The Tragic Story of Nikola Tesla

When you think about the greatest inventors  of all time, there are a few names that come to mind. Henry Ford. The Wright brothers.

Thomas Edison.  But there's one name that is not as recognizable. When you plug your phone in, turn on the  lights, or use the refrigerator, you have Nikola Tesla to thank.

This is the story of the  forgotten genius and the story begins at the end. On January 7, 1943 a maid working at the New  Yorker Hotel walked into room 3327, where she found the body of an 86--year-old man who  called the hotel home for the past decade. Tesla died alone and broke.

He lived off a diet  of warm milk and crackers and was obsessed with feeding the pigeons outside. One of the greatest  inventors of all time faded into obscurity and died penniless. There is a reason why this  happened which will become clear by the end of this story.

Tesla was born in the town of  Smiljan in present-day Croatia on July 10, 1856. He was born during a lightning storm. According to  family legend, the midwife said halfway through the birth: this child will be a child of darkness to  which his mother replied, no, he will be a child of light.

Little did she know how prophetic those  words would be. When Tesla was five he witnessed his older brother fall from a horse and later  die. This would haunt him for the rest of his life.

As a child, he began seeing visions accompanied by  flashes of light, confusing what was real and what was imaginary. This never went away. The vision  spurred his ability to conceive inventions in his head in such detail that he didn't even need  to draw them out.

He explained how the designs were perfected in his mind in an article in 1919.  "Invariably, my device works as I conceived that it should and the experiment comes out exactly  as I planned it. In 20 years there has not been a single exception.

" Tesla credits his mom for his  interest in invention. Đuka Mandić invented small household appliances in her spare time. She had an  eidetic memory - the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision and she passed this on  to her son.

Tesla's father was a priest and wanted him to become one too but Tesla was interested in  engineering. When he contracted cholera as a teen and nearly died, his father promised to send  him to engineering school if he survived and miraculously, he did. He went to study in Austria  at the Technical College of Graz where he is said to have worked from 3 am until 11 pm  every day.

Professors were worried that he would die from exhaustion. Tesla had a beautiful  mind. He could perform calculus in his head and spoke eight languages.

He was a good student  at the start but would not finish school. He dropped out after becoming addicted to gambling  and cut ties with his family so they wouldn't find out. His friends didn't know what happened to  him either.

They thought he drowned in a river. Tesla moved around Europe and eventually ended  up in Budapest working as an electrician at a telephone company. While walking around a park  in the city one day, he had an epiphany about developing a new way of generating electricity  using alternating current.

It would be his greatest invention that would change the world. I'll  explain more about AC a little later. In 1882, he settled in Paris to work for the French branch  of Thomas Edison's electric company.

He started off installing indoor lighting but the managers  noticed his talents and had him doing more complicated work, designing and building dynamos  and motors. He was soon traveling throughout Europe fixing problems at other Edison branches. Two  years later, in 1884, Tesla's manager offered him a job at Edison Machine Works in New York City.

He agreed and arrived in America with only four cents in his pocket because his money was stolen  on the boat ride over. Tesla initially had a good impression of Edison. Edison was also impressed by  Tesla, later saying: "I have had many hard-working assistants but you take the cake.

" This mutual  admiration didn't last. They would become bitter rivals. The two men disagreed over how electricity  should be contained and delivered.

Edison preferred direct current which is a system where the  electric charge only flows in one direction. Tesla was a fan of alternating current in which  the electric charge changes direction periodically. Changing directions is crucial to maintaining a  steady supply of electricity because it does not overpower outlets.

This means it can provide  more power and transmit power over longer distances. It's the reason AC powers our homes  and other large appliances whereas DC powers smaller items like flashlights. But Edison didn't  care about AC because it could have hurt the sales of direct current since he owned all the  patents for DC.

According to Tesla, a manager at Edison's company offered him a $50,000 bonus if  he could improve some machines that ran on DC. When he did, the manager refused to pay up. Another  account of the story has Edison telling Tesla: "You don't understand our American humor.

" Regardless  of how it played out, Tesla quit and set off to form his own electric company the following year  in 1885. But his investors showed little interest and decided to take the company and all of  Tesla's patents which they could do because Tesla had assigned the patents to the company in  exchange for stock which was now worthless. After losing his company, Tesla had to take a job digging  ditches for two dollars a day just to survive.

But his fortunes would change. In 1887, Tesla invented  an induction motor that ran on alternating current. The motor was the most efficient way to convert  electricity to mechanical power.

Aversion of it powers Tesla's vehicles which took its name from  the inventor. He patented the motor and showed it off the following year at the American Institute  of Electrical Engineers that caught the attention of George Westinghouse, a major player in the  electric market who realized Tesla's AC motor might just be what he needed to complete his  alternating current system and compete against Edison's DC system. So Tesla licensed the  patents for the AC motor to Westinghouse for $60,000 and also received stock and  royalties.

Westinghouse hired him as a consultant for $2,000 a month which is the  equivalent of over $50,000 a month today. The war of the currents began. Edison tried  hard to try to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla.

He secretly financed the electric chair that used  alternating current to prove how dangerous AC was. Edison's company also publicly tortured animals  to prove its point. In 1903, they electrocuted a circus elephant named Topsy and produced a film  about it called Electrocuting an Elephant.

Despite Edison's schemes, good things were happening for  Westinghouse and Tesla. They underbid Edison and his newly formed company General Electric to  illuminate the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The first all-electric fair  celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America.

It was clear to  the 27 million people who attended that AC would power the future. Their success continued when  they beat out Edison's General Electric again to build the world's first alternating current power  plant in Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power station was a massive success and helped light up  Buffalo, New York.

The building of the plant also meant Tesla became a pioneer in renewable energy.  His statue can be found at Niagara Falls today. Westinghouse and Tesla won the war of the  currents and direct current was being phased out.

But there were problems. Westinghouse's company  was running out of money and eventually went $10 million into debt. In 1897, he went to Tesla  and asked if his royalties could be reduced in a desperate attempt to save the company.

Tesla  was so compelled by compassion for his friend that he ripped up his contract. He was grateful to  Westinghouse for believing in him when no one else would. Tesla willingly walked away from $12 million  in royalties which in today's terms would be worth over $300 million.

Had he held on  to those royalties over time, he would have likely become the wealthiest person on the planet and the  first person with a billion dollar net worth. That act of compassion for his friend of tearing up his  contract saved Westinghouse. In return, Westinghouse paid Tesla $216,000 for the rights to use as ac patents forever.

This is the equivalent of about $60 million today. With that money, Tesla became financially independent and set up a series of laboratories in  New York for new projects where he was visited by the rich and famous, including his close friend and  one of the greatest American writers of all time, Mark Twain. This was his period of many inventions. 

He held over 300 patents in his lifetime. He created an early version of neon lighting, the  tesla turbine - a bladeless turbine for vehicles. He pioneered x-ray technology by experimenting  with radiation.

This is an x-ray of his own hand. Another stand-out invention was one of the first  remote controls. In 1898, he controlled a miniature boat at Madison Square Garden in New York.

It was  so far ahead of its time that the crowd thought he was using magic to make it move. That would be  the ancestor to today's remote-controlled drones. One of his most well-known inventions is the Tesla  coil - a device that can produce large amounts of high voltage electricity.

Because of the coils, he discovered he could send and receive powerful radio signals when they resonated at the same  frequency. Tesla was getting ready to broadcast his first radio signal but disaster struck. A  fire destroyed his lab in 1895.

He lost years of research and equipment. Tesla didn't apply for  a patent for the radio until two years later. The fire would be the turning point in his life that  led to a downhill spiral.

At the same time that he was working on radio, an Italian entrepreneur,  Guglielmo Marconi, was also working on the radio in England. He tried to acquire patent rights in the  US but was turned down because it was too similar to Tesla's. However, things changed when Marconi was  able to send the world's first transatlantic radio message in 1901 using 17 of Tesla's patents.

Edison  then threw his financial support behind Marconi. Tesla had no problem with Marconi's achievements  but in 1904, the US Patent Office suddenly changed its mind and awarded Marconi a patent for  the invention the radio. There has never been a reason given for this decision but the  powerful financial backing Marconi received could explain it.

Marconi went on to win the Nobel  Prize in Physics in 1911 which was only possible due to Tesla's work. Tesla was furious and sued  Marconi. The case dragged on in court for years and was only settled in Tesla's favor after his death. 

That radio incident negatively impacted the rest of Tesla's career. For example, Tesla was obsessed  with bringing wireless communication to the world and built a huge wireless transmission station in  Long Island, New York called Wardenclyffe Tower. He imagined a world where we could send and receive  messages wirelessly.

He was, again, well ahead of his time. But financial backers did not have enough  faith in his project. They pulled out and banked on Marconi's radio invention instead.

This left  Tesla in financial ruin. He had no choice but to abandon his dream project in 1905 and eventually  lost Wardenclyffe Tower to foreclosure. Tesla's mental health deteriorated.

He lived his last  decade in the New Yorker Hotel beginning in 1933. Westinghouse Corporation hired him as a consultant  and paid for his room. He lived rent-free but died in debt.

So why did one of the greatest inventors  of all time fade into obscurity and die penniless? You could say T esla was unlucky at times like  when the fire burned down his New York lab. But the main reason is because Tesla was not  a capitalist.

He made decisions that those with more business acumen would not have made such as  giving up his royalties for the AC motor. He wasn't concerned about money. He was concerned about the  pursuit of science for the betterment of humanity.

He wanted to change the world and he did. Thanks  in part to Elon Musk's company, people are starting to learn more about the man who inspired  the company, a man whose inventions would power our entire planet. It's because of Tesla  that modern society functions the way it does.

Tesla's mother called him a child of light  and she was quite right. Thanks for watching the story of Nikola Tesla, I hope you  enjoyed it. I'm Cindy Pom.

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