Tesla 2016 Full Documentary American Experience

Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas support your PBS station In 1891 a Serbian scientist demonstrated his latest inventions before an awestruck audience at Columbia University Tubes held in the hand of mr. Tesla a reporter wrote Appeared like a luminous sword in the hand of an archangel representing justice Nikola Tesla was already famous The scientist whose experiments with electricity were destined to transform daily life in the 20th century We live in an electrical world. We take it all for granted. We have light bulbs We run our refrigerator their air conditioners our electrical motors. All of that is all directly back to Tesla A hundred years ago. He pointed the way toward robots radio radar remote control the wireless transmission of messages and pictures He dreamed of harnessing the wind and the Sun to make free energy available for everyone when you think about electricity you think of Edison, but Tesla was just much more of a original American than Edison Tesla had a lot of obsessions and odd phobias and yet he was enormously popular and Celebrated they did not stop him at the turn of the 20th century Tesla was acclaimed Millions of Americans knew his name But only decades later. He was forgotten by all but a few He doesn't have a disciplined imagination. He has a fertile imagination and So he's it's kind of crazy. Oh He's a genius. No good. No doubt about it But he's an idiosyncratic genius His luxuriant imagination was the source of his genius and the cause of his downfall on June 6th 1884 28 year old Nikola Tesla arrived in New York City One of the millions of immigrants who had begun to transform the fabric of American society during the final decades of the 19th century The young immigrant knew no one six feet two inches tall He spoke with a heavy Serbian accent and weighed little more than a hundred and forty pounds He's very tall gangly handsome Looks like a vampire a little bit What I saw was rough and unattractive Tesla Is this America? I asked myself in painful surprise Everything about him is fastidious and courtly. He's very elegant looking He's got these amazing blue eyes that people notice Tesla had only four cents in his pocket along with some of his favorite poems But he carried with him a recommendation to the man. He admired more than any other 35 year old Thomas Edison was already a celebrated inventor an American folk hero The incandescent light bulb he had patented five years before had captured the imagination of people all over the world light was always associated with flame and Edison by inventing a light bulb was going to shift the country Away from natural gas and gas lighting to a world in which there would be electricity and electric light bulbs in every household and this was very Astonishing to people it was a miracle Electricity was very mysterious at the time my grandmother born in 1900 maybe Insisted that we always have those child proof things in the plugs Because she thought the electricity is dripping out and would collect on the floor and you'd step in it Tesla meandered down the lanes of lower Manhattan heading toward Edison's office with a revolutionary idea He was certain the celebrated inventor would be grateful for Beneath the ground ran 80,000 feet of copper conductors the world's first electric grid Thomas Edison's creation lighting homes and powering factories on the lower tip of Manhattan But Edison's system generated direct current DC and DC had severe limitations Direct current couldn't go very far You would have had to have a generating station every mile It was a very limited form of power so this was a real problem and Tesla had the solution a brilliant solution with direct current a generator produces electricity a stream of electrons that flows along a wire to a light bulb or a motor and Then returns to the generator in one long continuous loop But as the electrons travel energy is lost to the resistance of the wire Like a long river whose energy is spent the farther the current travels The alternative to DC is AC alternating current With alternating current the electrons don't flow in a single direction Instead they vibrate back and forth like an ocean tide surging with power that could send electricity long distances But no one had designed a motor that could run efficiently on AC Even Thomas Edison himself was baffled but in a waking vision Nikola Tesla had imagined an AC motor when he was 26 two years before he met Edison as If he had been waiting for that astonishing revelation since he was a small boy in Croatia He was born in the tiny Croatian village of Smiljan in 1856 as family stories have it on the stroke of midnight while a thunderstorm raged around He'll be a child of the storm the midwife said his mother responded no of light His father was a Greek Orthodox priest who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps but he took after his mother who invented a variety of ingenious devices for farming and housekeeping and Encouraged the boys precocious gifts Tesla takes this lifelong obsession with electricity back to when he was three years old and he is petting the family cat machak and he begins to create sort of this sheet of sparks and It makes this crackling noise like thunder and he says to his father What is that his father said well It's electricity such as you get during thunderstorms and stop that because you're you know, electrifying the cat For the rest of his life Tesla would be awestruck by the wonders of electricity as a child He spent hours playing beside a tumbling stream that ran beside his home His very first invention a hook designed to catch frogs made him the envy of his friends Before he was six he had invented a motor consisting of a rotating spindle powered by June bugs. I Wanted to harness the energies of nature to the service of man. He wrote later You can see the seeds of a number of his inventions when he was a child But he sometimes had difficulty separating reality from his own imagination Sometimes he wrote I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not From an early age. He was afflicted by spontaneous inexplicable visions that confused his picture of reality Yet empowered his preternatural gift for invention When he was 12 in an extraordinary feat of mind control He banished the images that haunted him by willing himself to live in a visual world of his own invention He could travel in his own visions Travel to foreign countries understand foreign languages and Having control over these visions spurred on his creative energy in later life By the time Tesla was 17 he had honed a keen visual facility When I get an idea he wrote I do not rush into actual work. I Started once building it up in my imagination. I Changed the construction make improvements and operate the device in my mind early in his life He developed this really magnificent way of visualizing physical things By the time it came for him to build them they came almost fully formed When he was 21 Tesla won a scholarship to a polytechnic institute in Graz, Austria He studied with a fierce determination sometimes 20 hours a day Tesla couldn't stop learning. He couldn't stop reading. He memorized all of Faust his memory was photographic and unassailable He would see something once he would hear something once and it never left him He was obsessive. So once he started to read Voltaire, he had to read every single thing that Voltaire ever wrote As Tesla immersed himself in the study of mathematics and science the mysteries of electricity were waiting to be unraveled When a professor told his class that it was impossible to construct a motor that could run on alternating current Tesla objected Mr. Tesla may accomplish great things the professor told the class, but he certainly never will do this Tesla disagreed He's pushing it with the professor he's saying I see and this is visionary he's saying I can do this At first he didn't see the solution, but he saw the problem DC motors waste energy There's metal surfaces moving over each other and they kind of do this and there's there's sparks It smells it breaks it wears out It's a clunky inelegant way to do it He's thinking that really wants to be a C. I mean he almost kills himself trying to trying to make it work Day and night year after year. I worked incessantly he wrote later. I Could visualize motors and generators the images I saw were to me perfectly real and tangible Solving the problem of alternating current was a matter of life and death. I Knew that I would perish if I failed Obsessed he stopped studying Lost his scholarship dropped out of school and drifted he was falling into a hallucinatory mind shattered space and Suffered in his own words a complete nervous breakdown for four years Tesla's imagination tormented him and Then it saved him in 1882 walking in a Budapest Park as the Sun was setting the solution he wrote Came like a flash of lightning. I cannot describe my emotions a Thousand secrets of nature I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her at all odds and at the peril of my existence I Think he sees some kind of intrinsic beauty to an AC motor I think that's where you really see this this famous Tesla insight and and and Intuition Tesla's genius was to take a DC motor and reimagine it He eliminated the mechanical parts where metal rubbed against metal replace the inner cylinder with one made of copper and Send an electric current through the outer ring Turning the outer ring and the cylinder into magnets The interaction of the two magnets made the inner cylinder spin without any parts touching Imagine a merry-go-round Okay, and you want to spin your kid around and and there's you know a pole sticking up from the merry-go-round so you you grab the pole here and you push it across like that and The merry-go-round goes around and you wait until the pole comes and then you grab it and push it again okay, so you can think of the pole as The electromagnet on the cylinder and you are The magnet on the outside and you're timing your grab Because if you just if you grabbed it here You know, you wouldn't be able to push you. You've got to grab it like that So that's the way an AC motor works No sparking no smell nothing wearing up He really just saw the whole thing in an instant Tesla was a 26 year old with an idea. He was convinced would change the world He went to work as an engineer for a branch of Thomas Edison's company in Paris But decided his main chance lay in New York with the great man himself He has a design in his head and he's actually made a prototype which works He is a huge admirer of Thomas Edison and He feels if Edison is presented with better technology He will embrace it as something that he could develop in his own company Presumably with the help of his very junior employ employee Nikola Tesla In the spring of 1884 Nikola Tesla brought his invention to America to share with his hero Thomas Edison this is late 19th century America in New York City, there's a Tremendous sense of possibility and it's a an age of incredible invention and technological change and He totally expects to be part of that Tesla walked confidently into Edison's office in Lower Manhattan the very day He arrived and flashed a letter of introduction from Edison's Paris office Meeting Edison Tesla said thrilled me to the marrow Edison hired him on the spot, but they were cut from two different molds Edison was a completely practical man and inventor he wanted to make things work and sell them Tesla really just wanted to understand how The mysteries of electricity work Tesla was a very well educated engineer. He understood both theory and mathematics Edison did a lot by trial and error He was able to work well with things when he could see the cause and effect immediately. He wasn't nearly as well educated He didn't he didn't even go to college Edison as he gets to know Tesla refers to him and this is not particularly a compliment as a poet of science Tesla worked for Edison redesigning generators 20 hours a day seven days a week I Have had many hard-working assistants Edison told him but you take the cake Encouraged Tesla worked even harder. He desperately wanted Edison's blessing as an inventor and needed his savvy as a businessman But when he described his AC motor to his boss Edison told him bluntly he was wasting his time There was no future in alternating current Edison had a lot of experience in how incredibly difficult it was to go from the idea to the reality and so he was very skeptical of people who just said ah well, I have this idea and this is going to be the solution and it also would have meant that he had to Retrofit and redo the entire system that he was so emotionally wedded to Disillusioned by Edison's rejection after six months Tesla abruptly quit and struck out on his own He's very naive and doesn't know how the world works and he thinks that he will be welcomed and well funded Because he wants to elucidate the mysteries of electricity He spent a year Patenting designs for arc lights for two, New Jersey businessmen who cheated him out of his patents and left him penniless When it came to business Tesla would always be naive He spent the next winter digging ditches for two dollars a day There were many days. He said when I did not know where my next meal was coming from When he leaves Edison's lab, his heart is broken This man who he thought was going to be a mentor to him In some kind of dark opposite way ends up mentoring him right just by teaching him. Maybe what he didn't want to be Tesla was alone without family or friends. He had been in America for nearly two years and had nothing to show for it My high education in science mechanics and literature. He wrote seemed to me like a mockery Then that spring his luck turned around Two investors who learned that Tesla had worked for Edison took a chance on the Serbian inventor They made him their partner and rented him a laboratory where he could perfect his invention if it worked it was worth millions during the last part of the 19th century as the railroad bound the nation together with steel tracks and Made a handful of Americans fabulously rich 22 year old George Westinghouse had invented the railroad airbrake and Parlayed his invention into a formidable fortune Now a wealthy man who knew how to bring inventions into the marketplace Westinghouse was looking to the future and the future was electricity there were a lot of people saying there's money to be made here and Westinghouse comes across Tesla and he thinks This man is a jewel and he may even have nailed the toughest technical problem in the middle of this emerging potentially immensely profitable game changer alternating current in 1888 Westinghouse bought Tesla's patents for tens of thousands of dollars making Tesla a rich man The contract specified paying Tesla has the inventor a bonus $2.50 for every horsepower of alternating current sold Tesla is someone who has the key technological creative insight and what he needs is someone to coach him and someone to fund him Tesla headed to Pittsburgh where Westinghouse began building Tesla's motor Along with the dynamos and transformers that would make long-distance transmission of electricity possible But the struggle to make Tesla's invention a commercial success was far from over Westinghouse was competing for the market with Edison and he was in trouble Electricity was a capital-intensive business and his company was overextended His investors were worried Westinghouse goes to Tesla and says in order for your dream your alternating current motor to succeed. I have to I Can't pay you what I promised you in the contract. I I'll go out of business Westinghouse asked Tesla to rescind the royalty clause in the contract without consulting a lawyer without hesitating Tesla agreed Tesla does not try to negotiate You know, okay We'll move it down from two dollars and fifty cents. I'll take I'll take ten cents on the dollar No, he doesn't negotiate at all He simply tears up the contract their contract was really very very generous $2.50 for every horsepower of electricity produced It would have made Tesla one of the richest Men in history. He was naive and also Tended to think he could break the state-of-the-art any morning before breakfast Just months after relinquishing his royalties Tesla appeared at Columbia University to demonstrate his new wonders Determined to astonish an audience of engineers along with a few influential investors a Lot of the reason for the demonstration was to get patronage. It was really what scientists were doing in the time In the air was this American sensibility of show me Yeah, you can write your fancy European words. You can write equations You can publish in some journal that nobody read. I want to see it Show me Tesla had begun to explore the possibility of transmitting energy without wires Here is a simple glass tube he told his astonished audience Wherever I move it in space. It's soft pleasing light persists with undiminished brightness People were used to incandescent lamps lamps with filaments But this idea of a light bulb with no filament that could turn on with absolutely no connection to wire or to a battery The lamps were Tesla's own invention the forerunners of today's fluorescent tubes Incandescent bulbs glowed hot Tesla called his tubes cold light Cold light is a bulb with gases in it. And when electricity is nearby it lights up It's wireless. You don't have to have all kinds of wiring to make it work. You just have to have ambient electricity Ambient electricity an electric field was created by another Tesla invention He invented this device called the Tesla coil which enabled him to generate enormously high voltage it could take low AC voltage and build up inside the coil an enormous amount of energy and then through a spark discharge release all of that energy very very quickly as One reporter put it Tesla acted the part of a veritable magician Like a good showman Tesla wanted to leave his audience dumbfounded He stretched out his hand and took hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity directly through his body Tesla was apparently unhurt by the whole thing was pretty amazing to people. Of course, he knew the secret It's called the skin effect. His body was taking the electricity and it was Literally running through his skin from where from his hand down to down to the ground and not Entering the the internal parts of his body where it really could do some some real damage I've done things like that and it hurts like hell Maybe Tesla was just hurting like crazy But the real danger with electricity is if you grab something that's at a high voltage It causes your muscles to contract in particular your heart so your heart can stop the boundary line between gee whiz gosh bang I Can make magic happen and the careful laboratory verification of results was not all that cleanly defined at that time Electricity is still somewhere between magic science and business Tesla concluded his three-hour lecture with a pay-on to electric energy and Its beneficent future as a servant of mankind Everywhere is energy. He said with the power derived from it. Humanity will advance with great strides The magnificent possibilities expand our minds strengthen our hopes and fill our hearts with supreme delight Tesla was motivated by Wonder and awe at nature. He really wasn't in this to make money He really felt that there should be a way Given how powerful nature is to harness that power and then use it to relieve human suffering and and toil On May 1st 1893 as a great choir broke into song President Grover Cleveland flicked a switch and a hundred and sixty thousand light bulbs lit up the evening sky over Chicago opening the Columbian Exposition The exposition signaled the coming triumph of alternating current over director Westinghouse had outfoxed Edison winning the contract to wire the exposition with alternating current 1275 tonne dynamos generated three times more energy than the entire city of Chicago Six months later Westinghouse went on to win a greater prize The contract to harness Niagara Falls to generate alternating current electricity Tesla worked with the engineers perfected all of these dynamos and motors and helped design everything The water powered the water wheels and that powered the generators and the generators send out electricity At that point DC was a technology that was defeated alternating current triumphed Before Tesla, you'd have to have thousands of little power plants at every mile After Tesla from one power source Niagara Falls, you could light up and power the entire Northeast The modern world was born Alternating current transformed daily life in the 20th century and made Tesla famous Tesla was all at once a celebrity a new Edison He was enormously famous Incredibly charming mesmerizing and funny He speaks many languages Loves poetry. He's just an all-around Renaissance man That people are very drawn to he is very beloved of newspaper reporters because he could go on for hours on almost any topic and have something interesting and insightful to say Tesla was fond of luxury. He lived in the Astor house the city's first luxury hotel and Dined at Delmonico's the lavish restaurant of choice for fashionable, New Yorkers Resplendent in his cutaway coat and striped dress pants He was the darling of New York society a regular at the glittering tables of the super-rich men like John Jacob Astor and JP Morgan He needed to be supported. He needed to cultivate and persuade these very powerful Industrialists that he was worthy of being invested in 37 years old Tesla devoted his prodigious energies to creating new inventions in his laboratory in lower Manhattan where he passed long solitary hours and Delighted in showing off his experiments to friends artists writers society figures the luminaries of his day among them Mark Twain Stars of the Gilded Age came to his laboratory and Tesla was a star among these stars Tesla continued inventing securing patent after patent Yet he was peculiar Dogged by troubling persistent obsessions. He was enormously popular and celebrated But he had a lot of odd phobias and routines Everything that he does should be divided by three If he was staying in a hotel the room should be divisible by three in his younger days He would he would swim in the morning and he always did 27 laps because it was divisible by three He would circle a block three times before entering a building. He had horrible germ phobia He couldn't stand the sight of women's earrings. He couldn't stand the idea of touching human hair I don't like to use the term obsessive-compulsive But he was he had a lot of restrictions keeping him away from actual humans Despite being a great humanitarian Tesla had a lot of issues with humanity Tesla was a romantic But romance had no place in his life. I Do not think there is any thrill he told a reporter like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success Such emotions make a man forget food sleep friends love everything It's a pity too For sometimes we feel so lonely In 1899 Tesla headed west He had enormous ambitions and they were growing too big for his New York laboratory 43 years old once again. He imagined an invention that he believed would change the world He set up shop outside of the resort town of Colorado Springs Checked into the Alta Vista Hotel room 207 a number divisible by three and went to work In a laboratory built to his specifications on the outskirts of town. He conducted a series of experiments in great secrecy He built this lab where he could generate huge amounts of electricity and built this huge fence around it saying keep out And where did he get the money to do this? by telling John Jacob Astor the fourth that he was now going to develop his cold light and The cold light was so superior to the Edison bulb and just think of the millions of light bulbs that were sold every year It would be displaced by the cold light But Tesla had no intention of profiting from a paltry thing like fluorescent lighting He soon had his coils producing a million volts of electricity Errant bolt set his laboratory on fire He drew so much power that he once plunged the entire town of Colorado Springs into darkness Using high voltages Tesla theorized that he could transmit electricity vast distances by sending electric currents through the earth you have this Tesla coil and there's this Enormous spark across the room That's a current The current makes a magnetic field that magnetic field spreads out If the current is large enough it can go miles and light a bulb he set up an experiment where he had some light bulbs in a field and they were surrounded in a 50-foot square of wire and he Transmitted power so that an electrical field was created within that wire and the bulbs lit up That was one of the things that led him to believe that he would be able to accomplish this on a wide scale at the end of eight months of experimentation Tesla announced that he had proved that he could transmit electric power abundantly and cheaply anywhere on the planet But he never produced the evidence to make his case This is where Tesla didn't do so well, he really thought he was on to something I Think his picture was pretty much wrong. I think he fooled himself The problem is a physics problem The farther you get away from the source the weaker and weaker the the electricity gets Tesla is of the school that that once he Believed he had some evidence for something. He was very quick to promote it Expound it to the world and and not at all interested in challenging it Tesla was damaging his credibility He tarnished it even further by claiming that late one night. He received signals from Mars His instrumentation was doing some weird flipping around and he was claiming that it was Communications from space it may have been gamma rays or cosmic rays even radio waves the fact that he interpreted it as Communication from alien beings or Martians Made people begin to to doubt him his fertile imagination So critical to his inventive powers was betraying That same year an Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi sent a wireless message across the English Channel Tesla dismissed him Marconi possesses more enterprise than knowledge. Let him continue. He's using 17 of my patents In the year 1900 44 year old Nikola Tesla returned to New York City He had burned through a hundred thousand dollars in eight months in Colorado Springs Now he was looking for many hundreds of thousands of dollars more Without using wires without using any other means of transmission than the earth He wanted to send electrical power and wireless messages around the globe And he believed he could do this based on the experiments. He had conducted in Colorado Springs Settling into the luxurious Waldorf Astoria hotel Tesla started looking for investors, but raising capital would not be easy Heedless he was making more and more extravagant claims he repeated that he had received signals from Mars and Insisted that he had the apparatus to signal the Martians back he also foresaw the transmission of pictures and Sound and music images and voices real-time But for investors you have to have something that seems a little more realistic and concrete. How do you? explain a vision Tesla's reputation as a scientist was on the line at this point Tesla has not had a commercially successful invention in a number of years and As he tries to get new people interested in investing in him they're less than enthusiastic because they feel that he's just going to take their money and vaporize it But JP Morgan the most powerful financier in America was intrigued Tesla's breakthrough with alternating current was worth millions Morgan wanted to hear what the eccentric inventor was proposing now Tesla told him that he had designed a small tower to transmit wireless messages He kept secret his intention to transmit electric power wirelessly To make unlimited electricity available free to anyone with an antenna Tesla's basic idea was to give energy for free for the betterment of humanity But he wasn't going to be able to sell this idea to Morgan. It was he was playing to what Morgan's interests were Morgan invested a hundred and fifty thousand dollars toward what he thought would be the wireless transmission of messages But warned that a hundred and fifty thousand was his limit With Morgan's money Tesla bought 200 acres on Long Island's North Shore He called it Wardenclyffe after its former owner and began building a transmission tower He also intended to have a manufacturing facility But JP Morgan's $150,000 was never going to complete what Tesla had in mind and I'm sure that when he took that money He thought they'd be more following once he achieved some measure of success But a triumphant Guglielmo Marconi doomed Tesla's dream on December 12 1901 Marconi sent the first wireless transmission across the Atlantic based on Tesla's patents eight years later Marconi would win the Nobel Prize for the invention of wireless telegraphy radio and The minute JP Morgan sees that he's done with Tesla So there's no more money coming from JP Morgan. So Tesla's in a very bad place This is where had he retained his Royalties for alternating current he would have had all the money he needed to do whatever he wanted But he didn't and he Wrote just these ever more pathetic Pleading and then insulting and bitter letters to Morgan I mean almost like what you would expect, you know a crazy divorced person to write Have you ever read the book of Job you wrote? If you will put my mind in place of his body, you will find my suffering accurately described With $50,000 more Wardenclyffe is completed and I have an immortal crown and an immense fortune You are a big man, but your work is wrought in passing form Mine is immortal Tesla didn't know how to work with the JP Morgan's of his era and What it would take to keep them on board He didn't know how to think about his technology from the perspective of people that would fund it finance it Part of the creativity is understanding how you can fit it into the world of practice It was a big flaw in his life in the summer of 1903 Just as he finished making his first experiment Tesla ran out of money His experiments on Long Island were never finished but what he was trying to do there was pretty far out now Messages might have been possible because to send a message you need a tiny tiny tiny amount of power But I don't think there was any way that he was gonna be able to put sufficient power out of this thing So that he was gonna be able to go You know even a mile The insight he demonstrated for the AC motor is true genius, but His dream of powering things over vast distances really wasn't workable and I've always been curious why he even thought that was possible Still Tesla dreamed of Wardenclyffe Trying desperately for years to raise the money to resurrect his vision. I Will be able to transmit energy of any amount to any place he said Tesla believed that the tower would also be powerful enough to send signals to nearby planets Especially if there were any Martians out there to receive them in 1916 his fortune dwindling he relinquished the Wardenclyffe mortgage to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel Where he had been living on credit for almost 20 years running up a debt of $20,000 The following year to make the land easier to sell the Waldorf had the tower dynamited Tesla was 61. He would spend the rest of his life imagining new inventions and hoping to find someone to invest in he consulted with various companies, but he was a Lonely Eccentric Scientist who really Was frustrated that his ideas had never been fully Seen through his goal was to try and sell something So he'd get the money go back to Wardenclyffe and complete his baby Which was a world global system to transmit light voice pictures and power to all points of the globe And he was trying to attach our technology to the wheelwork of nature Harnessing geothermal power the tides wind and Sun he did not want to sap the earth of our natural resources He stands for the future Tesla still commanded attention, but increasingly his ideas were losing their mooring in reality Science and science fiction meet in Nikola Tesla As time goes on his inventions start to take on more of the fantastic They are visions. They take full flight. They Unleash themselves from the strictures of reality He starts to develop an idea about photographing thought Which is one of his most poetic and beautiful Non inventions in my book. He thinks you know thought is electrical energy and we record electricity all the time Why can't we photograph thought? Tesla had never cared about money now. He had hardly any left Leaving behind a trail of debts he moved from one hotel to another His mind was drifting Despite the fact that Mark Twain is dead Tesla is sending him packages to an address that no longer exists in New York City. He's living with ghosts His only friends were the pigeons in Bryant Park I Have been feeding pigeons Thousands of them for years. He told a reporter One was different. It was a female. I Loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman And she loved me As long as I had her it was purpose to my life The night his beloved pigeon died. He saw a light in her eyes He described as more intense than the most powerful lamps in his laboratory When that light went out he said a light went out inside of me Nikola Tesla died on January 7th 1943 He was 86 years old alone in the New Yorker Hotel room 3 3 2 7 on the 33rd floor Six months later the United States Supreme Court ruled that the patents to Marconi's wireless device belonged to Tesla Tesla not Marconi invented radio But by now he was nearly forgotten His coils were never commercially successful His fluorescent lights never marketed his wireless system never realized His invention of radio never fully credited Even today his achievements remain obscure Alternating current electricity is not something you think about every time you put your hand on the light switch and turn on the lights There's not something that's easy to say. Ah, okay there there we are. There's the Tesla. That's what he gave us He established the basic framework for Electrical generation and distribution that drives our economy today, but he was moving down his own path He was pursuing a vision Didn't necessarily always see the gaps that would have to be filled in order to get where he was going But he could he always believed that he could get there His imagination carried him beyond his time With over 200 patents Tesla had an exhilarating sense of the future But a long road of invention had to be traveled before many of his ideas could be realized Tesla resonates with our own time Many of the things that he predicted are being brought to reality by the current generation wireless networking cell phones Yeah, I think that's what brought Tesla back to us was that his dream came true He was an artist he's working with his dreams he's working with his visions His medium is not pigment his medium is not clay his medium is electricity He was like a scientist with an artistic nature and many scientists are driven by that absolutely Tesla's really a visionary Enough of his stuff came true