"The future is mine," boasted Nikola Tesla.

For an autobiographical account in 1919, Tesla,

then 63, posed with a wireless bulb lit by an electromagnetic coil.

In June 1884, a fateful meeting took place in an office in a brownstone on Manhattan's lower
Fifth Avenue. The office belonged to that greatest of American inventors, Thomas Alva Edison,
who already was a celebrity for creating the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb. His
guest was an unknown Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla, who had just stepped off the boat
the previous day with four cents in his pocket and a dream of easing the world's toil through the
new science of electricity.

It would have been difficult to imagine two more dissimilar figures. Edison, at 37, slouching
about in a frayed Prince Albert coat, shabby shirt and bright neckerchief, was a folksy genius, a
native of small-town Ohio who liked to play the unschooled hick. He was as American as the
apple pie he practically lived on — "a completely lionized figure," observed the historian Jill
Jonnes, "the disheveled genius who minced no words, and embodied everything big and bold and
can-do about a self-confident young nation."

Tesla was eight years younger and a head taller. He stood slim and ramrod straight, well over 6
feet tall, with a neatly trimmed mustache, coal black hair and deep-set blue eyes of burning
intensity. He was dressed fastidiously in the only outfit he had left after much of his luggage had
been stolen on the journey — bowler hat, striped trousers and cutaway coat. He was a European
cosmopolitan who spoke formal, heavily accented English and was fluent as well in French,
German, Italian and his native Serbian. Obsessive in his avoidance of germs, Tesla did not offer
to shake hands with Edison. But he politely spoke up, knowing his host had hearing problems.

This eccentric visitor was a scientific genius who had a vivid visual imagination. "In some
instances I have seen the air around me filled with tongues of living flame," he later recalled.
Two years before, while working as an electrical engineer for the telephone company in
Budapest, he worked out a puzzle plaguing him to almost nervous collapse: how to design a
motor to operate efficiently on alternating current. During a walk with a colleague, he suddenly
grabbed a stick and drew diagrams in the sand of dual circuits 90 degrees out of phase with each
other that caused a magnet to rotate in space and thereby continually attract a steady stream of
electrons. "No more will men be slaves to hard tasks," he told his friend. "My motor will set
them free. It will do the work of the world."
 Thomas Edison hired Tesla when he came to the
U.S. in 1884. Tesla. a germaphobe, was shocked that his world-famous employer "lived in utter
disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene."

Of late, Tesla had been working as a junior engineer for Edison's European operation based in
Paris, and he was "thrilled to the marrow," he later wrote, to meet the man. He hoped to interest
his illustrious host in his vision of how to generate and distribute electricity on a large scale
through alternating current. But Edison was a firm believer in direct current and — as Tesla
recalled it — said "very bluntly that he was not interested in alternating current; anyone who
dabbled in that field was wasting his time."

The meeting marked the beginning of a fierce rivalry between these two men — the one a
pragmatist, the other a visionary — and an epic struggle between their competing technologies.
The outcome would shape the very future of the industrial world. It is invisibly manifested today
every time a switch is flipped to turn on the lights, television, computer, electric motors and
countless other amenities of modern life.

The day they met, Edison gave Tesla a practical test. He dispatched him to the East River docks
to repair the electrical system on the steamship Oregon, the first ship to be outfitted with lighting.
Tesla worked all night fixing the ship's dynamos, and Edison was so impressed he hired the
young immigrant he referred to as "our Parisian." Tesla's main assignment was to upgrade the
efficiency of the dynamos at the Pearl Street generating station. This was the hub of Edison's
recently created system of direct current that lit up Wall Street and the financial district. Here,
coal-fired steam engines powered the generators, producing alternating current in which the
electrons reverse direction at regular intervals. Before transmission over copper wires, the
alternating current was converted into direct current — in which the electrons flow in only one
direction — by an array of brushes and devices known as commutators.

Tesla spotted the system's shortcomings. The conversion from AC to DC involved the
cumbersome sparking process that he was convinced would be eliminated once the AC motor he
envisioned was developed. He also observed firsthand the severe limitations of direct current in
an electrical grid. There was no way to step up the voltage, and the amount of electricity could be
increased only by using thick and highly expensive copper wire. Alternating current, by contrast,
could theoretically be stepped up by a transformer into high voltages suitable for transmission
over great distances and then stepped down for distribution along the way.

Tesla worked hard for Edison but he lasted only a few months. He believed that Edison had
promised him $50,000 if he succeeded in improving the station's dynamos. But Edison insisted
that he had only been joking. When Edison refused even to raise his $18 a week salary to $25,
Tesla quit.

His fierce pride wounded, Tesla set out to make a name for himself. He selected a project that he
considered doable, though not particularly challenging. New Jersey businessmen agreed to back
his plan to improve the primitive public illumination in the city of Rahway, which used an early
system called arc lighting. Tesla succeeded in installing a better system, but his partners cheated
him out of patents he had obtained and forced him out of the company. He was once again
penniless and now forced into manual labor, including what he considered a most ignoble task:
digging ditches to bury the electric lines for Edison's direct current grid.
 George Westinghouse relied on
Tesla's system of AC transmission to electrify the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo,
N.Y.. using power generated by Niagara Falls.

Early in 1887, Tesla bounced back: With the backing of investors he had impressed with bit of
electrical sleight of hand — making a copper egg stand on end — he established a laboratory in
lower Manhattan and set about building a working prototype of the AC motor he had sketched in
the sand in Budapest. Until then, an important shortcoming of the early alternating current
systems was the lack of a workable motor that AC could power. Tesla had never committed a
line of his revolutionary concept to paper but in his new lab "merely reproduced the pictures as
they appeared to my vision and the operation was always as I expected."

The following year, he demonstrated his AC motor at a meeting of the prestigious American
Institute of Electrical Engineers. His lecture attracted the attention of George Westinghouse,
whose Pittsburgh-based company had developed the air brake and other safety devices for rail
transportation, and was now interested in the transmission of electricity. He had financed a
modest system using alternating current but it was limited to downtown Buffalo, N.Y., and he
realized that Tesla's work might be the key to transmitting power over great distances.

Westinghouse, who was both a shrewd businessman and a clever engineer, sought out inventors,
bought their patents and then collaborated with them to create better practical versions. Hard
driving and ambitious, he was an imposing presence, tall with a huge walrus handlebar
mustache, and such a pleasing conversationalist, noted a biographer, that "he could charm a bird
out of a tree."
Tesla had the patents. He had filed a few months before for seven patents that covered a
complete AC system. This included his motor and generators, transformers and transmission
lines for three complete AC versions. One version was single phase; the others were polyphase
— two phase and three phase. Polyphase systems were entirely new and reflected Tesla's
remarkable ability to visualize the forces simultaneously at work in circuits.

Westinghouse bought all of this for $70,000 (including $20,000 in cash) and an agreement to pay
a $2.50 royalty for every horsepower of developed electrical capacity. He also agreed to
minimum royalties of $30,000 to be paid over the next three years. Tesla paid off his investors
with part of the proceeds and saved enough to finance a new laboratory. He then went off to
Pittsburgh to serve as a Westinghouse consultant to help adapt his patents for commercial use.

The Westinghouse engineers didn't get along well with the newcomer. For one thing, they
differed over the most efficient frequency for the motor's operation. Tesla's preference of 60
cycles per second eventually prevailed.

"Someday I'll harness that power," said Tesla when

he saw a picture of Niagara Falls as a boy. In the 1890s, he designed the world's first
hydroelectric plant for the site.

Another sticking point was the lack of proper blueprints. The Westinghouse men had never met a
fellow engineer who expected them to work without blueprints. To guide them in the
development of his AC motor, all they had were the sketches Tesla made in a notebook no larger
than the palm of his hand. "Without ever having drawn a sketch," Tesla wrote, "I can give the
measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as
certainly as though I had made the actual drawings."

Tesla and his new ally Westinghouse were now pitted against Edison in what became known as
the War of the Currents. It was a struggle to establish the standard for the future of electricity.
Would it be the new and experimental alternating current or the tried-and-true direct current?
By 1888 Edison had a head start. He had 125 stations operating in cities across the United States,
while Westinghouse had only 98 stations running. But the technology seemed to favor AC for
long-distance transmission. AC required only one-third of the costly copper required for DC
wires. And unlike DC, it could be stepped up to high voltages, dispatched over wires from city to
city and then stepped down for distribution to users.

Edison's adamant opposition to AC was rooted in part in his legendary stubbornness. That trait,
which enabled him to push on with his inventions when others would have given up, brought
him much success. But it also prevented Edison from incorporating new technology that he
himself had not invented or developed — unlike Westinghouse, who scooped up ideas wherever
he found them.

Edison also opposed AC because he considered it dangerous. His DC might cause a small shock,
but AC could actually kill at high voltages. He and his associates launched a public campaign to
ban what they called the "damnable current." To dramatize the dangers of AC, Harold Brown, a
New York engineer on Edison's payroll, staged widely publicized electrocutions of dogs, a horse
and other animals. The campaign culminated in Brown's introduction of an electric chair built
with secondhand Westinghouse AC devices. The first electrocution took place at the state prison
at Auburn, N.Y., in 1890. The victim, a murderer named William Kemmler, suffered a prolonged
and horrible death, and electrocution was thereafter referred to in the press as "Westinghousing."

By 1900,
an array of 10 5,000-horsepower Tesla AC generators sent power from Niagara Falls to New
York City, 400 miles away.
The turning point in the War of the Currents came during the next two years. Westinghouse
survived Edison's propaganda campaign and a financial crisis so severe that, desperate to save
the company, he persuaded Tesla to sacrifice his future royalties. Edison was not so fortunate:
He lost control of his own company to a new business combine that soon became General
Electric.

Westinghouse then underbid Edison's successors to illuminate the Columbian Exposition — the
Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The fair became the glittering showcase for the new age of
electricity — and Tesla's brand of alternating current. Until now, the largest AC station was
capable of powering no more than 10,000 lights. At Chicago, Tesla's polyphase system lit up
some 180,000 bulbs and powered hundreds of exhibits. The huge Ferris wheel, the moving
sidewalk, towering water fountains — all were driven by AC electricity. A guidebook marveled
that "everything pulsates with quickening influence of the subtle and vivifying current." Tesla
(wearing thick cork-soled shoes for protection) mesmerized the crowds by passing sufficient
voltage through his slim frame to engulf himself in dazzling streams of light. It was his way, he
said, of demonstrating that "voltage has nothing . to do with the size and power of the current."

The success at Chicago set the stage for the realization of Tesla's boyhood dream — harnessing
the power of the mighty Niagara Falls. To achieve this leap forward in the generation and
transmission of alternating current, Westinghouse had to overcome criminal and financial
chicanery. First, an operative from General Electric purchased the AC blueprints for the World's
Fair and Niagara Falls from a turncoat Westinghouse draftsman. Then Wall Street backers of GE
tried and failed to simply take over Westinghouse Electric.

Turbines embedded in channels beneath the falls turned three 85-ton dynamos five times more
powerful than those installed at the fair. Here was manifested for the first time Tesla's concept of
a complete polyphase system of alternating current. The two-phase current generated by the
dynamos was stepped up by transformers into three-phase current, which was more efficient for
transmission. This invisible river of enormous voltages flashed 26 miles over wires to the city of
Buffalo where it lit thousands of bulbs, drove industry and ran the streetcars. "It was," the
Buffalo Enquirer rhapsodized at the first dramatic transmission in November 1896, "the journey
of God's own lightning to the employ of man."

In a few years, 20 percent of all the electricity in the U.S. flowed from Niagara Falls. Tesla and
Westinghouse had won the War of the Currents.
 In 1900 Tesla
posed for a double-exposed photo at a Colorado Springs lab to tout his experiments in wireless
transmission of power.

In the years that followed, Tesla became a darling of high society, a bon vivant much in demand
at dinners and salons graced by the likes of J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the Astors and the
Vanderbilts, and he hosted many of the elite at his Manhattan laboratory for after-hours
entertainment. One of his favorite guests was Mark Twain, who claimed he was temporarily
cured of constipation by a session on a vibrating platform mounted on an electrical oscillator.
Considered a highly eligible bachelor, Tesla was linked to several heiresses — even the noted
French actress Sarah Bernhardt — but remained unattached. "I do not believe an inventor should
marry," he explained, "because he has so intense a nature, with so much in it of wild, passionate
quality, that in giving himself to a woman he might love, he would give everything and so take
everything from his chosen field."

It was also true that Tesla's phobias discouraged intimacy. He could not stand to touch a person's
hair. He admitted to having "a violent aversion against the earrings of women" — pearls most of
all — because the sight of smooth round surfaces distressed him. "The mere sight of a peach
brought on a fever," he said. He also had strange numerical fixations. The number of his hotel
room, for example, always had to be divisible by three.

The destruction of Tesla's Manhattan laboratory in a March 1895 fire left him temporarily grief-
stricken at the loss of "all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus that it has taken
years to perfect." That included a small portable wireless transmission station and receiver he
tested by sending signals from the roof of his lab to his 10-story-high luxury hotel 30 blocks
uptown, where an aerial held aloft by a balloon was tethered to the roof. But with the support of
his numerous rich friends and admirers he continued to forge ahead with his research into the
wireless transmission of electrical signals, for which he filed two patents in 1897.

Tesla, it turned out, had invented radio. But unlike Guglielmo Marconi, who stunned the world
by sending a signal across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901, he failed to commercialize his wireless
innovations. Marconi not only got the public credit for inventing radio, he also received the
Nobel Prize for it in 1909. Not until nearly four decades later did the truth become clear. In 1943,
a few months after Tesla's death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his patents — not those of
Marconi — came first.

A 1900 brochure highlights Tesla's

vision of a "World Wireless Telephone Transmission."

In his later years, Tesla saw himself more as a discoverer of great concepts rather than the
developer of useful devices (see "Our Original Mad Scientist"). Dreaming ever-grander schemes,
he made sure he was not forgotten. Every year on his birthday, he staged an elaborate press
conference where reporters flocked to hear of his latest idea. On his 75th birthday in 1931 — the
year Edison died — old colleagues and young scientists inspired by his work honored him with a
Festschrift, a memorial book, and Time magazine put him on the cover.

But he had little money and was lonely during his last days. Former Westinghouse colleagues
paid $125 a month for his room and board at the Hotel New Yorker, where he occupied room
3327 (divisible by three, of course) and conducted various electrical experiments until the end.
He found companionship among pigeons, feeding them where they congregated outside the New
York Public Library and St. Patrick's Cathedral. He took ill or injured birds to his room where he
nursed them back to health in custom-built cages.

His favorite was a particularly elegant, pure white bird. "I loved that pigeon," he told John
O'Neill, a newspaper science writer he sometimes confided in during his last years. "Yes, I loved
her as a man loves a woman. When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that
time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, but when that something went out
of my life, I knew my life's work was finished."

I HAVE SEEN THE AIR AROUND ME FILLED WITH TONGUES OF LIVING FLAME

Edison told Tesla he was not interested in alternating current and that anyone who dabbled in
that field was wasting his time
Converting the power of Niagara Falls into electricity was described as the journey of God's own
lightning to the employ of man

~~~~~~~~

By Ronald H. Bailey

Ronald H. Bailey, author of several World War II and Civil War books, was an editor for the
original Life magazine.

Our Original Mad Scientist

Nikola Tesla dazzled people of his era with one visionary idea after another but showed little
patience for turning his brainstorms into practical reality. He tinkered with a primitive kind of X-
ray and gas-filled tube lights that predated the fluorescent bulb and neon lighting. In 1898 he
wowed an audience at Madison Square Garden with a demonstration of a toy boat that involved
the first use of remote control electronics and a multichannel broadcasting system. His handheld
transmitter commanded the large wooden craft to speed around a tank of water, changing
directions and blinking its lights on and off. "You see there the first of a race of robots," he
announced, "mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race."

Tesla burned through a million dollars trying to prove electrical power could be transmitted
through the upper atmosphere. In 1899 he set up a lab near Colorado Springs, Colo., where a
friend operated the local utility and offered to provide the power. High in the Rockies, Tesla
built a barn-like structure containing big dynamos and topped by a 200-foot-tall copper pole and
copper ball. When the system was fired up, the ball and tower spouted tongues of flame 120 feet
long, draining so much power that his friend's electric utility blacked out. Widely published
photos of Tesla surrounded by bolts of electricity reinforced his self-cultivated image as the
wizard who could command lightning. The fact that he returned to New York asserting that he
had received signals from outer space added to his reputation as a mad scientist.

An even more grandiose scheme preoccupied Tesla over the next decade. He envisioned a global
system of enormous towers to wirelessly transmit information and electricity. The idea that it
could flash stock market reports everywhere in the world especially appealed to Wall Street's
most powerful financier, J.P. Morgan, who agreed to provide substantial backing. In 1903 the
first transmission tower, known as Wardenclyffe, built on a 200-acre plot of land on rural Long
Island, was anchored by a 120-foot underground shaft and rose to a height of 187 feet. But Tesla
was forced to abandon the project when Morgan lost interest in it and withdrew his funding.

On Tesla's 78th birthday, in 1934, he revealed his work on a "death ray" — a beam of charged
particles — capable of preventing war. The idea seemed to foreshadow "Star Wars," the
Strategic Defense Initiative to shoot down missiles. But by then no one knew whether Tesla's
mind had degenerated into senility or was simply racing decades ahead of his time.

Sixty-seven years after his death, Tesla is a source of inspiration for 21st-century technophiles.
A Tesla line of electronic processors was released by the microchip maker Nvidia in 2007. The
Tesla Roadster, a new $100,000 electric sports car uses an AC motor modeled after Tesla's 1882
design. And the Dark Void video game features a hero named Tesla who mounts a technology
insurgency against aliens bent on destroying humanity. — Ronald H. Bailey

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