Even before the success of the electric car company that now bears his name, Nikola Tesla was a widely respected historical figure. Often, that respect could be based on surprisingly scant knowledge of the man’s life and accomplishments. Didn’t he do something with electricity? Wasn’t he involved in some kind of rivalry with Thomas Edison? Wouldn’t we all be enjoying wirelessly transmitted power, too cheap to meter, if his noble, solitary efforts hadn’t been thwarted by the establishment? Well, perhaps. Whatever dramatic satisfactions we find in Tesla’s story, we can only gauge his genius by surveying his actual inventions, four of which are explained in the new Lost in Time video above.
Tesla lived from 1856 to 1943, a period of such great technological change that, when he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat in an early phase of his career, some of the onlookers “were absolutely convinced that there was a trained monkey inside the boat, reading his hand signals.” The year was 1898, when the very idea of wireless control hadn’t entered anyone’s mind — but Tesla already foresaw a world of “vehicles that drive themselves, machines doing real work from thousands of kilometers away, and aircraft flown from a distance.” He may have been a tad early to that game, but his invention of the alternating current power system and the induction motor happened right on time.
At the end of the nineteenth century, “the race to get electricity to every household in America” was getting into gear. Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC) system technically worked, but would need a very large number of power stations to move power all over the continent. Tesla did his work on AC as a kind of correction to the shortcomings of DC, drawing what history remembers as a merciless negative-publicity campaign from Edison’s side. But none of its often-gruesome stunts meant to associate Tesla’s invention with death were a match for the success of AC’s implementation in the new power plant at Niagara Falls. More than 130 years later, AC has long powered the vast majority of homes. But if history had gone differently, the Tesla enthusiast can’t resist asking, would your house also be equipped with its own death ray?
In 1934, at one of his annual press conferences, the 78-year-old Tesla announced that he’d come up with his most important invention yet, a weapon so powerful that it could “end all wars.” Called ‘teleforce,’ it would fire beams so concentrated and energetic that they could destroy any target instantaneously upon contact. When he died in 1943, Tesla didn’t even leave sufficient documentation to tell whether the thing could have worked. He’d made slightly more progress on Wardenclyffe Tower, meant as a proof of concept for his grander vision of turning the Earth into a giant battery, filling it with electricity into which all humanity could tap at will. Industrialist J. P. Morgan had been footing the project’s bill, but cut off funding when it came out that the ever-ambitious Tesla really intended to build much more than what he’d promised, a wireless communication system — which, at that time, would have seemed like a pretty fantastical notion in itself.
Related content:
A Brief, Animated Introduction to Thomas Edison (and Nikola Tesla)
The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla’s Grades from High School & University: A Fascinating Glimpse
The Electric Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla: As Told by Technoillusionist Marco Tempest
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
