Creating all the key technologies for alternating current, which made global electrification practical, and imagining some of the essential inventions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life
Nikola Tesla
(1856–1943)
Nikola Tesla designed and built Wardenclyffe Tower at Shoreham, Long Island, during 1901–1902. It was billed as an experimental station for the wireless trans-Atlantic transmission of telegraph messages, telephone calls, and even images. His revolutionary theory was to dispense with “wires and all other artificial conductors” by using “the Earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents,” as he explained in the February 1901 issue of Collier’s Weekly. It made sense to his principal financial backer, the redoubtable J. P. Morgan, but when Tesla proposed two expensive changes, Morgan bowed out.
Tesla decided to scale up the facility from an experimental station to a fully operational transmitting station big enough to compete with the radio system Guglielmo Marconi had already successfully demonstrated. He also proposed using the station for something far more disruptive. As he explained in Collier’s, what he was building at Shoreham was like “a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the Earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the Earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits.” Now, here was the really wild part:
In this manner I was able to transmit to a distance, not only feeble effects [low currents] for the purposes of [wireless] signaling, but considerable amounts of energy, and later discoveries I made convinced me that I shall ultimately succeed in conveying power without wires, for industrial purposes, with high economy, and to any distance, however great.
J.P. Morgan was not a very imaginative man. And belief in what Tesla proposed called for enormous imagination. Thomas Edison had started the commercial transmission of conventionally generated electric power via wires in the 1870s. Tesla was proposing to “pump” electricity from the ground and transmit it through the ground wirelessly and for unlimited distances. After Morgan’s withdrawal, Tesla was unable to win any other backer. He was forced to abandon Wardenclyffe in 1906, and the great steel tower, which housed the “apparatus for transmitting electrical energy,” was demolished and sold for its scrap value—all of $1,750 in 1917. The property itself was foreclosed by the bank in 1922.
The failure of Wardenclyffe marked the beginning of the inventor’s long financial decline. The year of the foreclosure, 1922, Tesla began living in a series of Manhattan hotels, leaving each when his unpaid bills had become too large for hotel management to ignore. He spent a good deal of time walking in Central Park, feeding pigeons, bringing injured pigeons back to his room to nurse them to health. “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years,” he wrote. “But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.” It is said that he spent more than $2,000 to hasten her recovery from a broken wing and leg.
And so, he moved from hotel to hotel until, in 1934, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company began sending him a modest $125 monthly stipend that paid his living expenses at the Hotel New Yorker. Tesla had worked with George Westinghouse himself on the development of alternating current (AC), and the company clearly felt it owed him a debt. It is in Room 3327 of that hotel that Nikola Tesla died on January 7, 1943, aged eighty-six, of “coronary thrombosis.” As always, he had been alone in his room. His body was discovered by a maid who finally ignored the DO NOT DISTURB sign after it had remained on the door for two days.
His decline took place in obscurity, but his death brought some two thousand mourners, including a number of Nobel laureates, to what has been described as a “state funeral” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on January 12. Telegrams of condolence poured in from dignitaries such as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Two days earlier, New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had broadcast over the radio a eulogy written by Louis Adamic, like Tesla a Croatian-American. Tesla was cremated, his ashes interred in a glimmering golden sphere—his favorite, perfect shape—which today is displayed at the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, beside the inventor’s death mask.
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Nikola Tesla deserved more. His work on alternating current was critical to the creation of the modern electrical power grid. For that alone, he should have died a wealthy man. But his nearly 300 patents did not even begin to cover what he imagined:
• The wireless transfer of high-voltage electric power
• The “thought camera” (an imagined device to photograph the human mind)
• The AC motor (designed and built, even though many considered such a thing impossible)
• Hydroelectric power generation (he designed the plant at Niagara Falls, which provided Buffalo with electric power—but he envisioned even greater plants)
• X-ray research (eight years before Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1895 “discovery” of the phenomenon)
• The “death ray” weapon (a particle beam device)
• Robotics (he actually built a radio-controlled boat, and he envisioned a world of autonomous devices and self-driving cars)
• An “earthquake machine” (an oscillator device that, tuned to the inherent vibrations of large structures, amplified them and was capable of shaking even massive buildings apart; in 1898, Tesla claimed to have built the machine, but destroyed it when he realized its dangerous potential)
In the end, he imagined far more than he invented, and while his imaginings may yet produce disruptive inventions by others, his only partially realized career defines the limits of pure genius to create and implement disruptive innovation.
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Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, Lika, Croatia, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian Orthodox priest and his mother, Djuka Mandic, was an inventor of household appliances. His parents recognized Nikola’s potential and sent him to study at the Realschule (Higher Real Gymnasium), in Karlovac, where he became interested in the physics of electricity. He graduated in 1873, evaded compulsory service in the Austro-Hungarian Army by running away to the mountains in 1874, and lived in the countryside until he enrolled in the Austrian Polytechnic Institute at Graz, Austria, in 1875. He dropped out at the end of 1878, and then severed relations with his family, perhaps out of shame for having failed to complete his degree. He suffered a nervous breakdown the following year, after refusing his father’s plea to return home. He went to Prague in January 1880 to study at Charles-Ferdinand University, but left at the end of the year.
In 1881, Tesla went to work as chief electrician for the Budapest Telephone Exchange, for which he claimed to have invented a telephone amplifier, although no such device was patented. There is a story that, while strolling through a Budapest park with a friend, Tesla suddenly stopped and, using his walking stick, drew a diagram in the dirt, explaining to his companion that this was an induction motor, an electric motor capable of running on alternating current. In 1882, he took a job in Paris for the Continental Edison Company, installing incandescent lighting throughout the city. While living in Strasbourg the next year, he cobbled together a prototype of his induction motor and demonstrated it, but was unable to interest investors. So, when Charles Batchelor, a co-worker of Tesla’s from Paris who was also Edison’s right-hand man, asked Tesla to join the Edison firm in the United States, he jumped at the chance. One of his childhood dreams, he told Batchelor, was to harness the force of the falling water of Niagara Falls to generate electricity.
Tesla showed up at Edison’s office in 1884 with a letter from Batchelor addressed to his boss: “I know two great men,” it said, “one is you and the other is this young man.” Edison hired him on the spot, assigning him to find ways to improve the dynamos his factory was building. Tesla did as he was told, but he took a step beyond his brief and tried to persuade Edison to redesign his electrical generating and distribution system for alternating current (AC) instead of direct current (DC). Tesla pointed out that the DC system Edison was installing was inefficient, with voltage dropping off very quickly with distance. Indeed, current could not be transported more than two miles because it could not be stepped up to the high voltage levels that were needed to make efficient transmission possible. DC required building generating stations every two miles. In contrast to DC, which flows continuously in one direction, AC changes direction fifty or sixty times per second and can be stepped up to very high voltages, thereby minimizing power loss across even very considerable distances. While it was true that designing electrical appliances suitable for AC was more complicated, Tesla was convinced that the future belonged to alternating current.
Edison wanted to hear none of it. When George Westinghouse began building his AC electrical distribution system in direct competition, more and more utility companies joined the Westinghouse camp. Edison dug in and launched a public relations campaign beginning in 1888 to convince the public that his relatively low-voltage DC system was far safer than Westinghouse’s high-voltage AC transmission system.
Tesla left Edison’s Machine Works just six months after joining it, and he set about patenting an arc lighting system, based on an apparatus to produce a brilliant electric light by means of an electric arc—a kind of artificial lightning. After rounding up financial backers, he founded the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Company. Setting himself up as Edison’s competitor, Tesla quickly patented a significantly improved dynamo—as if to rub salt into Edison’s wound, it was not an AC generator, which Edison’s company did not offer, but a direct current dynamo, which was one of its major products. Tesla secured a lucrative contract to install the dynamo to supply electricity to Rahway, New Jersey.
Tesla was enjoying his triumph when, suddenly, his backers, having no interest in supporting Tesla’s efforts to create AC motors and AC electrical transmission equipment, pulled out. They started up their own electric utility, leaving the inventor without a dime. He was forced to piece together a living as a ditch digger until he found new backers for a new Tesla Electric Company. By 1888, he had money in place and quickly developed a successful AC motor. George Westinghouse licensed the motor and also hired Tesla as a consultant. For Westinghouse, Tesla next developed a complete system of polyphase alternating current generators, motors, and transformers—the complete suite of technology necessary to create an AC-based electrical grid. He had now planted his flag firmly in one camp as Westinghouse and Edison went to war over which system would power America and the world.
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Tesla’s affiliation with Westinghouse put him on the right side of the history of innovation in electric power, and his public demonstrations of AC electricity at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago were a spectacular success that made him world famous. Two years later, his design for the first hydroelectric power plant in Niagara Falls represented the decisive triumph for AC, and Tesla was hailed outright as a hero. King Nikola of Montenegro, a small nation allied with his native Serbia, even presented him with the Order of Danilo.
Tesla went on to pioneer in varied fields. His Tesla coil, invented in 1891, enabled him to conduct many experiments in lighting, X-ray generation, and high-frequency alternating current. The Tesla coil eventually found application in a wide array of electronic equipment throughout the twentieth century. He also made major discoveries that were commercialized by others, including fluorescent lighting, aspects of laser science, wireless communications, remote control, robotics, turbines, and even vertical-takeoff aircraft. As a committed futurist, Tesla predicted the emergence of solar power and energy generated from the wave motion of the sea. He predicted the use of satellites in global communication.
After his death, Tesla passed quickly into popular mythology as a kind of technological folk hero. His charismatic legacy spawned a legion of partisans, active even to this day. They claim on his behalf the inventor’s precedence in radio and television technology, and they believe that his advocacy of the wireless transmission of electric power will someday be vindicated. The discovery of terrestrial stationary waves, which Tesla himself considered his most important breakthrough, did prove that the earth could be used as a conductor. In one demonstration, Tesla wirelessly illuminated 200 lamps from a power source located twenty-five miles away.
Yet it was his creation of the essential elements of AC technology that proved to be the high-water mark of Tesla’s success as a practical creator of disruptive technology. The rest of his innovative legacy demonstrated the potential for disruption, which was realized, years later, by others or remained unrealized. In the end, Tesla may be seen as a martyr to the business of disruption. Innovators like Edison and Westinghouse lacked the visionary genius of Nikola Tesla, but they possessed in abundance a genius for applying innovation. They made disruption profitably transformative, not just potentially transformative. Tesla’s career is proof that genius and audacity are useful, perhaps even necessary, to creating disruptive innovations, but they are not sufficient to doing so.