Imagine a world without smartphones, without Wi-Fi, without radio, or television—a world where the night is an absolute, impenetrable, almost primitive darkness, disturbed only by the flickering glow of candles and the hiss of gas lamps. A world where energy is only a brutal force, visible and deafening, like steam trapped in cast-iron boilers. This was the world of the nineteenth century.
Now imagine a single man who, with the sole force of his mind, illuminated that world of darkness. A man who tamed alternating current, that invisible soul of electricity, and forced it to travel thousands of miles through thin copper wires to flood our cities with light. The man who invented the radio, X-rays, fluorescent lamps, drones, and that famous induction motor that today silently powers your electric cars. The name of this man is Nikola Tesla.
But this is not one of those success stories that Hollywood loves so much. It is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. What if I told you that the man who literally created the twentieth century and predicted the twenty-first died in absolute solitude, in atrocious misery, at the back of a cheap hotel room in New York, overwhelmed by unpaid bills? What if I told you that his greatest discoveries, which could have changed human civilization forever, were stolen and appropriated by others, or ridiculed and buried in archives for decades? What if I told you that his final dream, the most humanistic of all, to offer all humanity free and wireless energy extracted directly from the earth and the air, was deliberately and relentlessly annihilated by those who saw it as a mortal threat to their financial empires?
This is not just the story of an inventor. It is the story of the Prometheus of our time, a genius who brought men the fire of electricity and who was therefore chained with invisible bonds to the rock of oblivion and misery. Who was he really? Was he a mad scientist ahead of his time by a century, or a dangerous visionary broken and trampled by a ruthless system based on greed? But just before we go looking for answers in the most remote provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I invite you to subscribe to the channel Personalidades en Detalles and to like this video. Your support is indispensable for us to continue bringing to light the forgotten destinies of history. Let us begin.
He was born, according to family legend, exactly at midnight on the night of July 9 to 10, 1856, in the tiny village lost in the mountains of Smiljan, in present-day Croatia. That night, a storm of unprecedented violence raged. Lightning ripped through the black sky with a silent fury. The midwife helping with the delivery crossed herself in terror and told his mother,
“This child will be a child of darkness, a child of the storm.”
To which his mother, a woman of strong and poetic spirit, replied with a prophetic certainty,
“No, he will be a child of light.”
His father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian Orthodox priest, an educated, scholarly, and severe man who dreamed that his gifted son would follow in his footsteps and consecrate his life to God. His mother, Djuka Mandic, was the illiterate daughter of a priest, but she possessed a true inventive genius. She did not know how to read or write, but she could recite from memory entire volumes of Serbian popular epics. She made complex mechanical devices herself to facilitate heavy domestic chores, such as mechanical butter churns, spinning wheels, and many other things. From her, as Tesla himself believed, he inherited his gift, his spark.
Since his earliest childhood, Nikola was different. He was not like the others. He was obsessed with strange, terrifying, and magnificent visions. Blinding flashes of light, often accompanied by detailed three-dimensional images and complete scenes, tormented him. He possessed a phenomenal photographic memory, capable of retaining entire books word for word after just glancing at a page. He also possessed the gift that would become the foundation of his genius: the gift of eidetic imagination. He did not need blueprints, mathematical calculations, models, or long experiments. He could build the most complex machine in his imagination. He could set it in motion, observe its operation for weeks and months, see what parts wore out, where the balance broke, and make modifications, all without ever touching a single tool. His mind was a perfect virtual laboratory, an absolute reality simulator.
But this gift was also his curse. He was hypersensitive to the outside world. The ticking of a clock three rooms away resonated for him like dull hammer blows. The flight of a fly across the room caused a painful buzzing in his ears. The passing of a carriage on the street several blocks away made his whole body tremble. He suffered from countless obsessions and phobias. He had an atrocious panic of microbes, demanding absolute sterility in everything. He could not bear to touch another person’s hair. He was terrified by women’s earrings, especially pearl ones, and the smell of camphor. He was forced to count his steps when walking, or to calculate the volume of his soup bowl or his coffee cup before eating or drinking. He was a genius locked in the fragile and hypersensitive prison of his own mind.
His father insisted that he make a career in the church, but Nikola, passionate about physics and mathematics, dreamed of engineering. Their confrontation was long and painful. Destiny decided it through an illness that almost cost him his life. At the age of seventeen, he contracted cholera and found himself on the brink of death for nine months. He remained bedridden, unable to move, his body emaciated. When the doctors had already given up hope, his father entered the room to say goodbye and told him that he would soon get well. Nikola looked at him and whispered weakly,
“Perhaps I will recover if you let me study engineering.”
His father, willing to do anything to save his son, swore solemnly to send him to the best technical university in Europe, and as if by magic, Nikola began to recover slowly but steadily. Later he would say that it was not an illness but a remedy offered by destiny.
He entered the Polytechnic School of Graz in Austria, and it was there, in his second year, where he faced for the first time the problem that would define his whole life and career. During a physics class, a professor demonstrated the operation of a Gramme dynamo that ran on direct current. The machine produced loud sparks at the commutator, the device with brushes that reversed the direction of the current. The professor explained that this was a fatal and inevitable defect of direct current. It was then that the young and audacious student Tesla stood up and declared that this was not true. He stated that it was possible to create a motor without that imperfect commutator that produced sparks, without brushes—a motor that would work on a totally different and more elegant principle based on a rotating magnetic field created by alternating current.
The professor mocked him in front of the entire auditorium. He dedicated a whole lecture to demonstrating that it was mathematically and physically impossible, comparing Tesla’s idea to an attempt to build a perpetual motion machine. For Tesla, it was a challenge, a personal insult to his intelligence. The idea of the alternating current motor obsessed him completely. It became his torment. He thought about it day and night, driving himself to nervous exhaustion.
After his studies, he moved to Budapest, where he found work in a central telegraph company. One day in February 1882, while walking through the city park with his friend Anthony Szigeti, reciting from memory verses from Goethe’s Faust, he stopped in his tracks, petrified, looking at the setting sun. In his mind, like the lightning he had seen the night of his birth, the solution appeared to him perfect and complete. He took a stick and drew directly in the sand of the path the diagram of an electric induction motor—that same motor that today runs in every hairdryer, every vacuum cleaner, every machine tool, and every electric car. He did not invent it at that moment; he saw it complete in his head with all its details.
He understood that his future was not in a conservative Europe where they mocked his ideas. His future was in the New World, in the country of unlimited opportunities, a country that had been built on bold ideas: in America. And there, there was only one man capable of appreciating his genius in its true measure, a man whose name was already synonymous with the word electricity: the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Alva Edison.
In 1884, with almost no money in his pocket—he had lost his money on the way—and with a letter of recommendation from his former boss as his only luggage, Nikola Tesla landed in New York. The letter was addressed to Edison and, according to legend, contained a single sentence, but how prophetic:
“My dear Edison, I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.”
Thus began one of the most celebrated, dramatic, and tragic rivalries in the history of science: the clash of two worlds, of two philosophies, of two geniuses. One of them would become the symbol of the American dream, the embodiment of success. The other would become its greatest and most unjust victim. And if, like us, you are passionate about the stories of geniuses ahead of their time, subscribe to the channel, because now we will tell you the epic battle that determined how our world would be illuminated and why the name of one of its heroes was erased from history.
Upon arriving in New York in 1884, the twenty-eight-year-old Nikola Tesla looked like a character from a Jules Verne novel escaped into the real world: tall, almost two meters, incredibly thin, with the aristocratic manners of a European intellectual, the piercing and burning eyes of a fanatic, and a head full of ideas capable of revolutionizing the world. He entered the legendary laboratory of Thomas Edison in Menlo Park. It was not a simple building with workshops; it was the first invention factory in history, an assembly line of miracles, the true temple of the rising electric era. And there, in that temple, Tesla faced its high priest, his idol, who turned out to be his absolute and total opposite.
Thomas Alva Edison was already a living legend, a national hero of America, the Wizard of Menlo Park, the man who had invented the modern world with the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the kinetoscope. He was a genius, but of a very different kind. Edison was a pragmatist to the core, a brilliant experimenter who proceeded by brute force, by the method of thousands of trials and errors. His famous phrase,
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,”
was his credo of life and work. He despised the theoretical calculations and higher mathematics that Tesla so adored, relying instead on his intuition and endless practical experiments.
Tesla, on the other hand, was a visionary, a theorist who first built his machines in the ideal and immaterial world of his imagination, and only afterwards, when everything was adjusted down to the smallest detail, materialized them in metal, almost without any modification. Edison was not just an inventor; he was a brilliant businessman who was building his financial empire on a single technology: direct current (DC). His light bulbs, his generators, his first power plants in the world that were beginning to illuminate the financial district of New York—everything ran on direct current.
Direct current was simple and understandable, but it had a fatal and irremediable defect: it was practically impossible to transmit it efficiently over long distances. Due to the high resistance of the cables, energy was lost with every meter. This meant that to illuminate each block of the city, one had to build its own bulky, smoking power plant. For Edison, whose company Edison General Electric sold these stations, this defect was actually an advantage, the very basis of his business model.
It was then that Tesla approached him with an idea that, for Edison, was not only competing but directly heretical: the idea of alternating current (AC). Alternating current, unlike direct current, could be easily transformed with a brilliantly simple device, the transformer. The voltage could be raised to hundreds of thousands of volts to transmit it for hundreds and thousands of kilometers through thin wires with minimal losses, and then, at the final consumer, reduced to a safe level. This meant that a single giant power plant built, for example, near a distant waterfall or a coal mine, could supply energy to an entire city or even an entire region. Tesla’s system was incomparably more efficient, more elegant, and more profitable. But for Edison, it was a mortal threat to his entire business, to his entire empire built on direct current.
At first, Edison treated the young and enthusiastic Serb with an air of superiority and a fatherly condescension, considering him another eccentric European theorist. He hired him, but of course, not to create something new, but to improve the old—his own direct current machines that were inefficient and constantly broke down. Tesla, who dreamed of obtaining resources for his own projects, immersed himself fully in the work. He worked eighteen to twenty hours a day, slept directly in the laboratory for two to three hours a night, and his genius quickly manifested itself. He solved dozens of problems and radically improved the design of the dynamos, saving colossal sums for Edison’s company and enhancing his reputation.
According to the legend, Edison, seeing his enthusiasm, promised him one day in jest fifty thousand dollars—an astronomical sum for the time, a true fortune—if he managed to solve an especially complex problem with his generators. Tesla, little accustomed to American humor, took the promise seriously. A few months later, he presented twenty-four new models of machines, much more efficient and reliable. When he went to politely claim the promised reward, Edison laughed in his face and told him,
“Tesla, you still don’t understand our American humor.”
Instead of the promised sum, he only offered him a modest salary increase. For Tesla, it was not a simple deception, but the deepest of personal and professional humiliations. He understood that Edison would never allow him to work on his main idea, the alternating current system. He only saw in him a talented but dangerous competitor who had to be kept at bay. That very day, Tesla resigned.
Thus began the darkest and most humiliating period of his life. The genius who a few months earlier impressed professors in Europe with his knowledge now dug ditches in the streets of New York for a dollar a day, simply not to die of hunger. But even in those moments, wielding the pickaxe under a scorching sun, he did not stop thinking about his rotating magnetic fields.
Salvation came from the hands of some investors who, having heard of his ideas, believed in him. They helped him found his own company in New Jersey, the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing. In his own small laboratory, Tesla finally obtained total freedom and worked a miracle. In a few months, he not only built but perfected at an industrial level his entire polyphase alternating current system: generators, transformers, a distribution system, and above all, his brilliant induction motor that worked without brushes or a commutator. It was extremely simple, robust, and practically indestructible. In 1888, he obtained his seven key patents that described the system in its entirety. This system was ready to conquer the world.
And here is where the third protagonist of this drama enters the scene, a man who was not a brilliant inventor, but a brilliant industrialist: George Westinghouse. Westinghouse, who had made a fortune inventing the air brake for trains and had built an empire on it, was already betting on alternating current, understanding its advantages. However, he lacked a reliable and efficient alternating current motor. Upon seeing the demonstration of Tesla’s motor, which started with ease and ran without sparks or noise, Westinghouse, an engineer and businessman, understood it instantly: that was the future. It was the missing link that would allow him to crush Edison’s monopoly.
Immediately, he made Tesla an offer he could not refuse. He invited him to Pittsburgh, listened to him, and proposed royal conditions. He bought all forty of Tesla’s patents on the alternating current system for a colossal sum for the time: one million dollars in cash and shares. Most importantly, he promised to pay Tesla lifelong royalties of two dollars and fifty cents for each horsepower of electricity produced using his patents. Overnight, Tesla became fabulously rich and famous. His dream was beginning to come true.
For Thomas Edison, this was a declaration of war—a total, ruthless, and dirty war: the infamous War of the Currents. Edison, understanding that in a fair technical and economic competition his direct current system was doomed, launched the first large-scale smear campaign in history. His goal was not to demonstrate the superiority of his technology, but to instill in everyone an animal and irrational fear of his competitor’s technology. He decided to demonstrate that alternating current was a mortally dangerous, diabolical, and alien technology, while his direct current was safe, reliable, and familiar.
He began with public demonstrations. His agents, armed with a Westinghouse alternating current generator, traveled the country and, before audiences and journalists eager for sensationalism, electrocuted stray cats and dogs captured on the streets. Then they moved on to larger animals, calves and horses. The climax of this macabre campaign was the public execution of Topsy, the Coney Island circus elephant, who was also sacrificed with a discharge of alternating current. The event was even filmed.
But that was not enough for Edison. He secretly financed the development of a new, supposedly humane execution method: the first electric chair in the world. And, of course, he insisted that this chair run precisely on the alternating current from the Westinghouse system. The goal was simple: in the public’s mind, the expression alternating current had to become synonymous with the word execution. The lawyers of the first man condemned to death in the electric chair even tried to appeal the sentence, claiming it was a cruel and unusual punishment. Edison, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the chair, testified secretly before the court, asserting that death by alternating current would be instantaneous and painless. The first execution, which took place in 1890, turned out to be a nightmare. The body of the wretched condemned man literally scorched, but he did not die instantly. It was a monstrous spectacle, but Edison had achieved his goal. The newspapers headlined,
“Westinghouse has executed a man.”
Westinghouse and Tesla were horrified by these barbaric methods, but they accepted the challenge. Their main weapon was the brilliant demonstration of the safety and efficiency of their system. The climax of their counteroffensive was the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. It was a grandiose event, a fair of the future dedicated to the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. The battle for the lighting contract of the exposition was the decisive and final match of the War of the Currents. Edison and his merged company, General Electric, which had absorbed its competitors, asked for an exorbitant sum. Westinghouse, using Tesla’s cheaper and more efficient system, proposed a price almost two times lower and won the contract.
The night of the opening of the fair was Tesla’s greatest triumph. American President Grover Cleveland pressed a symbolic golden button, and one hundred thousand incandescent light bulbs, specially designed by Tesla and more durable than Edison’s, flooded the immense fairgrounds with light. His White City glowed with a dazzling light never seen before. It was a miracle. Millions of Americans accustomed to the dim gas lighting saw for the first time a city of light; they saw the future, and that future ran on alternating current.
And in the center of the fair, in his own pavilion, Tesla offered a true show of elegant magic. Dressed in a tailcoat and white gloves, he made discharges of hundreds of thousands of volts pass through his own body like a modern Zeus, lighting in his hands phosphorescent bulbs that were not connected to any wire. The public wavered between ecstasy and a respectful terror. He seemed to them not a scientist, but a master of lightning, a wizard from another world.
The War of the Currents was won morally, technically, and commercially. Shortly after came the final and unconditional victory: Westinghouse’s company won the contract to build the first gigantic hydroelectric power plant in the world at Niagara Falls. It was a pharaonic project that would use the practically inexhaustible power of the falls to generate electricity, and the heart of this plant was the gigantic alternating current generators designed according to the patents and under the personal direction of Nikola Tesla. In 1896, the switch was flipped, and the energy from Niagara flowed through the wires, illuminating the city of Buffalo, located more than thirty kilometers away. Tesla’s dream of a cheap, accessible energy transmitted over great distances had become a reality.
He was on top of the world. The genius who had defeated Edison himself—his name was on everyone’s lips. He was rich, famous, and received in the highest spheres of New York society. It seemed that an even greater and endless triumph awaited him. But it was precisely at that moment, at the pinnacle of his glory, when he took his first fatal, noble, and absolutely suicidal step toward oblivion.
George Westinghouse, who had spent a fortune on the War of the Currents and on the development of the Niagara project, found himself on the verge of bankruptcy. The bankers willing to save his company imposed a cruel condition: get rid of the lion’s share contract with Tesla, according to which they had to pay him lifelong royalties that, with the growth of electrification, could amount to billions of dollars. Westinghouse, a man of honor, went to see Tesla and spoke frankly about his problem. He told him that the company would not survive if it continued with those payments.
And Tesla, who was not a businessman but a visionary who believed in their common dream more than in his personal wealth, performed an incredible, almost sacred act. He took the contract that made him one of the richest men in the world and, before the astonished gaze of Westinghouse, tore it to pieces. He released Westinghouse and his company from all their future obligations. He believed that money was not the essential thing for him; the essential thing was his new, even more grandiose ideas, for which he was sure he would always find funding.
He ignored that by tearing up that contract, he was cutting his only lifeline. He voluntarily renounced his financial independence and the power it confers. And this noble but tragically naive act would make him dependent for the rest of his life on the whims of investors and bankers. These men would support him at first, taking advantage of his genius, and then later, when his ideas became too radical and began to threaten their own profits, betray him without mercy. He had won the War of the Currents, but he was preparing to enter a new, much more dangerous war: the war for his most audacious dream, the dream of a wireless world.
After triumphing in the War of the Currents, Nikola Tesla had become the undisputed king of electricity. His name resonated on both sides of the Atlantic, eclipsing for a time the fame of the pragmatic Edison. He was not just a scientist; he was a superstar, a media figure, the living embodiment of scientific progress and the mysteries of the universe. His laboratory in New York, first on South Fifth Avenue and then, after a mysterious fire, on Houston Street, became a place of pilgrimage for the most famous, rich, and influential personalities of the time. It was not a simple place of work; it was a theater of magic and science.
The writer Mark Twain, who adored scientific curiosities and was himself an amateur inventor, was a frequent guest and a close friend. He spent hours in the laboratory, participating with childlike wonder in Tesla’s experiments. There is a famous photograph in which Mark Twain is standing on a platform, holding in his hands a wireless light bulb illuminated by a high-frequency field. Tesla even practiced on his friend sessions of rejuvenating vibrotherapy on a special platform, convinced that mechanical vibrations had a beneficial effect on the body.
The financiers of Wall Street, such as Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, owner of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, sought his company and invested in his new enterprises, seeing in him not only a genius but the goose that laid the golden eggs. Journalists besieged him to hear his incredible, almost wild predictions about the future, and he predicted things with a terrifying prophetic precision. He spoke of a world where news, music, and even images would be transmitted instantaneously across the globe without wires, creating a worldwide system. A world where each person would carry in their pocket a small, easy-to-use personal communication device. A world where remote-controlled machines—”teleautomata,” as he called them—would perform all heavy and dangerous work, freeing humanity from slavery and war. A world where energy would be practically free and accessible everywhere, even in the most remote places on the planet. He described our twenty-first century with such precision that it seemed less a scientific prediction than a memory of the future. But for him, these were not fantasies; they were a concrete and precise engineering problem.
Having renounced Westinghouse’s millions of dollars, he was absolutely free, and he immersed himself completely, with a fanatical obsession, into his new and consuming passion: research on high-frequency currents and the wireless transmission of energy. In his laboratory, which looked like the cave of a wizard from the Arabian Nights, he created true miracles that terrified his contemporaries.
He invented and perfected the Tesla coil, a resonant transformer that generated an alternating voltage of extremely high frequency and incredible power. These coils created spectacular and deafening artificial discharges in his laboratory, similar to ball lightning several meters long. He learned to make these currents of hundreds of thousands of volts pass through his own body, lighting in his hands gas discharge lamps that were not connected to any wire, thus demonstrating that high-frequency current, unlike low-frequency current, is safe for human beings. These public demonstrations made a staggering, almost religious impression on the public. But for him, they were not magic tricks; they were scientific experiments that proved the possibility of transmitting energy through space, through the human body itself.
It was precisely during these experiments when he made his next great discovery, one that should have made him even richer and more famous, but which ultimately only brought him bitterness. He discovered that with the help of his coils, he could transmit not only energy but also information. He created the first powerful transmitters and sensitive receivers. In 1893, two years before the first experiments of Guglielmo Marconi, during a lecture at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, he publicly demonstrated all the fundamental principles of radio communication. He transmitted a signal from one end of the room to the other without any wire.
In 1898, at Madison Square Garden during a gigantic electrical exhibition, he presented to the public the first radio-controlled device in the world: a small, heavy iron boat that sailed in a pool, turned its lights on, turned, and stopped, obeying his orders from a control desk. The public was shocked. Some shouted that it was witchcraft, claiming that a trained monkey was hidden inside the boat. No one understood that they were witnessing the birth of the era of drones, robotics, and remote control. He obtained all the fundamental patents on radio. It seemed that a new gold mine was in his hands.
But Tesla was not interested in the simple transmission of dots and dashes in Morse code; that was something too small, too primitive for him. His mind was absorbed in a much more grandiose, more audacious, almost divine idea. He believed it was possible to transmit wirelessly not weak signals, but enormous volumes of energy—an energy sufficient to illuminate cities and power factories all over the world, and, something terrifying for the establishment of the time, for free.
His theory, based on experiments, was the following: the Earth and its conductive upper atmospheric layers, the ionosphere, form a gigantic spherical capacitor. If energy is injected into this system at a certain resonant frequency, it would be possible to extract that energy anywhere on the planet with a simple receiver connected to the ground. To demonstrate it in practice, he needed a new type of laboratory and colossal funds. And he found an investor. This time, it was the most powerful and richest man of his time, a titan of finance whose name was synonymous with Wall Street: John Pierpont Morgan, J.P. Morgan.
Morgan was a shark of capitalism, a man who built monopolies and despised competition. He had been one of those who financed Edison during the War of the Currents, but now, seeing the overwhelming victory of alternating current, he had decided to bet on the new favorite. Tesla presented himself before Morgan with a shrewd and carefully prepared proposal. He told him that he was building a worldwide wireless communication system that would allow the instantaneous transmission of stock quotes, news, and personal messages across the Atlantic. It was a direct challenge to the expensive and slow transoceanic telegraph cable that Morgan partly controlled. Tesla deliberately omitted his true objective, his ultimate goal: free energy. He sensed that Morgan, a man who grew rich selling the copper for cables and the energy that flowed through them, would never finance a project that rendered both obsolete. Morgan, seeing in Tesla’s project the opportunity to create a new absolute monopoly over world communications, accepted. He granted Tesla one hundred hundred fifty thousand dollars—an astronomical sum equivalent today to several million dollars—for the construction of a gigantic transmission station.
In 1901, on Long Island, at a place called Wardenclyffe, construction began on the most ambitious, beautiful, and tragic project of Tesla’s life: the Wardenclyffe Tower. It was a grandiose, almost extraterrestrial structure designed by the celebrated architect Stanford White: a wooden tower fifty-seven meters high, crowned by an immense copper dome in the shape of a mushroom, twenty meters in diameter. Under the tower, a shaft sank thirty-seven meters into the ground, from which extended a network of metallic rods intended to connect the tower to the Earth and transmit powerful low-frequency waves through the Earth’s crust. It was not a simple transmitter. In Tesla’s mind, it was a gigantic pump that was supposed to make the electromagnetic field of the entire planet oscillate, transforming it into an immense resonator.
Tesla was obsessed with this project. He believed he was on the verge of the greatest discovery in the history of humanity, a discovery that would free the world forever from poverty, wars over resources, and heavy physical labor. But his perfectionism and his delusions of grandeur betrayed him. Morgan’s money was terribly insufficient. The construction dragged on. Tesla demanded increasingly sophisticated and expensive components.
It was at that moment, in December 1901, when the event occurred that marked the beginning of the end for him. The Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, a talented engineer and an even more gifted businessman, using several key patents of Tesla—a fact that would be proven later by the Supreme Court of the United States, well after Tesla’s death—carried out the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission. He managed to transmit three weak signals, the letter S in Morse code, from England to Canada. The world was euphoric. The newspapers published grandiloquent headlines. Marconi became a hero, the father of radio.
For Tesla, it was a disaster in two ways. First, he considered that Marconi, whom he had once welcomed into his laboratory, had flagrantly stolen his technology. Second, his main and only investor, Morgan, was furious. He asked him,
“While everyone applauds Marconi who transmits simple signals, where is your famous project for which I gave you so much money?”
Tesla, desperate, wrote several letters to Morgan in which, trying to demonstrate the superiority of his project, he revealed its true and grandiose purpose. He explained that his system was much more complex and expensive because it was not designed simply to send insignificant signals, but to transmit unlimited energy. It was his fatal mistake, a professional suicide.
Morgan, upon reading this, understood instantly where it all led: free energy, wireless transmission. But then, how to install meters? How to control it, and above all, how to sell it? It was an attack on the foundations of his world, on the very essence of capitalism. That very day, he cut off all funding. He did not limit himself to denying more funds to Tesla; he used all his immense influence on Wall Street so that no other bank, no other investor, would give Tesla a single cent. He financially suffocated the project, turning Tesla into a pariah of the business world.
For Tesla, it was a death sentence. He tried to find other sources of funding, wrote letters, begged, but the doors of all banks were closed to him. The gigantic Wardenclyffe Tower, his dream, his great work, his Magnum Opus, remained unfinished, dominating the plain of Long Island like a gigantic, rusted, and silent monument to his genius and his tragic naivety.
His long and painful fall had begun. He was ruined. His prestigious laboratory on Houston Street caught fire under mysterious circumstances, destroying unique equipment. His patents were expiring, and he no longer had the means to materialize his new ideas. He was forced to sell his new, less important inventions simply to survive. He closed himself off more and more, immersing himself in the world of his visions, which many already considered a sign of incipient madness.
He told journalists that he received orderly signals from the planet Mars, that he had invented a death ray capable of annihilating enemy armies from a distance. They stopped taking him seriously. From the prophet of a new era, he was transforming in the eyes of everyone into a mad scientist, an eccentric and pathetic old man who fed pigeons in the parks.
In 1917, during the First World War, the American government, fearing that the unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower could serve as a reference point for German spy submarines, decided to demolish it. They dynamited it. With it, the last hope of Nikola Tesla was pulverized. The dream of a wireless and free energy for all humanity was buried under a pile of twisted scrap metal. He lived another twenty-six years, but it was no longer a life; it was a slow and painful decline in a world that he himself had created, but which never knew how to understand him.
