American Experience: Tesla (1988)

[bunniefuu]

NARRATOR: In , a Serbian scientist

demonstrated his latest inventions

before an awestruck audience at Columbia University.

"Tubes held in the hand of Mr. Tesla," a reporter wrote,

"appeared like a luminous sword in the hand of an archangel

representing justice."

Nikola Tesla was already famous--

the scientist whose experiments with electricity

were destined to transform daily life in the th century.

MAN: We live in an electrical world.

We take it all for granted.

We have light bulbs, we run our refrigerators,

our air conditioners, our electrical motors.

All of that is all directly back to Tesla.

NARRATOR: A hundred years ago,

he pointed the way toward robots, radio,

radar, remote control,

the wireless transmission of messages and pictures.

He dreamed of harnessing the wind and the sun

to make free energy available for everyone.

MAN: When you think about electricity,

you think of Edison.

But Tesla was just more of an original American than Edison.

WOMAN: Tesla had a lot of obsessions and odd phobias,

and yet he was enormously popular and celebrated.

They did not stop him.

NARRATOR: At the turn of the th century, Tesla was acclaimed.

Millions of Americans knew his name.

But only decades later, he was forgotten by all but a few.

MAN: He doesn't have a disciplined imagination;

he has a fertile imagination.

And so he's kind of crazy.

Oh, he is a genius, no doubt about it.

But he's an idiosyncratic genius.

NARRATOR: His luxuriant imagination was the source of his genius,

and the cause of his downfall.

On June , ,

-year-old Nikola Tesla arrived in New York City,

one of the millions of immigrants

who had begun to transform the fabric of American society

during the final decades of the th century.

The young immigrant knew no one.

Six feet two inches tall,

he spoke with a heavy Serbian accent

and weighed little more than pounds.

WOMAN: He's very tall, gangly, handsome.

Looks like a vampire a little bit.

NARRATOR: "What I saw was rough and unattractive," Tesla wrote.

'Is this America?' I asked myself in painful surprise."

WOMAN: Everything about him is fastidious and courtly.

He's very elegant-looking.

He's got these amazing blue eyes that people notice.

NARRATOR: Tesla had only four cents in his pocket

along with some of his favorite poems,

but he carried with him a recommendation

to the man he admired more than any other.

-year-old Thomas Edison was already a celebrated inventor,

an American folk hero.

The incandescent light bulb he had patented five years before

had captured the imagination of people all over the world.

JONNES: Light was always associated with flame.

And Edison, by inventing a light bulb,

was going to shift the country

away from natural gas and gas lighting

to a world in which there would be electricity

and electric light bulbs in every household.

And this was very astonishing to people.

It was a miracle.

MAN: Electricity was very mysterious at the time

My grandmother, born in , maybe,

insisted that we always have those childproof things

in the plugs, because she thought

the electricity was dripping out,

and it would collect on the floor

and you'd step in it.

NARRATOR: Tesla meandered down the lanes of lower Manhattan

heading toward Edison's office

with a revolutionary idea he was certain

the celebrated inventor would be grateful for.

Beneath the ground ran , feet of copper conductors--

the world's first electric grid, Thomas Edison's creation--

lighting homes and powering factories

on the lower tip of Manhattan.

But Edison's system generated direct current, DC,

and DC had severe limitations.

JONNES: Direct current couldn't go very far.

You would have had to have a generating station every mile.

It was a very limited form of power.

So this was a real problem.

And Tesla had the solution, a brilliant solution.

NARRATOR: With direct current,

a generator produces electricity,

a stream of electrons that flows along a wire

to a light bulb, or a motor,

and then returns to the generator

in one long continuous loop.

But as the electrons travel,

energy is lost to the resistance of the wire.

Like a long river whose energy is spent

the farther the current travels.

The alternative to DC is AC, alternating current.

With alternating current,

the electrons don't flow in a single direction.

Instead, they vibrate back and forth,

like an ocean tide,

surging with power that could send electricity long distances.

But no one had designed a motor

that could run efficiently on AC.

Even Thomas Edison himself was baffled.

But in a waking vision,

Nikola Tesla had imagined an AC motor when he was ,

two years before he met Edison,

as if he had been waiting for that astonishing revelation

since he was a small boy in Croatia.

[thunder rumbling]

He was born in the tiny Croatian village of Smiljan in ,

as family stories have it, on the stroke of midnight

while a thunderstorm raged around him.

"He'll be a child of the storm," the midwife said.

His mother responded, "No-- of light."

[thunder rumbling]

His father was a Greek Orthodox priest

who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps.

But he took after his mother,

who invented a variety of ingenious devices

for farming and housekeeping,

and encouraged the boy's precocious gifts.

JONNES: Tesla takes this lifelong obsession with electricity

back to when he was three years old

and he is petting the family cat, Macak.

And he begins to create sort of this sheet of sparks,

and it makes this crackling noise, like thunder.

And he says to his father, "What is that?"

And his father said, "Well, it's electricity,

"such as you get during thunderstorms.

And stop that, because you're, you know, electrifying the cat."

[thunder rumbling]

NARRATOR: For the rest of his life,

Tesla would be awestruck by the wonders of electricity.

As a child, he spent hours playing beside a tumbling stream

that ran beside his home.

His very first invention, a hook designed to catch frogs,

made him the envy of his friends.

Before he was six,

he had invented a motor consisting of a rotating spindle

powered by June bugs.

"I wanted to harness the energies of nature

to the service of man," he wrote later.

MAN: You can see the seeds of a number of his inventions

when he was a child.

But he sometimes had difficulty

separating reality from his own imagination.

NARRATOR: "Sometimes," he wrote, "I was quite unable to distinguish

whether what I saw was tangible or not."

From an early age,

he was afflicted by spontaneous, inexplicable visions

that confused his picture of reality,

yet empowered his preternatural gift for invention.

When he was ,

in an extraordinary feat of mind control,

he banished the images that haunted him

by willing himself to live in a visual world

of his own invention.

HUNT: He could travel in his own visions,

travel to foreign countries, understand foreign languages.

And having control over these visions

spurred on his creative energy in later life.

NARRATOR: By the time Tesla was ,

he had honed a keen visual facility.

"When I get an idea," he wrote, "I do not rush into actual work.

"I start at once building it up in my imagination.

"I change the construction, make improvements,

and operate the device in my mind."

FISHER: Early in his life, he developed this really magnificent way

of visualizing physical things.

By the time it came for him to build them,

they came almost fully formed.

NARRATOR: When he was , Tesla won a scholarship

to a polytechnic institute in Graz, Austria.

He studied with a fierce determination,

sometimes hours a day.

HUNT: Tesla couldn't stop learning.

He couldn't stop reading.

He memorized all of <span tts:fontStyle="italic">Faust.</span>

His memory was photographic and unassailable.

He would see something once, he would hear something once,

and it never left him.

He was obsessive, so once he started to read Voltaire,

he had to read every single thing that Voltaire ever wrote.

NARRATOR: As Tesla immersed himself

in the study of mathematics and science,

the mysteries of electricity were waiting to be unraveled.

When a professor told his class

that it was impossible to construct a motor

that could run on alternating current,

Tesla objected.

"Mr. Tesla may accomplish great things,"

the professor told the class,

"but he certainly never will do this."

Tesla disagreed.

FISHER: He's pushing it with the professor.

He's saying, "I see."

And this is visionary.

He's saying, "I can do this."

NARRATOR: At first, he didn't see the solution,

but he saw the problem.

DC motors waste energy.

FISHER: There's metal surfaces moving over each other,

and they kind of do this and there's...

There's sparks, it smells, it breaks, it wears out.

It's a clunky, inelegant way to do it.

He's thinking, "That really wants to be AC."

I mean, he almost kills himself trying to make it work.

NARRATOR: "Day and night, year after year,

I worked incessantly," he wrote later.

"I could visualize motors and generators.

"The images I saw were to me perfectly real and tangible.

"Solving the problem of alternating current

"was a matter of life and death.

I knew that I would perish if I failed."

Obsessed, he stopped studying, lost his scholarship,

dropped out of school, and drifted.

He was falling into a hallucinatory,

mind-shattered space,

and suffered, in his own words, "a complete nervous breakdown."

For four years, Tesla's imagination tormented him.

And then, it saved him.

In , walking in a Budapest park as the sun was setting,

the solution, he wrote, "came like a flash of lightning.

"I cannot describe my emotions.

"A thousand secrets of nature I would have given

"for that one which I had wrested from her at all odds

and at the peril of my existence."

FISHER: I think he sees some kind of intrinsic beauty to an AC motor.

I think that's where you really see

this famous Tesla insight and intuition.

NARRATOR: Tesla's genius was to take a DC motor and reimagine it.

He eliminated the mechanical parts

where metal rubbed against metal,

replaced the inner cylinder with one made of copper,

and sent an electric current through the outer ring,

turning the outer ring and the cylinder into magnets.

The interaction of the two magnets

made the inner cylinder spin without any parts touching.

FISHER: Imagine a merry-go-round, okay?

And you want to spin your kid around,

and there's, you know, a pole

sticking up from the merry-go-round.

So you grab the pole here

and you push it across like that,

and the merry-go-round goes around,

and you wait until the pole comes,

and then you grab it and push it again, okay?

So you can think of the pole

as the electromagnet on the cylinder,

and you are the magnet on the outside

and you're timing your grab.

Because if you just... if you grabbed it here,

you know, you wouldn't be able to push.

You've got to grab it like that.

So that's the way an AC motor works.

No sparking, no smell, nothing wearing out.

He really just saw the whole thing...

[snaps fingers]: In an instant.

NARRATOR: Tesla was a -year-old

with an idea he was convinced would change the world.

He went to work as an engineer

for a branch of Thomas Edison's company in Paris,

but decided his main chance lay in New York

with the great man himself.

JONNES: He has a design in his head

and he's actually made a prototype which works.

He is a huge admirer of Thomas Edison,

and he feels if Edison is presented

with better technology,

he will embrace it as something that he could develop

in his own company, presumably with the help

of his very junior employee, Nikola Tesla.

NARRATOR: In the spring of ,

Nikola Tesla brought his invention to America

to share with his hero, Thomas Edison.

JONNES: This is late th century America in New York City.

There's a tremendous sense of possibility,

and it's an age of incredible invention

and technological change.

And he totally expects to be part of that.

NARRATOR: Tesla walked confidently

into Edison's office in lower Manhattan

the very day he arrived,

and flashed a letter of introduction

from Edison's Paris office.

Meeting Edison, Tesla said, "thrilled me to the marrow."

Edison hired him on the spot.

But they were cut from two different molds.

JONNES: Edison was a completely practical man and inventor.

He wanted to make things work and sell them.

Tesla really just wanted to understand

how the mysteries of electricity worked.

MAN: Tesla was a very well-educated engineer.

He understood both theory and mathematics.

Edison did a lot by trial and error.

He was able to work well with things

when he could see the cause and effect immediately.

He wasn't nearly as well-educated.

He didn't even go to college.

Edison, as he gets to know Tesla, refers to him,

and this is not particularly a compliment,

as a "poet of science."

NARRATOR: Tesla worked for Edison redesigning generators

hours a day, seven days a week.

"I have had many hard-working assistants," Edison told him,

"but you take the cake."

Encouraged, Tesla worked even harder.

He desperately wanted Edison's blessing as an inventor,

and needed his savvy as a businessman.

But when he described his AC motor to his boss,

Edison told him bluntly he was wasting his time.

There was no future in alternating current.

JONNES: Edison had a lot of experience

in how incredibly difficult it was

to go from the idea to the reality.

And so he was very skeptical of people who just said,

"Ah, well, I have this idea,

and this is going to be the solution."

And it also would have meant that he had to retrofit

and redo the entire system

that he was so emotionally wedded to.

NARRATOR: Disillusioned by Edison's rejection,

after six months, Tesla abruptly quit

and struck out on his own.

JONNES: He's very naive and doesn't know how the world works,

and he thinks that he will be welcomed and well-funded

because he wants to elucidate the mysteries of electricity.

NARRATOR: He spent a year patenting designs for arc lights

for two New Jersey businessmen,

who cheated him out of his patents and left him penniless.

When it came to business, Tesla would always be naive.

He spent the next winter digging ditches

for two dollars a day.

"There were many days," he said,

"when I did not know where my next meal was coming from."

HUNT: When he leaves Edison's lab, his heart is broken.

This man who he thought was going to be a mentor to him

in some kind of dark, opposite way

ends up mentoring him, right,

just by teaching him maybe what he didn't want to be.

NARRATOR: Tesla was alone, without family or friends.

He had been in America for nearly two years

and had nothing to show for it.

"My high education in science, mechanics, and literature,"

he wrote, "seemed to me like a mockery."

Then, that spring, his luck turned around.

Two investors who learned that Tesla had worked for Edison

took a chance on the Serbian inventor.

They made him their partner and rented him a laboratory

where he could perfect his invention.

If it worked, it was worth millions.

During the last part of the th century,

as the railroad bound the nation together with steel tracks

and made a handful of Americans fabulously rich,

-year-old George Westinghouse

had invented the railroad air brake,

and parlayed his invention into a formidable fortune.

Now a wealthy man

who knew how to bring inventions into the marketplace,

Westinghouse was looking to the future,

and the future was electricity.

MAN: There were a lot of people saying

there's money to be made here.

And Westinghouse comes across Tesla, and he thinks,

"This man is a jewel,

"and he may even have nailed the toughest technical problem

"in the middle of this emerging,

"potentially immensely profitable game-changer:

alternating current."

NARRATOR: In , Westinghouse bought Tesla's patents

for tens of thousands of dollars,

making Tesla a rich man.

The contract specified paying Tesla, as the inventor, a bonus:

$. for every horsepower of alternating current sold.

STAUDENMAIER: Tesla is someone who has the key technological, creative insight,

and what he needs is

someone to coach him and someone to fund him.

NARRATOR: Tesla headed to Pittsburgh,

where Westinghouse began building Tesla's motor,

along with the dynamos and transformers that would make

long-distance transmission of electricity possible.

But the struggle

to make Tesla's invention a commercial success

was far from over.

Westinghouse was competing for the market with Edison,

and he was in trouble.

Electricity was a capital-intensive business,

and his company was overextended.

His investors were worried.

HUNT: Westinghouse goes to Tesla and says,

"In order for your dream,

"your alternating-current motor, to succeed,

"I have to... I can't pay you

"what I promised you in the contract.

I'll go out of business."

NARRATOR: Westinghouse asked Tesla

to rescind the royalty clause in the contract.

Without consulting a lawyer, without hesitating,

Tesla agreed.

HUNT: Tesla does not try to negotiate, you know?

"Okay, we'll move it down from $.,

I'll take ten cents on the dollar."

No, he doesn't negotiate at all.

He simply tears up the contract.

Their contract was really very, very generous.

$. for every horsepower of electricity produced?

It would have made Tesla one of the richest men in history.

He was naive and also tended to think

he could break the state of the art

any morning before breakfast.

NARRATOR: Just months after relinquishing his royalties,

Tesla appeared at Columbia University

to demonstrate his new wonders,

determined to astonish an audience of engineers

along with a few influential investors.

FISHER: A lot of the reason for the demonstration

was to get patronage.

It was really what scientists were doing in the time.

In the air was this American sensibility of "show me."

"Yeah, you can write

"your fancy European words, you can write equations,

"you can publish in some journal that nobody reads.

"I want to see it.

Show me."

NARRATOR: Tesla had begun to explore the possibility

of transmitting energy without wires.

"Here is a simple glass tube," he told his astonished audience.

"Wherever I move it in space, its soft, pleasing light

persists with undiminished brightness."

CLARK: People were used to incandescent lamps, lamps with filaments,

but this idea of a light bulb with no filament

that could turn on with absolutely no connection

to wire or to a battery?

NARRATOR: The lamps were Tesla's own invention,

the forerunners of today's fluorescent tubes.

Incandescent bulbs glowed hot.

Tesla called his tubes "cold light."

JONNES: Cold light is a bulb with gases in it,

and when electricity is nearby, it lights up.

It's wireless.

You don't have to have all kinds of wiring to make it work.

You just have to have ambient electricity.

NARRATOR: Ambient electricity, an electric field,

was created by another Tesla invention.

FISHER: He invented this device called the Tesla coil,

which enabled him to generate enormously high voltage.

It could take low AC voltage

and build up inside the coil an enormous amount of energy,

and then, through a spark discharge,

release all of that energy very, very quickly.

NARRATOR: As one reporter put it,

"Tesla acted the part of a veritable magician."

Like a good showman,

Tesla wanted to leave his audience dumbfounded.

He stretched out his hand

and took hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity

directly through his body.

CLARK: Tesla was apparently unhurt by the whole thing,

was pretty amazing to people.

Of course, he knew the secret.

It's called the skin effect.

His body was taking the electricity

and it was literally running through his skin,

from his hand down to the ground,

and not entering the internal parts of his body,

where it really could do some real damage.

I've done things like that, and it hurts like hell.

Maybe Tesla was just hurting like crazy,

but the real danger with electricity is

if you grab something that's at a high voltage,

it causes your muscles to contract,

and particularly your heart, and so your heart can stop.

STAUDENMAIER: The boundary line between, "Gee whiz, gosh, bang,

I can make magic happen,"

and the careful laboratory verification of results

was not all that cleanly defined.

At that time, electricity is still somewhere

between magic, science, and business.

NARRATOR: Tesla concluded his three-hour lecture

with a paean to electric energy

and its beneficent future as a servant of mankind.

"Everywhere is energy," he said.

"With the power derived from it,

humanity will advance with great strides."

"The magnificent possibilities expand our minds,

"strengthen our hopes,

and fill our hearts with supreme delight."

CLARK: Tesla was motivated by wonder and awe at nature.

He really wasn't in this to make money.

He really felt that there should be a way,

given how powerful nature is, to harness that power

and then use it to relieve human suffering and toil.

<span tts:fontStyle="italic">♪ Hallelujah! </span>

<span tts:fontStyle="italic">♪ Hallelujah! </span>

<span tts:fontStyle="italic"> ♪ Hallelujah! Hallelujah! </span>

<span tts:fontStyle="italic">♪ Hallelujah! </span>

NARRATOR: On May , , as a great choir broke into song,

President Grover Cleveland flicked a switch

and , light bulbs lit up the evening sky over Chicago,

opening the Columbian Exposition.

<span tts:fontStyle="italic">♪ Hallelujah! </span>

<span tts:fontStyle="italic">♪ Hallelujah! </span>

<span tts:fontStyle="italic"> ♪ Hallelujah! </span>

<span tts:fontStyle="italic">♪ Hallelujah! </span>

<span tts:fontStyle="italic"> ♪ For the Lord... </span>

NARRATOR: The exposition signaled the coming triumph

of alternating current over direct current.

Westinghouse had outfoxed Edison,

winning the contract to wire the exposition

with alternating current.

Twelve -ton dynamos generated three times more energy

than the entire city of Chicago.

Six months later,

Westinghouse went on to win a greater prize.

The contract to harness Niagara Falls

to generate alternating-current electricity.

JONNES: Tesla worked with the engineers,

perfected all of these dynamos and motors,

and helped design everything.

The water powered the waterwheels,

and that powered the generators,

and the generators sent out electricity.

At that point, DC was a technology that was defeated.

Alternating current triumphed.

SEIFER: Before Tesla, you would have to have

thousands of little power plants at every mile.

After Tesla,

from one power source, Niagara Falls,

you could light up and power the entire Northeast.

NARRATOR: The modern world was born.

Alternating current transformed daily life in the th century,

and made Tesla famous.

Tesla was all at once a celebrity-- a new Edison.

JONNES: He was enormously famous.

Incredibly charming, mesmerizing, and funny.

He speaks many languages, loves poetry.

He's just an all-around Renaissance man

that people are very drawn to.

He's very beloved of newspaper reporters

because he could go on for hours on almost any topic

and have something interesting and insightful to say.

NARRATOR: Tesla was fond of luxury.

He lived in the Astor House, the city's first luxury hotel,

and dined at Delmonico's,

the lavish restaurant of choice for fashionable New Yorkers.

Resplendent in his cutaway coat and striped dress pants,

he was the darling of New York society,

a regular at the glittering tables of the super-rich,

men like John Jacob Astor and J.P. Morgan.

JONNES: He needed to be supported.

He needed to cultivate and persuade

these very powerful industrialists

that he was worthy of being invested in.

NARRATOR: years old, Tesla devoted his prodigious energies

to creating new inventions

in his laboratory in lower Manhattan,

where he passed long, solitary hours,

and delighted in showing off his experiments to friends,

artists, writers, society figures,

the luminaries of his day, among them Mark Twain.

SEIFER: Stars of the Gilded Age came to his laboratory,

and Tesla was a star among these stars.

NARRATOR: Tesla continued inventing, securing patent after patent.

Yet he was peculiar,

dogged by troubling, persistent obsessions.

JONNES: He was enormously popular and celebrated,

but he had a lot of odd phobias and routines.

Everything that he does should be divided by three.

If he was staying in a hotel,

the room should be divisible by three.

In his younger days, he would swim in the morning,

and he always did laps

because it was divisible by three.

He would circle a block three times

before entering a building.

HUNT: He had horrible germ phobia.

He couldn't stand the sight of women's earrings.

He couldn't stand the idea of touching human hair.

I don't like to use the term "obsessive-compulsive,"

but he was.

HUNT: He had a lot of restrictions

keeping him away from actual humans.

Despite being a great humanitarian,

Tesla had a lot of issues with humanity.

NARRATOR: Tesla was a romantic,

but romance had no place in his life.

"I do not think there is any thrill," he told a reporter,

"like that felt by the inventor

"as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success.

"Such emotions make a man

"forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

It's a pity, too, for sometimes we feel so lonely."

In , Tesla headed west.

He had enormous ambitions,

and they were growing too big for his New York laboratory.

years old, once again, he imagined an invention

that he believed would change the world.

He set up shop

outside of the resort town of Colorado Springs,

checked into the Alta Vista Hotel--

room , a number divisible by three--

and went to work.

In a laboratory built to his specifications

on the outskirts of town,

he conducted a series of experiments in great secrecy.

JONNES: He built this lab

where he could generate huge amounts of electricity,

and built this huge fence around it saying, "Keep out."

And where did he get the money to do this?

By telling John Jacob Astor IV

that he was now going to develop his cold light,

and the cold light was so superior to the Edison bulb,

and just think of the millions of light bulbs

that were sold every year

that would be displaced by the cold light.

NARRATOR: But Tesla had no intention

of profiting from a paltry thing like fluorescent lighting.

He soon had his coils producing a million volts of electricity.

Errant bolts set his laboratory on fire.

He drew so much power that he once plunged

the entire town of Colorado Springs

into darkness.

Using high voltages, Tesla theorized

that he could transmit electricity vast distances

by sending electric currents through the Earth.

FISHER: You have this Tesla coil, and there's this...

[makes expl*si*n sound]

...this enormous spark across the room.

That's a current.

The current makes a magnetic field.

That magnetic field spreads out.

If the current is large enough,

it can go miles and light a bulb.

WOMAN: He set up an experiment

where he had some light bulbs in a field,

and they were surrounded in a -foot square of wire.

And he transmitted power

so that an electrical field was created within that wire,

and the bulbs lit up.

That was one of the things that led him to believe

that he would be able to accomplish this

on a wide scale.

NARRATOR: At the end of eight months of experimentation,

Tesla announced that he had proved

that he could transmit electric power abundantly and cheaply

anywhere on the planet.

But he never produced the evidence to make his case.

FISHER: This is where Tesla didn't do so well.

He really thought he was on to something.

I think his picture was pretty much wrong.

I think he fooled himself.

CLARK: The problem is a physics problem.

The farther you get away from the source,

the weaker and weaker the electricity gets.

Tesla is of the school that

once he believed he had some evidence for something,

he was very quick to promote it, expound it to the world,

and not at all interested in challenging it.

NARRATOR: Tesla was damaging his credibility.

He tarnished it even further by claiming that late one night,

he received signals from Mars.

CLARK: His instrumentation was doing some weird flipping around,

and he was claiming that it was communications from space.

It may have been gamma rays or cosmic rays,

even radio waves.

The fact that he interpreted it

as communication from alien beings or Martians

made people begin to doubt him.

NARRATOR: His fertile imagination,

so critical to his inventive powers,

was betraying him.

That same year,

an Italian electrical engineer, Guglielmo Marconi,

sent a wireless message across the English Channel.

Tesla dismissed him.

"Marconi possesses more enterprise than knowledge.

"Let him continue.

He is using of my patents."

In the year ,

-year-old Nikola Tesla returned to New York City.

He had burned through $,

in eight months in Colorado Springs.

Now he was looking

for many hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

ALCORN: Without using wires,

without using any other means of transmission than the Earth,

he wanted to send electrical power and wireless messages

around the globe.

And he believed he could do this

based on the experiments he had conducted in Colorado Springs.

NARRATOR: Settling into the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel,

Tesla started looking for investors.

But raising capital would not be easy.

Heedless, he was making more and more extravagant claims.

He repeated that he had received signals from Mars,

and insisted that he had the apparatus

to signal the Martians back.

ALCORN: He also foresaw the transmission of pictures and sound,

then music, images, and voices, real-time.

But for investors, you have to have something

that seems a little more realistic and concrete.

How do you explain a vision?

NARRATOR: Tesla's reputation as a scientist was on the line.

JONNES: At this point,

Tesla has not had a commercially successful invention

in a number of years.

And as he tries to get new people interested

in investing in him,

they're less than enthusiastic because they feel that

he's just going to take their money and vaporize it.

NARRATOR: But J.P. Morgan, the most powerful financier in America,

was intrigued.

Tesla's breakthrough with alternating current

was worth millions.

Morgan wanted to hear

what the eccentric inventor was proposing now.

Tesla told him that he had designed a small tower

to transmit wireless messages.

He kept secret his intention

to transmit electric power wirelessly;

to make unlimited electricity available free

to anyone with an antenna.

ALCORN: Tesla's basic idea was to give energy for free

for the betterment of humanity.

But he wasn't going to be able to sell this idea to Morgan.

He was playing to what Morgan's interests were.

NARRATOR: Morgan invested $,

toward what he thought would be

the wireless transmission of messages,

but warned that $, was his limit.

With Morgan's money,

Tesla bought acres on Long Island's North Shore.

He called it Wardenclyffe, after its former owner,

and began building a transmission tower.

ALCORN: He also intended to have a manufacturing facility,

but J.P. Morgan's $,

was never going to complete what Tesla had in mind.

And I'm sure that when he took that money,

he thought there'd be more following

once he achieved some measure of success.

NARRATOR: But a triumphant Guglielmo Marconi doomed Tesla's dream.

On December , ,

Marconi sent the first wireless transmission

across the Atlantic, based on Tesla's patents.

Eight years later,

Marconi would win the Nobel Prize

for the invention of wireless telegraphy-- radio.

JONNES: And the minute J.P. Morgan sees that, he's done with Tesla.

So there's no more money coming from J.P. Morgan.

So Tesla is in a very bad place.

This is where, had he retained his royalties

for alternating current,

he would have had all the money he needed

to do whatever he wanted.

But he didn't, and he wrote just these ever more pathetic,

pleading and insulting and bitter letters to Morgan.

I mean, almost like what you would expect, you know,

a crazy divorced person to write.

NARRATOR: "Have you ever read the book of Job?" he wrote.

"If you will put my mind in place of his body,

you will find my suffering accurately described."

"With fifty thousand dollars more, Wardenclyffe is completed,

and I have an immortal crown, and an immense fortune."

"You are a big man,

"but your work is wrought in passing form.

Mine is immortal."

STAUDENMAIER: Tesla didn't know how to work with the J.P. Morgans of his era

and what it would take to keep them on board.

He didn't know how to think about his technology

from the perspective of people that would fund it, finance it.

Part of the creativity is understanding

how you can fit it into the world of practice.

It was a big flaw in his life.

NARRATOR: In the summer of ,

just as he finished making his first experiments,

Tesla ran out of money.

CLARK: His experiments on Long Island were never finished.

But what he was trying to do there was pretty far out.

FISHER: Now, messages might have been possible,

because to send a message,

you need a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of power.

But I don't think there was any way

that he was going to be able

to put sufficient power out of this thing

so that he was going to be able to go, you know, even a mile.

The insight he demonstrated for the AC motor is true genius,

but his dream of powering things over vast distances

really wasn't workable, and I've always been curious

why he even thought that was possible.

NARRATOR: Still, Tesla dreamed of Wardenclyffe,

trying desperately for years

to raise the money to resurrect his vision.

"I will be able to transmit energy of any amount

to any place," he said.

Tesla believed that the tower would also be powerful enough

to send signals to nearby planets,

especially if there were any Martians out there

to receive them.

In , his fortune dwindling,

he relinquished the Wardenclyffe mortgage

to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel,

where he had been living on credit for almost years,

running up a debt of $,.

The following year, to make the land easier to sell,

the Waldorf had the tower dynamited.

Tesla was .

He would spend the rest of his life imagining new inventions

and hoping to find someone to invest in them.

JONNES: He consulted with various companies.

But he was a lonely, eccentric scientist

who really was frustrated

that his ideas had never been fully seen through.

His goal was to try and sell something

so he'd get the money, go back to Wardenclyffe,

and complete his baby, which was a world global system

to transmit light, voice, pictures, and power

to all points of the globe.

And he was trying to attach our technology

to the wheel work of nature--

harnessing geothermal power, the tides, wind, and sun.

He did not want to sap the Earth of our natural resources.

He stands for the future.

NARRATOR: Tesla still commanded attention,

but increasingly, his ideas were losing their mooring in reality.

HUNT: Science and science fiction meet in Nikola Tesla.

As time goes on,

his inventions start to take on more of the fantastic.

They are visions, they take full flight,

they unleash themselves from the strictures of reality.

He starts to develop an idea about photographing thought,

which is one of his most poetic and beautiful non-inventions

in my book.

He thinks, you know, "Thought is electrical energy,

"and we record electricity all the time.

Why can't we photograph thought?"

NARRATOR: Tesla had never cared about money.

Now he had hardly any left.

Leaving behind a trail of debts,

he moved from one hotel to another.

His mind was drifting.

HUNT: Despite the fact that Mark Twain is dead,

Tesla is sending him packages

to an address that no longer exists in New York City.

He's living with ghosts.

NARRATOR: His only friends were the pigeons in Bryant Park.

"I have been feeding pigeons,

thousands of them, for years," he told a reporter.

"One was different.

"It was a female.

"I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman,

"and she loved me.

As long as I had her, there was purpose to my life."

The night his beloved pigeon died,

he saw a light in her eyes he described as more intense

than the most powerful lamps in his laboratory.

"When that light went out," he said,

"a light went out inside of me."

Nikola Tesla died on January , .

He was years old, alone in the New Yorker Hotel,

room on the rd floor.

Six months later, the United States Supreme Court

ruled that the patents to Marconi's wireless device

belonged to Tesla.

Tesla, not Marconi, invented radio.

But by now, he was nearly forgotten.

His coils were never commercially successful,

his fluorescent lights never marketed,

his wireless system never realized,

his invention of radio never fully credited.

Even today, his achievements remain obscure.

HUNT: Alternating-current electricity is not something you think about

every time you put your hand on the light switch

and turn on the lights.

There's not something that's easy to say,

"Ah, okay, there we are.

There's the Tesla, that's what he gave us."

CLARK: He established the basic framework

for electrical generation and distribution

that drives our economy today.

But he was moving down his own path.

He was pursuing a vision.

Didn't necessarily always see the gaps

that would have to be filled

in order to get where he was going,

but he always believed that he could get there.

NARRATOR: His imagination carried him beyond his time.

With over patents,

Tesla had an exhilarating sense of the future.

But a long road of invention had to be traveled

before many of his ideas could be realized.

JONNES: Tesla resonates with our own time.

Many of the things that he predicted

are being brought to reality by the current generation.

Wireless networking, cell phones.

Yeah, I think that's what brought Tesla back to us,

was that his dream came true.

HUNT: He was an artist.

He's working with his dreams, he's working with his visions.

His medium is not pigment, his medium is not clay;

his medium is electricity.

FISHER: He was like a scientist with an artistic nature,

and many scientists are driven by that.

I mean, absolutely!

Tesla's really a visionary.

Enough of his stuff came true.

Enough of his stuff came true.