Original subtitles

When you think of electricity you think of Edison.

When you think of radio you think of Marconi.

But there is one electrical genius who is nearly forgotten,

a man who dreamed of giving the world an unlimited supply of energy.

His name was Nikola Tesla

and he was the master of lightning.

This program was made possible by contributions

to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank You.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind

over the material world,

the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.

Nikola Tesla, 1919

This is the story of a modern Prometheus

who changed the world with electricity.

It was Nikola Tesla who captured the power of Niagara Falls

with his alternating current system and made it possible

to transmit electricity to all of America and the world.

It was Tesla who patented the technology for wireless communications

that is used in all radio and television broadcasting.

His incredible legacy can be seen in everything from remote control

to neon and fluorescent lighting

X-rays

guided missiles

and even the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Yet somehow history has overlooked this remarkable man.

Tesla was indeed a genius of the first magnitude.

He was a technological visionary.

He could envision great things and make them work.

He was a foreigner,

an immigrant who arrived in America with only his dreams.

A proud and sometimes arrogant man,

he worked and locked horns with some of the most powerful people of his day.

Thomas Edison, who resented his ideas

Guglielmo Marconi, who capitalized on his inventions

George Westinghouse, who created the Westinghouse Electric Company

with Tesla's patents

and the great financier, J. Pierpont Morgan,

who supported and then abandoned him.

At the height of his career, Tesla was one of the most famous men in the world.

His inventions helped America grow into a powerful industrial nation.

His ideas created billion-dollar corporations.

But Tesla was not a practical man.

Always driven toward the next great breakthrough

he failed to protect his commercial interests.

In the end, others made fortunes with his inventions

and he wound up penniless and rejected.

Money does not mean to me what it does to other men.

All my money has been invested in inventions

to make man's life a little easier.

He was a visionary genius. There aren't many of them,

and he was willing to give his life to his visions.

We have to evolve means

for obtaining energy from stores that are forever inexhaustible.

What I intend to show you now, step-by-step,

is how I finally reached my dream.

This is the house in which, by coincidence bizarre,

I was born on the stroke of midnight

between July 9 and 10, 1856.

A fierce electrical storm raged that night.

Nikola Tesla was born of Serbian parents on the eastern edge

of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is today Croatia.

His father, Milutin, was an Orthodox priest

who expected his son to follow him in the clergy.

There were only two choices for children in those days

one being to go in the army and the other being to become a priest.

Tesla was not attracted by either of them,

which was very distressing to his father.

My father was a very erudite man.

The training he gave me comprised of guessing one another's thoughts

and repeating long passages of verse.

My mother descended from one of the oldest Serbian families in the country.

She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices

and wove the finest designs from thread.

Her fingers were nimble enough to tie three knots in an eyelash.

Early on, Tesla began to demonstrate an extraordinary imagination.

In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction

due to the appearance of images

often accompanied by strong flashes of light.

I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not.

To give an example, I was fascinated by a description of Niagara

and I pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the falls.

I told my uncle that one day I would go to America

and carry out this scheme.

Then, at the age of 17, while preparing for the seminary,

Tesla contracted cholera and a brush with death changed his life forever.

In one of the spells, which was thought to be my last,

my father rushed into the room.

Perhaps, I said, I may get well if you will let me study engineering.

You will go to the best technical institution in the world,

he solemnly said.

I came to life, like another Lazarus,

to the utter amazement of everyone.

In 1877, at the age of 21,

I travelled to Graz, Austria to begin my college education.

Here I quickly became obsessed with the science of electricity.

I wanted to know more of this wonderful force.

Every spark produced a thousand echoes in my brain.

In 1831, in England,

Michael Faraday had discovered the principal of electro-magnetic induction,

which made it possible to generate electricity.

Faraday discovered that if you have an electric circuit

in a changing magnetic field, it would induce an electric current to run in the wire.

So this was the invention of the method of inducing, of creating,

oscillating or AC electric currents. And it was that invention that Tesla

later harnessed into the electrical system that drives our civilization.

Early electric motors operated on direct current electricity

but required a system of sparking connections to induce a rotary effect in the machine.

I remarked to my professor that the design of generators and motors

could be greatly improved by using currents that alternated.

He embarrassed me, greatly, in front of my classmates saying:

Mr. Tesla will never accomplish this, it is a perpetual-motion scheme.

Meanwhile, in America, Thomas Alva Edison

had begun to experiment with vacuum tubes,

producing the first commercial incandescent light bulb in 1878.

Edison and Tesla would soon cross paths in a gargantuan technological struggle

between direct and alternating current electricity.

In 1880 Tesla moved to Budapest

where he found employment with the central telegraph office.

Here his idea for an AC motor began to haunt him.

In my room, I could hear the ticking of a watch

with three rooms between me and the timepiece.

A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body.

The whistle of a distant locomotive vibrated so strongly in my ears that the pain was unbearable.

To recover from these attacks, I took long walks in the city park.

One afternoon, which is ever- present in my recollection,

the sun was just setting

and reminded me of Goethe's glorious passage:

The glow retreats

done is the day of toil...

Upon its track to follow

follow soaring.

As I uttered these inspiring words, the idea came to me

like a lightning flash. I felt to my knees

and drew a diagram in the ground.

Tesla perceived a whirling field of energy.

He suddenly knew he could recreate this rotating field

by powering the coils of a motor in different steps or phases

like the pistons of an engine.

The resulting forces of magnetic attraction and repulsion

would literally twist the rotor in a circle,

the electrical equivalent of the wheel.

And all this was accomplished with alternating currents.

It would soon turn the wheels of industry around the world.

The strength of Tesla's mind

was almost certainly in his sense of visualization,

to be able to see things move in front of him.

You see, It was not a perpetual-motion scheme.

It had been the height of my ambition

and my most ardent wish to see America

and come in contact with the great Thomas Edison.

Accordingly, I undertook the voyage

and, after losing my money and tickets, and passing through a series of mishaps,

including a mutiny in which I almost lost my life,

I landed on these blessed shores with four cents in my pocket.

Tesla arrived in New York on June 6th, 1884.

A 28-year-old immigrant,

he was filled with dreams of success in this strange new land.

In his pocket he carried a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor,

one of Edison's associates in Europe.

My dear Edison,

I know two great men and you are one of them.

The other is this young man.

Tesla came to America because he had tried

to get his alternating current motor produced in Germany

and, I believe, in France as well, without any success.

And he realized that there was probably only one person in the world

who could help him with it and that was Thomas Edison.

New York had had electricity since the late 1870s.

Edison installed his first DC power station on Pearl Street

near the financial district in 1882.

He did this with help from the great Wall Street financier J. Pierpont Morgan.

But the system was far from perfect.

Electricity was a very new thing; most people didn't understand

what it was all about. They were very afraid of it.

There were fires breaking out. The horses on the streets

would get shocks through their shoes and run away.

So it was a very exciting time for Edison.

I was thrilled to the marrow meeting Edison.

This great man had revolutionized the world with his incandescent lamp.

And I was burning to show him my motor

that ran on alternating currents.

Edison had built his business on the direct current system

and any talk of alternating currents was an aggravation to him.

The problem with direct current is that you can't change the voltage.

What you'd generate, that's what you'd get.

And if you generated the power at too high a voltage,

you would blow out lamps at the other end.

If you generate at the proper power for the lamps

and you want to go any great distance,

then you need copper wire that's as thick as your arm.

and the Edison people said: Well, that's all right,

well just have a power station every mile or so.

DC was sufficient to power lights and run motors

but it could not be transmitted efficiently over long distances.

By raising and lowering the voltage

AC could solve the problem of distance

but a working AC motor did not exist.

In spite of their differences

Edison hired Tesla to improve the performance of his DC generators.

Tesla said he was promised $50,000 if he was successful.

The offer seemed too good to be true.

I entered the Edison Machine Works

where I undertook the design of DC dynamos and motors.

My regular hours were from 10:30 am till 5:00 am the next day.

When I completed the task I went to Edison for payment

and he laughed.

Edison was very amused by this

and said: You just don't understand our American sense of humor, Mr. Tesla.

So Tesla had had enough by that time

and he picked up his hat and walked out.

Tesla paid dearly for his pride.

I lived through a year of bitter tears and hard labor

digging ditches for Edison's underground cables.

But he was still determined to develop his AC motor.

With help from a group of investors

he opened a laboratory on Liberty Street only a few blocks from the Edison's offices.

There he began to assemble a prototype of the motor he had envisioned seven years earlier.

Along with it he developed all the components of

the system of AC power generation and transmission still used today.

In May of 1888, Tesla was ready to unveil his motor to the world.

The subject which I now have the pleasure of bringing to your notice

is a novel motor which I am confident will at once

establish the superior adaptability of alternating currents.

Over the next five years 22 U.S. patents were awarded to Nikola Tesla

for AC motors, generators, transformers and transmission lines

the most valuable patents since the invention of the telephone.

One of the few men who understood the great potential of Tesla's inventions

was the Pittsburgh industrialist George Westinghouse.

He visited Tesla's laboratory and, on the spot,

he offered to purchase all the patents dealing with the alternating current system

for one million dollars.

Westinghouse also proposed a royalty of $2.50

for each horsepower generated by a Tesla invention.

The young Serb was on his way to fortune and fame

while other inventors looked on with fascination and with envy.

In all my troubles

I did not neglect to become a real American citizen

making me a proud and happy man.

During the late 1880s Edison began a negative media campaign

to discredit the alternating current system of electricity

being developed by Westinghouse and Tesla.

It became known as The War of the Currents.

My personal desire would be to prohibit entirely the use of alternating currents.

They are as unnecessary as they are dangerous.

Edison employees demonstrated the dangers of alternating current

by electrocuting animals in public demonstrations.

Just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer

within six months after he puts in a system of any size.

None of his plans worry me in the least.

An Edison associate suggested using alternating current

as a means of executing criminals.

A test took place at New York's Auburn State Prison in 1890.

Several gruesome attempts were required to kill the victim.

Disgusted witnesses claimed his spinal cord burst into flame.

The infliction of the death penalty is not only barbarous and inhuman

but unnecessary as a factor in the scheme of modern civilization.

The war of the currents came to a dramatic head in 1893.

The Columbian Exposition in Chicago

was to be the first World's Fair lighted by electricity.

The Edison Company, the Thomson-Houston Company,

they all got together and formed General Electric Company 1892.

One of the first things they did of course was put in the bid for the job at the Fair.

Their bid was roughly a million dollars.

The Westinghouse bid was about half a million dollars, and naturally

Westinghouse got the job.

In retaliation, GE refused to sell Westinghouse

any of their Edison light bulbs.

And they got some judge to say that

Westinghouse couldn't use any one-piece lamps of any description at the Fair.

Westinghouse frantically devised a two-piece stopper lamp by Fair time

and saved the day.

Now Tesla had a chance to make history in Chicago.

His large AC generators would supply all of the Fair's electricity

and prove that his system would work on a large scale.

On May 1st, 1893 100,000 eager spectators filed into the fairgrounds,

awed by the gleaming neo-classical architecture.

Night fell, President Grover Cleveland pressed a button

and the fairgrounds exploded with brilliant tube lighting and multicolor searchlights

the most incredible display of lighting the world had ever seen.

In the great hall of electricity, the public could see that

the Tesla-Westinghouse system made it all possible.

To overcome the impression that AC was dangerous,

Tesla put on remarkable demonstrations.

He created a device called the Egg of Columbus

to show the rotating magnetic field created by his AC motor.

In his room, he had cork-soled shoes on and

a tuxedo and white tie and a top hat.

And he would put his hand on a terminal which would flash

electricity through his body creating a great shower

as his whole body was encompassed in flame.

And people were quite impressed by this, to say the least.

The Chicago exposition left an indelible impression on the American imagination.

This was the gleaming new city of the future,

and it was powered by the inventions of Nikola Tesla.

Since childhood, Tesla had dreamed of harnessing the power of the great natural wonder

called Niagara Falls.

The famous British physicist Lord Kelvin

was now head of an international commission to find a way to use the falls' power.

He had sent a cable to all the other members of this commission

and it said: Trust you avoid the gigantic mistake of alternating current.

But all this dramatically changed

when Lord Kelvin attended the Chicago exposition

and saw the AC system in operation.

A contract was immediately awarded to Westinghouse Electric

to power the mighty cataract with AC.

The technical challenge was daunting.

The Niagara plan called for three 5,000-horsepower alternators,

the largest generators ever made.

Tesla and Westinghouse engineers

had heated disagreements about the operating frequency.

Even when the system was finally installed,

Tesla was the only person who was certain it would operate.

The technical details have been completely worked out.

All that now remains is for the switch to be thrown.

In 1896 the system went online and the Electrical Age began.

The waters of the upper Niagara turned enormous water turbines

connected by shafts to the massive 5,000-horsepower generators.

The current from the generators was stepped up with transformers to 22,000 volts

and sent out over long-distance lines

then stepped back down to light municipalities

and power motors of Tesla's design.

The Niagara Falls Gazette proclaimed:

This morning the streetcars of this city are moving by falls power.

Hereafter the falls must work to earn their living.

Imagine my surprise when, 30 years later,

I saw my boyhood plan carried out at Niagara

and wondered at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.

Within a few years the number of generators at Niagara was increased to 10.

By the turn of the century,

the power lines stretched 360 miles to New York City.

The war of the currents was over and Tesla was the winner.

By the time Tesla effectively arrives on the scene with his motor,

Edison is out of the business.

He's basically written out of his own company.

This was something Edison would not soon forget.

In spite of the success of AC,

Westinghouse had over-extended his company's resources

leading to severe financial difficulties.

In order to save the company,

Tesla said that he tore up his royalty contract for $2.50 per horsepower generated.

Today this agreement would be worth trillions.

Had the inventor been tricked again?

This is something we've never found any record of in the

Westinghouse annals.

We do have something which is a Memorandum of Agreement about that,

but it was never signed.

But Tesla was ready to move on.

I had already perceived enough to get the idea

that energy could be transmitted and received

without connecting wires in between.

He was convinced his next invention would make him a millionaire once more.

My services with Westinghouse being no longer essential

I resumed experimental work in a laboratory on Grand Street

where I began immediately the design of high-frequency machines.

Following the success of Niagara, Tesla was at the height of social acclaim.

Everyone wanted to know more of this mysterious foreigner

who was transforming the world with his electrical inventions.

So far as personal appearance goes,

no one can look upon him without feeling his force.

His cheekbones are high and prominent, the mark of the Slav.

His eyes are blue, deeply set, and they burn like balls of fire.

Franklin Chester, The Citizen

Why was he so well known and so popular? It's because

the technological advance that he made were so directly related to the

relief of the drudgery that people had to endure in their work lives.

They could see what he did helped them personally.

Every evening Tesla showed up at Delmonico's,

the most expensive restaurant in town, to be shown to his special table.

He is fanatical about his dress, usually sporting a fine waistcoat

white leather gloves and a derby hat on his head.

He is meticulous about his health and drinks a glass of whisky a day

saying it will increases his life expectancy to 150 years of age.

Tesla hobnobbed with the leading politicians,

millionaires and celebrities of the era.

This was the best way for independent inventors to find support for their projects.

His friends were the New York elite:

John Jacob Astor

William K. Vanderbilt

and the writer Mark Twain.

I have just seen the drawings and description of an electrical machine lately patented by Mr. Tesla

which will revolutionize the whole electric business of the world.

One of Tesla's closest friends was Robert Underwood Johnson

editor of the prestigious Century Magazine.

Johnson's wife was deeply in love with Tesla.

My dear Niki, do leave aside the millionaires and Fifth Avenue

for some simple pleasures.

From one distinguished only by a great weakness, Katharine Johnson.

In fact, the world-famous inventor was also New York's most intriguing bachelor.

The fact that he never married, I think, had almost nothing to do with his

interest in women. It appeared that he was always very interested

and was attractive to women.

Many women sought his attention

the beautiful and wealthy socialite Flora Dodge

and even the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt.

But in spite of his charisma,

Tesla was only interested in his inventions.

He had so many phobias that he couldn't have had

close relationships with women.

He didn't like most of the jewelry that they wore or the perfume

and he couldn't bear to touch hair. And these...

and in fact he didn't like to shake hands. And so

these are all things that do tend to discourage intimate relationships.

The inventor even claimed that he destroyed his sexuality

at the age of 40.

A certain French actress kept coming to me

and made it impossible for me to concentrate.

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

Throughout the 1890s, alongside his work on AC power technology,

Tesla was also experimenting with high-frequency electricity.

In 1873 James Clerk Maxwell in England

had proven mathematically that light was electromagnetic radiation.

Light was electricity vibrating at an extremely high frequency.

To explore this unknown world, Tesla invented a unique device,

still known today as a Tesla coil.

The Tesla coil is an instrument that can step up voltages

to high voltages at high frequencies

that essentially transmits a radio signal.

Tesla invited friends and potential investors

to late-night demonstrations in his laboratory.

In experiments, he would permit his guests

to pass thousands of volts of electricity through their bodies

to light a lamp or melt a wire in their hands.

Mark Twain was always a willing subject.

Thunder is good. Thunder is impressive.

But it is lightning that does the work.

Even today it would be a little bit scary to go into Tesla's laboratory

and, in those days, when people didn't know anything about electricity,

it must have been terrifying.

With high frequencies, Tesla developed

some of the first neon and fluorescent illumination.

He also took the first X-ray photographs.

But these discoveries quickly paled one day in 1890

when a vacuum tube illuminated in his hand without any wire connection.

To me, it was the first evidence that I was transmitting energy

through the air.

This was the beginning of Tesla's lifelong obsession:

The wireless transmission of energy.

In 1892, Tesla was invited to Europe

to present the results of his high-frequency experiments.

In London and Paris, he amazed scientists and engineers

with lighting and electrical effects that looked more like magic than science.

He also announced a remarkable new possibility.

I would say a few words on a thought which fills my mind

and concerns the welfare of all.

I mean the transmission of intelligence and even power

without the use of wires.

I am becoming more convinced daily of the practicality of this scheme.

The race for radio was about to begin.

In 1888 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz

had demonstrated that currents of high frequency

emit electro-magnetic waves, or radio waves, into space.

But creating a practical means of wireless communication

would require a quantum leap in imagination.

Hertz created the first radio transmitter and the first receiver.

He had shown that you could create an electrical signal in one place

and detect it in another place with nothing in between.

While in England, Tesla befriended Sir William Crookes,

the discoverer of radiant matter.

Crookes was a mystic

and believed that human beings could communicate telepathically

when they were attuned to high-frequency brainwaves.

Tesla was skeptical. But one night in his bed

he had a powerful and disturbing vision.

I saw a cloud carrying angelic figures,

one of whom gradually assumed the features of my mother.

In that instant, a certitude, which no words can express,

came upon me that my mother had died.

And that was true.

Tesla was convinced that he and his mother were tuned to the same frequency.

His otherworldly experience would soon lead him to another revolutionary invention.

On his return to New York in 1893, Tesla banished himself from social life

and disappeared into his new laboratory on south Fifth Avenue.

Following his uncanny intuition he soon discovered that Tesla coils

would transmit and receive powerful radio signals

when they were tuned to resonate at the same frequency.

Tuning is the key to all radio and television transmission.

In my laboratory, I could take in my hands a coil

tuned to my body and collect three-quarter horsepower

anywhere in the room without any tangible connection.

Sometimes I would produce flames shooting out from my head,

and run a motor in my hands or light six or eight lamps.

By early 1895,

Tesla was ready to transmit a signal 50 miles to West Point, New York.

He could now produce one million volts with his new conical coil.

But that year, on the Ides of March, disaster struck.

Fire broke out in the building which housed Tesla's laboratory.

Everything was lost.

Utterly disheartened and broken in spirit, Nikola Tesla, one of the world's greatest electricians,

returned to his room in the Gerlach yesterday morning and took to his bed.

He has not arisen since.

I was devastated. What could I say?

The work of a lifetime lost in a fire that lasted only an hour or so.

The timing could not have been worse.

In England, a young Italian experimenter named Guglielmo Marconi

had been hard at work and created a device for wireless telegraphy.

Concerned that Marconi would exploit his ideas, Tesla opened a new laboratory

and rushed to complete his own system for wireless communication.

This patent, filed by Tesla in September 1897,

is the fundamental technology for radio.

But it would be 50 years before Tesla got credit for his invention.

Various people in various different countries

had the idea of exploiting this as a means of communication.

But I think Tesla was the one with the real vision, in which

he would broadcast signals on a definite carrier frequency

and you would have a series of antennas sensitive to one frequency only tuned to a certain frequency,

and it would detect only one of these signals and make an

intelligible transmission. And, once again,

his vision describes the world that we live in.

I was so blue and discouraged in those days that I do not believe I could have borne up

but for the regular treatments of electricity which I applied to myself.

It puts into a tired body what it needs most: life force.

Following the destruction of his laboratory,

Tesla developed a deeper interest in eastern thought and spiritualism.

Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic prana

and akasha and the kalpas which he claims

are the only theories modern science can entertain.

Inspired by the Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda,

Tesla began to look at the universe as a symphony of vibrations and waves.

We are whirling through endless space with an inconceivable speed.

Everything is spinning. Everywhere there is energy.

There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy

more completely.

In 1898 an unusual experiment took place in Tesla's laboratory.

He attached a small mechanical oscillator to an iron pillar.

Precisely timed pulses from the device made the entire building tremble.

Windows started crashing around the area

and he, being at the epicenter, didn't notice anything happening

until some police came bursting into his laboratory.

It was just at the moment where he'd picked up a sledgehammer and broken the oscillator.

He just said to the policeman that

Oh, too bad that they had just missed an interesting experiment.

Tesla was, I would say, obsessed with frequency, the notion of resonance.

The story where he takes the device and puts it on the girder in his office

and, you know, gets the frequency of the building and...

I mean, it's an apocryphal story, I'm sure.

But it gets right at the core that

Hey! If I've got the right frequency, I can move the world.

And indeed he wants... He talks about the frequency of the Earth

and that if he can do that he can, you know,

almost literally split the Earth in half.

Meanwhile, Marconi was doing more practical things,

and succeeded in transmitting a signal five miles on the Salisbury Plain in England.

Not to be outdone, Tesla decided to introduce an entirely new invention.

In a specially constructed pool,

potential backers were amazed to see the inventor controlling the motions

of a small mechanical boat with no wires attached to it.

This was the world's first radio-controlled device.

The machine even seemed to think.

Someone threw out the question: What is the cube root of 64?

and four flashes came back.

The audience was so surprised,

Tesla had to remove the lid to prove no one was inside.

Tesla developed his radio-controlled boat in 1898

and patented it and thought it was an armament for war.

He rationalized this as a means of ending war.

The military who looked at it thought it was too complicated and vulnerable.

Soon after the demonstration, Mark Twain wrote from Austria:

Dear Mr. Tesla,

Have you the Austrian and English patents on that destructive terror

which you have been inventing and thus make war henceforth impossible?

If so, won't you set a price on them and commission me to sell them?

Sincerely yours, Mark Twain

But I have no desire to be remembered as the inventor of a purely destructive device.

I prefer to be remembered as the inventor who abolished war.

That will be my highest pride.

In the summer of 1899 Tesla moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado

to conduct a series of secret experiments.

He told curious local reporters that he intended to send a wireless message

from Pikes Peak to Paris for the Paris Exposition of 1900,

but his plans were even more ambitious.

I came to the conclusion that it would be ultimately possible,

with very little elevation,

to transmit electrical power through the upper atmosphere.

Just outside the city, he constructed an experimental station with sliding roof panels.

A quote in Italian from Dante's Inferno

hung by the entrance of the strange wooden structure.

It read: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

During the construction phase Tesla studied lightning.

Now I can understand Tesla's fascination with it,

because what happens in lightning is that electricity is being transmitted

from one place to another. Electric power, not just electric signals,

but real electric power, is being transmitted from one place to another.

And the way it happens is that the air itself breaks down, ionizes, and

becomes what is called plasma and therefore for a moment it's a conductor,

and it's actually conducting electricity the way a wire conducts electricity.

Inside the station,

he began to assemble the largest Tesla coil ever built,

which he called the magnifying transmitter.

An antenna rose 145 feet above the building,

crowned with a copper-foil sphere.

The entire station was, in effect, a machine to create lightning.

Late one evening, Tesla put his transmitter to the test.

He signalled to an assistant to close the switch.

Huge streamers of electricity shot out of the coil and darted through the room.

The sound of the exploding discharges was deafening.

Outside, above the building,

bursts of artificial lightning more than 100 feet long

began to shoot out of the ball atop the antenna.

Its thunder could be heard 20 miles away

in the small mining town of Cripple Creek.

Suddenly the lightning stopped

and the entire city of Colorado Springs was plunged into darkness.

The experiment had set fire to and destroyed the local power company's generator.

Residents were furious and began to fear this mysterious stranger.

Undaunted, Tesla continued his wireless power experiments for six more months.

Late one night, an unusual event took place.

Tesla noticed a repeating signal being received by his apparatus.

To his own amazement,

he believed it was an extra-terrestrial communication.

In a letter to the American Red Cross he wrote:

Brothers, we have a message from another world.

It reads: One... Two... Three...

The press had a field day.

If the mystical "One, Two, Three" was impulsed from Mars, as Tesla says,

they certainly showed most excellent taste in choosing Colorado Springs.

It is a rule in inventional science:

When you're going to tell one, tell a good one

and men have become great in this way. Colorado Springs Gazette

Though widely ridiculed for his claim,

Tesla may have been the first to detect radio waves from space.

I believed that Tesla could have gotten these signals from space.

We are getting them today and these are the radio telescopes.

That's what radio telescopes do today: receive signals from space.

They are not from alien civilizations

but they are from the sun and from the stars.

On January 7th 1900, Tesla boarded a train back to New York City.

Perhaps he had mastered the power of lightning.

Or, at least, that's what he believed.

The law which I discovered in Colorado is wonderful

and it means that results undreamed of before will be possible

as soon as a large plant is constructed in accordance with my plan.

See the excitement coming.

When Tesla arrived home it was a brand new century.

Electricity was fueling the tremendous growth of the city.

And now there was talk in the air about the new art of wireless communication.

Marconi arrived in New York in 1900

to attract investors for his new company, Marconi America.

He filed a US patent for a system of wireless telegraphy.

But it was rejected because it was similar to Tesla's invention.

It became obvious, I think, to Marconi

as well as to other experimenters of the time that the Tesla system was an efficient,

powerful resonator that would produce electromagnetic waves

that you could work with.

Confident in the future, Tesla took up residence in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel

and wrote a sensational article for Century Magazine.

First, let us ask: What is the spring that drives all?

All this energy emanates from one single center, one single source:

the sun.

In this detailed futuristic vision,

he described the means of tapping the sun's energy with an antenna.

He suggested that it would be possible to control the weather with electrical energy.

He predicted that wars would soon be eliminated by machines.

And to unite all nations,

he proposed a global system of wireless communications.

When wireless is fully applied

the Earth will be converted into a huge brain

capable of response in every one of its parts.

He tells us about a vision he had for both power and communications

that he wasn't going to think small he was going to think globally on this.

And that's all very nice if it works.

The idea of a global communications network was very appealing to

one of the world's most powerful men: J. Pierpont Morgan.

He agreed to invest $150,000 into Tesla's worldwide radio broadcast center.

But the inventor's real plan

was to transmit, without wires, industrial levels of electrical power.

Tesla chose to keep this a secret from his investor.

In the summer of 1900, Tesla moved to Shoreham, Long Island

and began construction of a huge tower and plant called Wardenclyffe.

This tower of dreams was made entirely of large wood beams

and rose 187 feet above the ground.

The plant next to the tower was designed by the architect Stanford White

and was constructed under strict secrecy.

He certainly could have sent signals across the Atlantic with no trouble

with a station of that magnitude.

But he was still pursuing wireless power transmission.

The tower would light up the night, shooting sparks, making noises.

Such experiments, they alarmed the whole area.

Then, on December 8th 1901, Marconi took another step forward

and transmitted his famous letter "S" across the Atlantic.

Tesla dismissed the Italian's advances.

Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue.

He is using 17 of my patents.

The simple fact about Marconi is that

he used Tesla's system to transmit signals

and claimed that these were ideas that he had developed himself.

Morgan began to doubt the wisdom of his investment.

Marconi's system not only worked, it was also inexpensive.

And technical problems were beginning to catch up with Tesla.

He went back to Morgan again, asked for more money.

Morgan says: Where's the radio transmissions across the Atlantic? How's that coming along?

Well, it wasn't coming along.

Tesla was forced to tell Morgan his real plan.

What I contemplate and what I can certainly accomplish, Mr. Morgan,

is not a simple transmission of messages

but rather the worldwide transmission of electrical power.

A single plant of but 100 horsepower

can operate hundreds of millions of instruments.

But Morgan was a practical business man and had already decided to back Marconi.

I have received your letter

and in reply would say that I should not feel disposed at present to make

any further advances. J. Pierpont Morgan

Word spread rapidly that the investor had pulled out of Wardenclyffe

and Tesla was financially ruined.

Late one night in 1903,

the residents of Shoreham were astonished to see bright light

emanating from the tower and an effect in the air like the Aurora Borealis.

But, in fact, Tesla could not transmit wireless power.

And his major defect was that he was dreaming but he was doing very few calculations on paper.

Because, on paper, he could have realized that you can transmit power,

but not very much power.

You can transmit power to hear the radio, or for television, or for a telephone.

But once you want to start turning on lights in which you really need high currents

the power gets diluted because space is very large.

To his dying day, Tesla believed it could be done.

It is not a dream.

It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive.

Blind, faint-hearted, doubting world...

Wardenclyffe marked a turning point in Tesla's career.

Like a modern Prometheus, he had reached too high and failed.

In 1904, the U.S. patent office suddenly reversed its previous decisions

and gave Marconi a patent for radio.

One year later, Tesla's fundamental AC patents expired.

Now the inventions that powered the world could be used by anyone free of charge.

The public didn't realize that he had made this invention that had

made billionaires out of corporations and that he himself was broke.

With no money to carry on his work,

Tesla began to sink into an isolated world.

He was totally disinterested in business. I think it not necessarily bored him,

but he didn't make the relationship between the importance of business

and the importance of his invention and discovery.

Occasionally he was seen in public parks feeding the pigeons.

These are my sincere friends.

Tesla's melancholy turned to anger in 1909

when Marconi was awarded a Nobel Prize.

Mr. Marconi is a donkey.

The question of Tesla and radio is certainly a very interesting one.

It's clear that Tesla, in terms of certain basic notions of radio,

was very early, if not first,

in expressing them and even of getting... of taking them to the patent stage.

In desperate need of money, Tesla brought suit against the Marconi company

claiming that his patent rights had been infringed.

But he lacked the resources to wage a legal battle with a large corporation

and ultimately gave up.

Marconi had received the Nobel Prize for work that Tesla correctly

believed to be his own.

I suppose everything is fair in wireless as in warfare.

In 1915, the Nobel prize entered Tesla's life once again.

The Swedish government has decided to distribute the Nobel Prizes next week, as follows:

Physics: Thomas A. Edison and Nikola Tesla

Even Tesla was surprised by the front- page announcement in The New York Times.

I have concluded the honor conferred upon me concerns

the transmission of electrical energy without wires.

But one week later, the award was given to William H. Bragg of Oxford, England

for his work with X-rays and crystal structure.

The embarrassing situation was never really explained.

A rumor spread that Tesla had refused to share the prize with Edison.

The difference that the Nobel Prize could have made in Tesla's life

soon became evident.

Testimony given by Nikola Tesla, the electrical inventor,

in a judgment for $935 in back taxes was filed yesterday.

Mr. Tesla said under oath that he was penniless and had been living on credit.

In an attempt to give him long overdue recognition

the American Institute of Electrical Engineers

decided to award Tesla their prestigious Edison Medal.

But, on the night of the presentation, the guest of honor was missing

and Edison was conveniently away on business.

They found Tesla across the street by the New York Public Library

feeding the pigeons.

Later that night he was persuaded to accept his medal and announced

that he had finally completed his invention to transmit wireless power.

The energy goes to a distant place

and you will see something like the Aurora Borealis.

To conclude, we are coming to great results.

The audience thought Tesla was losing touch with reality.

I refuse to accord to some small-minded and jealous individuals

the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts.

These men are nothing more to me than microbes of a nasty disease.

Well, by that time, you know, Tesla

had ceased to have any financial means.

He was virtually dependent on being helped by hotels and people that he knew.

He began to bring injured birds back to his hotel room to nurse them.

He had more companionship with pigeons in that time of his life

than with human beings.

Working as a consulting engineer,

Tesla managed to maintain a small office and laboratory in the Metropolitan Tower.

To change his thoughts, he frequently attended movies in Times Square.

Here he could see his futuristic ideas appearing on the screen.

But his ideas were only accepted in science-fiction movies and magazines.

In 1924, there was a news report that while at Colorado Springs

Tesla had invented a death ray machine that shot bolts of lightning.

The inventor was strangely quiet on the topic.

Meanwhile, a new scientific star, Albert Einstein,

had captured the world's attention with his theory of relativity.

Tesla continuously attacked the validity of Einstein's work.

Scientists today wander through equation after equation

that have no relation to reality.

If we were to release the energy of atoms, instead of a blessing

it might bring disaster to mankind.

But no one took him seriously.

I think that every generation of scientists

feels that the new ideas that come along that replace their own ideas

represent a loss rather than a gain.

Tesla believed that Einstein was taking us intellectually in the wrong direction.

Rejected by traditional science, Tesla's interest again turned to the esoteric.

His intellect seemed to embrace a lot of different areas quite easily.

What he lacked were the social skills. And that's an enormous shame

because it interfered with his ability to use that genius to be practical.

Though nearly a recluse, he would occasionally attend dinner parties

at the home of the German poet and mystic George Sylvester Viereck

and he always intrigued the guests.

While we were in the midst of talking,

an apparition seemed to come into the room.

He walked so softly and he struck us as almost an unearthly creature.

And he talked of all sorts of, seemed to me at that time, unreal things

more in the nature of the psychic rather than scientific.

Tesla wrote a strange poem called Fragments of Olympian Gossip

and dedicated it to Viereck.

While listening on my cosmic phone I caught words from Olympus blown...

The latest tells of a cosmic gun. To be pelted is very poor fun.

The meaning of the poem would soon be explained.

I inherited from my father an ineradicable hatred of war.

But war can be stopped, not by making the strong weak,

but by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself.

Thomas Edison, America's best-known inventor, died in 1931.

That same year, Tesla came back to life.

His friends threw him a 75th birthday celebration.

Time magazine put his picture on the cover.

Letters of admiration poured in from scientists around the world,

including a generous Albert Einstein.

I congratulate you for your great success on your lifetime task.

Basking in the attention, Tesla announced at a press conference

that he had discovered a completely new source of power.

The idea, when it first burst upon me, was a tremendous shock.

And let me say that it has nothing to do with releasing so-called atomic energy.

I think that a lot of the proposals that he made in his later life were

so esoteric as to be impractical

in that time, and even in the current time.

When the Nazis rose to power in Germany,

Tesla decided that the time was right to reveal his new source of power:

a man-made form of lightning called teleforce

that could shoot an airplane from the sky.

Nikola Tesla, electrical wizard and radio pioneer,

announced that he was working on a machine to create a powerful electrical death beam

which could wipe out armies in a flash and destroy huge fleets of ships or planes.

The concept of using lightning bolts as a weapon certainly is

millennia old; it goes back at least to the ancient Greeks.

Think of Zeus throwing lightning bolts.

The main contribution that Tesla had

was to come up with a true scientific rational...

at least concept... of coming up with

controlling these lightning bolts and projecting them over long distances.

Tesla had experimented with this idea while at Colorado Springs.

Now he intended to build it on a large scale.

His plan was to charge small particles of tungsten or mercury

then accelerate them with lightning force through a special gun

with one end open to the atmosphere.

Tesla's death beam stirred the public's imagination

when it was featured in a Superman cartoon, the Electrothanasia-Ray.

But the idea was more than science-fiction.

Tesla tried to sell this concept to various governments:

England, the Soviet Union and the United States

all allied powers and against Germany.

He offered his system to England for $30 million and they entered negotiations.

When Tesla demanded payment before sending the final plans,

the deal fell through.

The British attempted to build their own death beam

but the project was soon abandoned.

As the Nazis surrounded Yugoslavia,

Tesla attempted to sell a beam weapon system to his former country.

There should be needed nine stations. Four for Serbia, three for Croatia

and two for Slovenia, and it will protect our dearest homeland.

At this point, even Tesla's countrymen thought he was just a crazy old man.

One day in 1937,

Tesla started out from his hotel room to feed his pigeons.

Suddenly, a few blocks from the hotel,

he was hit by a taxi and thrown to the ground.

Three of his ribs were broken.

He was 81 years old.

Remembering what he did for their company, Westinghouse executives

agreed to pay his room and board for the rest of his life.

The inventor also received a small stipend from the Yugoslav government.

During the Christmas season of 1942, Tesla's death was imminent.

Again he attempted to interest the United States in his beam weapon concept.

At the recommendation of two government engineers,

a meeting of high-level officials was scheduled at the White House

for January 8th 1943 to consider his plans.

But the meeting never took place.

Nikola Tesla, inventor of the Tesla coil, the induction motor

and hundreds of other electrical devices, died last night

in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker.

On last Thursday night, here in our city of New York,

a man who was 87 years of age died in his humble hotel room.

On January 10th 1943, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York

paid tribute to Tesla on the radio.

He died in poverty

but he was one of the most useful and successful men who ever lived.

Were we to eliminate from our industrial world the result of Tesla's work

the wheels of industry would cease to turn

and our electric trains and cars would stop.

Our towns would be dark, our mills and factories dead tonight.

But Tesla is not dead.

The real, the important part of Tesla lives in his achievement, which is great,

an integral part of our civilization, of our daily lives,

of our current war effort.

Ironically, only five months after Tesla's death,

the United States Supreme Court declared elements of the Marconi patent invalid.

The decision confirmed Nikola Tesla's patent priority

for the fundamental technology of radio.

Unknown subjects, equipment, experiments and research of Nikola Tesla

deceased. Espionage.

Following Tesla's death, fears rapidly increased

that he might have invented a powerful new weapon.

FBI special agent in charge, P. E. Foxworth, was called in to investigate.

He had been informed that Tesla's papers were not secure.

Tesla is reported to have completed and perfected his experiments in the

radio transmission of electrical power commonly referred to as the death ray.

A distant relative of Tesla named Sava Kosanovich

is taking steps to get possession of these important documents and plans.

Tesla's nephew Kosanovich was an up-and-coming Yugoslav diplomat

with suspected connections with the communists.

He insisted that his uncle's effects be returned to Yugoslavia.

Kosanovich had asked a locksmith to come and open the safe

thinking there might be a testament, a will, in the safe.

A will was never located.

And there was a lot of talk then about secret weapons and

negotiations with the USSR. It was all kinds of talk, you know.

Shortly before his death,

Tesla showed a delivery boy a box in his room

that he said contained a powerful weapon.

A number of people called me and asked me,

did I ever see in the hotel room a certain kind of a box, you know...

They were looking for some secret contraption that Tesla had invented.

I never saw anything like that.

The U.S. Office of Alien Property immediately seized all of Tesla's possessions

until their ownership could be established.

There's every evidence that they did look through all his papers

because the papers were not in order and certain things were missing.

All his technical papers on beam weapons

were secretly microfilmed by U.S. military agents.

On August 6th 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded on Hiroshima, Japan.

Soon after, the bomb would be in the Soviets' hands.

During this period, copies of Tesla's papers on the beam weapon

were shipped to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.

There, a top-secret research program began called "Project Nick"

to find a defense against nuclear-missile attack.

Copies of his... Some of his papers were sent to Wright-Patterson in 1945,

not to my facility, not even to a predecessor of my facility,

but to another part of the base, for analysis.

And then they vanished. Nobody seems to know what happened to them.

In 1952, Sava Kosanovich obtained permission from U.S. authorities

to return Tesla's estate, still stored in New York, to the inventor's homeland.

I personally believe

that the U.S. government may have overlooked some things of value

in the Tesla papers before they were released to the Yugoslav government.

A Tesla museum was opened in Belgrade by Yugoslavia's president, Marshal Tito.

But during the Cold War, the museum was off-limits to western scientists and scholars.

Then, in 1960, Soviet Premier Khrushchev announced that the USSR

had developed a powerful new weapom.

There was concern in the U.S. that the Russians may have access to

Tesla's missing papers on beam weapons in Belgrade and elsewhere.

It's possible that these papers on the particle-beam weapon

were obtained by the Soviet Union. But that wasn't the only topic.

In other words, I think that the United States

has always had Tesla's papers on particle-beam weaponry.

An American beam weapon program began at Lawrence Livermore laboratories.

But engineers could not produce an effective directed-energy weapon.

I've always been a sort of a fan of Nikola Tesla, an admirer,

and definitely he had the concept

of a charged particle-beam weapon back in the 1930s.

I haven't a clue, to be quite honest, how he meant to actually do it.

In 1978 evidence suggested that the Soviets were attempting to build

a huge beam weapon near Semipalatinsk in the Ukraine.

Soon after, President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative

in March 1983.

I call upon the scientific community in our country,

those who gave us nuclear weapons,

to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace,

to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

Tesla's concept for a beam weapon defense shield

was finally taken seriously by the United States

to combat the destructive threat of atomic weapons.

In spite of circumstantial evidence,

there is no direct proof that Tesla's ideas or plans

were used in the Strategic Defense Initiative.

And even today, after decades of investment and research,

scientists still disagree on whether beam weapons are realistic.

Basically, let me just make a short statement.

It's all I'm really at liberty to say. A considerable amount of effort

has taken place in the United States and in a number of other countries

trying to get these things up to a real weaponizable status.

And we stopped at that point.

No U.S. government archive has any record of Tesla's technical papers,

which were copied immediately after his death.

And what has become of Tesla's great dream

to transmit electrical power without wires?

This is the Navy and Air Force High- Frequency Active Auroral Research Program,

or HAARP, in Gakona, Alaska.

The large antenna array is designed to beam high-energy microwaves

into the ionosphere.

Tesla was a genius,

because way before anybody knew or even understood

the physics of the Earth and what we call today the ionosphere,

which is a layer of ionized particles about 80 kilometers above the Earth,

he conceived it, and he tried to use it to produce a variety of new concepts.

The HAARP project evolved from a patent filed in 1987

in which Tesla's work is referenced.

It proposed using the ionosphere like an enormous electrical circuit

to transmit power around the planet.

It even described a means of changing the weather

by super-heating portions of the upper atmosphere with microwave energy.

Tesla proposed that it might be possible to modify the weather by using radio waves.

I believe that this is impossible.

Ionospheric modification is still in its early experimental stages.

But microwave technology has already made it possible

to transmit wireless power with the use of satellites.

We go to Alaska, and in Alaska there is natural gas.

In order to send it somewhere you have to create a pipeline.

That's very expensive. So we said, all right, let's go into Alaska,

create microwaves from the natural gas, send them to a satellite

at a particular geosynchronous orbit, put a reflector there and send it to Japan.

And in Japan, you get an antenna which transforms these microwaves

into 60 Hz and you get electricity. So you make actually Tesla's dream.

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result.

He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up.

His work is like that of the planter: for the future.

His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come,

and point the way.

He was special; he was unique. He was unusual in all sorts of ways.

And if we are to understand our own creativity,

our own ability to invent

there is an awful lot to be learned by studying the way in which he created.

The day when we shall know exactly what electricity is

will chronicle an event probably greater,

more important, than any other recorded in the history of the human race.

Then, it will be a mere question of time

when men will succeed in attaching their machinery

to the very wheelwork of nature.

See the excitement coming!

Subtitled by Kate O'Hara & Serkan Yilmaz

To learn more about Nikola Tesla visit PBS online at pbs.org