everything. The water powered the water wheels and that powered the generators and the generators sent out electricity. At that point DC was a technology that was defeated. Alternating current triumphed.

Marc Seifer, Biographer:  Before Tesla you would have to have thousands of little power plants at every mile. After Tesla from one power source, Niagara Falls, you could light up and power the entire northeast.

Narrator:  The modern world was born. Alternating Current transformed daily life in the 20th century, and made Tesla famous. Tesla was all at once a celebrity, a new Edison.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  He was enormously famous, incredibly charming, mesmerizing, and funny. He speaks many languages, loves poetry. He’s just an all-around renaissance man that people are very drawn to. He’s very beloved of newspaper reporters because he could go on for hours on almost any topic and have something interesting and insightful to say.

Narrator:  Tesla was fond of luxury: he lived in the Astor House, the city’s first luxury hotel, and dined at Delmonico’s, the lavish restaurant of choice for fashionable New Yorkers.

Resplendent in his cutaway coat and striped dress pants, he was the darling of New York society, a regular at the glittering tables of the super rich… men like John Jacob Astor and JP Morgan.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  He needed to be supported. He needed to cultivate and persuade these very powerful industrialists that he was worthy of being invested in.

Narrator:  37 years old, Tesla devoted his prodigious energies to creating new inventions in his laboratory in lower Manhattan, where he passed long, solitary hours. And delighted in showing off his experiments to friends - artists, writers, society figures, the luminaries of his day, among them Mark Twain.

Marc Seifer, Biographer:  Stars of the Gilded Age came to his laboratory. And Tesla was a star among these stars.

Narrator:  Tesla continued inventing, securing patent after patent, yet he was peculiar, dogged by troubling, persistent obsessions.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  He was enormously popular and celebrated, but he had a lot of odd phobias and routines. Everything that he does should be divided by three. If he was staying in a hotel the room should be divisible by three.

Harold Clark, Scientist:  In his younger days he would swim in the morning and he always did 27 laps because it was divisible by three.

Marc Seifer, Biographer:  He would circle a block three times before entering a building.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  He had horrible germ phobia. He couldn’t stand the sight of women’s earrings. He couldn’t stand the idea of touching human hair.

Marc Seifer, Biographer:  I don’t like to use the term obsessive compulsive, but he was.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  He had a lot of restrictions keeping him away from actual humans. Despite being a great humanitarian, Tesla had a lot of issues with humanity.

Narrator:  Tesla was a romantic, but romance had no place in his life.

"I do not think there is any thrill, he told a reporter, "like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything."

"It’s a pity too, for sometimes we feel so lonely."

In 1899, Tesla headed West. He had enormous ambitions, and they were growing too big for his New York laboratory.

43 years old, once again, he imagined an invention that he believed would change the world.

He set up shop outside of the resort town of Colorado Springs, checked into the Alta Vista Hotel - room 207 - a number divisible by 3 - and went to work. In a laboratory built to his specifications on the outskirts of town, he conducted a series of experiments in great secrecy.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  He built this lab where he could generate huge amounts of electricity and built this huge fence around it saying, "Keep out."

And where did he get the money to do this? By telling John Jacob Astor IV that he was now going to develop his cold light and the cold light was so superior to the Edison bulb and just think of the millions of light bulbs that were sold every year that would be displaced by the cold light.

Narrator:  But Tesla had no intention of profiting from a paltry thing like fluorescent lighting. He soon had his coils producing a million volts of electricity. Errant bolts set his laboratory on fire. He drew so much power that he once plunged the entire town of Colorado Springs into darkness.

Using high voltages, Tesla theorized that he could transmit electricity vast distances by sending electric currents through the earth.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  You have this Tesla Coil and there’s this enormous spark across the room. That’s a current. The current makes a magnetic field. That magnetic field spreads out. If the current is large enough it can go miles, and light a bulb.

Jane Alcorn, President, Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe:  He set up an experiment where he had some light bulbs in a field. And they were surrounded in a 50-foot square of wire. And he transmitted power so that an electrical field was created within that wire and the bulbs lit up.

That was one of the things that led him to believe that he would be able to accomplish this on a wide scale.

Narrator:  At the end of eight months of experimentation, Tesla announced that he had proved that he could transmit electric power abundantly and cheaply anywhere on the planet. But he never produced the evidence to make his case.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  This is where Tesla didn’t do so well. He really thought he was on to something. I think his picture was pretty much wrong. I think he fooled himself.

Harold Clark, Scientist:  The problem is a physics problem: the farther you get away from the source, the weaker and weaker the electricity gets.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  Tesla is of the school that once he believed he had some evidence for something he was very quick to promote it, expound it to the world and not at all interested in challenging it.

Narrator:  Tesla was damaging his credibility. He tarnished it even further by claiming that late one night, he received signals from Mars.

Harold Clark, Scientist:  His instrumentation was doing some weird flipping around and he was claiming that it was communications from space. It may have been gamma rays or cosmic rays, even radio waves. The fact that he interpreted it as communication from alien beings or Martians made people begin to doubt him.

Narrator:  His fertile imagination, so critical to his inventive powers, was betraying him. That same year an Italian electrical engineer, Guglielmo Marconi, sent a wireless message across the English channel. Tesla dismissed him. Marconi possesses "more enterprise than knowledge… Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents."

In the year 1900, 44-year-old Nikola Tesla returned to New York City. He had burned through $100,000 in 8 months in Colorado Springs. Now, he was looking for many hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

Jane Alcorn, President, Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe:  Without using wires, without using any other means of transmission than the Earth, he wanted to send electrical power and wireless messages around the globe. And he believed he could do this based on the experiments he had conducted in Colorado Springs.

Narrator:  Settling into the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Tesla started looking for investors. But raising capital would not be easy. Heedless, he was making more and more extravagant claims. He repeated that he had received signals from Mars, and insisted that he had the apparatus to signal the Martians back.

Jane Alcorn, President, Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe:  He also foresaw the transmission of pictures and sound, music, images and voices, real time. But for investors, you have to have something that seems a little more realistic and concrete. How do you explain a vision?

Narrator:  Tesla’s reputation as a scientist was on the line.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  At this point Tesla has not had a commercially successful invention in a number of years. And as he tries to get new people interested in investing in him they’re less than enthusiastic because they feel that he’s just going to take their money and vaporize it.

Narrator:  But JP Morgan, the most powerful financier in America, was intrigued. Tesla’s breakthrough with alternating current was worth millions. Morgan wanted to hear what the eccentric inventor was proposing now.

Tesla told him that he had designed a small tower to transmit wireless messages.

He kept secret his intention to transmit electric power wirelessly – to make unlimited electricity available free to anyone with an antenna.

Jane Alcorn, President, Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe:  Tesla’s basic idea was to give energy for free for the betterment of humanity. But he wasn’t going to be able to sell this idea to Morgan. He was playing to what Morgan’s interests were.

Narrator:  Morgan invested $150,000 towards what he thought would be the wireless transmission of messages. But warned that $150,000 was his limit. With Morgan’s money, Tesla bought 200 acres on Long Island’s north shore. He called it Wardenclyffe, after its former owner, and began building a transmission tower.

Jane Alcorn, President, Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe:  He also intended to have a manufacturing facility. But JP Morgan’s $150,000 was never going to complete what Tesla had in mind. And I’m sure that when he took that money he thought there’d be more following once he achieved some measure of success.

Narrator:  But a triumphant Guglielmo Marconi doomed Tesla’s dream.

On December 12, 1901, Marconi sent the first wireless transmission across the Atlantic, based on Tesla’s patents. Eight years later, Marconi would win the Nobel Prize for the invention of wireless telegraphy – radio.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  And the minute JP Morgan sees that he’s done with Tesla. So there’s no more money coming from JP Morgan.

So Tesla is in a very bad place. This is where had he retained his royalties for alternating current he would have had all the money he needed to do whatever he wanted. But he didn’t and he wrote just these ever more pathetic, pleading and insulting and bitter letters to Morgan. I mean, almost like what you would expect, you know, a crazy divorced person to write.

Narrator:  "Have you ever read the book of Job?" he wrote. "If you will put my mind in place of his body you will find my suffering accurately described. With $ 50,000 more Wardenclyffe is completed, and I have an immortal crown and an immense fortune. You are a big man, but your work is wrought in passing form, mine is immortal."

John Staudenmeier, Historian:  Tesla didn’t know how to work with the JP Morgans of his era and what it would take to keep them on board. He didn’t know how to think about his technology from the perspective of people that would fund it, finance it. Part of creativity is understanding how you can fit it into the world of practice. It was a big flaw in his life.

Narrator:  In the summer of 1903, just as he finished making his first experiments, Tesla ran out of money.

Harold Clark, Scientist:  His experiments on Long Island were never finished. But what he was trying to do there was pretty far out.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  Messages might have been possible, because to send a message you need a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of power. But I don’t think there was any way that he was going to put sufficient power out of this thing so that he was going to be able to go even a mile.

The insight he demonstrated for the AC motor is true genius but his dream of powering things over vast distances really wasn’t workable and I’ve always been curious why he even though that was possible.

Narrator:  Still Tesla dreamed of Wardenclyffe, trying desperately for years to raise the money to resurrect his vision. "I will be able to transmit energy of any amount to any place," he said. Tesla believed the tower would also be powerful enough to send signals to nearby planets, especially if there were any Martians out there to receive them.

In 1916, his fortune dwindling, he relinquished the Wardenclyffe mortgage to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where he had been living on credit for almost 20 years, running up a debt of $20,000. The following year, to make the land easier to sell, the Waldorf had the tower dynamited.

Tesla was 61. He would spend the rest of his life imagining new inventions, and hoping to find someone to invest in them.

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  He consulted with various companies. But he was a lonely, eccentric scientist who really was frustrated that his ideas had never been fully seen through.

Marc Seifer, Biographer:  His goal was to try and sell something so he could get the money, go back to Wardenclyffe and complete his baby, which was a world global system to transmit light, voice, pictures and power to all points of the globe.

He was trying to attach our technology to the wheelwork of nature - harnessing geothermal power, the tides, the wind, and sun. He did not want to sap the Earth of our natural resources. He stands for the future.

Narrator:  Tesla still commanded attention, but increasingly, his ideas were losing their mooring in reality.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  Science and science fiction meet in Nikola Tesla. As time goes on his inventions start to take on more of the fantastic. They are visions. They take full flight. They unleash themselves from the strictures of reality.

He starts to develop an idea about photographing thought, which is one of his most poetic and beautiful non-inventions in my book. He thinks, you know, thought is electrical energy and we record electricity all the time, why can’t we photograph thought?

Narrator:  Tesla had never cared about money. Now, he had hardly any left. Leaving behind a trail of debts, he moved from one hotel to another. His mind was drifting.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  Despite the fact Mark Twain is dead, Tesla is sending him packages to an address that no longer exists in New York City. He’s living with ghosts.

Narrator:  His only friends were the pigeons in Bryant Park.

"I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them, for years," he told a reporter. "One was different. It was a female. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was purpose to my life." The night his beloved pigeon died, he saw a light in her eyes he described as more intense than the most powerful lamps in his laboratory. When that light went out, he said, a light went out inside of me.

Nikola Tesla died on January 7, 1943. He was 86 years old, alone in the New Yorker Hotel, room 3327 on the 33rd floor.

Six months later the United States Supreme Court ruled that the patents to Marconi’s wireless device belonged to Tesla. Tesla, not Marconi, invented radio. But by now, he was nearly forgotten. His coils were never commercially successful; his fluorescent lights never marketed; his wireless system never realized; his invention of radio never fully credited. Even today, his achievements remain obscure.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  Alternating current electricity is not something you think about every time you put your hand on the light switch and turn on the lights. There’s not something that’s easy to say, "Ah, okay, there. There we are. There’s the Tesla, that’s what he gave us."

Harold Clark, Scientist:  He established the basic framework for electrical generation and distribution that drives our economy today. But he was moving down his own path. He was pursuing a vision.

He didn’t necessarily always see the gaps that would have to be filled in order to get where he was going but he always believed that he could get there.

Narrator:  His imagination carried him beyond his time. With over 200 patents, Tesla had an exhilarating sense of the future. But a long road of invention had to be travelled before many of his ideas could be realized...

Jill Jonnes, Historian:  Tesla resonates with our own time. Many of the things that he predicted are being brought to reality by the current generation.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  Wireless networking, cell phones ... yeah I think that’s what brought Tesla back to us was that his dream came true.

Samantha Hunt, Writer:  He was an artist. He’s working with his dreams, he’s working with his visions. His medium is not pigment, his medium is not clay.

His medium is electricity.

Peter Fisher, Physicist:  He was like a scientist with an artistic nature and many scientists are driven by that. Absolutely!

Tesla really was a visionary. Enough of his stuff came true. Enough of his stuff came true.

More Ways to Watch

Tesla's Dinner Party

Join Robert Underwood Johnson, John Muir, Mark Twain, Stanford White, and Nikola Tesla for an imagined dinner party.

Tesla and Wireless Charging

Wireless power seems cutting edge, but it was actually pioneered over 100 years ago by Nikola Tesla.

Tesla: Trailer

Meet Nikola Tesla, the genius engineer and tireless inventor whose technology revolutionized the electrical age of the 20th century. 

The Evolution of Invention

The word “inventor” conjures images of a far-off past. Today, inventor Steve Hollinger keeps the spirit of innovation alive in his workshop.

The Tesla Coil

A hundred years before the world went "wireless," Nikola Tesla invented his Tesla coil, and wirelessly lit up his inventions.

The Columbian Exposition

At the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 160,000 light bulbs lit up the evening sky over Chicago.

The Triumph of Alternating Current

Alternating current transformed daily life in the 20th century, and made Tesla famous.

Nikola Tesla stunned audiences when he wirelessly lit up glass tubes filled with gas. He called it cold light. 

Behind the Scenes of Tesla

Harold Clark of the Liberty Science Center gives a demonstration of Nikola Tesla's wireless energy.

George Westinghouse

During the last part of the 19th century, George Westinghouse had made his fortune through his invention, the railroad air brake. 

Tesla: Chapter 1

Watch the opening scene of Tesla .

The Contract

In Nikola Tesla's original contract with George Westinghouse, the inventor was promised a bonus of $2.50 for every horsepower of alternating current sold. 

You May Also Like

American experience newsletter.

The Amazing Life Of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla accomplished more in his lifetime than many of us could ever hope to achieve in a 100 lifetimes. Tesla held over 300 different patents , spanning several countries. From wireless technology to alternating current, electric motors, Radio, X-Rays, radar and laser technology…the list goes on.

Nikola Tesla’s work would go on to inspire thousands of inventors, dreamers and engineers. To this very day, his inventions continue to shape life as we know it. You can’t help but wonder what the world would have looked like today if Nikola Tesla would have been able to finish his experiments with free energy and long range wireless energy transfer.

Here’s a brief look at Nikola Tesla’s fascinating life.

Nikola Tesla Timeline

A timeline of important events, achievements, setbacks and triumphs..

• July 10th 1859 Nikola Tesla is born Nikola Tesla is believed to have been born at midnight. During his birth, lightning struck during a summer storm. Born to a Serbian Family in Smiljan, Tesla was nicknamed `Child of the Storm`, by his aunt. That said, his mother replied to that comment by calling him `Child of the light`. He was born based on the conventional Slavonic rites, and his birth records show he was born on July 28th. Tesla was the fourth child in a family of five children. The family comprised of three sisters including Marica, Angelina, Milka and his old brother who was known as Dane. Dane died when Tesla was still at a tender age. Tesla attended his early education in 1861 in Smiljan, where he acquired various skills including arithmetic and he also mastered the German Language. The following year, Nikola Tesla moved to a place known as Gospic. Here, his father played the role of a Parish Pastor.
• 1870 Tesla's Brush With Death Nikola Tesla moved to a place known as Karlovac to complete his high school. Three years later, he went back to Smiljan and shortly after his arrival; he contracted cholera. He was in hospital for close to one year, and he faced near-death circumstances.
• 1875 Tesla Enrolls In College In 1875, Tesla enrolled to a Polytechnic based on a military scholarship. He was a disciplined student and achieved the highest grades possible while passing various exams. More so, he also started a cultural club and received a letter of commendation from the dean of the Technical Department. During his second year, he got into an argument with one his professors over the functionality of the Gramme dynamo.
• 1880 Tesla Moves To Prague To Study Philosophy Tesla’s uncle collected money to help him relocate to Prague to finish his studies. He arrived late to enroll for classes, and his lack of competence in Greek and Czech meant that he did not qualify for the classes he wanted to take. Instead, he took up classes in Philosophy at the university, though he did not receive grades for the courses.
• 1881 Tesla Begins His Career As Chief Electrical Engineer In 1881, he moved to Budapest in Hungary, to work for a telegraph company. Upon arriving, he noticed that the Budapest Telephone Exchange company was not in operation, so he worked at draftsman in another company. A few months later, the BTS Company was in operation, and he was given the position of chief electrical engineer. During his tenure, he introduced various operation upswings which improved the performance of the company.
• 1882 Tesla Goes To Work For Edison In 1882, he found another job in Paris with a company referred to as the Continental Edison Company. He began working in a new industry by installing indoor lighting resources. His company had several divisions, and he worked in the section of the company that was responsible for lighting systems. At this company, he improved his electrical engineering prowess. The management team noticed his abilities and soon introduced him as part of the team that would produce dynamos and motors. Following this, Tesla moved to New York in the USA. In 1884, one of his managers from Paris was relocated to the US to manage a company where he worked. During, this time, Tesla started a manufacturing division that was found in New York and sought for Tesla to be relocated to the country as well. In the same year, Tesla was relocated to the USA and started working immediately.
• 1885 Tesla Submits Some Of His First Patents In March 1885, he met with an attorney known as Lemuel Serrel, to help in the submission of various patents. Serrel introduced Tesla to various businessmen, including Benjamin Vail and Robert Lane. They agreed to help finance a new light production company under Tesla Name. Tesla worked to acquire the patents for the company including developing an enhanced DC motor. His solutions gained attention from the mass media who sought his solutions.
• 1887 Tesla Re-imagines The Electric Motor In 1887, Tesla came up with an induction motor that was operated by alternating current, a form of power that was becoming common in Europe and the USA. This type of power provided various benefits, especially in long-distance power transmission. In particular, the motor was operated by a polyphase current, which produced a rotating magnetic field to operate the motor. This innovative electric motor was patented in May 1988, and it comprised of a basic self-starting design that did not require the use of commutators. As a result, this reduced the occurrence of sparking the high maintenance that was associated with replacing mechanical brushes
• 1890 Tesla Begins His Work On Wireless Power Transmission After 1890, Tesla researched various approaches to transmitting power by inductive and capacitive coupling. This was through the use of AC voltages that were produced by his famous `Tesla coil.` He tried in many ways to come up with a wireless lighting system that was based on near field and capacitative coupling. He even performed various public demonstrations, where he would light up Geissler tubes to impress his audience. Tesla also spent close to well over a decade trying to come up with new solutions for lighting
• 1891 Tesla Patents The Tesla Coil In mid 1891, at the age of 35, he became a naturalized citizen of the US. In the same year, he also patented his famous Tesla Coil.
• 1943 Tesla's Death In early 1943, at age 86, Tesla died in a Hotel Room in New York. He died alone, and his body was found by a maid who ignored a do not disturb sign on Tesla’s room. The assistant medical professional evaluated the body and determined the cause of death was related to coronary complications. A few days after the FBI ordered for the acquisition of his belongings, John G Trump was called in to evaluate his works. Trump was a well known electrical engineer who worked for the state, which was held in custody. Following a three day investigation, a Trumps report concluded that was nothing that would demonstrate a hazard in unfriendly circumstances.

Tesla’s Inventions

How Tesla’s inventions changed the world forever…

Alternating Current

This is one of his first ever inventions that caused a stir at the 1893 Worlds Fair in Chicago. The resulting conclusion from Edison and Tesla`s argument on the distribution and production of electricity was provided. The argument could be summarized in relation to cost and safety factors. It was determined that the DC current produced by Edison was costly over long distances and it also produced sparks from the commutator. Edison and his proponents used various approaches to oppose Tesla`s Alternative Current as a solution. Edison tried to prove by going as far as electrocuting animals to prove his point. That said, Tesla responded by showing that AC was safe by shooting current through his body to produce light. This argument is regarded by most as the culmination of well over a decade of wrangles in terms of patents, corrupt deals and stolen ideas. Despite it all, this proves that the system developed by Tesla is effective at providing power in the modern era.

Modern Lighting

While Tesla did not invent light itself, he is responsible for the innovations that have been crucial in how it’s distributed and produced. He came up with fluorescent bulbs in his lab 40 years before they became a standard in the consumer market. More so, at the world`s fair, he used glass tubes by customizing them into the names of famous scientists, to create neon signs.

Ionizing radio and electromagnetic technologies were common on research during early in the 1800s. However, Nikola Tesla went in depth by studying everything up until the Kirlian photography. This resource has the ability to observe life force, which is now common in medical diagnostics. It was a transformative piece of technology which Tesla was key in it`s development. Similar to many of his inventions, the inspiration for X-rays came from his belief that everything we need, is around us at all times.

It’s important to note that the Guglielmo Marconi is initially credited to be the inventor of the original radio technology. However, the Supreme Court denied his patent in 1943, when it was determined that Tesla originally built the radio years before. In particular, Radio signals occur naturally and require a transmitter and receiver to be used. This is a technique that Tesla demonstrated at a presentation in 1892 before the National Electric Light Association. Five years later, Tesla made a patent application. However, in 1904, the patents were overturned with the U.S patent office determining that Marconi was the original owner. This was mainly due to the backing that Marconi had and the state, which was afraid of paying royalties to Tesla

Remote Control

This particular invention was a natural development from the radio. The demonstration of this technology occurred in 1898 and it comprised of several huge batteries. Also, the demonstration included large radio controlled switches, a rudder, running light and a boat propeller. Although this technology remained dormant for a long time, it has played an important role in modern day society.

Electric Motor

One of his greatest inventions has finally become popular by the car that brandishes his name. Although the technical aspects are beyond the scope of this summary, it is important to note that the invention of the motor was one Tesla`s exceptional inventions. In fact, the development of this motor could have helped in reducing the world`s dependency on oil. That said, this invention was compromised by the economic crisis in 1930 and the following world wars. All things considered, this technology has revolutionized the world in many ways.

With his exceptional prowess in scientific concepts, Nikola Tesla came up with the idea that all people are inspired by external impulses. In fact, according to him, every thought and act, was inspired by external stimuli. As a result, he came up with the concept of robotics. That said, an aspect of humanity was still present, with Tesla claiming the human replicas have limitations including growth and procreation. Nevertheless, Tesla worked with all his information to come up with practical solutions. Some of his visions for the future including robotic companions, use of sensors, autonomous systems and intelligent vehicles.

Tesla is also believed to have played a major role in the invention of the laser. Lasers have played an important role in various medical procedures such as surgery. Besides that, the laser has also been key in the development of digital media. That said, his invention of the laser is a classical example of crossing into the worlds of science fiction. The main paradox here being that laser energy can be beneficial for the society and potentially dangerous at the same time. Lasers are still evolving and most techniques are based on the research by Tesla.

Wireless Communications and Limitless Free Energy

These two technologies are directly linked and they can have a significant impact in our daily lives. J.P Morgan gave Tesla the funding to develop a technology that would leverage the occurrence of natural frequencies in the universe to transmit data. This includes a broad range of information that could be communicated including voice messages, text and images. This represented the world’s first communication resources, but it also showed that there was a worldwide technology that could be used to connect the entire world.

Myths, Rumors & Legends

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Tesla’s life – His ambitious and unfinished projects

WardenClyffe Tower

Long-Range Wireless Energy Transfer

Tesla was researching how energy could be transferred wireless by using his accumulated knowledge on microwaves and radio. This also involved the creation of the Tesla Coil and magnifying transmitter. Tesla wanted to come up with a system where energy could be transmitted through long distances. To achieve this goal, he developed the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, Long Island. The role of this island was to function as wireless telecommunications resources and transmit electrical power. That said, JP Morgan who funded the development of the tower finally cut down the funding for the same. Since he was unable to find any additional financiers, he was inclined to stop the development of the tower. As a result, he was never able to achieve his goal of transmitting energy worldwide.

Early in the 1930s, Tesla claimed to have come with a particle beam weapon. Theoretically speaking, this device would have been able of producing an intense and focused beam of energy. This energy could be sent across great distances to destroy armies, warplanes and more. Tesla advertised his technologies to various militaries all over the world, but never found the best financiers. According to Tesla, efforts had been made to steal the invention. His room was invaded, and his papers were scrutinized, but the perpetrators never found anything worth value.

Tesla’s Oscillator

In 1898, Tesla claimed to have developed and launched a small oscillating device that, when attached to a building, would shake it almost destroying everything around it. This device could essentially produce the same power as an earthquake. Upon realizing the potential side effects of owning such a technology, he informed his staff to destroy the technology. Some theorists still believe that the government continues to use his research in places such as the HAARP facility.

Free Electricity System

With financing from J.P Morgan, Tesla developed the Wardenclyffe Tower. This was a gigantic wireless transmission station that was found in New York in the early nineties. Morgan believed the Tower could transmit wireless resources all over the world. That said, Tesla had other plans. He intended to send messages, images and telephony all across the Atlantic to the UK. This would even be related to ships at sea based on his concepts of leveraging the Earth to conduct signals. If the project was successful, anyone could gain access to electricity, by simply inserting a rode into the ground. That said, free electricity is not profitable. This system could have serious ramifications for the energy supply in the world and Morgan refused to finance it.

Improved Airships

Tesla proposed that ships which were electrically powered could help in transporting passengers from New York to London in less than 4 hours. The airships would travel eight miles above the ground, and he also believed that the airships might source their power from the atmosphere. This would reduce the need to refuel, and the ships might be used to transport passengers to pre-chosen locations. He was never validated for his invention, and we nowadays have drones flying based on his work as inspiration.

Learn More About Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla Facts

Well known for his eccentricities, his long list of inventions and of course his technical prowess, Here’s a few facts about Nikola Tesla you may not know…

The shock of his brother’s death affected his personality

The defining moment in Tesla`s life was when he came across the death of his sibling. His death occurred during a riding accident and the years following this were traumatic for Tesla. In fact, he at one point mentioned he could see visions of the air around him `packed with flames of fire.` As an adolescent, he learnt to control his visions but would spend most of his time feeding and communicating with pigeons.

Tesla was once digging trenches for a living

Following his graduation from the state university, Tesla got a job with the local electrical company in Paris. However, he relocated later on in 1884, with the goal of working for Edison. Edison at the time was a prominent name when it came to technological innovations. Tesla quickly rose up the heights at the Edison Company, and he subsequently got a job as an engineer. Edison claimed to give a $50,000 reward for an improvement to his DC generator design. Tesla worked hard to come up with an alternative, but Edinson refused to pay up and Tesla lost his job. While Tesla searched for financiers for his project, he was forced to dig trenches to earn a living.

He discovered x rays with assistance from Mark Twain

Twain and Tesla become close compatriots in the early 18901. He received support from Mark Twain who had a lifelong obsession with new inventions and technologies as well. One day, while visiting Tesla`s lab, Twain decided to take photos that were lit by incandescent light. In 1895, Tesla and a well knew photograph her invited Twain in the lab to take a picture. This one was operated by an electrical device that was known as a Crookes tube. When Tesla reviews the resulting photograph negative, he determined that it was rather splotchy and therefore ruined. A few weeks later, he and another famous German Scientist known as Rontigen unveiled what is nowadays referred to as X-rays.

He developed a remote-controlled boat for military purposes.

During the Spanish American war that occurred in 1898, one of Tesla`s main projects was a small boat that could control through wireless signals. When he applied for the patent for the technology, the state did not believe it was functional and therefore sent their staff. Tesla did well to demonstrate his technology to the staff, and various other big names. This included J.P Morgan who was the financier of various estates. Tesla also informed a local news media that his invention would make it simple for battles to be fought without losing lives. This would render warfare useless, and this was one of his main goals. Today you can find similar technology in a wide range of technologies, such as the remotes for your TV, electric skateboards , adult electric scooters , self balancing scooters  and electric unicycles .

His claims of signals received from space were legitimate

During the summer of 1899, Tesla set up a lab in Colorado Springs. The station was a high altitude station that was to be used to transmit information and electrical resources over long distances. One day, while tracking the lightning storms, his equipment came across certain beeps. After determining that Solar and terrestrial factors were not the cause, he came to the conclusion that the signals came from another planet. On the following Christmas, Tesla informed the world that there was a message from an unknown world. However, a 1996 study copying Teslas experiment showed that the signal was caused by the moon passing through Jupiter.

The famous Stanford White designed his lab

J.P Morgan was one of the main financiers of Teslas projects. In fact, in 1901, he convinced Morgan to release an average of $150,000 for a new business venture. This was a powerful station that was based at Wardenclyffe, on the northern section of Long Island. The role of the of the station would be the new location where Tesla would work on his long-distance communication resources. It is here where Stanford white was hired to design his laboratory. He was a long time friend of Tesla, and they design a lab features a giant 180-foot tower. The tower was designed to act as a transmitter, and it was also linked to underground horizontal pipes.

His relationship with J.P Morgan was not stable

When financing for the Wardenclyffe project ran out, Tesla tried to ask for additional funding for the project, but he failed. While some theorists believe the Morgan cut out funding because Tesla planned to provide wireless power, his other key concern was getting caught up with radio projects. In 1903, after being denied funds by Morgan, Tesla closed up the project. The following year, he wrote accusing Morgan of being a Muslim follower.

He spent his last years in isolation

While for a long time Tesla was one of the big names in New York, poverty and age ultimately led to his death. He lived in isolation in various hotels, and he often preferred the company of pigeons. However, he remembered one aspect of his days as a showman, in the form of press conferences that were to be organised each year. After turning 79 in the same year, he announced that he was inventing a small-sized oscillator that had the power to destroy any military forces.

He once paid his hotel bills with a supposed `death beam` plan

The closed project at Wardenclyffee was finally settled by turning over the resources to various debtors that Tesla owed. In the years after this, the owners of a certain hotel known as Governor Clinton were also given the same piece of collateral payment. This was a wooden case that Tesla said contained a functional model of a unique war ending particle weapon. According to him, the `death beam`, could be able to stop any army and this made war useless. When he gave up the box containing the information, he also warned the employees that they must refrain from opening it. Following his death, the box was opened, and it was found to contain nothing but redundant electrical components.

Nikola Tesla Quotes

“I don’t care that they stole my idea . . I care that they don’t have any of their own” -Nikola Tesla

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” -Nikola Tesla

“All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.” ― Nikola Tesla

“If I would be fortunate to achieve some of my ideals, it would be on the behalf of the whole of humanity.” ― Nikola Tesla

“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.” ― Nikola Tesla

Recommended books about Nikola Tesla

There are a ton of great books on Nikola Tesla if you want to learn more about Nikola Tesla.

Here is a selection of some of our favorites to get you started:

• GoodReads.com – Nikola Tesla Quotes
• TeslaCommunity.com – Nikola Tesla Timeline
• TeslaUniverse.com – Nikola Tesla Timeline
• Wikipedia.org – Nikola Tesla
• TeslaAutobiorgraphy – My Inventions: The autobiography of Nikola Tesla

TransportationEvolved.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc, or its affiliate.

• Hypermilers, Urban Scooter Enthusiasts and Rideshare Participants, are Leading the Charge for Money-Saving Transportation Alternatives
• Just What is Passive Solar Design, and is it Right for You?
• Mi Electric Scooter GiveAway
• How to Prevent a Flat Tire
• Tips on How to Maintain Your Scooters Battery
• Could This Side Hustle Be For You? Becoming a Contract Charger

National Geographic

Greg Leyh's Tesla Coil Featured in National Geographic's "Future Shocked"

Lightning - Nature's High Voltage Spectacle

Stay connected with the universe.