The Strange and Brilliant Inventions of Nikola Tesla

Even before the suc­cess of the elec­tric car com­pa­ny that now bears his name, Niko­la Tes­la was a wide­ly respect­ed his­tor­i­cal fig­ure. Often, that respect could be based on sur­pris­ing­ly scant knowl­edge of the man’s life and accom­plish­ments. Did­n’t he do some­thing with elec­tric­i­ty?

Was­n’t he involved in some kind of rival­ry with Thomas Edi­son? Would­n’t we all be enjoy­ing wire­less­ly trans­mit­ted pow­er, too cheap to meter, if his noble, soli­tary efforts had­n’t been thwart­ed by the estab­lish­ment? What­ev­er dra­mat­ic sat­is­fac­tions we find in Tes­la’s sto­ry, we can only gauge his genius by sur­vey­ing his actu­al inven­tions, four of which are explained in the new Lost in Time video above.

Tes­la lived from 1856 to 1943, a peri­od of such great tech­no­log­i­cal change that, when he demon­strat­ed a radio-con­trolled boat in an ear­ly phase of his career, some of the onlook­ers “were absolute­ly con­vinced that there was a trained mon­key inside the boat, read­ing his hand sig­nals.” The year was 1898, when the very idea of wire­less con­trol had­n’t entered any­one’s mind — but Tes­la already fore­saw a world of “vehi­cles that dri­ve them­selves, machines doing real work from thou­sands of kilo­me­ters away, and air­craft flown from a dis­tance.” He may have been a tad ear­ly to that game, but his inven­tion of the alter­nat­ing cur­rent pow­er sys­tem and the induc­tion motor hap­pened right on time. At the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, “the race to get elec­tric­i­ty to every house­hold in Amer­i­ca” was get­ting into gear. Thomas Edis­on’s direct cur­rent (DC) sys­tem tech­ni­cal­ly worked, but would need a very large num­ber of pow­er sta­tions to move pow­er all over the con­ti­nent.

Tes­la did his work on AC as a kind of cor­rec­tion to the short­com­ings of DC, draw­ing what his­to­ry remem­bers as a mer­ci­less neg­a­tive-pub­lic­i­ty cam­paign from Edis­on’s side. But none of its often-grue­some stunts meant to asso­ciate Tes­la’s inven­tion with death were a match for the suc­cess of AC’s imple­men­ta­tion in the new pow­er plant at Nia­gara Falls. More than 130 years lat­er, AC has long pow­ered the vast major­i­ty of homes.

But if his­to­ry had gone dif­fer­ent­ly, the Tes­la enthu­si­ast can’t resist ask­ing, would your house also be equipped with its own death ray? In 1934, at one of his annu­al press con­fer­ences, the 78-year-old Tes­la announced that he’d come up with his most impor­tant inven­tion yet, a weapon so pow­er­ful that it could “end all wars.” Called ‘tele­force,’ it would fire beams so con­cen­trat­ed and ener­getic that they could destroy any tar­get instan­ta­neous­ly upon con­tact. When he died in 1943, Tes­la did­n’t even leave suf­fi­cient doc­u­men­ta­tion to tell whether the thing could have worked.

He’d made slight­ly more progress on War­den­clyffe Tow­er, meant as a proof of con­cept for his grander vision of turn­ing the Earth into a giant bat­tery, fill­ing it with elec­tric­i­ty into which all human­i­ty could tap at will. Mor­gan had been foot­ing the pro­jec­t’s bill, but cut off fund­ing when it came out that the ever-ambi­tious Tes­la real­ly intend­ed to build much more than what he’d promised, a wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem — which, at that time, would have seemed like a pret­ty fan­tas­ti­cal notion in itself. A Brief, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Thomas Edi­son (and Niko­la Tes­la) The Unlike­ly Friend­ship of Mark Twain and Niko­la Tes­la Niko­la Tesla’s Grades from High School & Uni­ver­si­ty: A Fas­ci­nat­ing Glimpse Niko­la Tes­la Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Wire­less Tech­nol­o­gy & the Smart­phone in 1926 The Elec­tric Rise and Fall of Niko­la Tes­la: As Told by Tech­noil­lu­sion­ist Mar­co Tem­pest Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee & More (1926/35) Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture.