Nikola Tesla arrived in America in 1884 with four cents in his pocket, a poem,
and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison. Edison hired him, worked him
nearly to death, and then refused to pay him what he had promised.
Tesla quit and spent the winter digging ditches. Within two years
he had sold his AC patents to George Westinghouse and ignited the War of Currents
that would electrify the world.
His laboratory on Fifth Avenue became a salon for the age. Mark Twain visited.
So did Rudyard Kipling. Tesla would perform experiments — balls of lightning,
currents passing through his own body — that left witnesses convinced they had
seen magic. He spoke eight languages. He had a photographic memory.
He could visualize machines in complete three-dimensional detail before building them,
running them in his mind to check for wear.
The collapse of Wardenclyffe broke him. JP Morgan had funded the tower expecting
a transatlantic radio system. When he understood Tesla intended to give the energy away
freely — no meter, no charge, no profit — he pulled the funding.
The tower was demolished for scrap during World War I. Tesla never recovered financially.
He spent his final years in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker, feeding pigeons,
refusing to see most visitors, and working on what he called a death ray
— a directed energy weapon he claimed could end all war by making it unwinnable.
When he died, the FBI seized every paper in his room. Many have never been made public.
