When you think of electricity
you think of Edison.
When you think of radio
you think of Marconi.
But there is one electrical
genius who is nearly forgotten,
a man who dreamed of giving the
world an unlimited supply of energy.
His name was Nikola Tesla
and he was the master of lightning.
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Thank You.
The progressive development of man
is vitally dependent on invention.
Its ultimate purpose is
the complete mastery of mind
over the material world,
the harnessing of the forces
of nature to human needs.
Nikola Tesla, 1919
This is the story of a modern Prometheus
who changed the world with electricity.
It was Nikola Tesla who captured
the power of Niagara Falls
with his alternating current system
and made it possible
to transmit electricity
to all of America and the world.
It was Tesla who patented the
technology for wireless communications
that is used in all radio
and television broadcasting.
His incredible legacy can be seen
in everything from remote control
to neon and fluorescent lighting
X-rays
guided missiles
and even the Strategic
Defense Initiative.
Yet somehow history has
overlooked this remarkable man.
Tesla was indeed a genius
of the first magnitude.
He was a technological visionary.
He could envision great
things and make them work.
He was a foreigner,
an immigrant who arrived in
America with only his dreams.
A proud and sometimes arrogant man,
he worked and locked horns with some
of the most powerful people of his day.
Thomas Edison, who resented his ideas
Guglielmo Marconi, who
capitalized on his inventions
George Westinghouse, who created
the Westinghouse Electric Company
with Tesla's patents
and the great financier,
J. Pierpont Morgan,
who supported and then abandoned him.
At the height of his career, Tesla was one
of the most famous men in the world.
His inventions helped America grow
into a powerful industrial nation.
His ideas created
billion-dollar corporations.
But Tesla was not a practical man.
Always driven toward the
next great breakthrough
he failed to protect his
commercial interests.
In the end, others made fortunes
with his inventions
and he wound up
penniless and rejected.
Money does not mean to me
what it does to other men.
All my money has been
invested in inventions
to make man's life a little easier.
He was a visionary genius.
There aren't many of them,
and he was willing to give
his life to his visions.
We have to evolve means
for obtaining energy from stores
that are forever inexhaustible.
What I intend to show you now,
step-by-step,
is how I finally reached my dream.
This is the house in which,
by coincidence bizarre,
I was born on the stroke of midnight
between July 9 and 10, 1856.
A fierce electrical storm
raged that night.
Nikola Tesla was born of Serbian
parents on the eastern edge
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
in what is today Croatia.
His father, Milutin, was an
Orthodox priest
who expected his son to follow
him in the clergy.
There were only two choices
for children in those days
one being to go in the army and
the other being to become a priest.
Tesla was not attracted by
either of them,
which was very distressing
to his father.
My father was a very erudite man.
The training he gave me comprised
of guessing one another's thoughts
and repeating long passages of verse.
My mother descended from one of the
oldest Serbian families in the country.
She invented and constructed
all kinds of tools and devices
and wove the finest designs
from thread.
Her fingers were nimble enough
to tie three knots in an eyelash.
Early on, Tesla began to demonstrate
an extraordinary imagination.
In my boyhood I suffered from
a peculiar affliction
due to the appearance of images
often accompanied by
strong flashes of light.
I was quite unable to
distinguish whether what
I saw was tangible or not.
To give an example, I was
fascinated by a description of Niagara
and I pictured in my imagination
a big wheel run by the falls.
I told my uncle that one day
I would go to America
and carry out this scheme.
Then, at the age of 17, while
preparing for the seminary,
Tesla contracted cholera and a brush
with death changed his life forever.
In one of the spells, which
was thought to be my last,
my father rushed into the room.
Perhaps, I said, I may get well if
you will let me study engineering.
You will go to the best technical
institution in the world,
he solemnly said.
I came to life,
like another Lazarus,
to the utter amazement
of everyone.
In 1877, at the age of 21,
I travelled to Graz, Austria
to begin my college education.
Here I quickly became obsessed
with the science of electricity.
I wanted to know more of
this wonderful force.
Every spark produced a
thousand echoes in my brain.
In 1831, in England,
Michael Faraday had discovered the
principal of electro-magnetic induction,
which made it possible to
generate electricity.
Faraday discovered that if
you have an electric circuit
in a changing magnetic field,
it would induce an electric
current to run in the wire.
So this was the invention of the
method of inducing, of creating,
oscillating or AC electric currents.
And it was that invention that Tesla
later harnessed into the electrical
system that drives our civilization.
Early electric motors operated
on direct current electricity
but required a system of
sparking connections to induce
a rotary effect in the machine.
I remarked to my professor that
the design of generators and motors
could be greatly improved by
using currents that alternated.
He embarrassed me, greatly,
in front of my classmates saying:
Mr. Tesla will never accomplish this,
it is a perpetual-motion scheme.
Meanwhile, in America,
Thomas Alva Edison
had begun to experiment
with vacuum tubes,
producing the first commercial
incandescent light bulb in 1878.
Edison and Tesla would soon cross paths
in a gargantuan technological struggle
between direct and alternating
current electricity.
In 1880 Tesla moved to Budapest
where he found employment with
the central telegraph office.
Here his idea for an AC
motor began to haunt him.
In my room, I could hear the
ticking of a watch
with three rooms between
me and the timepiece.
A carriage passing at a distance of a
few miles fairly shook my whole body.
The whistle of a distant locomotive
vibrated so strongly in my ears
that the pain was unbearable.
To recover from these attacks, I
took long walks in the city park.
One afternoon, which is ever-
present in my recollection,
the sun was just setting
and reminded me of Goethe's
glorious passage:
The glow retreats
done is the day of toil...
Upon its track to follow
follow soaring.
As I uttered these inspiring
words, the idea came to me
like a lightning flash.
I felt to my knees
and drew a diagram
in the ground.
Tesla perceived a
whirling field of energy.
He suddenly knew he could
recreate this rotating field
by powering the coils of a
motor in different steps or phases
like the pistons of an engine.
The resulting forces of magnetic
attraction and repulsion
would literally twist
the rotor in a circle,
the electrical equivalent of the wheel.
And all this was accomplished
with alternating currents.
It would soon turn the wheels
of industry around the world.
The strength of Tesla's mind
was almost certainly in his
sense of visualization,
to be able to see things
move in front of him.
You see, It was not a
perpetual-motion scheme.
It had been the height of my ambition
and my most ardent wish
to see America
and come in contact with
the great Thomas Edison.
Accordingly, I undertook the voyage
and, after losing my money and tickets,
and passing through a series of mishaps,
including a mutiny in which
I almost lost my life,
I landed on these blessed shores
with four cents in my pocket.
Tesla arrived in New York
on June 6th, 1884.
A 28-year-old immigrant,
he was filled with dreams of
success in this strange new land.
In his pocket he carried a letter of
recommendation from Charles Batchelor,
one of Edison's associates in Europe.
My dear Edison,
I know two great men
and you are one of them.
The other is this young man.
Tesla came to America
because he had tried
to get his alternating current
motor produced in Germany
and, I believe, in France
as well, without any success.
And he realized that there was
probably only one person in the world
who could help him with it
and that was Thomas Edison.
New York had had electricity
since the late 1870s.
Edison installed his first DC
power station on Pearl Street
near the financial district in 1882.
He did this with help from the great
Wall Street financier J. Pierpont Morgan.
But the system was far from perfect.
Electricity was a very new thing;
most people didn't understand
what it was all about.
They were very afraid of it.
There were fires breaking out.
The horses on the streets
would get shocks through
their shoes and run away.
So it was a very exciting
time for Edison.
I was thrilled to the marrow
meeting Edison.
This great man had revolutionized
the world with his incandescent lamp.
And I was burning to show him
my motor
that ran on alternating currents.
Edison had built his business
on the direct current system
and any talk of alternating
currents was an aggravation to him.
The problem with direct current is
that you can't change the voltage.
What you'd generate,
that's what you'd get.
And if you generated the
power at too high a voltage,
you would blow out lamps
at the other end.
If you generate at the
proper power for the lamps
and you want to go any
great distance,
then you need copper wire
that's as thick as your arm.
and the Edison people said:
Well, that's all right,
well just have a power
station every mile or so.
DC was sufficient to power
lights and run motors
but it could not be transmitted
efficiently over long distances.
By raising and lowering the voltage
AC could solve the
problem of distance
but a working AC motor
did not exist.
In spite of their differences
Edison hired Tesla to improve the
performance of his DC generators.
Tesla said he was promised
$50,000 if he was successful.
The offer seemed too good
to be true.
I entered the Edison Machine Works
where I undertook the design
of DC dynamos and motors.
My regular hours were from
10:30 am till 5:00 am the next day.
When I completed the task
I went to Edison for payment
and he laughed.
Edison was very amused by this
and said: You just don't understand
our American sense of humor, Mr. Tesla.
So Tesla had had enough
by that time
and he picked up his hat
and walked out.
Tesla paid dearly for his pride.
I lived through a year of
bitter tears and hard labor
digging ditches for
Edison's underground cables.
But he was still determined
to develop his AC motor.
With help from a group of investors
he opened a laboratory on Liberty Street
only a few blocks from the Edison's offices.
There he began to assemble a
prototype of the motor he had
envisioned seven years earlier.
Along with it he developed
all the components of
the system of AC power generation
and transmission still used today.
In May of 1888, Tesla was ready
to unveil his motor to the world.
The subject which I now have the
pleasure of bringing to your notice
is a novel motor which I
am confident will at once
establish the superior
adaptability of alternating currents.
Over the next five years 22 U.S.
patents were awarded to Nikola Tesla
for AC motors, generators,
transformers and transmission lines
the most valuable patents since
the invention of the telephone.
One of the few men who understood
the great potential of Tesla's inventions
was the Pittsburgh industrialist
George Westinghouse.
He visited Tesla's laboratory and,
on the spot,
he offered to purchase
all the patents dealing
with the alternating current system
for one million dollars.
Westinghouse also proposed
a royalty of $2.50
for each horsepower
generated by a Tesla invention.
The young Serb was on his
way to fortune and fame
while other inventors looked on
with fascination and with envy.
In all my troubles
I did not neglect to become
a real American citizen
making me a proud and happy man.
During the late 1880s Edison began
a negative media campaign
to discredit the alternating
current system of electricity
being developed by
Westinghouse and Tesla.
It became known as
The War of the Currents.
My personal desire would be to prohibit
entirely the use of alternating currents.
They are as unnecessary as
they are dangerous.
Edison employees demonstrated
the dangers of alternating current
by electrocuting animals
in public demonstrations.
Just as certain as death
Westinghouse will kill a customer
within six months after
he puts in a system of any size.
None of his plans worry me
in the least.
An Edison associate suggested
using alternating current
as a means of executing criminals.
A test took place at New York's
Auburn State Prison in 1890.
Several gruesome attempts
were required to kill the victim.
Disgusted witnesses claimed
his spinal cord burst into flame.
The infliction of the death penalty
is not only barbarous and inhuman
but unnecessary as a factor in
the scheme of modern civilization.
The war of the currents came
to a dramatic head in 1893.
The Columbian Exposition in Chicago
was to be the first World's
Fair lighted by electricity.
The Edison Company, the
Thomson-Houston Company,
they all got together and formed
General Electric Company 1892.
One of the first things they
did of course was put in the
bid for the job at the Fair.
Their bid was roughly
a million dollars.
The Westinghouse bid was about
half a million dollars, and naturally
Westinghouse got the job.
In retaliation, GE refused to sell
Westinghouse
any of their Edison light bulbs.
And they got some judge to say that
Westinghouse couldn't use any one-piece
lamps of any description at the Fair.
Westinghouse frantically devised
a two-piece stopper lamp by Fair time
and saved the day.
Now Tesla had a chance
to make history in Chicago.
His large AC generators would
supply all of the Fair's electricity
and prove that his system
would work on a large scale.
On May 1st, 1893 100,000 eager
spectators filed into the fairgrounds,
awed by the gleaming neo-classical
architecture.
Night fell, President Grover
Cleveland pressed a button
and the fairgrounds exploded
with brilliant tube lighting
and multicolor searchlights
the most incredible display of
lighting the world had ever seen.
In the great hall of electricity, the
public could see that
the Tesla-Westinghouse
system made it all possible.
To overcome the impression
that AC was dangerous,
Tesla put on remarkable
demonstrations.
He created a device called
the Egg of Columbus
to show the rotating magnetic
field created by his AC motor.
In his room, he had
cork-soled shoes on and
a tuxedo and white tie
and a top hat.
And he would put his hand
on a terminal which would flash
electricity through his body
creating a great shower
as his whole body was
encompassed in flame.
And people were quite impressed
by this, to say the least.
The Chicago exposition left an indelible
impression on the American imagination.
This was the gleaming new city of
the future,
and it was powered by
the inventions of Nikola Tesla.
Since childhood, Tesla had dreamed
of harnessing the power of
the great natural wonder
called Niagara Falls.
The famous British physicist
Lord Kelvin
was now head of an
international commission
to find a way to use the falls' power.
He had sent a cable to all the other
members of this commission
and it said: Trust you avoid the gigantic
mistake of alternating current.
But all this dramatically changed
when Lord Kelvin attended
the Chicago exposition
and saw the AC system in operation.
A contract was immediately
awarded to Westinghouse Electric
to power the mighty cataract with AC.
The technical challenge was daunting.
The Niagara plan called for three
5,000-horsepower alternators,
the largest generators ever made.
Tesla and Westinghouse engineers
had heated disagreements about
the operating frequency.
Even when the system was finally
installed,
Tesla was the only person
who was certain it would operate.
The technical details have been
completely worked out.
All that now remains is for
the switch to be thrown.
In 1896 the system went online
and the Electrical Age began.
The waters of the upper Niagara
turned enormous water turbines
connected by shafts to the
massive 5,000-horsepower generators.
The current from the generators
was stepped up with transformers
to 22,000 volts
and sent out over long-distance lines
then stepped back down to
light municipalities
and power motors of Tesla's design.
The Niagara Falls Gazette
proclaimed:
This morning the streetcars of
this city are moving by falls power.
Hereafter the falls must
work to earn their living.
Imagine my surprise when,
30 years later,
I saw my boyhood
plan carried out at Niagara
and wondered at the unfathomable
mystery of the mind.
Within a few years
the number of generators at
Niagara was increased to 10.
By the turn of the century,
the power lines stretched
360 miles to New York City.
The war of the currents was
over and Tesla was the winner.
By the time Tesla effectively
arrives on the scene with his motor,
Edison is out of the business.
He's basically written
out of his own company.
This was something Edison
would not soon forget.
In spite of the success of AC,
Westinghouse had over-extended
his company's resources
leading to severe
financial difficulties.
In order to save the company,
Tesla said that he tore up his
royalty contract for $2.50
per horsepower generated.
Today this agreement would be
worth trillions.
Had the inventor been
tricked again?
This is something we've never
found any record of in the
Westinghouse annals.
We do have something which is a
Memorandum of Agreement about that,
but it was never signed.
But Tesla was ready to move on.
I had already perceived enough
to get the idea
that energy could be transmitted
and received
without connecting wires in between.
He was convinced his next invention
would make him a millionaire once more.
My services with Westinghouse
being no longer essential
I resumed experimental work
in a laboratory on Grand Street
where I began immediately the
design of high-frequency machines.
Following the success of Niagara, Tesla
was at the height of social acclaim.
Everyone wanted to know more
of this mysterious foreigner
who was transforming the world
with his electrical inventions.
So far as personal appearance goes,
no one can look upon him
without feeling his force.
His cheekbones are high and
prominent, the mark of the Slav.
His eyes are blue, deeply set,
and they burn like balls of fire.
Franklin Chester, The Citizen
Why was he so well known and so
popular? It's because
the technological advance that he
made were so directly related to the
relief of the drudgery that people
had to endure in their work lives.
They could see what he did
helped them personally.
Every evening Tesla showed
up at Delmonico's,
the most expensive restaurant in town,
to be shown to his special table.
He is fanatical about his dress,
usually sporting a fine waistcoat
white leather gloves and
a derby hat on his head.
He is meticulous about his health
and drinks a glass of whisky a day
saying it will increases his life
expectancy to 150 years of age.
Tesla hobnobbed with the
leading politicians,
millionaires and celebrities of the era.
This was the best way for
independent inventors to find
support for their projects.
His friends were the New York elite:
John Jacob Astor
William K. Vanderbilt
and the writer Mark Twain.
I have just seen the drawings and
description of an electrical machine
lately patented by Mr. Tesla
which will revolutionize the whole
electric business of the world.
One of Tesla's closest friends
was Robert Underwood Johnson
editor of the prestigious
Century Magazine.
Johnson's wife was deeply
in love with Tesla.
My dear Niki, do leave aside
the millionaires and Fifth Avenue
for some simple pleasures.
From one distinguished only by
a great weakness, Katharine Johnson.
In fact, the world-famous inventor was
also New York's most intriguing bachelor.
The fact that he never married, I think,
had almost nothing to do with his
interest in women. It appeared
that he was always very interested
and was attractive to women.
Many women sought his attention
the beautiful and wealthy
socialite Flora Dodge
and even the famous French
actress Sarah Bernhardt.
But in spite of his charisma,
Tesla was only interested in
his inventions.
He had so many phobias that
he couldn't have had
close relationships with women.
He didn't like most of the jewelry
that they wore or the perfume
and he couldn't bear to touch
hair. And these...
and in fact he didn't like
to shake hands. And so
these are all things that do tend
to discourage intimate relationships.
The inventor even claimed
that he destroyed his sexuality
at the age of 40.
A certain French actress kept
coming to me
and made it impossible for me
to concentrate.
It's a pity too, for sometimes
I feel so lonely.
Throughout the 1890s, alongside
his work on AC power technology,
Tesla was also experimenting
with high-frequency electricity.
In 1873 James Clerk Maxwell
in England
had proven mathematically that light
was electromagnetic radiation.
Light was electricity vibrating
at an extremely high frequency.
To explore this unknown world,
Tesla invented a unique device,
still known today as a Tesla coil.
The Tesla coil is an instrument
that can step up voltages
to high voltages at high frequencies
that essentially transmits
a radio signal.
Tesla invited friends and
potential investors
to late-night demonstrations
in his laboratory.
In experiments, he would
permit his guests
to pass thousands of volts of
electricity through their bodies
to light a lamp or melt
a wire in their hands.
Mark Twain was always
a willing subject.
Thunder is good.
Thunder is impressive.
But it is lightning that
does the work.
Even today it would be a little bit
scary to go into Tesla's laboratory
and, in those days, when people
didn't know anything about electricity,
it must have been terrifying.
With high frequencies,
Tesla developed
some of the first neon and
fluorescent illumination.
He also took the first X-ray
photographs.
But these discoveries quickly
paled one day in 1890
when a vacuum tube illuminated in
his hand without any wire connection.
To me, it was the first evidence
that I was transmitting energy
through the air.
This was the beginning of
Tesla's lifelong obsession:
The wireless transmission of energy.
In 1892, Tesla was invited to Europe
to present the results of his
high-frequency experiments.
In London and Paris, he amazed
scientists and engineers
with lighting and electrical effects that
looked more like magic than science.
He also announced a
remarkable new possibility.
I would say a few words on a
thought which fills my mind
and concerns the welfare of all.
I mean the transmission of
intelligence and even power
without the use of wires.
I am becoming more convinced daily
of the practicality of this scheme.
The race for radio was
about to begin.
In 1888 the German physicist
Heinrich Hertz
had demonstrated that
currents of high frequency
emit electro-magnetic waves,
or radio waves, into space.
But creating a practical means
of wireless communication
would require a quantum leap
in imagination.
Hertz created the first radio
transmitter and the first receiver.
He had shown that you could create
an electrical signal in one place
and detect it in another
place with nothing in between.
While in England, Tesla befriended
Sir William Crookes,
the discoverer of radiant matter.
Crookes was a mystic
and believed that human beings
could communicate telepathically
when they were attuned to
high-frequency brainwaves.
Tesla was skeptical.
But one night in his bed
he had a powerful and disturbing vision.
I saw a cloud carrying angelic
figures,
one of whom gradually assumed
the features of my mother.
In that instant, a certitude,
which no words can express,
came upon me that
my mother had died.
And that was true.
Tesla was convinced that he and his
mother were tuned to the same frequency.
His otherworldly experience
would soon lead him to another
revolutionary invention.
On his return to New York in 1893,
Tesla banished himself from social life
and disappeared into his new
laboratory on south Fifth Avenue.
Following his uncanny intuition
he soon discovered that Tesla coils
would transmit and receive
powerful radio signals
when they were tuned to resonate
at the same frequency.
Tuning is the key to all radio
and television transmission.
In my laboratory, I could take
in my hands a coil
tuned to my body and collect
three-quarter horsepower
anywhere in the room without
any tangible connection.
Sometimes I would produce flames
shooting out from my head,
and run a motor in my hands
or light six or eight lamps.
By early 1895,
Tesla was ready to transmit a signal
50 miles to West Point, New York.
He could now produce one million
volts with his new conical coil.
But that year, on the Ides of March,
disaster struck.
Fire broke out in the building
which housed Tesla's laboratory.
Everything was lost.
Utterly disheartened and broken
in spirit, Nikola Tesla, one of
the world's greatest electricians,
returned to his room in the Gerlach
yesterday morning and took to his bed.
He has not arisen since.
I was devastated.
What could I say?
The work of a lifetime lost in a fire
that lasted only an hour or so.
The timing could not have
been worse.
In England, a young Italian experimenter
named Guglielmo Marconi
had been hard at work and created
a device for wireless telegraphy.
Concerned that Marconi would exploit
his ideas, Tesla opened a new laboratory
and rushed to complete his own
system for wireless communication.
This patent, filed by Tesla
in September 1897,
is the fundamental technology
for radio.
But it would be 50 years before
Tesla got credit for his invention.
Various people in various
different countries
had the idea of exploiting
this as a means of communication.
But I think Tesla was the one
with the real vision, in which
he would broadcast signals on
a definite carrier frequency
and you would have a series of
antennas sensitive to one frequency
only tuned to a certain frequency,
and it would detect only one
of these signals and make an
intelligible transmission.
And, once again,
his vision describes the world
that we live in.
I was so blue and discouraged
in those days that I do not
believe I could have borne up
but for the regular treatments of
electricity which I applied to myself.
It puts into a tired body
what it needs most: life force.
Following the destruction of
his laboratory,
Tesla developed a deeper interest
in eastern thought and spiritualism.
Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about
the Vedantic prana
and akasha and the kalpas
which he claims
are the only theories
modern science can entertain.
Inspired by the Hindu teacher
Swami Vivekananda,
Tesla began to look at the universe
as a symphony of vibrations and waves.
We are whirling through endless
space with an inconceivable speed.
Everything is spinning.
Everywhere there is energy.
There must be some way of availing
ourselves of this energy
more completely.
In 1898 an unusual experiment
took place in Tesla's laboratory.
He attached a small mechanical
oscillator to an iron pillar.
Precisely timed pulses from the device
made the entire building tremble.
Windows started crashing
around the area
and he, being at the epicenter,
didn't notice anything happening
until some police came bursting
into his laboratory.
It was just at the moment where
he'd picked up a sledgehammer
and broken the oscillator.
He just said to the policeman that
Oh, too bad that they had just
missed an interesting experiment.
Tesla was, I would say, obsessed with
frequency, the notion of resonance.
The story where he takes the device
and puts it on the girder in his office
and, you know, gets the frequency
of the building and...
I mean, it's an apocryphal
story, I'm sure.
But it gets right at the core that
Hey! If I've got the right frequency,
I can move the world.
And indeed he wants... He talks
about the frequency of the Earth
and that if he can do that he can,
you know,
almost literally split the Earth in half.
Meanwhile, Marconi was doing
more practical things,
and succeeded in transmitting
a signal five miles on the
Salisbury Plain in England.
Not to be outdone, Tesla decided to
introduce an entirely new invention.
In a specially constructed pool,
potential backers were amazed to see
the inventor controlling the motions
of a small mechanical boat
with no wires attached to it.
This was the world's first
radio-controlled device.
The machine even seemed to think.
Someone threw out the question:
What is the cube root of 64?
and four flashes came back.
The audience was so surprised,
Tesla had to remove the lid
to prove no one was inside.
Tesla developed his
radio-controlled boat in 1898
and patented it and thought
it was an armament for war.
He rationalized this as
a means of ending war.
The military who looked at it thought
it was too complicated and vulnerable.
Soon after the demonstration,
Mark Twain wrote from Austria:
Dear Mr. Tesla,
Have you the Austrian and English
patents on that destructive terror
which you have been inventing and
thus make war henceforth impossible?
If so, won't you set a price on
them and commission me to sell them?
Sincerely yours,
Mark Twain
But I have no desire to be
remembered as the inventor
of a purely destructive device.
I prefer to be remembered as
the inventor who abolished war.
That will be my highest pride.
In the summer of 1899 Tesla moved
to Colorado Springs, Colorado
to conduct a series of
secret experiments.
He told curious local reporters that
he intended to send a wireless message
from Pikes Peak to Paris
for the Paris Exposition of 1900,
but his plans were even
more ambitious.
I came to the conclusion that
it would be ultimately possible,
with very little elevation,
to transmit electrical power
through the upper atmosphere.
Just outside the city, he
constructed an experimental
station with sliding roof panels.
A quote in Italian from
Dante's Inferno
hung by the entrance of
the strange wooden structure.
It read: Abandon hope all ye
who enter here.
During the construction phase
Tesla studied lightning.
Now I can understand Tesla's
fascination with it,
because what happens in lightning is
that electricity is being transmitted
from one place to another.
Electric power, not just electric signals,
but real electric power, is being
transmitted from one place to another.
And the way it happens is that
the air itself breaks down, ionizes, and
becomes what is called plasma and
therefore for a moment it's a conductor,
and it's actually conducting electricity
the way a wire conducts electricity.
Inside the station,
he began to assemble the largest
Tesla coil ever built,
which he called the magnifying
transmitter.
An antenna rose 145 feet
above the building,
crowned with a copper-foil sphere.
The entire station was, in effect,
a machine to create lightning.
Late one evening, Tesla put
his transmitter to the test.
He signalled to an assistant
to close the switch.
Huge streamers of electricity shot out
of the coil and darted through the room.
The sound of the exploding
discharges was deafening.
Outside, above the building,
bursts of artificial lightning
more than 100 feet long
began to shoot out of
the ball atop the antenna.
Its thunder could be heard
20 miles away
in the small mining town of
Cripple Creek.
Suddenly the lightning stopped
and the entire city of Colorado
Springs was plunged into darkness.
The experiment had set fire to
and destroyed the local
power company's generator.
Residents were furious and began
to fear this mysterious stranger.
Undaunted, Tesla continued his wireless
power experiments for six more months.
Late one night, an unusual
event took place.
Tesla noticed a repeating signal
being received by his apparatus.
To his own amazement,
he believed it was an
extra-terrestrial communication.
In a letter to the American
Red Cross he wrote:
Brothers, we have a message from
another world.
It reads: One... Two... Three...
The press had a field day.
If the mystical "One, Two, Three"
was impulsed from Mars, as Tesla says,
they certainly showed most excellent
taste in choosing Colorado Springs.
It is a rule in inventional science:
When you're going to tell one,
tell a good one
and men have become great in
this way. Colorado Springs Gazette
Though widely ridiculed
for his claim,
Tesla may have been the first
to detect radio waves from space.
I believed that Tesla could have
gotten these signals from space.
We are getting them today and
these are the radio telescopes.
That's what radio telescopes do
today: receive signals from space.
They are not from
alien civilizations
but they are from the sun
and from the stars.
On January 7th 1900, Tesla boarded
a train back to New York City.
Perhaps he had mastered the
power of lightning.
Or, at least, that's what
he believed.
The law which I discovered
in Colorado is wonderful
and it means that results
undreamed of before will be possible
as soon as a large plant is constructed
in accordance with my plan.
See the excitement coming.
When Tesla arrived home
it was a brand new century.
Electricity was fueling the
tremendous growth of the city.
And now there was talk in the air about
the new art of wireless communication.
Marconi arrived in New York in 1900
to attract investors for his new
company, Marconi America.
He filed a US patent for a
system of wireless telegraphy.
But it was rejected because it
was similar to Tesla's invention.
It became obvious,
I think, to Marconi
as well as to other experimenters
of the time that the Tesla system
was an efficient,
powerful resonator that would
produce electromagnetic waves
that you could work with.
Confident in the future, Tesla took up
residence in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel
and wrote a sensational article
for Century Magazine.
First, let us ask:
What is the spring that drives all?
All this energy emanates from one
single center, one single source:
the sun.
In this detailed futuristic vision,
he described the means of tapping
the sun's energy with an antenna.
He suggested that it would be
possible to control the weather
with electrical energy.
He predicted that wars would
soon be eliminated by machines.
And to unite all nations,
he proposed a global system
of wireless communications.
When wireless is fully applied
the Earth will be converted
into a huge brain
capable of response in
every one of its parts.
He tells us about a vision he had
for both power and communications
that he wasn't going to think small
he was going to think globally on this.
And that's all very nice if it works.
The idea of a global communications
network was very appealing to
one of the world's most powerful
men: J. Pierpont Morgan.
He agreed to invest $150,000 into
Tesla's worldwide radio broadcast center.
But the inventor's real plan
was to transmit, without wires,
industrial levels of electrical power.
Tesla chose to keep this a
secret from his investor.
In the summer of 1900, Tesla
moved to Shoreham, Long Island
and began construction of a huge
tower and plant called Wardenclyffe.
This tower of dreams was made
entirely of large wood beams
and rose 187 feet
above the ground.
The plant next to the tower was
designed by the architect Stanford White
and was constructed under
strict secrecy.
He certainly could have sent signals
across the Atlantic with no trouble
with a station of that magnitude.
But he was still pursuing
wireless power transmission.
The tower would light up the night,
shooting sparks, making noises.
Such experiments, they alarmed
the whole area.
Then, on December 8th 1901,
Marconi took another step forward
and transmitted his famous
letter "S" across the Atlantic.
Tesla dismissed the Italian's advances.
Marconi is a good fellow.
Let him continue.
He is using 17 of my patents.
The simple fact about Marconi is that
he used Tesla's system to
transmit signals
and claimed that these were ideas
that he had developed himself.
Morgan began to doubt the
wisdom of his investment.
Marconi's system not only
worked, it was also inexpensive.
And technical problems were
beginning to catch up with Tesla.
He went back to Morgan again,
asked for more money.
Morgan says: Where's the radio
transmissions across the Atlantic?
How's that coming along?
Well, it wasn't coming along.
Tesla was forced to tell
Morgan his real plan.
What I contemplate and what I can
certainly accomplish, Mr. Morgan,
is not a simple transmission of messages
but rather the worldwide
transmission of electrical power.
A single plant of but 100 horsepower
can operate hundreds
of millions of instruments.
But Morgan was a practical business man
and had already decided to back Marconi.
I have received your letter
and in reply would say that I should not
feel disposed at present to make
any further advances.
J. Pierpont Morgan
Word spread rapidly that the investor
had pulled out of Wardenclyffe
and Tesla was financially ruined.
Late one night in 1903,
the residents of Shoreham were
astonished to see bright light
emanating from the tower and an effect
in the air like the Aurora Borealis.
But, in fact, Tesla could not
transmit wireless power.
And his major defect was that
he was dreaming but he was doing
very few calculations on paper.
Because, on paper, he could have
realized that you can transmit power,
but not very much power.
You can transmit power to hear
the radio, or for television,
or for a telephone.
But once you want to start
turning on lights in which
you really need high currents
the power gets diluted
because space is very large.
To his dying day, Tesla
believed it could be done.
It is not a dream.
It is a simple feat of scientific
electrical engineering, only expensive.
Blind, faint-hearted, doubting world...
Wardenclyffe marked a turning
point in Tesla's career.
Like a modern Prometheus, he
had reached too high and failed.
In 1904, the U.S. patent office
suddenly reversed its previous decisions
and gave Marconi a patent for radio.
One year later, Tesla's
fundamental AC patents expired.
Now the inventions that powered the world
could be used by anyone free of charge.
The public didn't realize that he
had made this invention that had
made billionaires out of corporations
and that he himself was broke.
With no money to carry on his work,
Tesla began to sink into
an isolated world.
He was totally disinterested in business.
I think it not necessarily bored him,
but he didn't make the relationship
between the importance of business
and the importance of his invention
and discovery.
Occasionally he was seen in
public parks feeding the pigeons.
These are my sincere friends.
Tesla's melancholy turned
to anger in 1909
when Marconi was awarded
a Nobel Prize.
Mr. Marconi is a donkey.
The question of Tesla and radio is
certainly a very interesting one.
It's clear that Tesla, in terms of
certain basic notions of radio,
was very early, if not first,
in expressing them and even of getting...
of taking them to the patent stage.
In desperate need of money, Tesla
brought suit against the Marconi company
claiming that his patent
rights had been infringed.
But he lacked the resources to wage
a legal battle with a large corporation
and ultimately gave up.
Marconi had received the Nobel
Prize for work that Tesla correctly
believed to be his own.
I suppose everything is fair
in wireless as in warfare.
In 1915, the Nobel prize
entered Tesla's life once again.
The Swedish government has decided
to distribute the Nobel Prizes
next week, as follows:
Physics: Thomas A. Edison
and Nikola Tesla
Even Tesla was surprised by the front-
page announcement in The New York Times.
I have concluded the honor conferred
upon me concerns
the transmission of electrical energy
without wires.
But one week later, the award was given
to William H. Bragg of Oxford, England
for his work with X-rays
and crystal structure.
The embarrassing situation
was never really explained.
A rumor spread that Tesla had refused
to share the prize with Edison.
The difference that the Nobel
Prize could have made in Tesla's life
soon became evident.
Testimony given by Nikola Tesla,
the electrical inventor,
in a judgment for $935 in back taxes
was filed yesterday.
Mr. Tesla said under oath that he was
penniless and had been living on credit.
In an attempt to give him
long overdue recognition
the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers
decided to award Tesla their
prestigious Edison Medal.
But, on the night of the presentation,
the guest of honor was missing
and Edison was conveniently
away on business.
They found Tesla across the street
by the New York Public Library
feeding the pigeons.
Later that night he was persuaded
to accept his medal and announced
that he had finally completed his
invention to transmit wireless power.
The energy goes to a distant place
and you will see something like the
Aurora Borealis.
To conclude, we are coming
to great results.
The audience thought Tesla was
losing touch with reality.
I refuse to accord to some
small-minded and jealous individuals
the satisfaction of having
thwarted my efforts.
These men are nothing more to me
than microbes of a nasty disease.
Well, by that time, you know, Tesla
had ceased to have any
financial means.
He was virtually dependent on being
helped by hotels and people that he knew.
He began to bring injured birds
back to his hotel room to nurse them.
He had more companionship with
pigeons in that time of his life
than with human beings.
Working as a consulting engineer,
Tesla managed to maintain a small office
and laboratory in the Metropolitan Tower.
To change his thoughts, he frequently
attended movies in Times Square.
Here he could see his futuristic
ideas appearing on the screen.
But his ideas were only accepted in
science-fiction movies and magazines.
In 1924, there was a news report
that while at Colorado Springs
Tesla had invented a death ray
machine that shot bolts of lightning.
The inventor was strangely
quiet on the topic.
Meanwhile, a new scientific star,
Albert Einstein,
had captured the world's
attention with his theory of relativity.
Tesla continuously attacked the
validity of Einstein's work.
Scientists today wander through
equation after equation
that have no relation to reality.
If we were to release the energy of
atoms, instead of a blessing
it might bring disaster to mankind.
But no one took him seriously.
I think that every generation
of scientists
feels that the new ideas that come
along that replace their own ideas
represent a loss rather than a gain.
Tesla believed that Einstein was taking
us intellectually in the wrong direction.
Rejected by traditional science, Tesla's
interest again turned to the esoteric.
His intellect seemed to embrace a
lot of different areas quite easily.
What he lacked were the social skills.
And that's an enormous shame
because it interfered with his ability
to use that genius to be practical.
Though nearly a recluse, he would
occasionally attend dinner parties
at the home of the German poet
and mystic George Sylvester Viereck
and he always intrigued the guests.
While we were in the midst of talking,
an apparition seemed to come
into the room.
He walked so softly and he struck us
as almost an unearthly creature.
And he talked of all sorts of, seemed
to me at that time, unreal things
more in the nature of the psychic
rather than scientific.
Tesla wrote a strange poem called
Fragments of Olympian Gossip
and dedicated it to Viereck.
While listening on my cosmic phone
I caught words from Olympus blown...
The latest tells of a cosmic gun.
To be pelted is very poor fun.
The meaning of the poem
would soon be explained.
I inherited from my father
an ineradicable hatred of war.
But war can be stopped, not
by making the strong weak,
but by making every nation, weak
or strong, able to defend itself.
Thomas Edison, America's
best-known inventor, died in 1931.
That same year, Tesla
came back to life.
His friends threw him a 75th
birthday celebration.
Time magazine put his picture
on the cover.
Letters of admiration poured in
from scientists around the world,
including a generous Albert Einstein.
I congratulate you for your great
success on your lifetime task.
Basking in the attention, Tesla
announced at a press conference
that he had discovered a
completely new source of power.
The idea, when it first burst
upon me, was a tremendous shock.
And let me say that it has nothing to do
with releasing so-called atomic energy.
I think that a lot of the proposals
that he made in his later life were
so esoteric as to be impractical
in that time, and even
in the current time.
When the Nazis rose to power
in Germany,
Tesla decided that the time was right
to reveal his new source of power:
a man-made form of lightning
called teleforce
that could shoot an airplane
from the sky.
Nikola Tesla, electrical wizard
and radio pioneer,
announced that he was working on
a machine to create a powerful
electrical death beam
which could wipe out armies in a flash
and destroy huge fleets of ships or planes.
The concept of using lightning
bolts as a weapon certainly is
millennia old; it goes back at least
to the ancient Greeks.
Think of Zeus throwing lightning bolts.
The main contribution that Tesla had
was to come up with a true
scientific rational...
at least concept... of coming up with
controlling these lightning bolts and
projecting them over long distances.
Tesla had experimented with this
idea while at Colorado Springs.
Now he intended to build it
on a large scale.
His plan was to charge small
particles of tungsten or mercury
then accelerate them with lightning
force through a special gun
with one end open to the atmosphere.
Tesla's death beam stirred the
public's imagination
when it was featured in a Superman
cartoon, the Electrothanasia-Ray.
But the idea was more than
science-fiction.
Tesla tried to sell this concept
to various governments:
England, the Soviet Union and
the United States
all allied powers and
against Germany.
He offered his system to England for
$30 million and they entered negotiations.
When Tesla demanded payment before
sending the final plans,
the deal fell through.
The British attempted to build
their own death beam
but the project was soon
abandoned.
As the Nazis surrounded Yugoslavia,
Tesla attempted to sell a beam
weapon system to his former country.
There should be needed nine stations.
Four for Serbia, three for Croatia
and two for Slovenia, and it will
protect our dearest homeland.
At this point, even Tesla's countrymen
thought he was just a crazy old man.
One day in 1937,
Tesla started out from his hotel room
to feed his pigeons.
Suddenly, a few blocks from the hotel,
he was hit by a taxi and
thrown to the ground.
Three of his ribs were broken.
He was 81 years old.
Remembering what he did for their
company, Westinghouse executives
agreed to pay his room and board
for the rest of his life.
The inventor also received a small
stipend from the Yugoslav government.
During the Christmas season of 1942,
Tesla's death was imminent.
Again he attempted to interest
the United States in his
beam weapon concept.
At the recommendation of two
government engineers,
a meeting of high-level officials
was scheduled at the White House
for January 8th 1943 to
consider his plans.
But the meeting never took place.
Nikola Tesla, inventor of the Tesla
coil, the induction motor
and hundreds of other electrical
devices, died last night
in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker.
On last Thursday night,
here in our city of New York,
a man who was 87 years of age
died in his humble hotel room.
On January 10th 1943, Mayor Fiorello
LaGuardia of New York
paid tribute to Tesla on the radio.
He died in poverty
but he was one of the most useful
and successful men who ever lived.
Were we to eliminate from our industrial
world the result of Tesla's work
the wheels of industry would
cease to turn
and our electric trains and cars
would stop.
Our towns would be dark,
our mills and factories dead tonight.
But Tesla is not dead.
The real, the important part of Tesla
lives in his achievement, which is great,
an integral part of our civilization,
of our daily lives,
of our current war effort.
Ironically, only five months
after Tesla's death,
the United States Supreme Court declared
elements of the Marconi patent invalid.
The decision confirmed Nikola
Tesla's patent priority
for the fundamental
technology of radio.
Unknown subjects, equipment, experiments
and research of Nikola Tesla
deceased. Espionage.
Following Tesla's death, fears
rapidly increased
that he might have invented
a powerful new weapon.
FBI special agent in charge, P. E. Foxworth,
was called in to investigate.
He had been informed that Tesla's
papers were not secure.
Tesla is reported to have completed
and perfected his experiments in the
radio transmission of electrical power
commonly referred to as the death ray.
A distant relative of Tesla named
Sava Kosanovich
is taking steps to get possession of
these important documents and plans.
Tesla's nephew Kosanovich was an
up-and-coming Yugoslav diplomat
with suspected connections
with the communists.
He insisted that his uncle's
effects be returned to Yugoslavia.
Kosanovich had asked a locksmith
to come and open the safe
thinking there might be a
testament, a will, in the safe.
A will was never located.
And there was a lot of talk
then about secret weapons and
negotiations with the USSR.
It was all kinds of talk, you know.
Shortly before his death,
Tesla showed a delivery boy
a box in his room
that he said contained
a powerful weapon.
A number of people called me
and asked me,
did I ever see in the hotel room
a certain kind of a box, you know...
They were looking for some secret
contraption that Tesla had invented.
I never saw anything like that.
The U.S. Office of Alien Property
immediately seized all of
Tesla's possessions
until their ownership
could be established.
There's every evidence that they
did look through all his papers
because the papers were not in
order and certain things were missing.
All his technical papers
on beam weapons
were secretly microfilmed
by U.S. military agents.
On August 6th 1945, the first atomic
bomb was exploded on Hiroshima, Japan.
Soon after, the bomb would
be in the Soviets' hands.
During this period, copies of Tesla's
papers on the beam weapon
were shipped to Wright Field
in Dayton, Ohio.
There, a top-secret research
program began called "Project Nick"
to find a defense against
nuclear-missile attack.
Copies of his... Some of his papers
were sent to Wright-Patterson in 1945,
not to my facility, not even to a
predecessor of my facility,
but to another part of the base,
for analysis.
And then they vanished. Nobody
seems to know what happened to them.
In 1952, Sava Kosanovich obtained
permission from U.S. authorities
to return Tesla's estate, still stored in
New York, to the inventor's homeland.
I personally believe
that the U.S. government may have
overlooked some things of value
in the Tesla papers before they were
released to the Yugoslav government.
A Tesla museum was opened in Belgrade
by Yugoslavia's president, Marshal Tito.
But during the Cold War,
the museum was off-limits to
western scientists and scholars.
Then, in 1960, Soviet Premier
Khrushchev announced that the USSR
had developed a powerful
new weapom.
There was concern in the U.S. that
the Russians may have access to
Tesla's missing papers on beam
weapons in Belgrade and elsewhere.
It's possible that these papers
on the particle-beam weapon
were obtained by the Soviet Union.
But that wasn't the only topic.
In other words, I think that
the United States
has always had Tesla's papers
on particle-beam weaponry.
An American beam weapon
program began at Lawrence
Livermore laboratories.
But engineers could not produce
an effective directed-energy weapon.
I've always been a sort of a fan
of Nikola Tesla, an admirer,
and definitely he had the concept
of a charged particle-beam weapon
back in the 1930s.
I haven't a clue, to be quite honest,
how he meant to actually do it.
In 1978 evidence suggested that
the Soviets were attempting to build
a huge beam weapon
near Semipalatinsk in the Ukraine.
Soon after, President Ronald Reagan
announced the Strategic Defense Initiative
in March 1983.
I call upon the scientific community
in our country,
those who gave us nuclear weapons,
to turn their great talents now to
the cause of mankind and world peace,
to give us the means of rendering these
nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
Tesla's concept for a beam weapon
defense shield
was finally taken seriously
by the United States
to combat the destructive
threat of atomic weapons.
In spite of circumstantial evidence,
there is no direct proof that
Tesla's ideas or plans
were used in the
Strategic Defense Initiative.
And even today, after decades of
investment and research,
scientists still disagree on
whether beam weapons are realistic.
Basically, let me just make
a short statement.
It's all I'm really at liberty to say.
A considerable amount of effort
has taken place in the United States
and in a number of other countries
trying to get these things up
to a real weaponizable status.
And we stopped at that point.
No U.S. government archive has any
record of Tesla's technical papers,
which were copied immediately
after his death.
And what has become of
Tesla's great dream
to transmit electrical power
without wires?
This is the Navy and Air Force High-
Frequency Active Auroral Research Program,
or HAARP, in Gakona, Alaska.
The large antenna array is designed
to beam high-energy microwaves
into the ionosphere.
Tesla was a genius,
because way before anybody
knew or even understood
the physics of the Earth and
what we call today the ionosphere,
which is a layer of ionized particles
about 80 kilometers above the Earth,
he conceived it, and he tried to use it
to produce a variety of new concepts.
The HAARP project evolved from
a patent filed in 1987
in which Tesla's work is referenced.
It proposed using the ionosphere
like an enormous electrical circuit
to transmit power around the planet.
It even described a means of
changing the weather
by super-heating portions of the
upper atmosphere with microwave energy.
Tesla proposed that it might be
possible to modify the weather
by using radio waves.
I believe that this is impossible.
Ionospheric modification is still
in its early experimental stages.
But microwave technology has
already made it possible
to transmit wireless power
with the use of satellites.
We go to Alaska, and in Alaska
there is natural gas.
In order to send it somewhere
you have to create a pipeline.
That's very expensive. So we said,
all right, let's go into Alaska,
create microwaves from the natural
gas, send them to a satellite
at a particular geosynchronous orbit,
put a reflector there and send it to Japan.
And in Japan, you get an antenna
which transforms these microwaves
into 60 Hz and you get electricity.
So you make actually Tesla's dream.
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 was special; he was unique.
He was unusual in all sorts of ways.
And if we are to understand
our own creativity,
our own ability to invent
there is an awful lot to be learned by
studying the way in which he created.
The day when we shall know
exactly what electricity is
will chronicle an event
probably greater,
more important, than any other recorded
in the history of the human race.
Then, it will be a mere
question of time
when men will succeed in
attaching their machinery
to the very wheelwork of nature.
See the excitement coming!
Kate O'Hara & Serkan Yilmaz
To learn more about Nikola Tesla
visit PBS online at pbs.org