THE TRAGIC STORY OF NIKOLA TESLA

When you think about the greatest inventors of all

time, there are a few names that come to
mind. Henry Ford. The Wright brothers. Thomas
Edison. But there's one name that is not as
recognizable.
When you plug your phone in, turn on the lights, or
use the refrigerator, you have
Nikola Tesla to thank. This is the story of
the forgotten genius and the story begins at the end.
On January 7, 1943 a maid working at the
New Yorker Hotel walked into room 3327, where
she
found the body of an 86--year-old man who called
the hotel home for the past decade.
Tesla died alone and broke. He lived off a diet of
warm milk and crackers and was obsessed with
feeding the pigeons outside. One of the
greatest inventors of all time faded into obscurity
and
died penniless. There is a reason why this happened
which will become clear by the end
of this story. Tesla was born in the town of Smiljan
in present-day Croatia on July 10, 1856.
He was born during a lightning storm. According
to family legend, the midwife said halfway through
the
birth: this child will be a child of darkness to which
his mother replied, no, he will be a child
of light. Little did she know how prophetic
those words would be. When Tesla was five he
witnessed
his older brother fall from a horse and later die. This
 would haunt him for the rest of his life.
As a child, he began seeing visions accompanied
by flashes of light, confusing what was real and what
was imaginary. This never went away. The
vision spurred his ability to conceive inventions in
his head in such detail that he didn't even need to
draw them out. He explained how the designs
were perfected in his mind in an article in
1919. "Invariably, my device works as I conceived
that
it should and the experiment comes out exactly as I
planned it. In 20 years there has not been
a single exception." Tesla credits his mom for
his interest in invention. Đuka Mandić invented
small
household appliances in her spare time. She had
an eidetic memory - the ability to recall an image
from
memory with high precision and she passed this
on to her son. Tesla's father was a priest and wanted
him to become one too but Tesla was interested
in engineering. When he contracted cholera as a teen
and nearly died, his father promised to send him to
engineering school if he survived and
miraculously, he did. He went to study in Austria at
the Technical College of Graz where he is
said to have worked from 3 am until 11 pm every
day. Professors were worried that he
would die from exhaustion. Tesla had a
beautiful mind. He could perform calculus in his
head and
spoke eight languages. He was a good student at the
start but would not finish school.
He dropped out after becoming addicted to
 gambling and cut ties with his family so they
wouldn't find
out. His friends didn't know what happened to him
either. They thought he drowned in a river.
Tesla moved around Europe and eventually ended up
in Budapest working as an electrician at a
telephone company. While walking around a park in
the city one day, he had an epiphany about
developing a new way of generating electricity using
alternating current. It would be his greatest
invention that would change the world. I'll explain
more about AC a little later. In 1882,
he settled in Paris to work for the French branch of
Thomas Edison's electric company. He started off
installing indoor lighting but the managers noticed
his talents and had him doing more
complicated work, designing and building
dynamos and motors. He was soon traveling
throughout Europe
fixing problems at other Edison branches. Two years
later, in 1884, Tesla's manager offered him
a job at Edison Machine Works in New York
City.He agreed and arrived in America with only
four
cents in his pocket because his money was stolen on
the boat ride over. Tesla initially had a good
impression of Edison. Edison was also impressed
by Tesla, later saying: "I have had many hard-
working
assistants but you take the cake." This
mutual admiration didn't last. They would become
bitter
rivals. The two men disagreed over how
electricity should be contained and delivered. Edison
 preferred
direct current which is a system where the electric
charge only flows in one direction.
Tesla was a fan of alternating current in which the
electric charge changes direction periodically.
Changing directions is crucial to maintaining
a steady supply of electricity because it does not
overpower outlets. This means it can provide more
power and transmit power over longer
distances. It's the reason AC powers our homes and
other large appliances whereas DC powers
smaller items like flashlights. But Edison didn't care
about AC because it could have hurt the
sales of direct current since he owned all the patents
for DC. According to Tesla, a manager at
Edison's company offered him a $50,000 bonus if he
could improve some machines that ran on DC.
When he did, the manager refused to pay up.
Another account of the story has Edison telling
Tesla:
"You don't understand our American humor."
Regardless of how it played out, Tesla quit and set
off to
form his own electric company the following year in
1885. But his investors showed little interest
and decided to take the company and all of Tesla's
patents which they could do because
Tesla had assigned the patents to the company
in exchange for stock which was now worthless.
After
losing his company, Tesla had to take a job
digging ditches for two dollars a day just to survive.
But
his fortunes would change. In 1887, Tesla
 invented an induction motor that ran on alternating
current.
The motor was the most efficient way to
convert electricity to mechanical power. Aversion of
it
powers Tesla's vehicles which took its name
from the inventor. He patented the motor and
showed it
off the following year at the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers that caught the attention
of George Westinghouse, a major player in
the electric market who realized Tesla's AC motor
might just be what he needed to complete
his alternating current system and compete against
Edison's DC system. So Tesla licensed the patents
for the AC motor to Westinghouse for
$60,000 and also received stock and royalties.
Westinghouse hired him as a consultant
for $2,000 a month which is the equivalent of over
$50,000 a month
today. The war of the currents began. Edison
tried hard to try to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla.
He secretly financed the electric chair that
used alternating current to prove how dangerous AC
was.
Edison's company also publicly tortured animals to
prove its point. In 1903, they electrocuted a
circus elephant named Topsy and produced a
film about it called Electrocuting an Elephant.
Despite
Edison's schemes, good things were happening
for Westinghouse and Tesla. They underbid Edison
and
his newly formed company General Electric
 to illuminate the World's Colombian Exposition
in Chicago in 1893. The first all-electric
fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher
Columbus's discovery of America. It was clear to the
27 million people who attended that AC would
power the future. Their success continued when they
beat out Edison's General Electric again to
build the world's first alternating current power plant
in Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power
station was a massive success and helped light
up Buffalo, New York. The building of the plant also
meant Tesla became a pioneer in renewable
energy. His statue can be found at Niagara Falls
today.
Westinghouse and Tesla won the war of the currents
and direct current was being phased out.
But there were problems. Westinghouse's
company was running out of money and eventually
went $10
million into debt. In 1897, he went to Tesla and
asked if his royalties could be reduced
in a desperate attempt to save the company.
Tesla was so compelled by compassion for his friend
that he ripped up his contract. He was grateful
to Westinghouse for believing in him when no one
else
would. Tesla willingly walked away from $12
million in royalties which in today's terms
would be worth over $300 million. Had he held on to
those royalties over time, he would have likely
become the wealthiest person on the planet and
the first person with a billion dollar net worth. That
act of compassion for his friend of tearing up
his contract saved Westinghouse. In return,
 Westinghouse
paid Tesla $216,000 for the rights to use as ac
patents forever. This
is the equivalent of about $60 milliontoday. With
that money, Tesla became financially
independent and set up a series of laboratories
in New York for new projects where he was visited
by
the rich and famous, including his close friend
and one of the greatest American writers of all time,
Mark Twain. This was his period of many
inventions. He held over 300 patents in his lifetime.
He created an early version of neon lighting,
the tesla turbine - a bladeless turbine for vehicles.
He pioneered x-ray technology by
experimenting with radiation. This is an x-ray of his
own hand.
Another stand-out invention was one of the
first remote controls. In 1898, he controlled a
miniature
boat at Madison Square Garden in New York. It
was so far ahead of its time that the crowd thought
he was using magic to make it move. That would
be the ancestor to today's remote-controlled drones.
One of his most well-known inventions is the
Tesla coil - a device that can produce large amounts
of
high voltage electricity. Because of the coils,he
discovered he could send and receive powerful
radio signals when they resonated at the
same frequency. Tesla was getting ready to
broadcast
his first radio signal but disaster struck. A fire
destroyed his lab in 1895. He lost years
 of research and equipment. Tesla didn't apply for a
patent for the radio until two years later. The
fire would be the turning point in his life that led to a
downhill spiral. At the same time that
he was working on radio, an Italian
entrepreneur, Guglielmo Marconi, was also working
on the radio
in England. He tried to acquire patent rights in
the US but was turned down because it was too
similar
to Tesla's. However, things changed when Marconi
was able to send the world's first transatlantic radio
message in 1901 using 17 of Tesla's patents.
Edison then threw his financial support behind
Marconi.
Tesla had no problem with Marconi's
achievements but in 1904, the US Patent Office
suddenly changed
its mind and awarded Marconi a patent for the
invention the radio. There has never
been a reason given for this decision but
the powerful financial backing Marconi received
could explain it. Marconi went on to win the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1911 which was only
possible
due to Tesla's work. Tesla was furious and
sued Marconi. The case dragged on in court for years
and
was only settled in Tesla's favor after his death. That
radio incident negatively impacted the rest
of Tesla's career. For example, Tesla was
obsessed with bringing wireless communication to
the world
and built a huge wireless transmission station
 in Long Island, New York called Wardenclyffe
Tower. He
imagined a world where we could send and
receive messages wirelessly. He was, again, well
ahead of his
time. But financial backers did not have enough faith
in his project. They pulled out and banked
on Marconi's radio invention instead. This left Tesla
in financial ruin. He had no choice but to
abandon his dream project in 1905 and
eventually lost Wardenclyffe Tower to foreclosure.
Tesla's
mental health deteriorated. He lived his last decade
in the New Yorker Hotel beginning in 1933.
Westinghouse Corporation hired him as a
consultant and paid for his room. He lived rent-free
but died
in debt. So why did one of the greatest inventors of
all time fade into obscurity and die penniless?
You could say T esla was unlucky at times like when
the fire burned down his New York lab.
But the main reason is because Tesla was not a
capitalist. He made decisions that those with
more business acumen would not have made such
as giving up his royalties for the AC motor. He
wasn't
concerned about money. He was concerned about
the pursuit of science for the betterment of humanity.
He wanted to change the world and he did. Thanks in
part to Elon Musk's company, people are starting
to learn more about the man who inspired the
company, a man whose inventions would
power our entire planet. It's because of Tesla that
modern society functions the way it does.
Tesla's mother called him a child of light and she
was quite right.

INFINITY PODCASTS:
https://t.me/Podcast_English_listening