This week’s entry: Nikola Tesla
What it’s about: Thomas Edison is generally acknowledged as America’s greatest inventor—if not the world’s—but a former employee turned rival, Nikola Tesla, may be the more fascinating. A Serbian immigrant who came to New York to work for Edison, before quitting over a pay dispute, Tesla presaged our wireless era by more than a century, transmitting electricity wirelessly in 1891, and inventing remote control by the end of that decade. However, his life and career were full of ups and downs, and he had the misfortune to strike on several inventions at the same time as a rival—most notably Guglielmo Marconi, whom he battled for years after claiming Marconi’s radio was developed using numerous Tesla patents. At different times in his life, Tesla was wealthy and destitute, sickly and hale, praised as a genius and dismissed as a crank. While he was undeniably a genius, Tesla lacked Edison’s practicality and business sense, and some of his most groundbreaking inventions were never put into common use. Even so, as evidenced by the electric car company that uses his name, Tesla is still synonymous with technological leaps forward.
Strangest fact: Some of Tesla’s last inventions were among his most outlandish, and potentially transformative. The inventor died deeply in debt, and one of the main reasons was the years he spent (1901-1917) on a madly ambitious, ultimately unworkable project called Wardenclyffe Tower. The 187-foot tower was to be the proof of concept for a World Wireless System, a series of towers that would broadcast both telecommunications and wireless electricity. Tesla had been demonstrating short-range wireless energy transmission for a decade when he began work on Wardenclyffe, but the tower was supposed to use the electrostatic charge of the Earth itself, building up energy and then sending it out to numerous small receivers, thus powering a whole city. Tesla also claimed Wardenclyffe would be a telecommunications tower capable of reaching across the Atlantic. While the inventor originally had the financial backing of J.P. Morgan, Morgan pulled out in 1904 after a stock market panic and Tesla couldn’t afford to complete work. The never-functional tower was eventually sold to pay off debts and torn down. Meanwhile, the world had begun to adopt Marconi’s system of radio, which required cheaper equipment. Wireless power transmission was never again attempted on a grand scale.
Biggest controversy: Tesla’s rivalry with Edison may have cost both men a Nobel Prize. A competition grew between the two men as Westinghouse began using Tesla’s alternating current (AC) technology for transmitting electricity, while Edison’s company (which would become General Electric) obviously favored his own system, direct current (DC). DC was the original standard, but AC was better at sending electricity over long distances, and the equipment was cheaper. The “War of Currents” nearly bankrupted Edison, and he resorted to a smear campaign, inventing stories of multiple deaths at the hands of AC, and even trying to replace the word “electrocuted” with “Westinghoused” in the popular consciousness. Edison famously Westinghoused a Coney Island circus elephant, using alternating current, and filmed the spectacle as anti-AC propaganda. Edison lost the war when, in 1892, even GE began investing heavily in AC, and it quickly became the standard. Years later, Reuters briefly reported that the 1915 Nobel Prize was being jointly awarded to Edison and Tesla, but a week later reported the award was in fact going to Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg for using X-rays to analyze crystals. Rumors abounded that one or both of the original recipients had refused the prize, although the Nobel Committee insisted that it had never been awarded to them in the first place. As for possible motives, some thought neither wanted the other one to get credit, or simply that their animosity was such that neither man wanted his name side by side with the other’s. Whether there’s any truth to those rumors or not, neither inventor ever won the Nobel.