Plays from youtube-nocookie.com once you press play.
Nikola Tesla He Lit Up the World… and Died Broke
He imagined wireless power, radio and remote control decades before anyone else. He died alone, in debt, in room 3327 of a New York hotel.
Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 during a lightning storm, according to family legend. He survived cholera, saw the rotating magnetic field in a flash in a Budapest park, and arrived in New York with four cents in his pocket. He worked for Thomas Edison, lost the promised $50,000, dug ditches for $2 a day, and then, with George Westinghouse, won the War of the Currents. Alternating current lit up the 1893 World's Fair and brought power from Niagara Falls to Buffalo. Then he gave up his royalties, lost his tower on Long Island, and spent his last years feeding pigeons.
Today the power in your home is alternating current, and the unit of magnetic field strength is called the tesla.
The facts behind this file
What the record shows
- Tesla emigrated to New York in 1884 and went to work for Edison's company.
- After losing his first company he dug ditches for $2 a day, as he wrote in a letter in 1938.
- Westinghouse licensed his alternating-current motor, and in 1891 Tesla released Westinghouse from the royalty clause of their contract.
- In 1898 he showed a radio-controlled boat (the 'telautomaton'), and in 1899 he built a lightning laboratory in Colorado Springs.
- He died alone on 7 January 1943 in room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker, effectively bankrupt. Pigeons were among his few companions in his last years.
- In 1960 the SI unit of magnetic flux density was named the tesla.
Legends, disputes & careful wording
- The $50,000 Edison bonus that turned out to be 'a practical joke' is Tesla's own account; no other record of the offer survives.
- The lightning storm at his birth, the vision of the AC motor in a Budapest park and arriving in America with four cents are traditional stories. We did not find them in contemporary records.
Main sources
- Nikola Tesla, My Inventions (1919)
- W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (2013)
Spotted a mistake or know a better source? Tell us.
Further reading
- Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age A historian's biography that separates the inventor from the myth. View on Amazon →
- Empires of Light Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the race to electrify the world. View on Amazon →
As an Amazon Associate, Inventor Files earns from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra.
Image & film credits
- Tesla on arrival in the US: Napoleon Sarony, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Room 3327, Hotel New Yorker: Simone Cortesi, CC BY 3.0 ·
- Smiljan: Zátonyi Sándor (ifj.), CC BY 3.0 · Tesla's radio-controlled boat (Nikola Tesla Museum, Belgrade): Boban Markovic, CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Other archival photos are public domain or CC0 (incl. Fortepan, Scientific American 1888, NASA); video clips from Pexels.
- Music and sound made for this video.
