American Experience (1988–…): Season 29, Episode 1 - Tesla - full transcript

In 1891, a Serbian scientist

demonstrated
his latest inventions

before an awestruck audience
at Columbia University.

"Tubes held in the hand
of Mr. Tesla," a reporter wrote,

"appeared like a luminous sword
in the hand of an archangel

representing justice."

Nikola Tesla was already
famous...

The scientist whose experiments
with electricity

were destined to transform
daily life in the 20th century.

We live in an electrical world.

We take it all for granted.



We have light bulbs,
we run our refrigerators,

our air conditioners,
our electrical motors.

All of that is all
directly back to Tesla.

A hundred years ago,

he pointed the way
toward robots, radio,

radar, remote control,

the wireless transmission
of messages and pictures.

He dreamed of harnessing
the wind and the sun

to make free energy available
for everyone.

When you think
about electricity,

you think of Edison.

But Tesla was just more of an
original American than Edison.

Tesla had a lot of obsessions
and odd phobias,

and yet he was enormously
popular and celebrated.



They did not stop him.

At the turn of the 20th century,
Tesla was acclaimed.

Millions of Americans
knew his name.

But only decades later, he was
forgotten by all but a few.

He doesn't have
a disciplined imagination;

he has a fertile imagination.

And so he's kind of crazy.

Oh, he is a genius,
no doubt about it.

But he's an idiosyncratic
genius.

His luxuriant imagination
was the source of his genius,

and the cause of his downfall.

On June 6, 1884,

28-year-old Nikola Tesla arrived
in New York City,

one of the millions
of immigrants

who had begun to transform
the fabric of American society

during the final decades
of the 19th century.

The young immigrant knew no one.

Six feet two inches tall,

he spoke with a heavy Serbian
accent

and weighed little more
than 140 pounds.

He's very tall, gangly,
handsome.

Looks like a vampire
a little bit.

"What I saw was rough
and unattractive," Tesla wrote.

'Is this America?' I asked
myself in painful surprise."

Everything about him
is fastidious and courtly.

He's very elegant-looking.

He's got these amazing blue eyes
that people notice.

Tesla had only four cents
in his pocket

along with some
of his favorite poems,

but he carried with him
a recommendation

to the man he admired
more than any other.

35-year-old Thomas Edison was
already a celebrated inventor,

an American folk hero.

The incandescent light bulb he
had patented five years before

had captured the imagination
of people all over the world.

Light was always associated
with flame.

And Edison,
by inventing a light bulb,

was going to shift the country

away from natural gas
and gas lighting

to a world in which
there would be electricity

and electric light bulbs
in every household.

And this was very astonishing
to people.

It was a miracle.

Electricity was very mysterious
at the time

My grandmother,
born in 1900, maybe,

insisted that we always have
those childproof things

in the plugs,
because she thought

the electricity
was dripping out,

and it would collect
on the floor

and you'd step in it.

Tesla meandered down the lanes
of lower Manhattan

heading toward Edison's office

with a revolutionary idea
he was certain

the celebrated inventor
would be grateful for.

Beneath the ground ran 80,000
feet of copper conductors...

The world's first electric grid,
Thomas Edison's creation...

Lighting homes
and powering factories

on the lower tip of Manhattan.

But Edison's system generated
direct current, DC,

and DC had severe limitations.

Direct current
couldn't go very far.

You would have had to have
a generating station every mile.

It was a very limited form
of power.

So this was a real problem.

And Tesla had the solution,
a brilliant solution.

With direct current,

a generator produces
electricity,

a stream of electrons
that flows along a wire

to a light bulb, or a motor,

and then returns
to the generator

in one long continuous loop.

But as the electrons travel,

energy is lost to the resistance
of the wire.

Like a long river
whose energy is spent

the farther the current travels.

The alternative to DC is AC,
alternating current.

With alternating current,

the electrons don't flow
in a single direction.

Instead, they vibrate
back and forth,

like an ocean tide,

surging with power that could
send electricity long distances.

But no one had designed a motor

that could run efficiently
on AC.

Even Thomas Edison himself
was baffled.

But in a waking vision,

Nikola Tesla had imagined
an AC motor when he was 26,

two years before he met Edison,

as if he had been waiting
for that astonishing revelation

since he was a small boy
in Croatia.

He was born in the tiny Croatian
village of Smiljan in 1856,

as family stories have it,
on the stroke of midnight

while a thunderstorm raged
around him.

"He'll be a child of the storm,"
the midwife said.

His mother responded,
"No... of light."

His father was
a Greek Orthodox priest

who wanted his son
to follow in his footsteps.

But he took after his mother,

who invented a variety
of ingenious devices

for farming and housekeeping,

and encouraged
the boy's precocious gifts.

Tesla takes this lifelong
obsession with electricity

back to when he was
three years old

and he is petting
the family cat, Macak.

And he begins to create
sort of this sheet of sparks,

and it makes this crackling
noise, like thunder.

And he says to his father,
"What is that?"

And his father said,
"Well, it's electricity,

"such as you get
during thunderstorms.

And stop that, because you're,
you know, electrifying the cat."

For the rest of his life,

Tesla would be awestruck
by the wonders of electricity.

As a child, he spent hours
playing beside a tumbling stream

that ran beside his home.

His very first invention,
a hook designed to catch frogs,

made him the envy
of his friends.

Before he was six,

he had invented a motor
consisting of a rotating spindle

powered by June bugs.

"I wanted to harness
the energies of nature

to the service of man,"
he wrote later.

You can see the seeds
of a number of his inventions

when he was a child.

But he sometimes had difficulty

separating reality
from his own imagination.

"Sometimes," he wrote, "I was
quite unable to distinguish

whether what I saw
was tangible or not."

From an early age,

he was afflicted by spontaneous,
inexplicable visions

that confused his picture
of reality,

yet empowered his preternatural
gift for invention.

When he was 12,

in an extraordinary feat
of mind control,

he banished the images
that haunted him

by willing himself to live
in a visual world

of his own invention.

He could travel
in his own visions,

travel to foreign countries,
understand foreign languages.

And having control
over these visions

spurred on his creative energy
in later life.

By the time Tesla was 17,

he had honed
a keen visual facility.

"When I get an idea," he wrote,
"I do not rush into actual work.

"I start at once building it up
in my imagination.

"I change the construction,
make improvements,

and operate the device
in my mind."

Early in his life, he developed
this really magnificent way

of visualizing physical things.

By the time it came for him
to build them,

they came almost fully formed.

When he was 21,
Tesla won a scholarship

to a polytechnic institute
in Graz, Austria.

He studied
with a fierce determination,

sometimes 20 hours a day.

Tesla couldn't stop learning.

He couldn't stop reading.

He memorized all of Faust.

His memory was photographic
and unassailable.

He would see something once,
he would hear something once,

and it never left him.

He was obsessive, so once
he started to read Voltaire,

he had to read every single
thing that Voltaire ever wrote.

As Tesla immersed himself

in the study of mathematics
and science,

the mysteries of electricity
were waiting to be unraveled.

When a professor told his class

that it was impossible
to construct a motor

that could run
on alternating current,

Tesla objected.

"Mr. Tesla may accomplish
great things,"

the professor told the class,

"but he certainly never
will do this."

Tesla disagreed.

He's pushing it
with the professor.

He's saying, "I see."

And this is visionary.

He's saying, "I can do this."

At first, he didn't see
the solution,

but he saw the problem.

DC motors waste energy.

There's metal surfaces
moving over each other,

and they kind of do this
and there's...

There's sparks, it smells,
it breaks, it wears out.

It's a clunky, inelegant way
to do it.

He's thinking,
"That really wants to be AC."

I mean, he almost kills himself
trying to make it work.

"Day and night, year after year,

I worked incessantly,"
he wrote later.

"I could visualize motors
and generators.

"The images I saw were to me
perfectly real and tangible.

"Solving the problem
of alternating current

"was a matter of life and death.

I knew that I would perish
if I failed."

Obsessed, he stopped studying,
lost his scholarship,

dropped out of school,
and drifted.

He was falling
into a hallucinatory,

mind-shattered space,

and suffered, in his own words,
"a complete nervous breakdown."

For four years, Tesla's
imagination tormented him.

And then, it saved him.

In 1882, walking in a Budapest
park as the sun was setting,

the solution, he wrote,
"came like a flash of lightning.

"I cannot describe my emotions.

"A thousand secrets of nature
I would have given

"for that one which I had
wrested from her at all odds

and at the peril
of my existence."

I think he sees some kind of
intrinsic beauty to an AC motor.

I think that's
where you really see

this famous Tesla insight
and intuition.

Tesla's genius was to take
a DC motor and reimagine it.

He eliminated
the mechanical parts

where metal rubbed
against metal,

replaced the inner cylinder
with one made of copper,

and sent an electric current
through the outer ring,

turning the outer ring
and the cylinder into magnets.

The interaction
of the two magnets

made the inner cylinder spin
without any parts touching.

Imagine a merry-go-round, okay?

And you want to spin
your kid around,

and there's, you know, a pole

sticking up
from the merry-go-round.

So you grab the pole here

and you push it across
like that,

and the merry-go-round
goes around,

and you wait
until the pole comes,

and then you grab it
and push it again, okay?

So you can think of the pole

as the electromagnet
on the cylinder,

and you are the magnet
on the outside

and you're timing your grab.

Because if you just...
if you grabbed it here,

you know, you wouldn't be able
to push.

You've got to grab it like that.

So that's the way
an AC motor works.

No sparking, no smell,
nothing wearing out.

He really just saw
the whole thing...

In an instant.

Tesla was a 26-year-old

with an idea he was convinced
would change the world.

He went to work as an engineer

for a branch of Thomas Edison's
company in Paris,

but decided his main chance
lay in New York

with the great man himself.

He has a design in his head

and he's actually made
a prototype which works.

He is a huge admirer
of Thomas Edison,

and he feels
if Edison is presented

with better technology,

he will embrace it as something
that he could develop

in his own company,
presumably with the help

of his very junior employee,
Nikola Tesla.

In the spring of 1884,

Nikola Tesla brought
his invention to America

to share with his hero,
Thomas Edison.

This is late 19th century
America in New York City.

There's a tremendous sense
of possibility,

and it's an age
of incredible invention

and technological change.

And he totally expects
to be part of that.

Tesla walked confidently

into Edison's office
in lower Manhattan

the very day he arrived,

and flashed
a letter of introduction

from Edison's Paris office.

Meeting Edison, Tesla said,
"thrilled me to the marrow."

Edison hired him on the spot.

But they were cut
from two different molds.

Edison was a completely
practical man and inventor.

He wanted to make things work
and sell them.

Tesla really just wanted
to understand

how the mysteries of electricity
worked.

Tesla was a very
well-educated engineer.

He understood
both theory and mathematics.

Edison did a lot
by trial and error.

He was able to work well
with things

when he could see the cause
and effect immediately.

He wasn't nearly
as well-educated.

He didn't even go to college.

Edison, as he gets to know
Tesla, refers to him,

and this is not particularly
a compliment,

as a "poet of science."

Tesla worked for Edison
redesigning generators

20 hours a day,
seven days a week.

"I have had many hard-working
assistants," Edison told him,

"but you take the cake."

Encouraged,
Tesla worked even harder.

He desperately wanted Edison's
blessing as an inventor,

and needed his savvy
as a businessman.

But when he described
his AC motor to his boss,

Edison told him bluntly
he was wasting his time.

There was no future
in alternating current.

Edison had a lot of experience

in how incredibly difficult
it was

to go from the idea
to the reality.

And so he was very skeptical
of people who just said,

"Ah, well, I have this idea,

and this is going to be
the solution."

And it also would have meant
that he had to retrofit

and redo the entire system

that he was so emotionally
wedded to.

Disillusioned
by Edison's rejection,

after six months,
Tesla abruptly quit

and struck out on his own.

He's very naive and doesn't
know how the world works,

and he thinks that he will be
welcomed and well-funded

because he wants to elucidate
the mysteries of electricity.

He spent a year
patenting designs for arc lights

for two New Jersey businessmen,

who cheated him out of his
patents and left him penniless.

When it came to business,
Tesla would always be naive.

He spent the next winter
digging ditches

for two dollars a day.

"There were many days," he said,

"when I did not know where
my next meal was coming from."

When he leaves Edison's lab,
his heart is broken.

This man who he thought
was going to be a mentor to him

in some kind of dark,
opposite way

ends up mentoring him, right,

just by teaching him maybe
what he didn't want to be.

Tesla was alone,
without family or friends.

He had been in America
for nearly two years

and had nothing to show for it.

"My high education in science,
mechanics, and literature,"

he wrote,
"seemed to me like a mockery."

Then, that spring,
his luck turned around.

Two investors who learned
that Tesla had worked for Edison

took a chance
on the Serbian inventor.

They made him their partner
and rented him a laboratory

where he could perfect
his invention.

If it worked,
it was worth millions.

During the last part
of the 19th century,

as the railroad bound the nation
together with steel tracks

and made a handful of Americans
fabulously rich,

22-year-old George Westinghouse

had invented
the railroad air brake,

and parlayed his invention
into a formidable fortune.

Now a wealthy man

who knew how to bring inventions
into the marketplace,

Westinghouse was looking
to the future,

and the future was electricity.

There were a lot of people
saying

there's money to be made here.

And Westinghouse comes across
Tesla, and he thinks,

"This man is a jewel,

"and he may even have nailed
the toughest technical problem

"in the middle of this emerging,

"potentially immensely
profitable game-changer:

alternating current."

In 1888, Westinghouse bought
Tesla's patents

for tens of thousands
of dollars,

making Tesla a rich man.

The contract specified paying
Tesla, as the inventor, a bonus:

$2.50 for every horsepower
of alternating current sold.

Tesla is someone who has the key
technological, creative insight,

and what he needs is

someone to coach him
and someone to fund him.

Tesla headed to Pittsburgh,

where Westinghouse began
building Tesla's motor,

along with the dynamos
and transformers that would make

long-distance transmission
of electricity possible.

But the struggle

to make Tesla's invention
a commercial success

was far from over.

Westinghouse was competing
for the market with Edison,

and he was in trouble.

Electricity was
a capital-intensive business,

and his company
was overextended.

His investors were worried.

Westinghouse goes to Tesla
and says,

"In order for your dream,

"your alternating-current motor,
to succeed,

"I have to... I can't pay you

"what I promised you
in the contract.

I'll go out of business."

Westinghouse asked Tesla

to rescind the royalty clause
in the contract.

Without consulting a lawyer,
without hesitating,

Tesla agreed.

Tesla does not try to negotiate,
you know?

"Okay, we'll move it down
from $2.50,

I'll take ten cents
on the dollar."

No, he doesn't negotiate at all.

He simply tears up the contract.

Their contract was really
very, very generous.

$2.50 for every horsepower
of electricity produced?

It would have made Tesla one
of the richest men in history.

He was naive
and also tended to think

he could break
the state of the art

any morning before breakfast.

Just months after relinquishing
his royalties,

Tesla appeared
at Columbia University

to demonstrate his new wonders,

determined to astonish
an audience of engineers

along with a few influential
investors.

A lot of the reason
for the demonstration

was to get patronage.

It was really what scientists
were doing in the time.

In the air was this American
sensibility of "show me."

"Yeah, you can write

"your fancy European words,
you can write equations,

"you can publish in some journal
that nobody reads.

"I want to see it.

Show me."

Tesla had begun to explore
the possibility

of transmitting energy
without wires.

"Here is a simple glass tube,"
he told his astonished audience.

"Wherever I move it in space,
its soft, pleasing light

persists with undiminished
brightness."

People were used to incandescent
lamps, lamps with filaments,

but this idea of a light bulb
with no filament

that could turn on
with absolutely no connection

to wire or to a battery?

The lamps were
Tesla's own invention,

the forerunners
of today's fluorescent tubes.

Incandescent bulbs glowed hot.

Tesla called his tubes
"cold light."

Cold light is a bulb
with gases in it,

and when electricity is nearby,
it lights up.

It's wireless.

You don't have to have all kinds
of wiring to make it work.

You just have to have
ambient electricity.

Ambient electricity,
an electric field,

was created
by another Tesla invention.

He invented this device
called the Tesla coil,

which enabled him to generate
enormously high voltage.

It could take low AC voltage

and build up inside the coil
an enormous amount of energy,

and then,
through a spark discharge,

release all of that energy
very, very quickly.

As one reporter put it,

"Tesla acted the part
of a veritable magician."

Like a good showman,

Tesla wanted to leave
his audience dumbfounded.

He stretched out his hand

and took hundreds of thousands
of volts of electricity

directly through his body.

Tesla was apparently unhurt
by the whole thing,

was pretty amazing to people.

Of course, he knew the secret.

It's called the skin effect.

His body was taking
the electricity

and it was literally running
through his skin,

from his hand
down to the ground,

and not entering the internal
parts of his body,

where it really could do
some real damage.

I've done things like that,
and it hurts like hell.

Maybe Tesla was just hurting
like crazy,

but the real danger
with electricity is

if you grab something that's
at a high voltage,

it causes your muscles
to contract,

and particularly your heart,
and so your heart can stop.

The boundary line between,
"Gee whiz, gosh, bang,

I can make magic happen,"

and the careful laboratory
verification of results

was not all that
cleanly defined.

At that time,
electricity is still somewhere

between magic, science,
and business.

Tesla concluded
his three-hour lecture

with a paean to electric energy

and its beneficent future
as a servant of mankind.

"Everywhere is energy," he said.

"With the power derived from it,

humanity will advance
with great strides."

"The magnificent possibilities
expand our minds,

"strengthen our hopes,

and fill our hearts
with supreme delight."

Tesla was motivated
by wonder and awe at nature.

He really wasn't in this
to make money.

He really felt that
there should be a way,

given how powerful nature is,
to harness that power

and then use it to relieve
human suffering and toil.

♪ Hallelujah! ♪

♪ Hallelujah! ♪

♪ Hallelujah! Hallelujah! ♪

♪ Hallelujah! ♪

On May 1, 1893, as
a great choir broke into song,

President Grover Cleveland
flicked a switch

and 160,000 light bulbs lit up
the evening sky over Chicago,

opening
the Columbian Exposition.

♪ Hallelujah! ♪

♪ Hallelujah! ♪

♪ Hallelujah! ♪

♪ Hallelujah! ♪

♪ For the Lord... ♪

The exposition signaled
the coming triumph

of alternating current
over direct current.

Westinghouse
had outfoxed Edison,

winning the contract
to wire the exposition

with alternating current.

Twelve 75-ton dynamos generated
three times more energy

than the entire city of Chicago.

Six months later,

Westinghouse went on
to win a greater prize.

The contract to harness
Niagara Falls

to generate alternating-current
electricity.

Tesla worked with the engineers,

perfected all of these dynamos
and motors,

and helped design everything.

The water powered
the waterwheels,

and that powered the generators,

and the generators
sent out electricity.

At that point, DC was
a technology that was defeated.

Alternating current triumphed.

Before Tesla,
you would have to have

thousands of little power plants
at every mile.

After Tesla,

from one power source,
Niagara Falls,

you could light up and power
the entire Northeast.

The modern world was born.

Alternating current transformed
daily life in the 20th century,

and made Tesla famous.

Tesla was all at once
a celebrity... a new Edison.

He was enormously famous.

Incredibly charming,
mesmerizing, and funny.

He speaks many languages,
loves poetry.

He's just an all-around
Renaissance man

that people are very drawn to.

He's very beloved
of newspaper reporters

because he could go on for hours
on almost any topic

and have something interesting
and insightful to say.

Tesla was fond of luxury.

He lived in the Astor House,
the city's first luxury hotel,

and dined at Delmonico's,

the lavish restaurant of choice
for fashionable New Yorkers.

Resplendent in his cutaway coat
and striped dress pants,

he was the darling
of New York society,

a regular at the glittering
tables of the super-rich,

men like John Jacob Astor
and J.P. Morgan.

He needed to be supported.

He needed to cultivate
and persuade

these very powerful
industrialists

that he was worthy
of being invested in.

37 years old, Tesla devoted
his prodigious energies

to creating new inventions

in his laboratory
in lower Manhattan,

where he passed long,
solitary hours,

and delighted in showing off
his experiments to friends,

artists, writers,
society figures,

the luminaries of his day,
among them Mark Twain.

Stars of the Gilded Age came
to his laboratory,

and Tesla was a star
among these stars.

Tesla continued inventing,
securing patent after patent.

Yet he was peculiar,

dogged by troubling,
persistent obsessions.

He was enormously popular
and celebrated,

but he had a lot of odd phobias
and routines.

Everything that he does
should be divided by three.

If he was staying in a hotel,

the room should be divisible
by three.

In his younger days,
he would swim in the morning,

and he always did 27 laps

because it was divisible
by three.

He would circle a block
three times

before entering a building.

He had horrible germ phobia.

He couldn't stand the sight
of women's earrings.

He couldn't stand the idea
of touching human hair.

I don't like to use the term
"obsessive-compulsive,"

but he was.

He had a lot of restrictions

keeping him away
from actual humans.

Despite being
a great humanitarian,

Tesla had a lot of issues
with humanity.

Tesla was a romantic,

but romance had no place
in his life.

"I do not think there is any
thrill," he told a reporter,

"like that felt by the inventor

"as he sees some creation of
the brain unfolding to success.

"Such emotions make a man

"forget food, sleep, friends,
love, everything.

It's a pity, too, for sometimes
we feel so lonely."

In 1899, Tesla headed west.

He had enormous ambitions,

and they were growing too big
for his New York laboratory.

43 years old, once again,
he imagined an invention

that he believed
would change the world.

He set up shop

outside of the resort town
of Colorado Springs,

checked into
the Alta Vista Hotel...

Room 207,
a number divisible by three...

And went to work.

In a laboratory built
to his specifications

on the outskirts of town,

he conducted a series of
experiments in great secrecy.

He built this lab

where he could generate
huge amounts of electricity,

and built this huge fence
around it saying, "Keep out."

And where did he get the money
to do this?

By telling John Jacob Astor IV

that he was now going to develop
his cold light,

and the cold light was
so superior to the Edison bulb,

and just think of the millions
of light bulbs

that were sold every year

that would be displaced
by the cold light.

But Tesla had no intention

of profiting from a paltry thing
like fluorescent lighting.

He soon had his coils producing
a million volts of electricity.

Errant bolts set his laboratory
on fire.

He drew so much power
that he once plunged

the entire town
of Colorado Springs

into darkness.

Using high voltages,
Tesla theorized

that he could transmit
electricity vast distances

by sending electric currents
through the Earth.

You have this Tesla coil,
and there's this...

this enormous spark
across the room.

That's a current.

The current makes
a magnetic field.

That magnetic field spreads out.

If the current is large enough,

it can go miles
and light a bulb.

He set up an experiment

where he had some light bulbs
in a field,

and they were surrounded
in a 50-foot square of wire.

And he transmitted power

so that an electrical field
was created within that wire,

and the bulbs lit up.

That was one of the things
that led him to believe

that he would be able
to accomplish this

on a wide scale.

At the end of eight months
of experimentation,

Tesla announced
that he had proved

that he could transmit electric
power abundantly and cheaply

anywhere on the planet.

But he never produced
the evidence to make his case.

This is where Tesla
didn't do so well.

He really thought
he was on to something.

I think his picture
was pretty much wrong.

I think he fooled himself.

The problem is
a physics problem.

The farther you get away
from the source,

the weaker and weaker
the electricity gets.

Tesla is of the school that

once he believed he had
some evidence for something,

he was very quick to promote it,
expound it to the world,

and not at all interested
in challenging it.

Tesla was damaging
his credibility.

He tarnished it even further
by claiming that late one night,

he received signals from Mars.

His instrumentation was doing
some weird flipping around,

and he was claiming that it was
communications from space.

It may have been gamma rays
or cosmic rays,

even radio waves.

The fact that he interpreted it

as communication
from alien beings or Martians

made people begin to doubt him.

His fertile imagination,

so critical
to his inventive powers,

was betraying him.

That same year,

an Italian electrical engineer,
Guglielmo Marconi,

sent a wireless message
across the English Channel.

Tesla dismissed him.

"Marconi possesses more
enterprise than knowledge.

"Let him continue.

He is using 17 of my patents."

In the year 1900,

44-year-old Nikola Tesla
returned to New York City.

He had burned through $100,000

in eight months
in Colorado Springs.

Now he was looking

for many hundreds of thousands
of dollars more.

Without using wires,

without using any other means
of transmission than the Earth,

he wanted to send electrical
power and wireless messages

around the globe.

And he believed he could do this

based on the experiments he had
conducted in Colorado Springs.

Settling into the luxurious
Waldorf Astoria Hotel,

Tesla started looking
for investors.

But raising capital
would not be easy.

Heedless, he was making more
and more extravagant claims.

He repeated that he had received
signals from Mars,

and insisted
that he had the apparatus

to signal the Martians back.

He also foresaw the transmission
of pictures and sound,

then music, images, and voices,
real-time.

But for investors,
you have to have something

that seems a little more
realistic and concrete.

How do you explain a vision?

Tesla's reputation as
a scientist was on the line.

At this point,

Tesla has not had a commercially
successful invention

in a number of years.

And as he tries to get
new people interested

in investing in him,

they're less than enthusiastic
because they feel that

he's just going to take
their money and vaporize it.

But J.P. Morgan, the most
powerful financier in America,

was intrigued.

Tesla's breakthrough
with alternating current

was worth millions.

Morgan wanted to hear

what the eccentric inventor
was proposing now.

Tesla told him that he had
designed a small tower

to transmit wireless messages.

He kept secret his intention

to transmit electric power
wirelessly;

to make unlimited electricity
available free

to anyone with an antenna.

Tesla's basic idea was
to give energy for free

for the betterment of humanity.

But he wasn't going to be able
to sell this idea to Morgan.

He was playing
to what Morgan's interests were.

Morgan invested $150,000

toward what he thought would be

the wireless transmission
of messages,

but warned that $150,000
was his limit.

With Morgan's money,

Tesla bought 200 acres
on Long Island's North Shore.

He called it Wardenclyffe,
after its former owner,

and began building
a transmission tower.

He also intended to have
a manufacturing facility,

but J.P. Morgan's $150,000

was never going to complete
what Tesla had in mind.

And I'm sure that
when he took that money,

he thought
there'd be more following

once he achieved
some measure of success.

But a triumphant Guglielmo
Marconi doomed Tesla's dream.

On December 12, 1901,

Marconi sent
the first wireless transmission

across the Atlantic,
based on Tesla's patents.

Eight years later,

Marconi would win
the Nobel Prize

for the invention
of wireless telegraphy... radio.

And the minute J.P. Morgan
sees that, he's done with Tesla.

So there's no more money
coming from J.P. Morgan.

So Tesla is in a very bad place.

This is where, had he retained
his royalties

for alternating current,

he would have had
all the money he needed

to do whatever he wanted.

But he didn't, and he wrote
just these ever more pathetic,

pleading and insulting
and bitter letters to Morgan.

I mean, almost like
what you would expect, you know,

a crazy divorced person
to write.

"Have you ever read
the book of Job?" he wrote.

"If you will put my mind
in place of his body,

you will find my suffering
accurately described."

"With fifty thousand dollars
more, Wardenclyffe is completed,

and I have an immortal crown,
and an immense fortune."

"You are a big man,

"but your work is wrought
in passing form.

Mine is immortal."

Tesla didn't know how to work
with the J.P. Morgans of his era

and what it would take
to keep them on board.

He didn't know how to think
about his technology

from the perspective of people
that would fund it, finance it.

Part of the creativity
is understanding

how you can fit it
into the world of practice.

It was a big flaw in his life.

In the summer of 1903,

just as he finished making
his first experiments,

Tesla ran out of money.

His experiments on Long Island
were never finished.

But what he was trying to do
there was pretty far out.

Now, messages might have
been possible,

because to send a message,

you need a tiny, tiny,
tiny amount of power.

But I don't think
there was any way

that he was going to be able

to put sufficient power
out of this thing

so that he was going to be able
to go, you know, even a mile.

The insight he demonstrated
for the AC motor is true genius,

but his dream of powering things
over vast distances

really wasn't workable,
and I've always been curious

why he even thought
that was possible.

Still, Tesla dreamed
of Wardenclyffe,

trying desperately for years

to raise the money
to resurrect his vision.

"I will be able to transmit
energy of any amount

to any place," he said.

Tesla believed that the tower
would also be powerful enough

to send signals
to nearby planets,

especially if there were
any Martians out there

to receive them.

In 1916, his fortune dwindling,

he relinquished
the Wardenclyffe mortgage

to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel,

where he had been living
on credit for almost 20 years,

running up a debt of $20,000.

The following year,
to make the land easier to sell,

the Waldorf had the tower
dynamited.

Tesla was 61.

He would spend the rest of his
life imagining new inventions

and hoping to find someone
to invest in them.

He consulted
with various companies.

But he was a lonely,
eccentric scientist

who really was frustrated

that his ideas had never been
fully seen through.

His goal was to try
and sell something

so he'd get the money,
go back to Wardenclyffe,

and complete his baby,
which was a world global system

to transmit light, voice,
pictures, and power

to all points of the globe.

And he was trying to attach
our technology

to the wheel work of nature...

Harnessing geothermal power,
the tides, wind, and sun.

He did not want to sap the Earth
of our natural resources.

He stands for the future.

Tesla still commanded attention,

but increasingly, his ideas were
losing their mooring in reality.

Science and science fiction meet
in Nikola Tesla.

As time goes on,

his inventions start to take on
more of the fantastic.

They are visions,
they take full flight,

they unleash themselves
from the strictures of reality.

He starts to develop an idea
about photographing thought,

which is one of his most poetic
and beautiful non-inventions

in my book.

He thinks, you know,
"Thought is electrical energy,

"and we record electricity
all the time.

Why can't we photograph
thought?"

Tesla had never cared
about money.

Now he had hardly any left.

Leaving behind a trail of debts,

he moved from one hotel
to another.

His mind was drifting.

Despite the fact that
Mark Twain is dead,

Tesla is sending him packages

to an address that no longer
exists in New York City.

He's living with ghosts.

His only friends were
the pigeons in Bryant Park.

"I have been feeding pigeons,

thousands of them, for years,"
he told a reporter.

"One was different.

"It was a female.

"I loved that pigeon
as a man loves a woman,

"and she loved me.

As long as I had her,
there was purpose to my life."

The night his beloved pigeon
died,

he saw a light in her eyes
he described as more intense

than the most powerful lamps
in his laboratory.

"When that light went out,"
he said,

"a light went out inside of me."

Nikola Tesla died
on January 7, 1943.

He was 86 years old,
alone in the New Yorker Hotel,

room 3327 on the 33rd floor.

Six months later,
the United States Supreme Court

ruled that the patents
to Marconi's wireless device

belonged to Tesla.

Tesla, not Marconi,
invented radio.

But by now,
he was nearly forgotten.

His coils were never
commercially successful,

his fluorescent lights
never marketed,

his wireless system
never realized,

his invention of radio
never fully credited.

Even today, his achievements
remain obscure.

Alternating-current electricity
is not something you think about

every time you put your hand
on the light switch

and turn on the lights.

There's not something
that's easy to say,

"Ah, okay, there we are.

There's the Tesla,
that's what he gave us."

He established
the basic framework

for electrical generation
and distribution

that drives our economy today.

But he was moving down
his own path.

He was pursuing a vision.

Didn't necessarily always see
the gaps

that would have to be filled

in order to get
where he was going,

but he always believed
that he could get there.

His imagination carried him
beyond his time.

With over 200 patents,

Tesla had an exhilarating sense
of the future.

But a long road of invention
had to be traveled

before many of his ideas
could be realized.

Tesla resonates
with our own time.

Many of the things
that he predicted

are being brought to reality
by the current generation.

Wireless networking,
cell phones.

Yeah, I think that's
what brought Tesla back to us,

was that his dream came true.

He was an artist.

He's working with his dreams,
he's working with his visions.

His medium is not pigment,
his medium is not clay;

his medium is electricity.

He was like a scientist
with an artistic nature,

and many scientists
are driven by that.

I mean, absolutely!

Tesla's really a visionary.

Enough of his stuff came true.

Enough of his stuff came true.