The Triumph and Tragedy of Nikola Tesla
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For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for travelers to North America. They gaze on, awestruck, as nearly 3,000 tons of water plunges over 150 feet every second, causing the Earth to tremble beneath them. But for one child in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a mere picture of this wonder of nature was enough to set his mind racing.

He ran to his uncle with a crazy idea: What if you could harness the fall's power? This child was the budding inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla. And nearly 30 years later, he would see his dream become a reality. At one minute past midnight on November 16th, 1896, a switch is thrown that brings the world's first hydroelectric power station to life.

In the coming months and years, power from the falls reaches New York City. Broadway is ablaze with lights, while the subway rumbles underground, carrying commuters to their destinations. Tesla himself is heralded as one of the leading inventors in America and seems destined to go down in history as an architect of the modern world. But soon after, his life would take a dramatically different course.

His investors would abandon him. He would become consumed by obsessive-compulsive disorder. And this man amongst men would live out his final days with only pigeons for company. So how did a young man from the Austrian Empire become the inventor who helped create the modern world? And why did someone to whom we still owe so much today end his life destitute and alone?

Nikola Tesla was the archetypal mad genius, full of incredible ideas. He rose from obscurity. He had the world at his feet, but then he had the most precipitous and tragic decline. His brain was wired up differently. He was an oddity, but at the same time,

He was a deeply, deeply humanitarian person. He died impoverished and alone. It almost seems as if there was a conspiracy of big business working against him.

You're listening to Forbidden History, the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Janine Harony, and this is the triumphant tragedy of Nikola Tesla.

The world of the mid-19th century is very different to today. It is a world without electricity. It's forged through the blood and sweat of man. The poor get up and go to bed with the sun, while the rich fight the dark with fire, candles, and gas.

The fastest way to travel is the coal-guzzling steam train, and communication is through voice, art, and books. Slowly but surely, however, the world is undergoing a revolution. Men with surnames like Faraday, Volta, Ohm, and Edison are heralding the dawn of the electricity age.

And in a small village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the midst of a thunderstorm, a child is born who will join their ranks as one of the greatest inventors in history: Nikola Tesla. Tony McMahon is an author and historian. We asked him about the young Tesla's childhood

Nikola Tesla was born in what was then the Austrian Empire, a huge, sprawling empire across Europe, in what is now Croatia, although he himself and his family most likely identified as Serbs.

Nikola Tesla's mother ran the home when he was a child, and she's credited with having invented a mechanical egg beater and a state-of-the-art loom, and that was despite the fact she'd never seen machines like this. Tesla is fascinated by her inventions, and as he grows up, he soon discovers that he is unlike the other children in his village. Historian and author Alan Butler.

He was almost certainly autistic. His brain was wired up differently than most of our brains are. He had an incredible memory. I mean, totally photographic, could remember an entire book, no problem. Rarely slept at all, was obsessive-compulsive in all manner of ways.

He also displays signs of what we might today diagnose as synesthesia, where the divisions between a person's senses become blurred. Even slight mental stimulation would see visions of scenes and objects invade Tesla's mind without warning. In some people, this can feel like a harmless quirk. In others, it can feel isolating.

But in Tesla, it enables him to think outside the box in an incredibly visual way. Tony McMahon.

he could barely distinguish between reality and his own imagination. But maybe that was a gift because he was able to harness those visions to almost have an idea of what the future, a future that didn't yet exist, would look like. And then by harnessing those visions, he could put them down on paper and begin inventing stuff. His vivid imagination

combined with his photographic memory were the perfect cocktail that one day would lead him to be one of the world's greatest inventors. And so, inspired by his mother and the visions of the future he sees in his mind, this is the moment where Tesla decides he wants to become an engineer. But it will not be a straightforward path because his father will oppose him.

The future of much of our modern world is therefore about to pivot on Tesla's ability to change his mind. Tesla's father, Milyutin, is renowned in his village for his incredible memory, his mathematical prowess, and his ability to speak 12 languages. In many ways, he and his son are very similar.

But Milyutin is also a devout Eastern Orthodox priest who expects Tesla to give up his engineering ambitions and follow in his footsteps. Tesla tries to change his father's mind with little success, but when he's 17, he contracts cholera. It's a traumatic time for him and his family. He's confined to bed for nine months and close to death on at least two occasions.

But Tesla is able to use his illness to his advantage. Tony McMahon. He said to his father, "If I recover from cholera, promise me that I can go to engineering school." His father agreed, he recovered, and amazingly, his father kept that promise.

now free to pursue his ambitions. When he's 19, he wins a scholarship to study engineering in Austria. One aspect of his course soon begins to intrigue him: electricity.

At this point in history, electricity is only just beginning to move from the laboratory to the outside world. But thousands of miles away, a dazzling display in a small village in the United States is about to catapult it into the mainstream, creating an entire new industry that Tesla will one day play a key role in shaping.

For the inhabitants of the remote town of Menlo Park, New Jersey, the New Year's Eve of 1879 would be one they would never forget. Train after train pulls up at the tiny station platform, decanting hundreds of men and women dressed in elegant evening wear.

They've been persuaded to eschew the glitzy celebrations in nearby New York City and travel to this small village by the promise that tonight they will see the future. They huddle together in the cold, counting down the minutes, and as the clock strikes midnight, it happens. Night becomes day. There's a collective gasp as the street is lit by a series of incandescent light bulbs.

The audience is bewitched. These bulbs are like magic. And then they meet the man behind them. His name is Thomas Edison. In reality, Thomas Edison was not the inventor of the light bulb itself. But as Tony McMahon reveals, his talent lay in taking such inventions from the drawing board and turning them into a product for people to buy.

Edison wasn't just an inventor, he was also a brilliant entrepreneur. He realised, for example, with a light bulb, it was no good just inventing a clever gadget. He was going to have to create a whole infrastructure, a network that would make the light bulb relevant to everybody, to the general population. So he was going to have to create the grid, the wiring, the power stations that would turn it into a utility.

Edison vows to make electricity so cheap that only the rich will buy candles. And this titan of industry is soon to play a key role in Tesla's career, first as patron and then as adversary. After a spell teaching in a school back in his village in 1881, Tesla gets his first practical engineering experience, working in Budapest on the city's telephone exchange.

The following year, he takes up a job offer in Paris, working for Edison's European operation, installing indoor lighting. Over the next couple of years, he impresses his managers, and when one is instructed to return to the United States, he asks Tesla to come with him. Tesla immediately agrees. Tony McMahon.

Tesla impresses in Paris, but he jumps at the chance to go to the United States and work for Edison over there. Now, the reason for that isn't to get rich. He's not interested in becoming fabulously wealthy. It's the opportunities that America offers. It was a place where he could realize his dreams. He could create inventions that would change the world. America was the place to make that happen.

Tesla arrives in Manhattan in June 1884 and starts work almost immediately at Edison's machine works. He soon bumps into Thomas Edison himself. Edison tasks Tesla with improving his power generators.

and as an incentive, offers him a $50,000 bonus if he is successful. For the next year, Tesla throws himself into the work, and he is able to make the required improvements. But when he returns to Edison for the promised reward, Edison says the whole thing had simply been a joke. Alan Butler

"Edison was everything Tesla wasn't. Edison was greedy and conniving and not a nice man at all. He's a very famous man in history, but very few people know what an awful man he was." Tesla feels personally betrayed and responds by quitting his job. But there is another reason he thinks leaving Edison's employ is the right decision. He has come to believe that Edison's approach to electricity is wrong.

This young Serbian immigrant believes that he can take on the industry's most successful entrepreneur alone and beat him at his own game. It is this combination of self-belief and morals that would lead Tesla to his fortune and see him lose it all. The flow of electricity can take two forms. Direct current, or DC, used by Edison's network, flows in one direction along a wire

Tesla believes that the future lies with alternating current, or AC, which changes direction periodically. We asked Tony McMahon what the difference meant in practice. When you transmit electricity over long distances, it loses voltage. Now, with Edison's preferred approach, DC, you would have essentially had to have had a power station on every street corner in order to power homes and businesses.

It may seem odd today to imagine every street having its own DC power station, but that was what Edison was rolling out around the world. Tesla believed this to be nonsensical. He thinks that AC is far better for sending electricity to where it's needed, because a simple device called a transformer could make long-distance transmission a reality.

With a transformer, the voltage of alternating current can be changed up and down. So you can send it at a high voltage from a power station a long way, then step it down to a low voltage when it gets to a house, for example. But with AC, with Tesla's approach, you could have fewer larger power stations that were powering entire cities.

Even Edison must surely have seen that Tesla's vision is the superior one. But it's also one he has no interest in implementing. In fact, he will fight Tesla to prevent it from happening. Edison holds the key patents to his DC system, and they're making him vast amounts of money. And Tesla's AC concept has one significant flaw. Edison had a trump card.

And that was that only DC could power motors. Now, they weren't very good motors. They had perishable parts, they were expensive. But it was only DC that could turn electricity into movement. Now, if Tesla could unlock the secret of using AC to power motors, then he'd motor ahead of Edison.

Tesla, now flying solo, convinces a couple of investors to finance his own company and begins working on building that missing piece of the puzzle: an AC electric motor. His approach to working is completely different to Edison's, where Edison would invest time and money building countless prototypes, testing them and refining them. Tesla works much faster.

By harnessing that incredible imagination he possessed since childhood, he has already invented an AC motor in his mind. Tony McMahon. In 1882, Tesla was taking a stroll in a park in Budapest with a friend, but his mind was full of

how to make AC electricity a reality. And as the sun was setting in the sky, he had one of his great visions. And there and then, he started drawing in the sand what was to become, in reality, a realization of the AC motor. But as he is building an AC motor, exactly as he'd seen it in his head during that walk in the park, his investors get cold feet and pull out.

While he searches for new money, he's forced to make ends meet by taking a job digging ditches, ironically for Edison's DC cables. But in 1887, Tesla secures further financial backing and sets up the Tesla Electric Company.

In his new headquarters in Manhattan, he builds and crucially patents a viable AC motor. It not only works with alternating current, it's also cheaper to manufacture and maintain. It is, in short, far superior to Edison's. Alan Butler

He had a mind very similar to that of Leonardo da Vinci in that it worked in many different directions simultaneously. But he was, in essence, an engineer. He thought like a physicist but acted like an engineer. Alternating power and motors was a tremendous leap forward at the time. So that's clearly one of the greatest things that Tesla did.

But while Tesla's AC motor solves the biggest drawback with AC, Edison is not about to give up easily. Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe was the editor of the Fortean Times, and we asked him to compare Edison and Tesla.

Edison, to some extent, was in the pocket of the big business organizations that were buying his work, buying his inventions, buying his technology. Whereas Tesla was an idealist and a dreamer. And those two personalities clash. Tesla cannot take on Thomas Edison alone, chiefly because he can't afford to. He will need an equally wealthy and powerful backer.

But fortunately, he's about to come to the attention of George Westinghouse. George Westinghouse, like Thomas Edison, is an engineer and businessman. But unlike Edison, he's also a believer in AC, devoting all his resources into developing and marketing it. When he hears that Tesla has made an AC motor, he seeks him out and makes him an offer. He'll give him a job.

$60,000 in cash and, most lucratively, a royalty of $2.50 per horsepower produced by each of Tesla's motors. Tesla accepts, and through his new patron, the young man from an obscure village in Europe will become a key figure in the United States electricity industry.

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But, while he may have won the battle, what he is about to enter is full-scale war. At first, Westinghouse and Tesla are met with success. The superiority of their AC system sees them begin to cut into Edison's market share. And for Tesla personally, those lucrative royalty payments are starting to accrue.

But Edison isn't going down without a fight. He will attempt to convince the electricity-buying public that Tesla's AC is far more dangerous than his own DC. What results is a public relations battle in which Edison will fight Tesla and Westinghouse for control of the future of electricity. Tony McMahon.

On the one side you had Edison and DC backed by General Electric, and on the other you had Tesla and AC backed by Westinghouse, and this was to become known as the War of the Currents. Using AC electricity, Edison stages electrocutions of stray animals in front of large audiences. His implication is clear: do you really want this AC electricity in your home?

And Edison is about to go even further. By the late 1800s, executing criminals by hanging is becoming increasingly unpopular in the United States. A series of botched executions prompts New York State to seek alternative methods, such as electrocution. They contact Thomas Edison for his recommendations.

Edison's first response is that he believes capital punishment should be abolished entirely. But then, he spies an opportunity. He suggests that if electrocution is to be used, then the best appliance would be an AC dynamo, manufactured by Westinghouse and Tesla. It is evidence of how far Edison was willing to go to further his business interests.

and is at once barbaric and genius. Three AC dynamos are secured through a second-hand dealer in Boston, and the world's first electric chair is constructed. In August 1890, William Kemmler, a convicted murderer, is the first criminal to be sentenced to death by electrocution.

Kemmler is strapped into the electric chair, and 1300 volts of AC electricity is administered for 17 seconds. His face contorts with pain, and he clenches his fist so tight that blood rolls down his hands and drips onto the floor. But he is still alive, and so a second charge of 2000 volts is administered for a staggering 4 minutes.

The smell of burning flesh fills the room, and Kemmler catches fire. Once his charred body stops smoldering, in front of a group of horrified onlookers, he is finally pronounced dead. Westinghouse is horrified. He remarks they could have done a better job with an axe.

Edison suggests putting the next prisoner's hands in jars of water might speed things up. AC's reputation has taken another hit, and by now, Westinghouse can hardly afford to stay in this fight. And when a London bank collapses and triggers a financial panic, his investors start pulling out. He does manage to secure new lenders, but they have a condition.

Westinghouse must cut back on what they saw as excessive spending on research and patents. In short, he must terminate his royalty contract with Tesla. As Tony McMahon describes, Tesla makes one of the worst business decisions in history.

Tesla incredibly agreed to give up the royalties on the electric horsepower produced by his motors. And he did that to essentially help Westinghouse through a financial squeeze. And he, out of incredible loyalty to his patron, tore up his contract in front of Westinghouse. Now, given the way that things were going to play out, that proved to be a

catastrophic mistake because Tesla could have been the richest person on the planet, the equivalent of Bill Gates, but instead in that moment of loyalty to his patron, he was going to lose everything. Call it loyalty, call it naivety. Either way, Tesla has just walked away from the millions in royalties already owed to him and the billions that his patents would have gone on to generate.

And so, as the tide of the current wars changes, he won't now benefit. In 1893, Chicago will be home to the World's Columbian Exposition, a showcase of the latest in global technology, including electric lighting. Tesla and Westinghouse see their chance to turn public opinion back in their favor, while Edison hopes to bury AC once and for all.

But Edison's inefficient DC cabling is expensive, and Westinghouse is able to undercut his rival bid by half. He and Tesla secure the contract, and when the doors open, President Grover Cleveland himself switches on their dazzling display of 100,000 incandescent lamps. In the room next door, visitors are entranced by the AC generators powering them.

The pair are back in the race, and Tesla is about to achieve a childhood dream that will secure them victory over Edison once and for all. Tony McMahon.

From childhood, Tesla was mesmerized by images of the Niagara Falls, that vast waterfall in Northern America. Fast forward to the 1890s, and he was involved in a competitive bid against Edison. He was backed by Westinghouse to build a power station at the falls.

Now he won that bid and as a result of creating that AC driven power station, New York for the first time was ablaze with lights. The New York that we know today. Times Square, Broadway, all those lights, the metro and so on, all powered by Tesla's power station. And even poor old Edison had to give up the ghost and convert to AC.

Edison's DC system is doomed. Tesla is heralded as one of the leading inventors in America, and he sees his vision of AC electricity transmission become the standard around the world. Westinghouse will sell his systems in America, Europe, and even China. But Tesla's earlier naivety comes back to haunt him.

Because he had ripped up his royalty contract, Westinghouse doesn't need to pay him a cent. Historian Andrew Gough. I think you could safely say that Tesla was a fantastic scientist and just an awful businessman. And that was the story throughout his entire career. People were nicking his patents and absolutely just taking advantage of everything he did because they had more money and a greater opportunity to exploit it.

But, perhaps surprisingly, Tesla does not seem concerned. He's already thinking about his next big idea, which promises to do away with transmission wires entirely. But he's soon to discover that missing out on those royalty payments will mean the difference between success and failure.

While the War of the Currents had been raging, Tesla had still been working on other projects. In 1891, he had patented a circuit known as the Tesla Coil.

A Tesla coil makes it possible to send electrical signals, and even electrical power itself, through the air. At a public lecture in New York, Tesla had astonished his audience by doing just that: using a coil to power nearby electric lights wirelessly.

His next aim is to increase the distance, believing that thin air at high altitude would be the most conductive. In 1899, he moves out of his small laboratory in New York City to a larger site in Colorado Springs. There he builds the largest Tesla coil ever constructed. And as Tony McMahon reveals, when the coil is powered up, the results are staggering.

Light bulbs within 100 feet of the lab actually glowed even when turned off. Horses in the nearby stable bolted after receiving shocks through their metal shoes. And even butterflies were electrified and apparently swirled round in circles. It's got to be said, it looked like Tesla was onto something.

Having successfully powered lights hundreds of feet away from the coil, Tesla's ambitions grow still further, and he envisages what he calls the "World Wireless System." His aim is to achieve a wireless electricity transmission on a worldwide scale, using a gargantuan Tesla coil to send power across the Atlantic. And it would also have a secondary purpose: the broadcast of music and images. Tony McMahon.

The world wireless system was Tesla at his most ambitious. What he envisaged was from a tower, say, he would be able to power electric cars in London or in Paris, for example.

Elon Musk eat your heart out. On the other hand, he even thought that it might be possible to transmit music or even images to a small device from which you'll be able to see those images and listen to that music. Now today, you might call that your iPhone. Tesla secures investment from JP Morgan and in 1901 begins to build a tower nearly 200 feet tall at Wardenclyffe, Long Island.

He is about to face competition. At the dawn of the electric age, a lot of people around the world were innovating and inventing at the same time. But the key thing was to patent your innovation and then to defend it against infringements. Across the Atlantic, Italian-born inventor Marconi is working on the radio.

And on the 12th of December 1901, he has a breakthrough, making the first transatlantic radio transmission from England to Newfoundland. Tesla's work is completely overshadowed. The press turn against him, claiming that his Wardenclyffe project is a hoax

Investors start piling their money into Marconi's projects, while J.P. Morgan pulls Tesla's funding. Construction at Wardenclyffe grinds to a halt, and the tower would later be demolished and sold for scrap.

What makes this downturn in fortune even harder for Tesla to cope with is the fact that Marconi's triumph was only made possible by infringing on Tesla's own wireless patents. Tony McMahon. Tesla files patents for radio in 1897. Now, Marconi tries to file his own patents, but they're rejected because it's recognized that Tesla has got there first. So when Marconi makes his first transatlantic broadcast,

He's essentially using Tesla's technology. But what's really shocking is that subsequent to that, Marconi is able to obtain a patent for radio. Now, that might have been because he had great connections to the English aristocracy. That's one theory. But the US Patent Office reverses its previous decision and gives the patent to Marconi. And understandably, Tesla was absolutely furious.

Tesla sues Marconi for infringing his patents that had made radio possible. But while the backing of Westinghouse had enabled him to defeat Thomas Edison, he is now alone and without investors. Unable to fund a protracted legal battle, he is forced to concede.

Tesla never got the recognition he deserved. He would quip when new inventions would come out attributed to somebody else, "Hey, wait a second, that used 17 of my patents." But it did no good. Nobody wanted to know. He was the mad scientist, not a businessman. With his dreams crushed, there are reports that Tesla had a mental breakdown. And as Alan Butler and Andrew Gough reveal, the OCD he has suffered with since childhood begins to tighten its grip on his mind.

From this point forward, people comment not on his genius, but on his erratic and increasingly bizarre behavior.

He had strange phobias. He had a hatred of jewelry. He couldn't touch human hair. He refused to shake hands. He could get himself into a literal fever if he saw a peach. He ordered his dinner from the same gentleman every day. He could not sit down at a meal without working out the capacity of the bowl. And that gentleman had to clean his silverware with

18 napkins. He was an oddity. And this is what made him the quirky mad scientist that everyone thought he was. These quirks become public and have also been noticed by the investors, who have now lost faith in him.

It's fair to say that these were terrible, tragic times for Tesla. I mean, imagine it. He's going to be seeing his AC technology everywhere. He's going to be hearing radio everywhere, which is now credited as Marconi's invention. I mean, this is enough to drive anybody mad. And Tesla wasn't the most stable person to start with.

Tesla continues to develop devices and concepts that are ahead of their time. From a bladeless turbine that inadvertently leads to the invention of the speedometer, to an early concept of radar. But with a lack of funds, they don't make it off the drawing board. He shuffles between a series of hotel rooms, leaving unpaid bills behind, before finally moving to the hotel that would become his last residence.

The last hotel that Tesla moved into was the New Yorker. And because he had sort of an obsession with the number three, he chose room 3327, and he lived there. And one of his more curious obsessions was the pigeons outside, which he'd go and feed. And one particular pigeon he became rather attracted to. He ended up spending something like $2,000 looking after it.

It's terrible to think that this was the man who literally made lightning fly through the air, who dazzled audiences for years, who took people's minds to a strange future. And now he is this curious, disheveled figure ambling around a park, feeding the pigeons, pretty much looking like a tramp, and then retreating back to his hotel, a shadow of his former self.

On the 7th of January, 1943, in his room in the New Yorker Hotel, Tesla dies, aged 86. His death completes the tragic arc of his life. He had risen from obscurity to become the toast of American society, successfully beaten Edison to create our modern system of electricity transmission, harnessed Niagara Falls, and given rise to the radio.

But bad business decisions, an inability to defend his patents, and his battles with mental illness meant that he did not get the credit he deserved. But in the months and years that followed, Tesla's stature would grow. Soon after his death, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Marconi's radio patent in favor of Tesla's.

And while Tesla's name lives on in the fashionable electric car brand, so too does his idea of wireless power, an area of increasing interest to technology companies. His other grand vision, the transmission of images and music over the air, is probably how you're listening to this podcast. Next time on Forbidden History. It was a skull with a bit of hair on it, and it looked horrible.

In 1943, the remains of a woman were found inside a hollow witch elm tree. But who killed her? And why was she murdered? The reason that the police were unable to identify her was because she was a German spy. Now, MI5 was very interested. They were like, who is this woman? He began to think that perhaps the cover-up theory had some merit to it after all. The only thing he couldn't work out was what was being covered up.

We examine the 80-year-old case and ask, can modern technology finally identify the woman in the witch elm? You've been listening to Forbidden History, a Like a Shot production in association with Viasat History, part of Viasat World Limited.