Original subtitles

- [Narrator] Some say he was the greatest inventor

of all time, even beating out Edison

to electrify the planet.

- His name was known around the world after this event.

- [Narrator] But was he the mad genius

who revolutionized the modern world, or was he just mad?

- [Narrator] At one point, he actually referred

to one bird as his wife.

- [Narrator] Now, the shocking truth behind Nicola Tesla.

You'll never flip on a light switch the same way again.

On Modern Marvels.

[intense music]

[suspenseful electronic music]

- [Sam] He was a true American hero, but after a while,

people forgot about what he did.

- [Jeff] I believe that he was the most important inventor

in human history.

- [Joseph] Some of his neighbors did think

he was absolutely crazy and thought

he was a danger to their community.

- [Samantha] I think that he had a different version

of what the future would look like.

He's responsible for the 20th century.

[triumphant music]

- [Narrator] For the power to change night into day,

thank Nikola Tesla.

- It's clear, there are so many aspects of modern life,

everyday life that is directly influenced

or created by Nikola Tesla.

- [Narrator] His alternating current

or AC power system paved the way for all

of our modern electric conveniences.

- He's basically responsible for our entire system

of electricity, our entire modern world.

- [Narrator] But tragically in later years,

his brilliance responsible, for more than 200 patents

was overshadowed by what some considered madness.

- He was often seen as sort of the mad scientist

who was out of control and would destroy the world,

when he really wanted to improve the lot of humanity.

- [Narrator] Because of Tesla,

a turn of the switch brings power to our fingertips.

Yet the same intellect

fanatically rescued injured pigeons,

was repulsed by women's jewelry

and claimed to receive communications from outer space.

- [Nikola Tesla] "Our virtues

and our failings are inseparable like force and matter.

When they separate, man is no more."

Nikola Tesla.

- [Narrator] At the beginning of the 20th century,

Tesla's amazing accomplishments were celebrated.

But he died in 1943 at The New Yorker Hotel,

in this small room,

virtually destitute and discredited,

as he watched the world he helped create simply forget him.

Nevertheless, the FBI amassed a secret file on Tesla

and when he died the United States government

took charge of his papers.

- If you listen to everything he talked about,

it was so powerful,

[electricity buzzes]

it was so frightening,

[electricity buzzes]

and so terrifying,

[electricity buzzes]

that they just pounced upon all his possessions

and whisked them away.

- [Narrator] What were the powerful

and terrifying ideas that may have

threatened national security?

Were they a madman's rantings or works of genius?

- There is still a place for Nikola Tesla's contributions.

Many people believe that he was actually onto something.

Maybe it's time to look back and reinvestigate

what Tesla was really up to.

- [Narrator] We know one thing Tesla was up to,

wireless energy that could be transmitted around the world.

The wireless transmission of power would appear

over and over again, even in Tesla's most exotic visions.

The key to understanding this remarkable idea was this

peculiar yet powerful invention.

First patented an 1891 by Tesla at the age of 35

called the Tesla coil.

- Nothing like it had ever been done before.

Think of the Tesla coil as a giant electrical pump.

This is an example of a modern day Tesla coil.

We're gonna take power from a wall outlet,

feed it to the base of the unit where we're gonna step up

the voltage tremendously until it comes out the top.

So I'm gonna step back and we're gonna take a look.

[coil buzzes]

- [Narrator] This Tesla coil steps up standard power

from a wall outlet of 120 volts to more than 500,000 volts.

Imagine electricity flowing in a wire

the same way as water pumped through a hose.

The current can be likened to the flow of water,

the voltage can be likened to water pressure.

If a nozzle was attached to the hose,

the force of the water pressure is dramatically increased.

While the flow of water is decreased.

A Tesla coil acts in the same way.

By passing the current from a small primary coil

to a secondary much larger coil,

it steps up the voltage tremendously

and reduces the current.

This makes the Tesla coil a transformer.

- Much like firefighters would connect a big hose

to a fire hydrant and then use the nozzle

to spray that water very far away,

Tesla coil does the same thing.

- [Narrator] Using an enormous Tesla coil,

the inventor wanted to pump the earth

and atmosphere full of electric energy,

He believed he could use the earth as a natural conductor

of electricity and send power around the world.

In essence, the earth will become a giant electrical outlet

To prove his wildly original theory,

Tesla left his home in New York City

and began experimenting with wireless power in 1899.

At the age of 43 on the wind swept prairies of Colorado.

- He believed that there was some specific frequency

at which the earth could be struck as with a hammer.

Tesla believed that the earth could be rung electrically

just as a bell can be rung with a clapper.

- [Narrator] He constructed a laboratory and tower

that soared 80 feet into the air.

Inside the barn-like structure was an enormous Tesla coil.

- For Tesla to be creating these electrical arcs

in his laboratory was very unsettling

to the people in Colorado because they felt

that he was conjuring the work of God.

[thunder rumbles] [electricity buzzes]

- [Narrator] By tapping into the local electrical power

from Colorado Springs,

Tesla's coil produced more than 12 million volts.

He often demonstrated his wireless concept

by illuminating a phosphorescent bulb while holding it

in his hand.

- When the machine is on the entire lab

is filled with high voltage electricity.

I'm gonna grab this fluorescent light

and show you what I mean.

[coil buzzes]

- [Narrator] The Tesla coil outputs electric energy

without harming humans, similar to the way

transmission towers bombarded us with radio waves.

- What you're seeing is electricity fly through the air

from the Tesla coil to the bulb, lighting it.

That's the essence of Tesla's original idea.

He wanted to transmit power globally so that people

need only receive it to use it.

- [Narrator] Tesla claimed his experiments in Colorado

were a success and he achieved the transmission of power,

illuminating light bulbs up to one mile away.

[electricity buzzes]

In addition to pronouncements of his Colorado electrical

discoveries, Tesla also made an even more startling claim,

that he received messages from outer space.

- He got a lot of flack when he came back to New York

for saying I've spoken to Mars, or talking to Martians

but it's interesting because the ideas that he were using

are exactly the ideas that we're using now

to send messages out into outer space.

We're sending radio waves out into outer space

to try to see if anyone's out there.

So people back then really had some idea

that he might be crazy, but he was actually

probably really ahead of his time.

- [Narrator] However, Tesla believed

he had crossed a threshold and proven

he could send power wirelessly.

He just had to find more money to build

an even bigger transmitter.

[waves crash]

Tesla returned to the east coast on Long Island Sound.

In the town of Shore, a street sign marks

the entrance to a now abandoned and forgotten location.

In 1901, based on his Colorado experiments,

Tesla began to build his visionary wireless power network

here on this site.

He called it Warden Cliff.

[electricity buzzes]

It was comprised of a laboratory and power station.

Adjacent to it was a tremendous 187 foot tower.

Power from the plant was sent to a giant Tesla coil

in the tower.

Underneath the tower, the inventor sank huge shafts

120 feet into the soil to transmit

the electrical current into the earth.

This was to be the first of many transmitters

in a system that would encircle the world

with wireless energy.

The vast amounts of electricity necessary

would come from huge hydroelectric projects.

- A lot of people thought it was crazy

because they couldn't understand what he was seeing

and what he was envisioning for the future.

He was able to conceive of things

that other people weren't, he was a visionary.

Nikola Tesla had an ingenious vision for a worldwide

wireless power network but to realize that dream,

he needed to convince the most powerful banker in America,

JP Morgan to invest $150,000 in the project.

Tesla promised the financier that the tower

would make millions by also broadcasting messages,

news, music, and even pictures to any part of the world.

- This is the original foundation for Tesla's tower.

If you look, you can see that it's an eight sided figure.

It had a huge hole down in the ground,

right in front of where I'm standing,

120 feet down and a spiral staircase went around it.

And then opened to the sky, 187 feet was the tower.

Tower was attached by huge timbers on bars like this

at each of the points along the side foundation walls.

It loomed over everything in the area.

It was overwhelming when you think of the size

and scope of such a huge, huge construction.

- [Narrator] This is the actual lab

and power plant at Warden Cliff,

where Tesla worked for more than four years

trying to develop his wireless concept.

It was purchased by a photographic company

more than 60 years ago.

After remodeling, only part of the outside lab remains.

- [Jane] Really getting to go inside.

This is so exciting. - All right,

this door hasn't been open in a while.

- [Narrator] Although the building hasn't been used

in more than a decade, the owners agree to open

the doors to "Modern Marvels" for a rare look inside.

- Wow.

Oh, this is incredible.

This is a amazing to be in here where Tesla worked,

where he spent time with his assistants.

It's just amazing that over a 100 years ago

Tesla was walking in these very walls,

his equipment it was here, his dreams were alive.

He was looking forward to what he hoped

would be a very glorious future.

- [Narrator] In part, it was timing

that ultimately doomed Warden Cliff.

On December 12th of 1901, as Tesla was working

at his wireless network, Guglielmo Marconi

beat him to the punch and successfully transmitted

a radio signal across the Atlantic.

While Marconi's achievements were indeed a first,

in reality he used 17 of Tesla's patents

to accomplish this feat.

Tesla is not only forgotten as the father of radio,

Marconi's transmission sealed the fate of Warden Cliff.

- Morgan was no longer interested

in supporting Tesla's work here.

Marconi already did it.

Why should he keep supporting Tesla?

And of course, Tesla's plan was greater than Morgan knew.

Tesla could see reason to continue the funding

and continue the work, but it wasn't Morgan's plan.

- [Narrator] So in 1905 while still under construction

and after some amazing electrical displays,

the Warden Cliff project was abandoned and later destroyed.

[loud bang]

- [Nikola Tesla] "The world was not prepared for it.

It was too far ahead of its time.

But the same laws will prevail in the end

and make it a triumphant success."

Nikola Tesla.

- [Narrator] But could Tesla have succeeded?

The mainstream scientific community has grave doubts.

- Tesla's schemes for worldwide

electrification was simply out of the question.

It makes no sense from the standpoint

of the energy involved and the inefficiency of it.

- [Narrator] Still some aren't sure.

- I believe that the wireless transmission

of power is possible.

The chance that power could be transmitted

around the globe without wires was too great

a discovery to pass up.

- [Narrator] Jeff Parisse, a high voltage technician

was part of a team that built one of the largest

Tesla coils in modern times.

The 13M.

[electricity buzzes]

- The reason that 13M was built was to give scientists

the opportunity to actually investigate

some of Tesla's wireless transmission theories

to see if they're practical.

- [Narrator] The 13M generates close

to 12 million volts of power.

- What we learned is that the machine we built

is not large enough.

It's actually a quarter scale version

of what Tesla made in Colorado Springs

and it seems the machine that large is really necessary.

We hope in the future that we'll have the funding

to be able to build a full scale Tesla coil

and prove his theories.

Today, we take our electrified world for granted.

Energy that powers our needs is as close

as the nearest outlet.

[thunder rumbles]

According to legend, a man who made it all happen

was born in Croatia in 1856 at the stroke of midnight

during an electrical storm.

- Tesla's immediately associated with thunder and lightning,

with electricity.

[thunder rumbles]

- [Narrator] Tesla began his career

as an electrical engineer with a telephone company

in Budapest in 1881.

One day as he was walking through a park with a friend,

Tesla suddenly envisioned a groundbreaking concept

for a new electric motor and drew it out in the dirt.

This simple illustration became the patent

for induction motor, which would go on

to be the standard electric motor for the world.

It's used for everything from tools and appliances

to hybrid cars, to industrial plants.

The induction motor works by energizing coils of wire

placed around a stationary frame called the stator.

This induces a current in the coils onto a rotor.

The alternating current in the coils causes the poles

of the magnetic fields around them

to change between north and south.

The resulting attraction and repulsion with the coils

as they alternate causes the rotor to spin.

- And the exact same ideas that Nikola Tesla

came up with a 100 years ago are still used today

in induction motors such as this one.

The motor's made of two parts, the rotor

and the coil.

Within the coil, a north south magnetic field rotates

and as a magnetic field rotates, the rotor follows it.

Just like it did a 100 years ago

when Nikola Tesla made the first prototype.

[motor buzzes]

- [Narrator] In 1884 at age 28,

Tesla moved to America with little money

and only a letter of recommendation

from his boss to Thomas Edison.

The letters simply read, "I know of two great men,

you are one of them.

This young man is the other."

Edison hired the brilliant young engineer

and eventually asked him to redesign his company's electric

generators for a $50,000 bonus.

After Tesla developed a number of enormously profitable

new patents, he asked Edison for his bonus.

- Edison says, you gotta be kidding me.

You got a lot to learn about an American sense of humor

and he doesn't give him the $50,000.

And Tesla turns around immediately and says,

well, Mr. Edison, I resign.

- [Narrator] And so began a lifelong feud

between the upstart young genius

and the established inventor.

- Tesla leaves Edisons and he was digging ditches

in New York City for a year.

Very, very dark time.

All of his dreams are in shambles at this point.

- [Narrator] While toiling to feed himself

and raised capital for new inventions,

Tesla was appalled at the web of power wires

strung up in the city.

- This whole system was a nightmare

of cables and wiring overhead.

Matter of fact, in some areas,

it even blocked out the sun.

- [Narrator] The electrical system he found deficient

was called direct current or DC.

Edison, Tesla's former employer, was a major investor

in DC power.

Tesla knew there was a better way

and was determined to invent a new system

that became the global standard, alternating current or AC.

- He used a direct current cable

that would carry about a million watts

to light a typical New York City block.

Using alternating current and Tesla's AC system,

a small wire such as this could power

the same amount of homes.

Same amount of power, just look at the difference.

- [Narrator] The difference between AC and DC power

is all about how electricity or electrons flow.

For DC current to work there must be a continuous

and direct flow of electrons along a wire

from negative to positive poles.

- When power's applied electrons, as signified

by the red band, move to the work,

do the work and then come all the way back to the generator.

The problem with this process is that the electrons

encounter resistance along these wires.

It's difficult for electrons to travel

these great distances.

So most of the energy in the system is lost in the wire.

- Well the way Thomas Edison envisioned his system,

he would have to put a power plant just about every mile

to keep the voltage steady along his DC power grid.

- [Narrator] In 1887, Tesla filed seven US patents

for another more efficient and cheaper power system

called alternating current.

- What Tesla discovered in his AC system

was it was not necessary to send the electrons

all the way to the work and back again.

In fact, he alternated the current,

sending it back and forth.

- [Narrator] Tesla developed a system of AC generators

that alternated electric current between negative

and positive poles at 60 cycles per second.

By sending AC through a transformer

with virtually no power loss, he could step up the voltage

and lower the current so that AC could be efficiently

transmitted hundreds of miles further than DC current.

Millionaire entrepreneur George Westinghouse

thought Tesla's inventions could be the key

to long distance power transmission.

He purchased the patents

for $60,000 and a healthy share of stock

in the Westinghouse corporation.

If the new AC system was successful,

Tesla would a rich man.

Nikola Tesla became a citizen of the United States in 1891.

The same year an all out war of the currents

erupted between his AC and Edison's DC power.

Edison launched a propaganda campaign

that showed the dangers of AC.

- The public, they had rather grotesque experiments

where they would take animals and electrocute them

with alternating current.

- [Narrator] Edison convinced New York state

to use Tesla's and Westinghouse AC power

for the very first electrocution in 1890.

A reporter called it a gruesome spectacle

far worse than any hanging.

Edison dubbed the technique Westinghousing.

- Whether it was electrocuting animals

or electrocuting prisoners, the thrust was,

this is something you don't want in your house.

- [Narrator] In 1893, despite the bad press,

Tesla and the Westinghouse Corporation

won the bid for illuminating the Chicago World's Fair,

the first all electric fair in history,

Edison who made an unsuccessful bid

was frustrated over losing this opportunity

and refuse to let Tesla use his patented light bulbs.

[lights buzz]

- So Tesla needed to come up with a new light bulb,

make 250,000 of 'em in six months time to light the fair.

Edison's bulb had a screw base at the bottom.

He patented the whole method of powering the ball

through this screw base and how to seal

the vacuum off inside.

Tesla's solution was to have a ground glass stopper

in the bottom of the bulb.

The wires passed through the stopper

and he was able to manufacture a bulb

that didn't interfere with Edison's patents.

Tesla was able to beat Edison at his own game

by producing a lamp that was more easy to manufacture

and he was able to do so in a short amount of time.

- [Narrator] On May 1st, 1893, President Grover Cleveland

pushed a button and more than 200,000

of Tesla's incandescent lamps illuminated

the fair grounds.

It was a monumental success and ushered in the era

of modern electric lighting.

- Tesla was hailed the mastermind

and the genius behind making this possible

and his name was known around the world after this event.

- [Narrator] Tesla, filled with confidence

after this victory over Edison

Millions have witnessed its stunning power.

Niagara Falls can send more than 750,000 gallons of water

over its crest every second, producing enough power

to generate 2.4 million kilowatts of electricity.

At that rate, the falls could power

half of Las Vegas on a hot summer night.

Ever since pioneers began building sawmills

along the Niagara River in the 1700s,

many had envisioned brand new ways to harness

the thundering power of the falls.

In 1893 after witnessing Tesla's and Westinghouse's triumph

at the Chicago World's Fair, the Niagara Falls Commission

awarded them the contract to tap the falls

for generating alternating current.

- The big problem with using Niagara Falls

for electricity was that the major consumer

of that electric power was Buffalo.

Buffalo is about 20 miles or so

and using DC transmission was totally impractical

because a repeater station would have to have been built

every two miles.

AC avoided all of that.

- [Narrator] At the falls Tesla designed

and engineered a complex system of generators

and transformers to produce his AC power.

- Tesla didn't write down everything.

Most of his stuff was in his head.

He had to do it verbally.

Tesla was in his own little world more or less.

He would not explain things to other people,

but his assistants would.

- [Narrator] In 1896, the first AC hydroelectric station

for long distance power transmission went online

and Buffalo, New York became the premier city

to be electrified by power transmission.

- Tesla was not here when they actually flipped the switch

but he had so much confidence in his own work

that he knew it would work.

- [Narrator] Today new power plants

have replaced Tesla structures.

The buildings of one of the most important historical sites

in the modern world,

now stand forgotten like dinosaurs.

And for the man who envisioned it all

only an isolated statue marks his extraordinary achievement.

- I wonder how many people who come by here,

past this statue actually have any idea

who Nikola Tesla was and what he did to shape their world.

- [Narrator] Today, our world is ablaze

thanks to Tesla's AC technology.

He had won his final battle with Edison

but victory came at an enormous cost.

Westinghouse was financially drained

by the war of the currents.

In a grand gesture to keep the company afloat,

Tesla tore up his royalties contract

claiming better inventions lay ahead.

- Had the contract been fulfilled,

Tesla would have been a millionaire

and been free of financial worries the rest of his life.

- [Nikola Tesla] "Money does not represent

such a value as men have placed upon it.

All my money has been invested into experiments

with which I have made new discoveries

enabling mankind to have a little easier life."

- [Narrator] After the triumph

over Edison and the success of his alternating current,

Nikola Tesla was a celebrity.

- And he's friends with Mark Twain,

he's friends with all manner of ambassadors

and ballerinas and prima donnas,

and he's really kind of at the height of society.

- [Narrator] But genius often comes with a price.

Tesla suffered from bizarre compulsions

like his consuming need to rescue injured pigeons

and nurse them back to health.

- He has an infirmary for them right out outside

his bedroom window where he's trying to heal, you know,

some that have broken wings, broken legs.

And in fact, at one point he actually

referred to one bird as his wife.

And he said, you know, when she died,

the inventive spirit left him.

- [Narrator] Tesla had a fear of germs that compelled him

to wash his hands constantly.

He did things in threes and was adamant about living

in a room at The New Yorker Hotel

with a number divisible by three.

- He demanded the room 3327,

where he'd lived for 10 years.

He always requested nine napkins

and if he had a bread or something,

it could be cut into nine, three times three pieces.

Even the number of dishes he had or the number of towels

he received in this room was usually a three or nine.

- Tesla never married and claimed he was celibate.

- He had a horrible affliction against women

with pierced ears.

He couldn't stand the site of pierced ears and jewelry.

And pearl earrings he said, just set his teeth on edge.

It was almost like fingers on a chalkboard

for him to see pearl earrings.

- [Narrator] Even with his list of obsessions

and compulsions, Tesla had always been able

to tap into his remarkable inventive intellect.

In 1898, he created the remote control

when he demonstrated a six foot long radio wave

controlled boat at Madison Square Garden.

[horn blows]

[model boat hums]

On a quiet lake in Riverside, California,

Tesla's work is alive and well as a fleet

of remote controlled model boats set sale.

- This is very much like Tesla did a 100 years ago.

- [Narrator] Inside these boats are the basic components

of remote control Tesla conceived

at the turn of the 20th century.

A battery inside the remote control device

sends power to an oscillator that

converts it into a radio wave pulse.

The radio wave is transmitted

to a small receiver on the boat,

which sends the electric pulse to a motor.

Varying the pulse of the radio wave

from the transmitter to the receiver

causes the motor arms to move in different directions.

Using a joystick, the operator controls

the radio pulse signal and controls the boat.

[model boat hums]

Tesla's remote control principles are seen today

in everything from televisions

to unmanned military predator drones

used for battlefield reconnaissance

to satellites operating in space.

Tesla's shocking experiments continue now

on "Modern Marvels Mad Electricity Plus."

One of the most powerful forces in nature

is an earthquake.

Suppose that power was harnessed as a weapon.

[tense music]

Some believe Tesla may have discovered a way.

- The Tesla earthquake machine was a mechanical oscillator,

which is basically a machine

that produces vibrations.

And by producing these vibrations

the machine could be made to resonate

with different structures.

- [Narrator] The oscillator machine is based

on the principle that every substance

when stimulated has a resonant frequency.

If the frequency is matched and amplified

by an outside force such as the oscillator machine,

any material can be literally shaken to pieces.

The destruction of the Tacoma Narrow's Bridge

in Washington in 1940, demonstrates this principle.

The winds whipping around the bridge

hit just the right frequency, causing the steel

to sway violently in a rhythmic pattern

that finally broke it apart.

[water splashes]

- To demonstrate the power of resonance,

we're going to see what happens to a wine glass

as it vibrates to its breaking point.

First, I'll start a glass vibrating

and use a microphone connected to an oscilloscope

to see what frequency the glass vibrates at.

I'll then set that frequency on a signal generator,

[mellow hum]

Which is going to play a bag through an amplifier

into a speaker.

Because the glass is going to be moving

more than 400 times per second,

we will be using a strobe light

in order to slow down the motion.

Now this is going to be loud,

so I have to wear some protection.

As the vibrations increase in intensity,

the glass will start to move more and more

and eventually it can't take it anymore.

So as I turn up the volume the glass will break.

[oscilloscope hums]

[high pitched hum]

[glass shatters]

So what we saw was like a mini earthquake

and Tesla's earthquake machine would be able to do this

but on a much larger scale.

- [Narrator] In 1898, Tesla claimed

to have created an oscillator with an adjustable frequency

that was no bigger than an alarm clock.

And he wrote of an attempt to use it

on a building under construction.

- [Nikola Tesla] "In a few minutes,

I felt the building beginning to tremble.

10 minutes more and I could have laid it in the street.

And with the same device, I could have dropped

the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River

in less than an hour."

- [Narrator] Perhaps this opened a Pandora's box

during later experiments with a device.

- There's a legend that he started up his little oscillator

or what some called the earthquake machine

and he started vibrating Lower Manhattan

and they call went out to the police department

and the police came running.

They were pounding on the door.

They broke into his lab and they saw him

with a sledge hammerer smashing the machine.

The switch got stuck, he couldn't turn it off

and he almost brought down some buildings

in the neighborhood.

- [Narrator] In 1934, Tesla conceived a death ray.

His idea was to blast concentrated beams of particles

charged with millions of volts of electricity

through the air,

which could down fleets

of enemy aircraft at a distance of 250 miles.

[electricity buzzes]

- Tesla terrified people with this idea of the death ray.

I mean, even the name death ray,

it sounds like it's science fiction, right?

- [Narrator] Tesla spent his later years

in two small rooms in The New Yorker Hotel.

Today room 3327, one of his rooms, showed the cramped space

he occupied for the last 10 years of his life.

- Tesla died alone in his room at the hotel.

They weren't even sure exactly when he died

because people hadn't seen him for a couple of days.

A chamber maid finally entered his room

the day after he died and found his body.

- [Narrator] But when his death at the age

of 86 was discovered, the United States government

took control of his scientific papers.

- There was a great deal of concern

at the time of his death as to what was in his papers,

because we were in the middle of World War II

and there's a great deal of concern

what if the Nazis get ahold of this.

- [Narrator] The government claims

that after inspecting Tesla's papers

they were released in 1952 and later sent

to Belgrade, Serbia where they now remain

at the Nikola Tesla Museum.

However, many believe some of his papers are still missing.

- Who knows what were in these papers.

You know, maybe they are very sensitive,

maybe they are the plans for the death ray

and, and you know, I guess that shouldn't

be public knowledge.

It's a terrific mystery who took Nikola Teslas papers.

- [Narrator] We may never know what

all these papers contained.

The United States consumes nearly 20 million barrels

of oil a day and gasoline prices fluctuate wildly.

Even a century ago Tesla saw the future of fossil fuels.

- [Nikola Tesla] "If we use fuel to get our power

we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly.

This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful

and will have to be stopped in the interest

of coming generations."

- Tesla was disturbed by the rate

at which society was burning up non-renewable fuels,

coal, oil was just coming in then

and he foresaw a time that you would need

to go to some other source of power.

- [Narrator] Tesla anticipated the development

of what we now call renewable energy.

In 1901,

he patented an apparatus for the utilization

of radiant energy.

The patent refers to the sun as well

as other sources of radiant energy, like cosmic rays.

- Nikola Tesla was

one of the first people to realize

that we have an almost endless supply of energy

coming in from space, from our own sun.

I bet you wouldn't be surprised to find out that today,

all kinds of applications run on solar power.

- [Narrator] Tesla also championed geothermal power.

In 1931, he wrote an article for The New York Times

entitled "Our Future Mode of Power",

which explored how to utilize the earth's natural energy.

- [Nikola Tesla] "All that is necessary

is to find an economic and speedy way

of sinking deep shafts to tap

into this enormous geothermal energy."

- One cutting edge car maker is paying homage

to Tesla's green foresight by adopting

his name.

Today, Tesla motors produces the best selling

electric vehicles on the market.

The company's all electric fleet includes cars

assisted by cutting edge autopilot technology.

A step towards a potentially self-driving vehicle.

The company began cranking out electric vehicles

in 2008 with a battery driven Tesla Roadster,

a vehicle that used a version

of its namesake and better's AC induction motor.

The Roadster could go from zero to 60 in 3.9 seconds

and travel more than 200 miles without a drop of gas.

[electricity buzzes]

Tesla was also a green lighting pioneer.

At the 1893 Chicago World's Fair,

Tesla displayed a fluorescent bulb that burned

much cooler and lasted longer

than Edison's incandescent bulbs.

A forerunner of today's longer lasting efficient lighting.

- This is an actual Edison light bulb.

This filament's made of carbon and by passing electricity

through it, it becomes heated and this heat produces

a white light,

More than half of the energy that went

into this light bulb produced heat instead of light

and that made it very inefficient.

Tesla as a result developed a lamp on a different principle

that didn't produce heat.

It produced light by a gas inside of a bulb.

The electricity enters the bulb through the ends

and there's electrodes inside.

And as it enters the bulb, the gas would get excited

and ignite inside lighting the whole space

within the walls of the tube.

The result was the light was brighter,

it ran cooler and it was more efficient than Edison's bulb.

The modern compact fluorescent light operates

on the same principle.

There's gas inside that's excited by a high voltage.

And this is Tesla's principle still used today.

- [Narrator] Which other of Tesla's ideas

were too far ahead of his time?

History may have neglected this genius,

but today he is being rediscovered.

- I believe that someday

we will reinvestigate Tesla's work

and we will discover the secrets

that he was so confident in.

- Nikola Tesla made the modern world

what it is today and although it took many years

for a lot of people to finally realize it,

I think perhaps that is changing now.

- The legacy of Tesla is really

this creative spirit of the inventor,

to have no bounds on thought.

He really believed anything was possible.

- [Nikola Tesla] Let the future tell the truth

and evaluate each one according to their work

and accomplishments.

The present is theirs, the future

for which I really worked, is mine."

Nikola Tesla.