1When you think about the greatest inventors of all time, there are a few names that come to mind.
2Henry Ford.
3The Wright brothers.
4Thomas Edison.
5But there's one name that is not as recognizable.
6When you plug your phone in, turn on the lights, or use the refrigerator,
7you have Nikola Tesla to thank.
8This is the story of the forgotten genius and the story begins at the end.
9On January 7, 1943 a maid working at the New Yorker Hotel walked into room 3327,
10where she found the body of an 86-year-old man who called the hotel home for the past decade.
11Tesla died alone and broke.
12He lived off a diet of warm milk and crackers and was obsessed with feeding the pigeons outside.
13One of the greatest inventors of all time faded into obscurity and died penniless.
14There is a reason why this happened which will become clear by the end of this story.
15Tesla was born in the town of Smiljan in present-day Croatia on July 10, 1856.
16He was born during a lightning storm.
17According to family legend, the midwife said halfway through the birth:
18"this child will be a child of darkness", to which, his mother replied, no, he will be a child of light.
19Little did she know how prophetic those words would be.
20When Tesla was five he witnessed his older brother fall from a horse and later die.
21This would haunt him for the rest of his life.
22As a child, he began seeing visions accompanied by flashes of light, confusing what was real and what was imaginary.
23This never went away.
24The vision spurred his ability to conceive inventions in his head in such detail that he didn't even need to draw them out.
25He explained how the designs were perfected in his mind in an article in 1919.
26"Invariably, my device works as I conceived that it should and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it.
27In 20 years there has not been a single exception."
28Tesla credits his mom for his interest in invention.
29Đuka Mandić invented small household appliances in her spare time.
30She had an eidetic memory - the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision
31and she passed this on to her son.
32Tesla's father was a priest and wanted him to become one too
33but Tesla was interested in engineering.
34When he contracted cholera as a teen and nearly died,
35his father promised to send him to engineering school if he survived and miraculously, he did.
36He went to study in Austria at the Technical College of Graz where he is said to have worked from 3 am until 11 pm every day.
37Professors were worried that he would die from exhaustion.
38Tesla had a beautiful mind.
39He could perform calculus in his head and spoke eight languages.
40He was a good student at the start but would not finish school.
41He dropped out after becoming addicted to gambling and cut ties with his family so they wouldn't find out.
42His friends didn't know what happened to him either.
43They thought he drowned in a river.
44Tesla moved around Europe and eventually ended up in Budapest working as an electrician at a telephone company.
45While walking around a park in the city one day,
46he had an epiphany about developing a new way of generating electricity using alternating current.
47It would be his greatest invention that would change the world.
48I'll explain more about AC a little later.
49In 1882, he settled in Paris to work for the French branch of Thomas Edison's electric company.
50He started off installing indoor lighting but the managers noticed his talents and had him doing more complicated work,
51designing and building dynamos and motors.
52He was soon traveling throughout Europe fixing problems at other Edison branches.
53Two years later, in 1884, Tesla's manager offered him a job at Edison Machine Works in New York City.
54He agreed and arrived in America with only four cents in his pocket because his money was stolen on the boat ride over.
55Tesla initially had a good impression of Edison.
56Edison was also impressed by Tesla, later saying: "I have had many hard-working assistants but you take the cake."
57This mutual admiration didn't last.
58They would become bitter rivals.
59The two men disagreed over how electricity should be contained and delivered.
60Edison preferred direct current which is a system where the electric charge only flows in one direction.
61Tesla was a fan of alternating current in which the electric charge changes direction periodically.
62Changing directions is crucial to maintaining a steady supply of electricity
63because it does not overpower outlets.
64This means it can provide more power and transmit power over longer distances.
65It's the reason AC powers our homes and other large appliances
66whereas DC powers smaller items like flashlights.
67But Edison didn't care about AC because it could have hurt the sales of direct current since he owned all the patents for DC.
68According to Tesla, a manager at Edison's company offered him a $50,000 bonus if he could improve some machines that ran on DC.
69When he did, the manager refused to pay up.
70Another account of the story has Edison telling Tesla: "You don't understand our American humor."
71Regardless of how it played out, Tesla quit and set off to form his own electric company the following year in 1885.
72But his investors showed little interest and decided to take the company and all of Tesla's patents
73which they could do because Tesla had assigned the patents to the company in exchange for stock which was now worthless.
74After losing his company, Tesla had to take a job digging ditches for two dollars a day just to survive.
75But his fortunes would change.
76In 1887, Tesla invented an induction motor that ran on alternating current.
77The motor was the most efficient way to convert electricity to mechanical power.
78A version of it powers Tesla's vehicles which took its name from the inventor.
79He patented the motor and showed it off the following year at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
80That caught the attention of George Westinghouse, a major player in the electric market
81who realized Tesla's AC motor might just be what he needed to complete his alternating current system
82and compete against Edison's DC system.
83So Tesla licensed the patents for the AC motor to Westinghouse for $60,000
84and also received stock and royalties.
85Westinghouse hired him as a consultant for $2,000 a month
86which is the equivalent of over $50,000 a month today.
87The war of the currents began.
88Edison tried hard to try to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla.
89He secretly financed the electric chair that used alternating current to prove how dangerous AC was.
90Edison's company also publicly tortured animals to prove its point.
91In 1903, they electrocuted a circus elephant named Topsy
92and produced a film about it called Electrocuting an Elephant.
93Despite Edison's schemes, good things were happening for Westinghouse and Tesla.
94They underbid Edison and his newly formed company General Electric to illuminate the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
95The first all-electric fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America.
96It was clear to the 27 million people who attended that AC would power the future.
97Their success continued when they beat out Edison's General Electric again
98to build the world's first alternating current power plant in Niagara Falls.
99The hydroelectric power station was a massive success and helped light up Buffalo, New York.
100The building of the plant also meant Tesla became a pioneer in renewable energy.
101His statue can be found at Niagara Falls today.
102Westinghouse and Tesla won the war of the currents and direct current was being phased out.
103But there were problems.
104Westinghouse's company was running out of money and eventually went $10 million into debt.
105In 1897, he went to Tesla and asked if his royalties could be reduced in a desperate attempt to save the company.
106Tesla was so compelled by compassion for his friend that he ripped up his contract.
107He was grateful to Westinghouse for believing in him when no one else would.
108Tesla willingly walked away from 12 million dollars in royalties
109which in today's terms would be worth over $300 million.
110Had he held on to those royalties over time,
111he would have likely become the wealthiest person on the planet
112and the first person with a billion dollar net worth.
113That act of compassion for his friend of tearing up his contract saved Westinghouse.
114In return, Westinghouse paid Tesla $216,000 for the rights to use his AC patents forever.
115This is the equivalent of about 6 million dollars today.
116With that money, Tesla became financially independent
117and set up a series of laboratories in New York for new projects where he was visited by the rich and famous,
118including his close friend and one of the greatest American writers of all time, Mark Twain.
119This was his period of many inventions.
120He held over 300 patents in his lifetime.
121He created an early version of neon lighting,
122the tesla turbine - a bladeless turbine for vehicles.
123He pioneered x-ray technology by experimenting with radiation.
124This is an x-ray of his own hand.
125Another stand-out invention was one of the first remote controls.
126In 1898, he controlled a miniature boat at Madison Square Garden in New York.
127It was so far ahead of its time that the crowd thought he was using magic to make it move.
128That would be the ancestor to today's remote-controlled drones.
129One of his most well-known inventions is the Tesla coil -
130a device that can produce large amounts of high voltage electricity.
131Because of the coils, he discovered he could send and receive powerful radio signals when they resonated at the same frequency.
132Tesla was getting ready to broadcast his first radio signal but disaster struck.
133A fire destroyed his lab in 1895.
134He lost years of research and equipment.
135Tesla didn't apply for a patent for the radio until two years later.
136The fire would be the turning point in his life that led to a downhill spiral.
137At the same time that he was working on radio,
138an Italian entrepreneur, Guglielmo Marconi, was also working on the radio in England.
139He tried to acquire patent rights in the US but was turned down because it was too similar to Tesla's.
140However, things changed when Marconi was able to send the world's first transatlantic radio message in 1901 using 17 of Tesla's patents.
141Edison then threw his financial support behind Marconi.
142Tesla had no problem with Marconi's achievements but in 1904,
143the US Patent Office suddenly changed its mind and awarded Marconi a patent for the invention of the radio.
144There has never been a reason given for this decision but the powerful financial backing Marconi received could explain it.
145Marconi went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1911 which was only possible due to Tesla's work.
146Tesla was furious and sued Marconi.
147The case dragged on in court for years and was only settled in Tesla's favor after his death.
148That radio incident negatively impacted the rest of Tesla's career.
149For example, Tesla was obsessed with bringing wireless communication to the world
150and built a huge wireless transmission station in Long Island, New York called Wardenclyffe Tower.
151He imagined a world where we could send and receive messages wirelessly.
152He was, again, well ahead of his time.
153But financial backers did not have enough faith in his project.
154They pulled out and banked on Marconi's radio invention instead.
155This left Tesla in financial ruin.
156He had no choice but to abandon his dream project in 1905
157and eventually lost Wardenclyffe Tower to foreclosure.
158Tesla's mental health deteriorated.
159He lived his last decade in the New Yorker Hotel beginning in 1933.
160Westinghouse Corporation hired him as a consultant and paid for his room.
161He lived rent-free but died in debt.
162So why did one of the greatest inventors of all time fade into obscurity and die penniless?
163You could say Tesla was unlucky at times like when the fire burned down his New York lab.
164But the main reason is because Tesla was not a capitalist.
165He made decisions that those with more business acumen would not have made
166such as giving up his royalties for the AC motor.
167He wasn't concerned about money.
168He was concerned about the pursuit of science for the betterment of humanity.
169He wanted to change the world and he did.
170Thanks in part to Elon Musk's company, people are starting to learn more about the man who inspired the company,
171a man whose inventions would power our entire planet.
172It's because of Tesla that modern society functions the way it does.
173Tesla's mother called him a child of light and she was quite right.