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File 011 · Documentary · 7:09

Nikola Tesla He Helped Power the World. Why Did He Die Poor?

In January 1943, a hotel maid in New York opened the door of room 3327 and found an old man, dead, alone and deeply in debt. He was the man who lit up the world.

This is the full story of Nikola Tesla: born at midnight in a lightning storm (as family legend has it), nearly killed by cholera at seventeen, struck by the idea of the rotating magnetic field in a park in Budapest. He arrived in New York with four cents in his pocket, worked for Thomas Edison, dug ditches for two dollars a day, and then won the war of the currents with George Westinghouse. He lit the 1893 World's Fair, harnessed Niagara Falls, steered a boat by radio and made lightning in Colorado, before his dream of wireless power at Wardenclyffe collapsed and he spent his last years alone with the pigeons of New York.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Room 3327
  2. 0:37 A child of the storm
  3. 1:43 Graz and the impossible machine
  4. 2:15 The vision in Budapest
  5. 2:41 New York and Thomas Edison
  6. 3:21 The war of the currents
  7. 4:44 Radio, lightning and Colorado
  8. 5:07 Wardenclyffe
  9. 5:44 The last years
  10. 6:37 His legacy

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

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Electricity & light
Image & film credits
  • Room 3327, Hotel New Yorker: Simone Cortesi, CC BY 3.0 · Smiljan memorial centre: Zátonyi Sándor (ifj.), CC BY 3.0 · Tesla's radio boat (replica): Boban Markovic, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Milutin Tesla and Tesla in his New York laboratory: The Nikola Tesla Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Young Tesla (Sarony): CC BY-SA 4.0 · Hotel New Yorker: Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Graz University of Technology: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 AT.
  • Other archival images are public domain (Library of Congress, Smithsonian, Wellcome Collection, NASA); video clips from Pexels.
  • Music and sound made for this video.

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