Electricity was dangerous business in the 19th century. Legend says that the Brooklyn Dodgers got their name because the borough’s residents spent so much time dodging the sparks that flew from the electric trolley line. Differently engineered generators transmitted electricity at different frequencies. America’s titan of invention, Thomas Edison, was selling DC (Direct Current), whose one-directional charge could be transmitted no further than a mile and was useful mostly in districts whose occupants could afford to install their own generators.
Into this mess stepped a visionary, the Serbian inventor Nikola Telsa. He foresaw that electricity, if democratically distributed, would power the world and make possible inventions no one (except maybe Tesla?) could imagine.
As biographer Richard Munson notes in his instructive Tesla: Inventor of the Modern (W.W. Norton), the inventor as a young man suffered “episodes of seeing things with strobing intensity” and visions credited with “allowing him to vividly see and manipulate inventions in his head.” The son of an Eastern Orthodox priest, Tesla was a dreamy child wandering the cathedral of nature while being drilled by his father in rigorous mental exercises.
Although many engineer-technicians in many countries tinkered in the same field, Tesla finally enabled the reliable delivery of high frequency, high-voltage electricity and championed the system commonly used today, AC (Alternating Current). He invented the technology of radio before Guglielmo Marconi. While endowed with a strong work ethic, Tesla wasn’t always savvy enough to swim with the sharks he encountered. He frequently lost money and credit to more entrepreneurial men such as Edison and George Westinghouse. Even so, he earned millions of dollars in today’s money—and spent it all on new experiments and an exquisitely eccentric style of life.
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Tesla’s mind was always roving. He demonstrated a model boat driven by remote control in 1898 and naively hoped its military application would end warfare. Tesla also imagined robots to relieve men of “laborious work” and foresaw artificial intelligence. He was also a showman who amazed audiences with a glowing tube that looked like George Lucas’ lightsaber.
Largely disregarded as he entered his declining years in the 1930s, Tesla imagined harnessing cosmic rays to shoot down aircraft and a pocket-size device capable of destroying buildings. But he was taken seriously enough for Communist agents and the forerunner of the CIA to sift through his papers after his death in New York City in 1943, searching for clues.
He died poor, not entirely forgotten but eclipsed in popular memory by Edison, his rival and onetime employer. However, Tesla has captured the imagination of the young and creative in recent years. David Bowie played him on film and his name has been adopted by a rock band and by Elon Musk for his electric car. Tesla would not have advocated STEM education but STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. After all, he envisioned his AC motor while walking in a park reciting poems by Goethe.
