Nikola Tesla

Their life

The visionary who gave the world alternating current, radio fundamentals, and remote control — imagined complete machines in his head, rotating them in imagination before building — and died alone in a hotel room, decades ahead of schedule.

Known for

• Alternating current (AC) power system
• Tesla coil
• AC induction motor
• Niagara Falls hydroelectric project
• Foundational radio and wireless technology
• Wardenclyffe Tower and wireless power vision

The road they walked

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in the village of Smiljan, in what was then the Austrian Empire and is now Croatia, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest with a gift for languages and a mother whose talent for mechanical invention he later credited as his own inheritance. He studied engineering at the Graz Polytechnic and briefly at Prague, absorbing the new science of electricity just as it was becoming an industry rather than a curiosity. In 1882, working for the Continental Edison Company in France, he is said to have first pictured a rotating magnetic field in his mind — the seed of the alternating-current motor. Two years later he sailed for New York with little more than a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison and a few cents in his pocket.

He arrived in a country electrifying itself literally, and the argument over how to do it — Edison's direct current versus the alternating current Tesla championed — was not academic but commercial warfare. After a brief, contentious stint at Edison's company, Tesla found a backer in George Westinghouse, and their alliance won out: AC could travel farther and cheaper, and by 1893 it lit the Chicago World's Fair and, soon after, carried power from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, the first large-scale proof that electricity could be generated far from where it was used. Tesla's name for a time stood beside Edison's and Westinghouse's as one of the men remaking American life, and his public demonstrations — coils throwing lightning, wireless bulbs glowing in his hands — made him a celebrity as much as an engineer.

The turning point came at Wardenclyffe, the Long Island tower Tesla began in 1901 with financing from J. P. Morgan, meant to broadcast not just messages but power itself through the earth and air. Morgan withdrew support once wireless telegraphy alone proved profitable, and the project collapsed unfinished, taking much of Tesla's fortune and reputation with it. He spent his later decades in New York hotel rooms, still patenting and theorizing — on remote control, on turbines, on ideas for directed energy — but increasingly isolated, his once-grand public image fading into that of an eccentric relic even as the technologies he had set in motion quietly became the backbone of modern life.

How their story ended

Tesla died on January 7, 1943, alone in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, found by a maid who had ignored his do-not-disturb sign for two days. He was 86, in debt, and largely out of the public eye, though the U.S. Supreme Court that same year restored his rightful claim to key radio patents over Marconi's. The official cause was coronary thrombosis. In the days after his death, the FBI took possession of his papers, a detail that has fed decades of speculation but adds no established facts to the plain and quiet end of a man who had once lit a World's Fair.

In their words

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From the Journal