History
Nikola Tesla: The Child of Light Who Died Alone
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On 8 January 1943, a hotel maid opened the door of room 3327 in New York. Inside was the man who helped bring alternating current, the electricity in your home today, into the world, and who died alone and in debt. This is the life of Nikola Tesla from his birth in a storm to his last days: the Budapest sand drawing, Edison and the $50,000 story, the war of the currents, Niagara Falls, the Wardenclyffe tower and the white pigeon.
Key takeaways
- Tesla was born at midnight between 9 and 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, then in the Austrian Empire and now in Croatia; in February 1882, in a Budapest park, he drew the idea of a motor turned by a rotating magnetic field in the sand.
- The famous $50,000 promise from Edison is known only from Tesla's own account; historians treat it with caution.
- In July 1888 Westinghouse bought the rights to Tesla's AC patents (about $60,000 in cash and shares plus $2.50 per horsepower); AC lit the 1893 Chicago fair and, on 16 November 1896, sent Niagara power more than 40 km to Buffalo.
- J. P. Morgan gave $150,000 in 1901 for the Wardenclyffe tower, but stopped funding it; work ended around 1906 and the tower was demolished for scrap in 1917.
- Tesla died alone in room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker on 7 January 1943, aged 86; homes in Cambodia today use the alternating current he helped make practical.
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Full video
32 min100coins≈ $1.00
Unlock for 100 coinsPay once. Yours to keep.
Full video chapters
Sources
Original from: Cypher original
Nikola Tesla, My Inventions (1919)
W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (2013)
Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981)
John J. O'Neill, Prodigal Genius (1944)
Photo: Napoleon Sarony (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
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