For most of history between the point Nikola Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison were respectively doing their things to the present day, if you asked just about anyone which of these men were greater, you’d likely have gotten a response akin to “Nikola who? …I mean, Edison of course? He and God gave us light!” That said, if you asked someone when both were in their prime, you may have gotten a more mixed answer with, contrary to popular belief, Tesla in his day one of the most preeminent celebrity scientists in the world along with Edison. Edison famed for getting things done with perspiration, while Tesla had the reputation for doing his thing through inspiration.

Yet very quickly after his death, Tesla became all but forgotten, while Edison’s legend endured… At least until extremely modern times when the internet masses have jumped on the Nikola Tesla hype train and generally vilified Edison as nothing but a charlatan, and someone largely responsible for Tesla’s fall from grace. But what is the truth here? Were either or even potentially both nothing but media hyping narcissists taking credit for others’ work? Were either or potentially both actually great men of history? What is the story between them and why are they so often compared? And overall, which one was actually a greater cog in the human technological advancement machine?

And before you go answering this in the comments based on your current knowledge of the pair, let us caution you because in the history of researching and writing on all manner of topics to the tune of over 5,000 articles on our Todayifoundout website and over 2,000 videos here, we have never found any topic we’ve covered more rife with widespread and generally accepted myths when it came to BOTH the individuals we are going to cover today.

On this note, as for Edison, as historian Keith Nier once very aptly stated, “He is actually one of the least well known of all famous people, and much of what everybody thinks they know about him is no more reliable than a fairy tale.” And as for Tesla? Well, after doing a deep dive on him as well, the consensus among our team here is that’s even more of the case for him than Edison, with the reality of most people’s impressions of Tesla the man and with regards to his work being wildly fictional, even right down to the thing he’s most famous for.

So, dear viewers, get out your dinner and snacks or, if you’re watching this on the porcelain throne, prepare to have your legs fall thoroughly asleep while others in your household begin to wonder if you’ve died in there, because we are going to leave no stone unturned in order to try to rectify the rampant misinformation on both men and their respective life stories in our attempt to try to clear it all up.

Let’s dive into it, shall we?

The Myth of the Edison vs Tesla Feud and the Many Myths Embedded

First and foremost before we get into their respective quite fascinating life stories and compare and contrast and debunk countless myths about both men, we should first address a handful of the more rampant myths concerning the two men’s supposed extreme dislike of each other and feud.

There was no feud. In fact, there wasn’t even any conflict between Tesla and Edison during the war of the currents because, contrary to popular belief, Tesla wasn’t really involved in this.

“But what about his innovative AC Induction motor that changed the electric world and gave us the power grid we have today?!?!?! That’s why Edison lost the War of the Currents!”

Well, on this one, contrary to popular belief, Tesla’s AC Induction motor didn’t come into play in the War of the Currents other than costing Westinghouse a lot of money. It wasn’t until AFTER the war of the currents was already lost by Edison and co that a practical, working version of Tesla’s device was able to be implemented and put into commercial use. And it wasn’t even Tesla that made said motor actually work for this purpose. Someone else did that work after Tesla left the project without really making any real progress on it, with said other individual who solved the issues with it forgotten by popular history, though we will rectify that shortly. But in the end, it was a group effort from Tesla’s idea to the people who made it work in a way that it could be used to make AC power transmission more economically feasible than it already was.

And, yes- already was.

Before Tesla’s motor.

Which, by the way, was just something someone else had come up with before him, even giving lectures on it before Tesla patented his version of more or less the exact same thing. More on this in a bit as well.

Going back to the alleged feud in general, it’s often stated it really ramped up owing to Edison stealing Tesla’s work. But the reality was not only did Edison not take any patents from Tesla, he actually appears to have allowed Tesla to patent things he came up with when working on projects at his job for Edison, even though this wasn’t typical, then or now, and it’s not really clear why Edison allowed this in Tesla’s case. But because Edison did this, it was part of the reason Tesla was able to crack on on his own, all culminating in Tesla earning his own fortune and worldwide fame, before very abruptly losing both his fortune and reputation for reasons we’ll get into.

On top of this, also contrary to popular belief, Edison did not slight Tesla by failing to give him a bonus causing Tesla to leave his employ in anger. In fact, by all appearances, both men almost never interacted in their lives, even while Tesla worked for Edison, as Tesla worked under someone else while there. And as far as the few things they DID say about each other, it was mostly nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the other’s work, with Tesla only slightly criticizing Edison’s methods. And, not to sound like a broken record, but full details on this momentarily as well!

On top of this, at the height of Tesla’s fame and wealth in March of 1895, his lab burned down. How, nobody knows, but rumored to be at the time started on one of the floors below by someone smoking. Whatever the case- lab destroyed, Tesla would state to a New York Times reporter, “I am in too much grief to talk. What can I say? The work of half my lifetime, very nearly: all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus, that it has taken years to perfect, swept away in a fire that lasted only an hour or two. . . . Everything is gone. I must begin over again.”

Edison, hearing about what happened to his famous former employee, sent a message to Tesla that he was free to come use Edison’s Llewellyn Park workshop while he worked on finding and building up a new lab.

They clearly hated each other…

Moving on to the Nobel Prize, on November 6, 1915 thanks to a Reuters news report, with many other outlets picking it up, the world was briefly under the impression that Edison and Tesla had jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physics. As to why Tesla was never awarded such, the rumor mill tends to state everything from that Edison torpedoed the whole thing to spite Tesla or that Tesla himself refused to share such a prize with his mortal enemy. Thus, the Nobel Prize in physics that year was given instead to William H Bragg and Lawrence Bragg “for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays”.

Except other than the fact that it was reported that Tesla and Edison had won the Nobel Prize at the time, they actually hadn’t, as the Nobel committee would ring in on once they heard of the report. They stated both that they never were planning to award either individual a Nobel Prize, and that “Any rumor that a person has not been given a Nobel Prize because he has made known his intention to refuse the reward is ridiculous.”

Further, on the note that Tesla would have rejected such a prize, Tesla himself stated upon hearing the report that he and Edison had jointly won, that while he hadn’t heard anything directly about it from the Nobel committee, he seemed happy about it and that “I have concluded that the honor has been conferred on me in acknowledgement of a discovery announced a short time ago which concerns the transmission of electrical energy without wires.”

When he found out he hadn’t actually won, Tesla would write one Robert Underwood Johnson about the whole thing, shrugging it off and stating, “In a thousand years, there will be many recipients of the Nobel Prize, but I have not less than four dozens of my creations identified with my name in the technical literature. These are honors real and permanent, which are bestowed, not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake.”

One prize Tesla DID win and later accept was the Edison Medal in 1917 awarded him by the American Institute of Electrical Engineering, who Tesla at one point served as the Vice President of from 1892 to 1894.

That said, he did at first state he would refuse such an honor, writing BA Behrend of Westinghouse who had nominated Tesla for the award, “You propose to honor me with a medal which I could pin upon my coat and strut for a vain hour before the members and guests of your institute. You would bestow an outward semblance of honoring me but you would decorate my body and continue to let starve, for failure to supply recognition, my mind and its creative products which have supplied the foundation upon which the major portion of your Institute exists…”

Not dissuaded, Behrend and others on the committee ultimately convinced Tesla to accept the now prestigious award. Tesla then not only showed up to accept it, but seemed very happy about the whole thing, though just before the award ceremony itself he randomly disappeared, only to be found outside in Bryan Park across the street feeding pigeons, as was something of an obsession for him throughout the latter part of his life. He did, however, come back in and delivered a lengthy speech, among other things referring to Edison as “this wonderful man, who had had no theoretical training at all, no advantages, who did all himself, getting great results by virtue of his industry and application.”

He also started out his whole speech in an oddly humble tone compared to his other writings… at first at least, more on the second half of his speech later,

“Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen. I wish to thank you heartily for your kind sympathy and appreciation. I am not deceiving myself in the fact, of which you must be aware, that the speakers have greatly magnified my modest achievements. One should in such a situation be neither diffident nor self-assertive, and in that sense I will concede that some measure of credit may be due to me for the first steps tin certain new directions; but the ideas I advanced have triumphed, the forces and elements have been conquered, and greatness achieved, through the cooperation of many able men some of whom, I am glad to say, are present this evening. Inventors, engineers, designers, manufacturers and financiers have done their share until, as Mr. Behrend said, a gigantic revolution has been wrought in the transmission and transformation of energy.”

Speaking of his winning the Edison medal and rumors of a Nobel Prize win, as to the myth that Tesla somehow labored in obscurity or the like at the time, overshadowed by titans like Edison that some purport, going back to his lab fire, two days later on March 14, 1895, Charles Dana of the New York Sun would write, “The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s workshop, with its wonderful contents, is something more than a private calamity. It is a misfortune to the whole world. It is not in any degree an exaggeration to say that the men living at this time who are more important to the human race than this young gentleman, can be counted on the fingers of one hand; perhaps on the thumb of one hand.”

Alrighty, so that setup and broad overview out of the way, let’s dive into some more interesting details in case you don’t want to take our word for it on any of it.

First, let’s start with the whole Edison stealing Tesla’s patents and taking credit for his work, while simultaneously pissing Tesla off via a promised bonus, which all led to the infamous quote from Edison to Tesla of “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor,” originally claimed in John J. O’Neill’s 1944 work Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla. Noteworthy here, O’Neill does not cite his source of that quote and by all evidence, if it did occur, it wasn’t over this matter.

To begin with, an actual Edison and Tesla fact is that almost immediately upon arriving in the United States, Tesla began working at Edison’s Machine Works for a period of about six months.

According to legend, their fictional feud all started when Tesla was offered a $50,000 bonus (about $2 million today) if he could improve the design of certain of Edison’s machinery. When Tesla successfully completed this task, Edison’s company (or Edison himself, in some versions of the tale) declined to pay out.

As to the origin of this story, this one came from Tesla later in life. He wrote of all this,

“The S.S. Oregon, the fastest passenger steamer at that time, had both of its lighting machines disabled and its sailing was delayed. As the superstructure had been built after their installation it was impossible to remove them from the hold. The predicament was a serious one and Edison was much annoyed. In the evening I took the necessary instruments with me and went aboard the vessel where I stayed for the night. The dynamos were in bad condition, having several short-circuits and breaks, but with the assistance of the crew I succeeded in putting them in good shape… During this period I designed twenty-four different types of standard machines with short cores and of uniform pattern which replaced the old ones. The Manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task but it turned out to be a practical joke. This gave me a painful shock and I resigned my position.”

Now, even if true, it should be explicitly pointed out that Edison wasn’t involved in any of the Bonus talk, with the story simply mentioning Tesla’s manager. All other accounts of it, such as the supposed quote from Edison about American humor, have been slowly popping up in the years since seemingly out of thin air. But also, this story seems to have been made up by Tesla as well, or at least highly exaggerated. And, in fact, as we’ll get into a bit and the sad reasons why, at this point in his life, Tesla was making up an awful lot of things that were, shall we say, making others in the world, especially in the industries he was dealing in, not just lose any faith in the man, but also quietly begin to distance themselves from him as mentally ill at best, or a charlatan trying to get back some of his former fame and hype at worst. And maybe a little bit of both.

But on this story, even if Tesla’s manager had made such a promise of, in modern dollars, a near $2 million bonus, it bizarrely makes Tesla look rather dimwitted, given his pay at the time was only $18 per week and he would otherwise have just been doing his job in making these improvements. Further, even if bonuses were offered (and, indeed, Edison was known to give bonuses and promotions and the like to employees who did significant things), it certainly wouldn’t have been for a figure like $50,000, which would have made Tesla not only quite wealthy overnight, but given him more money than Edison’s Machine Works actually had at the time.

The story, thus, seems a little suspect on its details.

This is also not documented in Tesla’s journal around the time it supposedly happened, which, we’re just guessing if someone offered you the equivalent of $2 million today as a bonus to do your normal job, you’d probably write that crap down in your nightly written musings. Further, you’d certainly write about it if they then reneged on the deal. Especially if it then made you so angry it was the reason you quit your job, as Tesla claims here. What he actually wrote in his journal when he left the company, however, was simply “Good by to the Edison Machine Works.”

Why Tesla Stopped Working for Edison

So why did he leave, especially as in the aftermath for a time he had to take to digging ditches for underground telegraph cables for Western Union? Well, nobody knows with any certainty. But it seems to be centered around his work on arc lighting for Edison. At the time, he was working on an outdoor arc lighting system Edison had previously patented in 1884, which Tesla did and created a workable system. But during this time, Edison had pivoted and made an agreement with the American Electric Manufacturing Company to use their arc-lighting system for his customers seeking outdoor lighting, IF the American Electric Manufacturing Company would use Edison’s incandescent system for their indoor lighting customers. Thus, Tesla’s work was essentially thrown out as no longer needed by the company. It was shortly after this that Tesla made his exit. It has been suggested Tesla was upset about this, so left for that reason. BUT, his autobiography actually paints a different picture of him seemingly just being afforded an opportunity based on the arc lighting system he’d come up with.

He states, “Immediately thereafter some people approached me with the proposal of forming an arc light company under my name, to which I agreed.” Noteworthy on this, again, for whatever reason, Tesla was allowed to patent the things he’d done for Edison and keep it as his own. This debunks the idea that Edison was just sitting back evilly cackling as he stole his brilliant employee, Tesla’s, inventions for fun and profit. In fact, it went the other way and, for whatever reason, he seems to have allowed Tesla to take them, something that was pivotal in Tesla’s first steps into his own independent work.

Tesla goes on, “Here finally was an opportunity to develop the motor, but when I broached the subject to my new associates they said: ‘No, we want the arc lamp. We don’t care for this alternating current of yours.’ In 1886 my system of arc lighting was perfected and adopted for factory and municipal lighting, and I was free, but with no other possession than a beautifully engraved certificate of stock of hypothetical value. Then followed a period of struggle in the new medium for which I was not fitted…”

He does not explicitly say what this work was, but we can only assume from the timing here, he was referring to the digging of ditches for Western Union lines.

However, such digging all worked out for Tesla as it was through this job that he was ultimately connected with Alfred S. Brown, the then head of Western Union’s telegraph service for the New York Metropolitan District. A few more connections later via Brown and Tesla found his work on his motor partially funded and with his own laboratory in the fall of 1886, eventually incorporated as the Tesla Electric Company.

Tesla states of all this in his autobiography, “the reward came in the end and in April, 1887, the Tesla Electric Company was organized, providing a laboratory and facilities. The motors I built there were exactly as I had imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision and the operation was always as I expected.”

We’ll get more into Tesla’s rather peculiar waking visions later when we dive into his life story in detail.

The Love of Tesla’s Life

But on a related note, going back to Tesla’s claim here on the whole Bonus and the questionable nature of it. It’s at this point we should probably dive into the fact that during this period of his life when Tesla came up with this story, let’s just say the formerly brilliant mind was, very sadly, a slice of cheddar short of a cheese sandwich, with the man himself becoming increasingly “eccentric,” to put it kindly. For example, beyond making wild claims about various world changing inventions he’d supposedly successfully made later in life that were provably false and often wouldn’t have worked anyway, around this time, he was also claiming pigeons were speaking to him, one of whom he had fallen in love with. As he wrote, “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”

Speaking of his love life, Tesla was seemingly celebite in his lifetime, though perhaps not from being asexual or anything of the sort, as he would reference in his autobiography the need to overcome such urges and even elsewhere ponder if he’d sacrificed too much for his work in forgoing a wife and family. But also that he felt that doing so, and remaining unattached and chaste, was extremely beneficial to his work.

But going back to the bird, he also claimed when the avian love of his life was dying, she came to him and he saw “two powerful beams of light” emanating from her eyes. And that “Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.”

It must have been love, because at a time when he was deeply in debt and barely scraping by on the generosity of others, he reportedly spent about $2,000 (about $40,000 today) for this and other bird’s care who had been injured or were sick. His love of caring for pigeons in his room and feeding them from his window also contributed to his eviction from the St. Regis in 1923, along with the whole not paying his bills thing. He bounced around from here similarly until finally Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company decided to start paying $125 per month (about $3000 today) to Tesla, as well as paying for his room at the Hotel New Yorker to make sure he was reasonably comfortable in the last decade or so of his life.

War of the Currents Myth

But in any event, let’s now dive into greater detail with regards to our claim that Edison and Tesla never had a conflict during the war of the currents- AC vs DC, and that Tesla’s motor didn’t actually play into that war really either.

First, to be clear, the war of the currents was not Edison vs Tesla, it was Edison against George Westinghouse and other companies like Thomson-Houston.

We should also start this section by debunking very briefly the idea that Tesla invented AC power, which is another common, and very inexplicable, idea you’ll read on the interwebs. He did not. Others like Faraday and Hippolyte Pixii pioneered that, with the latter creating an AC generator all the way back in 1832, over a half century before Tesla was working on his AC Induction motor. There was also significant AC generator and transformer work done by various individuals such as Sabastian Ziani de Ferranti and William Stanley, who based their work on yet others’.

But it was Stanley, not Tesla, who arguably won the war of the currents for Westinghouse. It was Stanley’s complete high voltage AC system including generators, transformers, and high-voltage transmission lines that allowed for AC power to be relatively efficiently transmitted over large areas. And it was Stanley’s transformer design that served as the prototype for the transformers that came after. But lest you think Stanley deserves all the credit, his work was, in turn, based on others’, such as his transformer design based on the work of Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs before.

Further, without the work of Oliver Shallenberger Stanley’s system would have been extremely difficult to get to work in a commercially viable way. Why? Because it was Shallenberger who came up with a critical piece of the puzzle in the world’s first commercially successful AC electrical meter, which, funny enough, was the result of an accident. While working on a lamp, a nearby spring fell into it, at which point Shallenberger noticed it was rotating, which could only be by electromagnetic force. He quickly realized he could use this fact to create a device that turned small wheels proportional to the power flowing along the lines and thus, he had found a way to measure the usage of AC Power.

And then there was Benjamin Lamme. Without Lammes’ work on Tesla’s motor, it was completely worthless for this application or, at least as the system was at the time, and, much like Tesla himself in this case, would have gone in the dustbin of history, with others’ similar devices used instead. And we do not say that lightly with regards to Tesla in general. Because without the success of his motor, it seems unlikely any of the rest of his work, even if it had still occurred, would have garnered him any notability with the masses or investors any more than any other brilliant scientist or engineer working on similar things.

And speaking of all that and AC Power transmission, almost a decade before Tesla threw his giant brain cells into the ring, guys like Oskar von Miller and Galileo Ferraris were also doing their thing. The latter, Ferraris, is not called the “Father of three-phase current” for no reason. A title he ultimately earned through his work when he developed his AC motor idea three years before Tesla invented his version of mostly the same thing. In fact, when thinking about more efficient ways to do things, Westinghouse initially debated whether to go with Tesla or Ferraris, but ultimately settled on the former for reasons unclear today, but may have simply been proximity to the individual. Ferraris was an ocean and more away in Italy. Tesla was nearby, and holding a U.S. Patent on such a device as Ferraris had outlined in his previous paper that, again, was published before Tesla applied for his patent on largely the same thing.

On this, electrical engineer and author Laurence A Hawkins in 1903 would write, “Accordingly, when Tesla announced in May 1888 that he had solved this motor problem, he at once became one of the most prominent figures in the engineering world. His solution was a theory of the combination of two or more alternating currents of different phase to produce a resultant rotating magnetic field. This same theory had been published in Italy… prior to Tesla by Ferraris in L’Elettricita April 22 1888. Ferraris, however, contented himself with publication of the theory, while Tesla patented it, and followed up his first patents with a mass of other patents describing every conceivable construction and more of operation that could in any way be imagined to embody his rotating magnetic field. It is for this reason that the rotating field theory is associated in this country with the name of Tesla rather than with that of Ferraris, although the contrary is the fact in every other country. The idea of a rotating magnetic field as the resultant of two currents was not novel. It had been produced by Bailey in 1879 with commuted direct currents, by Deprez in 1883 with alternating currents…. But the time had not come in 1888, and the motors described by Tesla, even if they had been commercially efficient structures, could not be operated on the circuits then existing. Like Edison’s three wire system, the rotating field must have been obvious when changed conditions called for its application, but in 1888 it was not what was wanted.”

He further notes of the criticism of Tesla’s motor at the time, and why it took several years for it to be practical in the existing AC systems, “As Swinbourne said at the time “Electrician Vol 21, p 342, ‘The low efficiency is not at all the chief objection to the scheme. The whole arrangement is impracticable, as it demands special alternate-current generators and leads. Until Mr. Tesla can produce a motor which will work on alternate current circuits as they are, and do that efficiently even with varying loads and without difficulty in starting, he can hardly be said to have solved the problem.’… The achievement of the Tesla and Ferraris publications was not the solution of a problem presented by existing conditions. They assumed non-existent and, at that time, impracticable conditions, and then applied the obvious principle of the rotating field of Bailey and Deprez. Had not experience subsequently proved the polyphase generator more efficient than the single phase, the rotary field of Tesla and Ferraris, like that of Bailey and Deprez, would never have become of more than academic interest.”

And, indeed, as alluded to, it took others a few years to figure all this out, with Tesla barely involved.

Hawkins goes on referencing this, “But engineering today owes Tesla no more than it owes Ferraras, Deprez, or Bailey, for Tesla never produced a commercially successful motor. As the demand for polyphase motors gradually came into existence, he worked hard to produce a commercial motor, but it did not appear in the market. The motors of the so called fundamental patents failed absolutely to meet commercial conditions. Though the later Tesla patents describe multitudinous modifications, Tesla himself, with practically unlimited means at his disposal, seems to have failed to produce a commercial self-starting motor for power purposes.”

So, what actually happened during the War of the Currents?

As alluded to, news of Tesla’s Alternating Current Induction Motor eventually reached George Westinghouse, primary owner of the Westinghouse Company. Both Edison and Westinghouse were already fighting to secure dominance of the energy markets, and the latter put his faith in Tesla’s innovation to help his and his team’s system win the battle thanks to efficiency improvements over their previous system.

That said, once again, Tesla’s motor didn’t end up coming into play in the War of the Currents other than costing Westinghouse a lot of money. This is something that famously, during the Financial Panic of 1890, allegedly saw Westinghouse almost lose control of his company. At the time, the Westinghouse team, which for a time included Tesla, were still trying to work out the kinks without Tesla’s help as he had already stepped away from the project before his motor could be made to work from a practical standpoint for their purposes. As to why he left, rumors are that he did not work well with others who were working on the project, but that’s difficult to determine the veracity. It may simply be that the contract for him to consult on it was up before they’d actually figured out how to make it work practically for their specific purposes and he wanted to use his newfound wealth to work on other things.

However, even though they weren’t yet deploying Tesla’s motor, it was costing Westinghouse $15,000 per year (about $500,000 per year today) as part of the guaranteed minimum royalty arrangement regardless of distribution. Westinghouse’s new lenders who were refinancing his debts were not a fan of this and a few other such investments that seemed to not be needed to continue business as usual.

Thus, in 1891, Westinghouse told Tesla he had two options. On the one hand, he could stick with that original agreement and Westinghouse would have to cede control of his company to his lenders. The result of this for Tesla would then be he would have to bank on getting his money somehow from them, and potentially have a nice legal battle over it, as Tesla had also sold the manufacturing rights for the motor to Westinghouse for $65,000 (about $2.2 million) as part of the deal. Note, the deal also paid Tesla an additional $24,000 (about $800,000 today) for a year to consult while they tried to deploy his motor, though as alluded to very little came of this other than Tesla getting a nice paycheck. Given the lenders were pretty explicitly wanting to cut ties with Tesla, not seeing the future potential value of what Tesla had made given the current state of it and their AC system at the time, Westinghouse seemed to think Tesla wasn’t going to have much luck there.

Option 2 for Tesla was that he could agree to forgo those royalty payments and Westinghouse would continue to work on potentially deploying his motor.

While Tesla choosing option 2 is often presented as him making an altruistic, or sometimes stated, naive, move, Tesla was not so stupid- obviously- nor altruistic at all when it came to his work, being extremely litigious on it in many other cases, as most inventors are when they feel their work has been stolen and being used for profit by others. But considering his choices, agreeing to Westinghouses’ terms was probably just a good move given the data he had at the time. Having Westinghouse continue to push and perfect his motor and try to deploy it at scale was potentially a huge long term financial and professional benefit to him beyond the royalty payments from Westinghouse itself. While certainly keeping both would have been massively better, if Westinghouse was being honest with him, which that’s not fully clear other than that Westinghouse was definitely in severe financial trouble at the time, and his new lenders were wanting him to cut back on such unprofitable spending, then it was a prudent move. Whether it was a smart one or not though, who knows? But, for what it’s worth, it all worked out reasonably well for Tesla once the kinks were worked out and his motor deployed, as shortly thereafter, Westinghouse and GE jointly paid $216,000 (about $8 million today) to Tesla for the patent for the motor. Had Tesla not agreed to this change in contract, his motor would likely never have been used here, with other’s similar work eventually used instead.

Going back to the difficulty in deploying the motor, Tesla explains, “In the early part of 1888 an arrangement was made with the Westinghouse Company for the manufacture of the motors on a large scale. But great difficulties had still to be overcome. My system was based on the use of low frequency currents and the Westinghouse experts had adopted 133 cycles with the object of securing advantages in the transformation. They did not want to depart from their standard forms of apparatus and my efforts had to be concentrated upon adapting the motor to these conditions. Another necessity was to produce a motor capable of running efficiently at this frequency on two wires which was not easy of accomplishment.”

As to the other key figures involved in figuring out these needed tweaks on Tesla’s motor, it was first one Charles F. Scott who worked on it with Tesla, and later the aforementioned Benjamin Lamme who took over the project when it stalled and appeared to be going nowhere. Lamme made the practical version of Tesla’s induction motor that would work for their purposes given the AC system of the day, as well as ultimately improving things on the motor over the course of several years working on it, long after Tesla was not involved at all. Granted, without Tesla’s original work, Lamme wouldn’t have been able to do his thing. But without Lamme, Tesla’s device would have had zero impact. A prototype that simply wasn’t practical for their usage.

It’s almost like the idea of the lone inventor is a pure myth…

On that note, Tesla himself even noted, “The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result; he does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter – for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.”

Speaking of pointing the way for others, Tesla also tends to get credit today for much of Lamme’s work after, including Lamme’s work on the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with Lamme designing many of the key apparatuses at the exhibit, not Tesla.

To add insult to injury, Lamme also is the one who designed the giant hydroelectric generators at the famous Adams Power Plant at Niagara Falls. Today Tesla is generally given credit for that as well and it’s sometimes even claimed he designing the plant, despite having relatively little to do with it other than things like a bit of consulting work, primarily advising Edward Dean Adams of the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company that they should go with Westinghouse and his system for the project instead of that of Westinghouses’ competitors.

As to why Tesla is sometimes given vastly more credit here on this, this isn’t just because of the modern Tesla fanboys, but for the ones that existed during his lifetime. Attaching the famous scientists’ name to things just sold papers, and the media was happy to do so at every potential connection, with reports at the time generally acting as if Tesla had a lot more to do with the project than he actually did, similar to what they did during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and many other things Tesla related.

Tesla himself also vaguely gives the impression he had a lot more to do with it in his autobiography, where he would claim this was the fulfillment of a childhood promise he had made to his uncle. Stating, “I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.”

In any event, as an interesting brief little aside here, Benjamin Lammes’ sister, Bertha Lamme Feicht, also worked for Westinghouse as an electrical engineer. How did a woman hold such a position in the late 19th century? Well, she just so happened to be the first woman in America to graduate with a degree in engineering other than civil engineering, with her focus mechanical engineering with a speciality in electricity.

Did Edison Torpedo Tesla’s Invention of Radar?

Moving on from there, let’s now discuss Tesla and Radar.

During WWI Thomas Edison was sitting on the Naval Consulting Board. Noteworthy, Edison only agreed to consult with the military as long as nothing he worked on was used for offensive purposes- only for defending the lives of Allied military members. As for why, Edison stated, “Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

Now, you might at this point be thinking “Wasn’t Edison out murdering elephants and horses for fun and profit?” Well, if you’re generally at this point getting the vibe that a huge percentage of the things most people say about Tesla and Edison are either myth or the facts altered enough to the point they are basically myth, well, stay tuned for the story on this one. Because it’s par for the course.

But in any event, a common story goes that at this point the spiteful Edison torpedoed yet another of Tesla’s great innovations, when Tesla proposed to the Naval Consulting Board using a radar-like system he’d come up with to aid in the war effort, something that would have been truly revolutionary at the time…

Except, no.

It is true that the Naval Consulting Board shot down Tesla’s idea and Edison was seemingly involved in that decision, being head of the board. But this was not because of any spiteful act. Rather, simply because it was a genius idea… that was dumb and wouldn’t have worked in the way Tesla was trying to apply it. And demonstrated once again Tesla’s propensity to copy other’s work and his pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how a lot of the things he was working on actually worked. Not too dissimilar to his work on wireless electricity, or really quite a lot of his work in general.

Now, before you go to the comments about that last sentence, wait until you watch the main Tesla section of this video.

But as for Radar, Tesla was proposing to use radio waves to track submarines. The issue was that radio waves and Tesla’s proposed system wouldn’t have worked for this given water was their medium. Thus, the Navy rejected Tesla’s idea and went with working on an alternate technology in sonar instead, passive versions of which had already been in use by humans going all the way back to Leonardo Da Vinci, with active echo-location versions leading up to the war having been used by humans for things like detecting icebergs and the like. But around WWI, militaries of the world began focussing on refining sonar systems for use in detecting and locating submarines.

We should also briefly point out this story has given rise to the myth that Tesla invented radar, but this isn’t correct either. A couple decades before this, Heinrich Hertz very famously, and Tesla was well familiar with this by all appearance, had already done experiments showing radio waves would reflect off metal objects when he was exploring the suggestion which had, in turn, previously been made by James Clerk Maxwell. Further, over a decade before Tesla’s suggestion to use the system in water, Christian Hülsmeyer had already patented the world’s first functional radar system, albeit a crude one compared to what would later be developed. One newspaper account of a demonstration of this system, which was used on ships in one test, even suggested what Tesla later proposed, “Because, above and under water metal objects reflect waves, this invention might have significance for future warfare.”

What Tesla and Edison Had to Say About Each Other

Moving on from there, as for Edison’s thoughts on Tesla. About the only thing he ever seems to have said about the man directly is, according to Tesla, things like “this is a damned good man” and “you take the cake!” although whether he actually said these things isn’t quite clear as we really only have Tesla’s word on it, written at a time in his life he was writing a lot of things with extremely questionable veracity. As for the “damned good man” one, this incident allegedly occurred when Edison found out Tesla had stayed up all night working on a project he’d been assigned to and was told so by Tesla’s manager.

In terms of what Tesla had to say about Edison, beyond the aforementioned, “this wonderful man, who had had no theoretical training at all, no advantages, who did all himself, getting great results by virtue of his industry and application” bit of his Edison medal acceptance speech, Tesla praised Edison in an article he wrote for the New York Times when Edison died, stating, “The recurrence of a phenomenon like [Thomas] Edison is not very likely. The profound change of conditions and the ever increasing necessity of theoretical training would seem to make it impossible. He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.”

And as for Tesla’s criticism of Edison, about the worst he seems to have ever said was to take a little jab at Edison’s research methods. That said, even here, while it is a small criticism, it’s also a great compliment concerning Edison’s work ethic, persistence, and meticulous way of tackling problems. Tesla stated, “If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once, with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.”

Tesla would elsewhere expand on this, “[Edison’s] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.”

And given Edison himself allegedly, but not actually, stated, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” but he also definitely did have the quote “There is no experient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking” over his desk, this assessment of Tesla’s perhaps checks out, partially.

However, to be fair, if we’re going to go with a real Edison quote instead of the “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” thing he never actually said (more on this in the Bonus Facts later), what he did say ws “Genius is hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and common sense.” That latter, common sense, is an important one, and Edison’s, through decades of work and experience had, over the years, become decidedly uncommon in the best ways.

Edison may not have had the depth of understanding of one field that Tesla in his early years did, outside of perhaps telegraphy. But Edison’s broad, more shallow, expertise was incredibly valuable in ability to take ideas and knowledge from one field and apply it to another in ways those who were only experts in that field likely wouldn’t have thought of. This advantage was only enhanced by his team, some of whom were experts in various fields, and could thus augment Edison’s deficiencies. In some sense, Edison had the best of both worlds. So there was really no miracle at all in the prodigious amount of accomplishments Edison and co achieved as alluded to by Tesla. Teamwork makes the dreamwork.

Referencing this facet of Edison’s work, with regards to the light bulb, famed British scientist John Tyndall would comment on Edison and his teams’ unique abilities in this way, stating in 1879, “Edison has the penetration to seize the relationship of facts and principles, and the art to reduce them to novel and concrete combinations. Hence, though he has accomplished nothing new in relation to the electric light, an adverse opinion as to his ability to solve the complicated problem . . . would be unwarranted. . . . Knowing something of the practical problem, I should certainly prefer seeing it in Mr. Edison’s hands to having it in mine.”

Edison further very correctly noted, “I never did anything worth doing entirely by accident…. Almost none of my inventions were derived in that manner. They were achieved by having trained myself to be analytical and to endure and tolerate hard work.”

That said, he did do one thing by accident that changed the world forever more than any of his other work, though this is a rare case where Edison usually isn’t given any credit because he didn’t understand the implications of what he’d just discovered and patented. Someone else working for him did, however, and his work based on Edison’s discovery birthed the modern age of technology. More on this later when discussing Edison’s life and work.

But going back to Edison’s methods and Tesla’s mild criticism of it, all of this is an important point to explicitly highlight because the way Edison and co were doing research was relatively revolutionary at the time, and is far more the way many new discoveries have happened since. Putting brilliant and complimentary minds on a problem, then systematically performing mass and very meticulous research and experiments until they came up with a suitable solution. To Tesla this may have seemed inefficient, and maybe it was at times in some respects. But it also more or less industrialized invention and progress at whatever they put their minds to. Allowing them to make advancements vastly quicker than most, and with a much higher assuredness of success. Not relying on anyone’s individual ingenuity or genius or sudden inspiration, but almost a production-line approach to invention and innovation. This is in some respects how invention has always worked, with everyone building off each other’s ideas throughout history. Edison simply took the broad idea, and put it in one central lab work place. And created an efficient system within all that for his team to tackle any problem. And, just as importantly, via his eventual reputation and clout with the media and ability to intrigue the masses and investors was able to provide ample funding for any bit of research they wanted to tackle.

Granted, with this, much like Tesla, Edison was well known for his pretty egregious self promotion and broad and fantastically predictions, just the difference between the two, and why Edison’s legend endured and Tesla’s did not, was that Edison and his team occasionally actually backed up these wild claims with revolutionary inventions and systems that the general public was extremely well aware of and were subsequently using. And, with Edison as the front man, he, at least publicly, generally got the credit. We will dive into how much he deserved or not when we do a deep dive into Edison’s fascinating story.

But all that preamble, background, and myth busting out of the way about the pair’s relationship, let’s now discuss the two great men’s real individual stories and what they got up to and actually did or didn’t do.

And we begin with Nikola Tesla.

The Real Story of Nikola Tesla

In the mid-19th century, the Austrian Empire, which stretched for over a thousand miles (1600 km) from Italy to Ukraine, was a place of contradictions. The ruling patriarch, Minister of the Interior Baron Alexander von Bach, was on the one hand something of a despot, abolishing public trials, reducing the freedom of the press and imprisoning political opponents. Conversely, his rule also saw the relaxing of economic laws, the demise of internal custom duties and peasants freed from their feudal obligations.

It was during this time, in the small village of Smiljan, situated within the Empire’s military frontier (now modern-day Croatia) that Nikola Tesla was born on July 9th or 10th (with the confusion owing to the time at around midnight), 1856, the fourth of five children. Tesla’s father, Milutin, was a priest, and the family soon moved to nearby Gospić, where his parish was located.

From the beginning, Tesla was seemingly a rather brilliant child, though Tesla claims his father discouraged scientific academic pursuit, hoping Tesla would become a priest himself someday and doggedly stuck to this point. Even, according to Tesla, restricting his study, with Tesla partially attributing this to the death of his apparently brilliant older brother Dane, back when Tesla was 5 years old. Tesla writes of his brother and this event,

”In the first place I had a brother who was gifted to an extraordinary degree — one of those rare phenomena of mentality which biological investigation has failed to explain. His premature death left my parents disconsolate. We owned a horse which had been presented to us by a dear friend. It was a magnificent animal of Arabian breed, possessed of almost human intelligence, and was cared for and petted by the whole family, having on one occasion saved my father’s life under remarkable circumstances… This horse was responsible for my brother’s injuries from which he died. I witnest the tragic scene and altho fifty-six years have elapsed since, my visual impression of it has lost none of its force. The recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison… Anything I did that was creditable merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself. But I was far from being considered a stupid boy, if I am to judge from an incident of which I have still a strong remembrance. One day the Aldermen were passing thru a street where I was at play with other boys. The oldest of these venerable gentlemen — a wealthy citizen — paused to give a silver piece to each of us. Coming to me he suddenly stopt and commanded, “Look in my eyes.” I met his gaze, my hand outstretched to receive the much valued coin, when, to my dismay, he said, ‘No, not much, you can get nothing from me, you are too smart.’”

It was also as a youth that Tesla first became interested in electricity, noting while petting his cat on a dry, winter night, “As I stroked Macak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.”

His father then told him, “Well, this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.”

Tesla’s reply was allegedly, “Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God.”

Another core facet of Tesla’s personality deriving from his youth that is important to point out was his obsession with working hard and efficiency and a complete disregard for sleep as far as humanly possible. This work ethic he attributed to his mother, noting of her, “She worked regularly from four o’clock in the morning till eleven in the evening. From four to breakfast time-six am- while others slumbered, I never closed my eyes but watched my mother with intense pleasure as she attended quickly-sometimes running-to her many self-imposed duties. She directed the servants to take care of all our domestic animals, she milked the cows, she performed all sorts of labor unassisted, set the table, prepared breakfast for the whole household. Only when it was ready to be served did the rest of the family get up. After breakfast everybody followed my mother’s inspiring example. All did their work diligently, liked it, and so achieved a measure of contentment.”

Tesla also credits his mother for elements of his mental prowess, noting, “I must trace to my mother’s influence whatever inventiveness I possess, the training she gave me must have been helpful. It comprised all sorts of exercises — as guessing one another’s thoughts, discovering the defects of some form or expression, repeating long sentences or performing mental calculations. These daily lessons were intended to strengthen memory and reason and especially to develop the critical sense, and were undoubtedly very beneficial.”

Going back to his mother’s own brilliance, he states, “My mother was an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibers herself. She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home was the product of her hands. When she was past sixty, her fingers were still nimble enough to tie three knots in an eyelash.”

Tesla’s Visions

Now, it’s at this point we should probably discuss Tesla’s visions, which started in his youth… He states, “In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those I imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. None of the students of psychology or physiology whom I have consulted could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomena. They seem to have been unique altho I was probably predisposed as I know that my brother experienced a similar trouble. The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed. To give an idea of my distress, suppose that I had witnest a funeral or some such nerve-racking spectacle. Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all my efforts to banish it. Sometimes it would even remain fixt in space tho I pushed my hand thru it. If my explanation is correct, it should be able to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come; I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem.”

On this latter point, he is hypothesizing that images in the mind are literally present in the retina of the eye as you think them, and in his case seemingly simply representing more strongly, perhaps because of his more advanced intellect. And as for his work on this, later in life he apparently attempted to create a device to read human thought through the eyes and then project it on a screen.

In any event, he goes on, “To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to get it I had to conjure continuously new images. It was not long before I found that I had exhausted all of those at my command; my “reel” had run out, as it were, because I had seen little of the world — only objects in my home and the immediate surroundings. As I performed these mental operations for the second or third time, in order to chase the appearances from my vision, the remedy gradually lost all its force. Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them, but by and by I succeeded in fixing them; they gained in strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision farther and farther, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel — of course, in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys — see new places, cities and countries — live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.”

He would further state this ability was key for his scientific advancement as it allowed him to picture new devices extremely vividly in his mind, as well as create, and test them until they worked, thus ensuring whatever he made would work the first time exactly as it had in his head…

“I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. The moment one constructs a device to carry into practise a crude idea he finds himself unavoidably engrost with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results may be obtained but always at the sacrifice of quality. My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise?”

This all is particularly noteworthy to explicitly point out when discussing the fact that later in life Tesla frequently claimed to invent things and have working models that he simply did not. And, in fact, could not have worked the way he described or even sometimes at all even if done a different way. Thus, it’s been conjectured that he may not actually have been making it up, at least as far as he was concerned. He may have simply invented and got the device to work in his head. And, thus, assumed it would work in reality, even though for the last few decades of his life he was not only, again, seemingly a slice of cheddar short of a cheese sandwich for a portion of that, but also operating on a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of certain facets of science, more based in late 19th century ideas, than advancements made since, many of which he largely rejected, occasionally in part precisely because some principal contradicted things he’d supposedly invented and got working….

But because of his confidence in his ability to run experiments and invent things in his head, it perhaps explains why he may have felt the devices later in life he claimed to have invented would have worked, even though they simply wouldn’t have in the real world.

You might at this point wonder what caused Tesla’s visions, which, as noted, were not just confined to imagining inventions, but if you read through his autobiography could get pretty, shall we say, interesting, to put it kindly. Well, even physicians today aren’t sure, though it’s been conjectured by some, particularly as some of his more noteworthy often accompanied times of extreme exhaustion and complete mental breakdowns by Tesla, that they may have been the result of extreme sleep deprivation. You see, Tesla claimed for much of his life he only slept a couple hours per night. If this is accurate, then such hallucinations very well could have been triggered by such, and this may also have strongly contributed to his mental decline as he aged.

Of course, it’s also been suggested that Tesla may simply not have been aware of how much he was actually sleeping. As there are accounts from hotel employees who looked after his room that they regularly found him just standing or sitting there in silence, seemingly in some sort of trance and fully oblivious of anything in his surroundings, including their presence as they went about their duties. Thus, some hypothesize that during this time, he may have been misinterpreting this half-asleep like daze and the dreams they produced as vivid waking visions, when he was, in fact, just completely exhausted and partially, or fully asleep and dreaming. Or perhaps it was all a quirk of his brain to go into these types of trances and have such visions during them.

Whatever the case, regardless of how much he was actually sleeping compared to what he claimed, his issues with sleep and work routine were already manifesting at a young age, with his professors at university writing his father and warning the young man was headed for an early grave.

On this, he states, “during the whole first year I regularly started my work at three o’clock in the morning and continued until eleven at night, no Sundays or holidays excepted. As most of my fellow -students took thinks easily, naturally enough I eclipsed all records. In the course of that year I past thru nine exams and the professors thought I deserved more than the highest qualifications. Armed with their flattering certificates, I went home for a short rest, expecting a triumph, and was mortified when my father made light of these hard won honors. That almost killed my ambition; but later, after he had died, I was pained to find a package of letters which the professors had written him to the effect that unless he took me away from the Institution I would be killed thru overwork.”

And speaking of his academic quirks at this time, he states, “I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, ‘Never more!’”

King of the Castle, A Master of His Domain

Going back to his father allegedly not wanting him to pursue academia, he states, “My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading. He did not permit it and would fly into a rage when he caught me in the act. He hid the candles when he found that I was reading in secret. He did not want me to spoil my eyes. But I obtained tallow, made the wicking and cast the sticks into tin forms, and every night I would bush the keyhole and the cracks and read, often till dawn, when all others slept and my mother started on her arduous daily task.”

It was during this reading that he claims he began to become a master of himself and his impulses, noting, “On one occasion I came across a novel entitled ‘Abafi’ (the Son of Aba), a Serbian translation of a well known Hungarian writer, Josika. This work somehow awakened my dormant powers of will and I began to practise self-control. At first my resolutions faded like snow in April, but in a little while I conquered my weakness and felt a pleasure I never knew before — that of doing as I willed. In the course of time this vigorous mental exercise became second nature. At the outset my wishes had to be subdued but gradually desire and will grew to be identical. After years of such discipline I gained so complete a mastery over myself that I toyed with passions which have meant destruction to some of the strongest men. At a certain age I contracted a mania for gambling which greatly worried my parents. To sit down to a game of cards was for me the quintessence of pleasure. My father led an exemplary life and could not excuse the senseless waste of time and money in which I indulged. I had a strong resolve but my philosophy was bad. I would say to him, ‘I can stop whenever I please but is it worth while to give up that which I would purchase with the joys of Paradise?’ On frequent occasions he gave vent to his anger and contempt but my mother was different. She understood the character of men and knew that one’s salvation could only be brought about thru his own efforts. One afternoon, I remember, when I had lost all my money and was craving for a game, she came to me with a roll of bills and said, ‘Go and enjoy yourself. The sooner you lose all we possess the better it will be. I know that you will get over it.’ She was right. I conquered my passion then and there and only regretted that it had not been a hundred times as strong. I not only vanquished but tore it from my heart so as not to leave even a trace of desire. Ever since that time I have been as indifferent to any form of gambling as to picking teeth. During another period I smoked excessively, threatening to ruin my health. Then my will asserted itself and I not only stopt but destroyed all inclination. Long ago I suffered from heart trouble until I discovered that it was due to the innocent cup of coffee I consumed every morning. I discontinued at once, tho I confess it was not an easy task. In this way I checked and bridled other habits and passions and have not only preserved my life but derived an immense amount of satisfaction from what most men would consider privation and sacrifice.”

Beyond overcoming such impulses, he also notes he was lucky to make it to adulthood. Stating he was “rendered by illness a hopeless physical wreck and given up by physicians. More than this, thru ignorance and lightheartedness, I got into all sorts of difficulties, dangers and scrapes from which I extricated myself as by enchantment. I was almost drowned a dozen times; was nearly boiled alive and just mist being cremated. I was entombed, lost and frozen. I had hair-breadth escapes from mad dogs, hogs, and other wild animals. I past thru dreadful diseases and met with all kinds of odd mishaps and that I am hale and hearty today seems like a miracle. But as I recall these incidents to my mind I feel convinced that my preservation was not altogether accidental.”

He elaborates, “An inventor’s endeavor is essentially lifesaving. Whether he harnesses forces, improves devices, or provides new comforts and conveniences, he is adding to the safety of our existence. He is also better qualified than the average individual to protect himself in peril, for he is observant and resourceful. If I had no other evidence that I was, in a measure, possest of such qualities I would find it in these personal experiences.”

Not just a genius, able to construct devices in his head that would always work perfectly, able to survive fantastical scenarios thanks to his intellect, and in complete control of all his impulses, he also states he was incredible with a bow and arrow and sling. Noting, “My arrows, when shot, disappeared from sight and at close range traversed a plank of pine one inch thick. Thru the continuous tightening of the bows I developed skin on my stomach very much like that of a crocodile and I am often wondering whether it is due to this exercise that I am able even now to digest cobble-stones! Nor can I pass in silence my performances with the sling which would have enabled me to give a stunning exhibit at the Hippodrome. And now I will tell of one of my feats with this antique implement of war which will strain to the utmost the credulity of the reader. I was practicing while walking with my uncle along the river. The sun was setting, the trout were playful and from time to time one would shoot up into the air, its glistening body sharply defined against a projecting rock beyond. Of course any boy might have hit a fish under these propitious conditions but I undertook a much more difficult task and I foretold to my uncle, to the minutest detail, what I intended doing. I was to hurl a stone to meet the fish, press its body against the rock, and cut it in two. It was no sooner said than done. My uncle looked at me almost scared out of his wits and exclaimed “Vade retro Satanas!” and it was a few days before he spoke to me again.”

As for his physical prowess, he states even into older age, “A short time ago I was returning to my hotel. It was a bitter cold night, the ground slippery, and no taxi to be had. Half a block behind me followed another man, evidently as anxious as myself to get under cover. Suddenly my legs went up in the air. In the same instant there was a flash in my brain, the nerves responded, the muscles contracted, I swung thru 180 degrees and landed on my hands. I resumed my walk as tho nothing had happened when the stranger caught up with me. “How old are you?” he asked, surveying me critically. “Oh, about fifty-nine,” I replied. “What of it?” “Well,” said he, “I have seen a cat do this but never a man.” About a month since I wanted to order new eyeglasses and went to an oculist who put me thru the usual tests. He lookt at me incredulously as I read off with ease the smallest print at considerable distance. But when I told him that I was past sixty he gasped in astonishment. Friends of mine often remark that my suits fit me like gloves but they do not know that all my clothing is made to measurements which were taken nearly 35 years ago and never changed. During this same period my weight has not varied one pound.”

And as for his overall opinion of himself, he sums up, “We are all meat machines and it happens that I am a much more sensitive machine than other people and I receive impressions to which they are inert, and I can both understand and interpret these impressions. I am simply a finer automaton than others.”

A Turning Point

Going back to his academics, his father’s stance on all this changed markedly thanks to Tesla nearly dying of cholera. He states, “I contracted the awful disease on the very day of my arrival and altho surviving the crisis, I was confined to bed for nine months with scarcely any ability to move. My energy was completely exhausted and for the second time I found myself at death’s door. In one of the sinking spells which was thought to be the last, my father rushed into the room. I still see his pallid face as he tried to cheer me in tones belying his assurance. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘I may get well if you will let me study engineering.’ ‘You will go to the best technical institution in the world,’ he solemnly replied, and I knew that he meant it… I came to life like another Lazarus to the utter amazement of everybody.”

Following his miraculous recovery, allegedly a pacifist, he went into hiding among the mountains in order to escape conscription into the Empire’s military. Then, in 1875, Nikola enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz, where he did very well initially. However, by his third year, for reasons that are still debated, he was struggling, and he left without graduating, leaving behind a rumour that he’d drowned in the Mur River. What he actually did was cross the border into Slovenia without telling anyone, not even his family it appears, and took a job as a draftsman. However, ultimately Tesla was deported from Slovenia for failing to get a residence permit, and he thus returned home just in time to see his father die a month later at the age of 60 in 1879.

Tesla brushes over this period in his life in his autobiography, simply vaguely alluding to the fact that he “realized that my parents had been making too great sacrifices on my account and resolved to relieve them of the burden” by leaving school.

Two years after this, Tesla began working for a man named Tivadar Puskás at The Budapest Telephone Exchange in Hungary. Impressing his superiors, they soon promoted him to the position of chief engineer, where the young scientist made several improvements to their equipment.

There are a few noteworthy things about his time in Budapest that are significant to point out as to how they affected his life and work beyond..

First, he suffered from an occurrence of one of his many mental breakdowns, presumably owing to extreme exhaustion. To give a taste of what these episodes were like for him, he states “It was here that I suffered the complete breakdown of the nerves to which I have referred. What I experienced during the period of that illness surpasses all belief. My sight and hearing were always extraordinary. I could clearly discern objects in the distance when others saw no trace of them. Several times in my boyhood I saved the houses of our neighbors from fire by hearing the faint crackling sounds which did not disturb their sleep, and calling for help. In 1899, when I was past forty and carrying on my experiments in Colorado, I could hear very distinctly thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles. The limit of audition for my young assistants was scarcely more than 150 miles. My ear was thus over thirteen times more sensitive. Yet at that time I was, so to speak, stone deaf in comparison with the acuteness of my hearing while under the nervous strain. In Budapest I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable. The ground under my feet trembled continuously. I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all. The roaring noises from near and far often produced the effect of spoken words which would have frightened me had I not been able to resolve them into their accidental components. The sun’s rays, when periodically intercepted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me. I had to summon all my will power to pass under a bridge or other structure as I experienced a crushing pressure on the skull. In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object at a distance of twelve feet by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead. My pulse varied from a few to two hundred and sixty beats and all the tissues of the body quivered with twitchings and tremors which was perhaps the hardest to bear. A renowned physician who gave me daily large doses of Bromide of Potassium pronounced my malady unique and incurable. I clung desperately to life, but never expected to recover. Can anyone believe that so hopeless a physical wreck could ever be transformed into a man of astonishing strength and tenacity, able to work thirty-eight years almost without a day’s interruption, and find himself still strong and fresh in body and mind? Such is my case. A powerful desire to live and to continue the work, and the assistance of a devoted friend and athlete accomplished the wonder. My health returned and with it the vigor of mind.”

Another important thing to point out here is that in Budapest at this time the world’s first AC transformers were created in the late 1870s, not long before Tesla’s arrival there. While Tesla himself never seems to have made mention of studying these, given his work at the time and interests then, as well as later in life, it’s generally thought he likely did observe these and became familiar with how they worked.

Speaking of AC power, it was also at this point, in 1881, that Tesla claims he had a vision and suddenly saw how to create his later famed AC induction motor. He elaborates,

“I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the City Park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe’s “Faust.” The sun was just setting and reminded me of the glorious passage… As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him: “See my motor here; watch me reverse it.”…”

He goes on, “The pieces of apparatus I conceived were to me absolutely real and tangible in every detail, even to the minute marks and signs of wear. I delighted in imagining the motors constantly running, for in this way they presented to mind’s eye a more fascinating sight. When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots. In less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name.”

And that, while it would take him several years to actually make the motor, “The motors I built there were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision, and the operation was always as I expected.”

We should at this point point out that it’s only Tesla’s word that any of this actually occurred, and if he truly had invented such a thing at that point, and knowing the work on AC power that was presently being done in Budapest, it seems odd he didn’t at least patent it at this point or pursue it in any way other than in his head.

Normally we’d not be so skeptical, but as you’ll soon see as a running theme with Tesla and his work, given so many people were working on the same things at the same time, including his most famous invention of the AC Induction Motor as previously noted, Tesla had a propensity to claim publicly when he’d come out with his own version of something that he’d already done or thought up whatever thing years before and only now was getting around to telling the world about it, thus making it appear he was the true inventor, even if someone else beat him to the punch on a working device. But the thing is, he never once provided any evidence backing up a single one of these claims we could find. We just have his word he did…

But going back to his day job, in 1882, his boss at the telephone exchange ultimately recommended Tesla for another job, this time in Paris, working for none other than the Continental Edison Company, installing indoor electric lighting across the city.

Once again, Tesla impressed his employers by improving designs, and he began to be sent on troubleshooting missions to other Edison utilities. Next came a big step for the young engineer. Tesla’s overseer, Charles Batchelor, one of Edison’s chief lieutenants so to speak, was recalled to New York City, and decided to invite Tesla to also make the trip at some point if he so chose.

Of this journey and decision in it, Tesla would write of yet another place he was allegedly promised a large bonus that went unpaid, “One of the administrators had promised me a liberal compensation in case I succeeded, as well as a fair consideration of the improvements I had made in their dynamos and I hoped to realize a substantial sum. There were three administrators whom I shall designate as A, B and C for convenience. When I called on A he told me that B had the say. This gentleman thought that only C could decide and the latter was quite sure that A alone had the power to act. After several laps of this circulus vivios it dawned upon me that my reward was a castle in Spain. The utter failure of my attempts to raise capital for development was another disappointment and when Mr. Batchellor prest me to go to America with a view of redesigning the Edison machines, I determined to try my fortunes in the Land of Golden Promise. But the chance was nearly mist. I liquefied my modest assets, secured accommodations and found myself at the railroad station as the train was pulling out. At that moment I discovered that my money and tickets were gone. What to do was the question. Hercules had plenty of time to deliberate but I had to decide while running alongside the train with opposite feelings surging in my brain like condenser oscillations. Resolve, helped by dexterity, won out in the nick of time and upon passing thru the usual experiences, as trivial as unpleasant, I managed to embark for New York with the remnants of my belongings, some poems and articles I had written, and a package of calculations relating to solutions of an unsolvable integral and to my flying machine. During the voyage I sat most of the time at the stern of the ship watching for an opportunity to save somebody from a watery grave, without the slightest thought of danger. Later when I had absorbed some of the practical American sense I shivered at the recollection and marvelled at my former folly.”

Upon his arrival in America, he was decidedly unimpressed, noting he thought, “Is this America? … It is a century behind Europe in civilization.”

That said, five years later, he switched completely, noting, “I became convinced that it was more than one hundred years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.”

But going back to shortly after his arrival in the U.S., he almost immediately began working at Edison’s Machine Works and got to meet the man himself, stating “The meeting with Edison was a memorable event in my life. I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries reading all sorts of stuff that fell into my hands, from Newton’s ‘Principia’ to the novels of Paul de Kock, and felt that most of my life had been squandered. But it did not take long before I recognized that it was the best thing I could have done. Within a few weeks I had won Edison’s confidence and it came about in this way.”

He then goes on to recount the story of the S.S. Oregon as previously described. He also states here, “At five o’clock in the morning, when passing along Fifth Avenue on my way to the shop, I met Edison with Batchellor and a few others as they were returning home to retire. ‘Here is our Parisian running around at night,’ he said. When I told him that I was coming from the Oregon and had repaired both machines, he looked at me in silence and walked away without another word. But when he had gone some distance I heard him remark: ‘Batchellor, this is a damn good man,’ and from that time on I had full freedom in directing the work.”

He also claims Edison would later state, “I have had many hard-working assistants but you take the cake.”

Of course, as covered, this employ was not to last terribly long, approximately a mere six months, after which he did his arc lighting and ditch digging thing, and officially gave the world his AC Induction Motor.

Tesla Coil

Fastforwarding to after Tesla’s AC patents had made him a relatively wealthy man, this gave him the opportunity to pursue further inventions of his own. Working from various spaces in Manhattan, over the next few years Tesla worked on a number of fascinating projects such as the now-famous Tesla Coil. In a nutshell, this is a device that produces high-voltage, high-frequency, low-current AC electricity and, among other things and most noteworthy for our story today and how Tesla utilized it to wow audiences, can cause arcs of electricity through the air in quite dazzling displays, as well as cause fluorescent bulbs close enough to light up without being connected to anything.

That said, despite today often being touted as revolutionary, the Tesla Coil was actually just evolutionary, as with pretty much all inventions ever created by man. For example, among other things, the Tesla coil was building off the Ruhmkorff coil invented almost a half century before Tesla got around to his advancement. And even the Ruhmkorff coil wasn’t wholly original, building off others’ work. In particular the likes of Charles Grafton Page and Nicholas Callan who independently invented the induction coil back in 1836, and then improved upon by others.

On top of that, while Tesla was doing his thing on the Tesla Coil, patenting it in 1891, others were doing experiments with very similar devices, even none other than Elihu Thomson who co-founded General Electric with Thomas Edison, as well as co-founded the aforementioned Thomson-Houston company that was Westinghouse’s chief competitor in the AC power transmission front during the war of the currents.

This is not to knock Tesla’s work so much as to just explicitly point out once again that nobody comes up with things on their own. And generally multiple people come up with something similar all around the same time. Which is an incredibly important point when talking about Edison and Tesla and their respective contributions to the world.

Magnifying Transmitter

Moving on from the Tesla Coil, we should probably mention Tesla allegedly created an adaptation of this in his Magnifying Transmitter which could, among other things, allegedly light a field of fluorescent bulbs anywhere in the world if properly tuned… Of this invention, Tesla would write, “I feel certain that of all my inventions, the Magnifying Transmitter will prove most important and valuable to future generations.” As to how it worked, this is something of a mystery and you’ll find no shortage of varied explanations online about it. But if you thought “It didn’t”, you’re probably right. But for those that purported it did, it allegedly worked by creating standing waves of energy in the Earth, which then could be picked up elsewhere or used by devices tuned or designed to resonate with the right frequency. Of course, there are many other explanations to what this could do and how it worked, and Tesla’s own accounts muddy the waters quite a bit there, including even referencing the use of x-rays at one point. But whatever the case as he, and many Tesla enthusiasts, often cite this as his greatest invention, we thought we should at least mention it.

X-Rays

Speaking of x-rays, something he did actually create was his Shadograph, which was essentially one of the early examples of an x-ray image. Tesla claims he invented this before anyone else, though allegedly lost evidence of it in his lab fire… After Wilhelm Rontgen published his own use of x-ray film technology in 1895, Tesla would shortly thereafter come out with his own and did obtain some of the early images of the human body utilizing x-rays with remarkable quality compared to what others were doing at the time. But, in the end, while it’s always possible he was the first, surviving evidence more just has Tesla as a pioneer in the use of x-ray technology, rather than the inventor, contrary to many internet rumors.

Neon Lamp

As for some other interesting work he did during this time, Tesla also is often credited with inventing the neon lamp, allegedly demonstrating this at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. However, This isn’t actually correct owing to the tiny fact that neon wasn’t discovered until 5 years later in 1898. The real first neon lamp was made by George Claude and presented at the Paris Motor Show in 1910. What Tesla did do was make some improvements on fluorescent lighting over the course of his work on wirelessly lighting up such bulbs. Key here for the typical idea of a neon lamp most of us have, is that in all this he also created fluorescent light signs via bent tubes. However, also important to note was that such lights Tesla demonstrated in 1893 were not only not neon, but not commercially viable at the time either.

Earthquake Machine

Yet another device Tesla supposedly invented was a so-called “Earthquake machine” based on his Tesla Oscillator. A relatively small device that, according to a 79 year old Tesla, tuned correctly could tap into the resonant frequencies of the makeup of buildings and topple them with fairly little energy needed. For example, Tesla claimed he’d previously used this device once at his 46 East Houston Street lab. This resulted in the police being called when he shook the building and neighboring buildings relatively violently. As for the Empire State Building, he claimed his small, 7 inch, 2 lb steam powered oscillator that, to quote him, “you could put in your overcoat pocket”, could take down this building with a mere 5 pounds of air pressure. He also noted the oscillator could be used to vibrate the ground as well and thus facilitate communication over any distance one wanted via these vibrations. Another good use he proposed was to use it to help locate various minerals under the earth. There was a danger, however, as he claimed that it was entirely possible to use the device to, to quote the man himself, “split the earth like an apple,” At this same event, because of all these amazing uses, he claimed that he expected within 2 years the device would earn him somewhere in the ballpark of $100 million…

As ever with so many of his claims, no evidence was offered to back up any of it. It is technically possible to make such a device that could shake a building to an extent in some cases, but not to demolish it and, as you might expect, many are skeptical this shaking of the building story ever happened.

Making Students Bright

Moving on from there, Tesla also explored using AC current to help stimulate intelligence in students “by saturating them unconsciously with electricity”. He elaborated on all this in Popular Electricity Magazine in 1912, noting he would wire the walls of a classroom “saturating [the schoolroom] with infinitesimal electric waves vibrating at high frequency. The whole room will thus, Mr. Tesla claims, be converted into a health-giving and stimulating electromagnetic field or ‘bath.’”

In the end, his hypothesis was that his device would stimulate the student’s brains and make them smarter somehow. Leveraging his famous name, he managed to get the superintendent of schools in New York, William H. Maxwell, to agree to allow him to conduct such an experiment on a classroom of unsuspecting students. However, for whatever reason, Tesla never actually did this. Probably for the best…

Solving the Enigma of Death

Some other of his life’s work, for a time at least, also included, to quote him “solving the enigma of death” though he eventually abandoned this work after a rather strange experience during one of his mental breakdowns.

He states,

“Ever since I was told by some of the greatest men of the time, leaders in science whose names are immortal, that I am possesst of an unusual mind, I bent all my thinking faculties on the solution of great problems regardless of sacrifice. For many years I endeavored to solve the enigma of death, and watched eagerly for every kind of spiritual indication. But only once in the course of my existence have I had an experience which momentarily impressed me as supernatural. It was at the time of my mother’s death. I had become completely exhausted by pain and long vigilance, and one night was carried to a building about two blocks from our home. As I lay helpless there, I thought that if my mother died while I was away from her bedside she would surely give me a sign. Two or three months before I was in London in company with my late friend, Sir William Crookes, when spiritualism was discussed, and I was under the full sway of these thoughts. I might not have paid attention to other men, but was susceptible to his arguments as it was his epochal work on radiant matter, which I had read as a student, that made me embrace the electrical career. I reflected that the conditions for a look into the beyond were most favorable, for my mother was a woman of genius and particularly excelling in the powers of intuition. During the whole night every fiber in my brain was strained in expectancy, but nothing happened until early in the morning, when I fell in a sleep, or perhaps a swoon, and saw a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother. The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices. In that instant a certitude, which no words can express, came upon me that my mother had just died. And that was true. I was unable to understand the tremendous weight of the painful knowledge I received in advance, and wrote a letter to Sir William Crookes while still under the domination of these impressions and in poor bodily health. When I recovered I sought for a long time the external cause of this strange manifestation and, to my great relief, I succeeded after many months of fruitless effort. I had seen the painting of a celebrated artist, representing allegorically one of the seasons in the form of a cloud with a group of angels which seemed to actually float in the air, and this had struck me forcefully. It was exactly the same that appeared in my dream, with the exception of my mother’s likeness. The music came from the choir in the church nearby at the early mass of Easter morning, explaining everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts. This occurred long ago, and I have never had the faintest reason since to change my views on psychical and spiritual phenomena, for which there is absolutely no foundation. The belief in these is the natural outgrowth of intellectual development. Religious dogmas are no longer accepted in their orthodox meaning, but every individual clings to faith in a supreme power of some kind. We all must have an ideal to govern our conduct and insure contentment, but it is immaterial whether it be one of creed, art, science or anything else, so long as it fulfills the function of a dematerializing force. It is essential to the peaceful existence of humanity as a whole that one common conception should prevail.”

The Thought Camera

In any event, going back to his inventions, another of his slightly out there inventions was the aforementioned thought camera, which Tesla claims he first experimented with in 1893. Later in life he would elaborate, “I became convinced that a definite image formed in thought must, by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina, which might possibly be read by suitable apparatus… If this can be done successfully, then the objects imagined by a person would be clearly reflected on the screen as they are formed. and in this way every thought of the individual could be read. Our minds would then, indeed, be like open books.”

The Ozone Device

Yet another slightly oddball thing Tesla attempted to make and market was via his 1900 Tesla Ozone Company, which sold a device that could be used to pass ozone through oils, which could then be sold for therapeutic purposes. He also tried to market a version of this device to be used to sanitize hospital rooms, though neither of these things went anywhere.

Tesla’s Rising and Falling Fame

We’ll get into more of his inventions in a bit, but shortly after Tesla’s rise in prominence thanks to his AC Induction Motor and related patents, he went on a sold out lecture tour from New York to London and Paris, putting on a show that wowed his audiences and the media, primarily with his Tesla Coil. Anyone who’s seen a Tesla Coil in action, not just for its abilities at shooting electricity through the air, but illuminating certain types of bulbs wirelessly and a variety of other things like this, can imagine how not only is it incredible to see and hear even to modern eyes, but to a late 19th century audience, this must have seemed pure magic.

On this and his initial work on wireless lighting, he states, “If my memory serves me right, it was in November, 1890, that I performed a laboratory experiment which was one of the most extraordinary and spectacular ever recorded in the annals of science. In investigating the behaviour of high frequency currents I had satisfied myself that an electric field of sufficient intensity could be produced in a room to light up electrodeless vacuum tubes. Accordingly, a transformer was built to test the theory and the first trial proved a marvelous success.”

As alluded to, Tesla would spend quite a lot of time and investor money pursuing this form of wireless lighting, but never managed to come up with anything commercially viable.

Going back to his demonstrations and articles in the papers where he discussed his work here, while the masses were extremely impressed and some in the industry intrigued, not everyone was so enthusiastic, as reported in the English Journal Industries, “We think, however, that anyone who has read many of Mr. Tesla’s articles must have difficulty in understanding the frequent vague and idiomatic statements with which they abound. We do not think it too much to ask an electrician occupying such a prominent position as Mr. Tesla has gained for himself in America to omit passages that may detract from his reputation, and to allow us to admire him even more. If Mr. Tesla could keep phantom ideas about the electromagnetic theory of light and Hertz and Dr. Lodge out of his work, we feel sure he would make his interesting experiments more clear.”

The London Electrical Review would go on of the demonstrations themselves, “If a few quantitative determinations of current, voltage, or even of frequency, had been given in the lecture it would have had a definitive scientific value. To reduce even one out of the 50 experiments to a complete research would be worth all the other 49 brilliant and suggestive demonstrations. We have no desire to pick out weak points in such an interesting lecture, but we think that any one who read Mr. Tesla’s articles must have had great difficulty in understanding his repeated idiomatic statements… We hope Mr. Tesla is correct when he surmises that the future light may be produced by vacuum tubes, but we believe the subject has been thoroughly searched out… by many inventors without a result which has been very promising.”

The aforementioned Electrical Engineer Laurenc A Hawkins would further writes of this lecture series of Tesla’s, “After Tesla’s apparent failure in motor production” -note here he’s referencing Tesla’s inability to get his motor working on the existing power service at the time and walking away from it to let others figure it out- “he turned to more promising fields. In 1891, he burst upon the electrical world with the first of a series of the most remarkable lectures ever delivered before a scientific audience. The experiments shown were fairly startling. Lamps and motors were operated on open circuit with a single-line wire. Lamps were made to burn brightly when short-circuited by a heavy copper bar, while exhausted tubes were brought to incandescence without any wire near them. Tubes were lighted by merely approaching them with the hand. Beautiful flames of varied appearance were made to leap from many objects, even from the hand of the lecturer himself. Before the eyes of the startled spectators Tesla touched both terminals of a 200,000 volt transformer, with no more serious results than the production of the flames aforesaid. Throughout the lecture vague hints were offered of the tremendous possibilities exposed by the experiments- possibilities of obtaining unlimited light and power anywhere on the earth’s surface, not by means expensive, but by taking the energy directly from the earth itself or from the circumambient ether. The public was astounded. Popular opinion, ever ready to ascribe the most impossible attributes to the vaguely understood force, electricity, hailed the lectures as disclosing a new era of wonders and Tesla as the last and greatest of electrical wizards. Even the eye of science was dazzled by Tesla’s brilliant flames, and the most extravagant tributes were poured upon him. As stated in the London Electrical Engineer, ‘No man in our age has achieved such a universal scientific reputation in a single stride as this gifted young electrical engineer.’ It was asserted that similar effects to those shown by Tesla had previously been produced by Crookes, Hertz, Rayleigh, Spottiswood, Lodge, Dr La Rue, Kennedy and Thomson, some of those effects having been patented nine years before the first Tesla lecture. But Tesla had made his experiments more spectacular by the use of higher voltages and higher frequencies, and the difference in degree passed for novelty in kind. It is true that the lectures abounded in fallacies and absurdities, as, for instance, Tesla’s favorite theory of magnetic screening, his misconception of harmonics, his inexplicable statement regarding Arago’s experiment, and even a gross misunderstanding of the fundamental law of physical science- the conservation of energy, but all were overlooked or forgiven…. No attempt at any commercial adaptation of the Experiments is described, but, instead, Tesla’s vague hints at possibilities won him the reputation of prophet of the new era. Today as we look back on those lectures of ten years ago and the development since then, it is hard to understand the scientific enthusiasm Tesla aroused. Have any useful results ever come from those famous experiments? Instead of Tesla’s high frequencies, the tendency has been steadily to lower frequencies. Instead of using static effects for power transmission, the chief problem on modern long-distance lines is to diminish those very effects. The electrostatic light is still a laboratory toy, while wires and a filament are still used in commerce. Central stations still produce their power and distribute it through their mains.The prophecies of those lectures and articles are still unfulfilled, and their suggestions forgotten or disregarded.”

Just as a brief aside which is important to the real story of Tesla, Hawkins goes on about much of Tesla’s conduct as a scientist. Much like any scientist with time and money available and widespread interest, Tesla was constantly jumping on new advancements related to his field and doing experiments on whatever thing. But, Tesla also had a propensity, as we’ve already alluded to and found in spades in our own research on him, to imply, or often even just outright state, he’d invented the thing before, but without providing any evidence. As Hawkins himself observed in 1903, “In the succeeding years each new idea or fad in the electrical world was eagerly seized upon by him and made the pretext for rushing into print, at first in the technical papers, and later, as the engineering press began to regard his effusions askance, in the non-technical daily papers, the adoption of the latter medium being accompanied with increase in sensationalism. When X rays were holding the popular attention, he dabbled in them and published his results. When the Wehnelt interrupter attracted the interest of scientists, Tesla immediately leaped into notice. As the London Electrical Review says ‘Tesla lets himself out on the Wehnelt interruption… [and that] he invented this device two or three years ago. This belated publication in our contemporary would not, according to the generally accepted code, secure to Tesla the credit of being the inventor; but Tesla evidently does not regret this, since he considers there is not merit in the invention.’ And again ‘Tesla has expressed a somewhat ungenerous contempt for the Wehnelt break, which has recently given such remarkable results in the hands of experimenters here and abroad. Its inferiority to Tesla’s break appears to be known as yet only to Tesla; in simplicity, at least, it is certainly superior.”

Hawkins goes on, “When the efforts of Marconi, Lodge and Slaby brought their first achievements in wireless telegraphy before the world Tesla had nothing but pity for their puerile efforts. When Marconi was ready to send a signal a few hundred miles, Tesla was ready (in the papers) to transmit thousands of horsepower the same distance. When Marconi was attempting to signal across the Atlantic, Tesla had already (in the papers) received a signal from Mars. (New York Sun Jan 3, 1901). Before the enthusiasm over the Spanish War had had time to cool, Tesla had published a description of his torpedoes, which would revolutionize warfare. (New York Sun November 21, 1898)… It was of this torpedo boat invention that Tesla said (Criterion November 19, 1898) ‘Had I nothing else to show for a life-work, this would put the laurels of everlasting fame on my head.’ It was of this same invention that Prof Brackett, of Princeton, said “Electrical Engineer Vol 26, 491) “The shortest, most correct and most complete criticism which I can make in reference to this bold boast is that, what is new about it is useless, while that which is useful had all been discovered by other scientists long before Tesla made this startling announcement.” It was of this invention that Prof Dolbear, of Tufts College, said “Electrical Engineer Vol 26 p 491) ‘…During the last six years he has made so many startling announcements and has performed so few of his promises that he is getting to be like the man who called ‘Wolf wolf!’ until no one listened to him. Mr. Tesla has failed so often before that there is no call to believe these things until he really does them.’ …as for the message from Mars (New York Sun” January 3, 1901) must be passed by with merely the comment made by Prof Fessenden “Electrical World” Vol 37, p 165 that “only the crassest ignorance could attribute any such origin” to the so-called signals.”

Hawkins sums up, “Ten years ago, if public opinion in this country had been required to name the electrician of greatest promise, the answer without doubt would have been ‘Nikola Tesla’. Today his name provokes at best a regret that so great a promise should have been unfulfilled. In ten years the attitude of the scientific press has passed from admiring expectancy to good natured banter and at last to charitable silence.”

Remote Control Boat

All that said, Hawkins’ criticism on one thing Tesla had done in his “torpedo” idea was, at least, premature in writing it off, though how this would ultimately be achieved could not have been done by the way Tesla understood things. Nevertheless, his vision was correct.

Specifically, in 1889, Tesla made one of his most famous demonstrations, using a system which he named ‘Teleautomatics’ to remotely control an iron hulled model boat across a small indoor pond made for this demonstration at Madison Square Garden. Tesla stated of the demo, “When first shown… it created a sensation such as no other invention of mine has ever produced.”

And you can see why. Not just lighting up a tube wirelessly, this time he was controlling something in relatively complex ways, and making it appear even more complex than it actually was. You see, the demo wasn’t just to show that he could control the boat without touching it, but to illustrate the idea of an independent automaton in general, all of which showcased Tesla’s abilities to wow an audience. For example, at one point he had the audience ask questions of the boat, in particular in one case “What is the cube root of 64.” In response, Tesla subtly had the lights on his boat flash four times, seeming to imply the boat had heard the question, done the calculation, and produced the answer.

While the device wasn’t illustrating anything new in the way of scientific principle, it was, nonetheless, a brilliant application of the technology available. And from this, there is a reasonable argument to be made that Tesla is the father of remote control vehicles.

Ever the visionary, Tesla predicted great things for this technology, even for its potential to end all wars. Imagining a world in which all manner of vessels and machines were not just remotely controlled, but fully independent automatons. He elaborated to one reporter of the potential of devices like this, “You do not see there a wireless torpedo, you see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.”

Inventing Radio

On this note of Radio transmissions, we’ll get into this more later when discussing Tesla’s famous tower, but for now very briefly, it’s often said that Tesla once again got credit stolen him by another when Guglielmo Marconi got not only the Nobel Prize but also general credit today for inventing radio transmissions. First, it should be noted that as ever, others had previously done work on this, such as Russian physicist Alexander Popov, who had previously made a radio receiver before Marconi or Tesla, etc. etc. Again, none of this was happening in a vacuum.

But as for the specific claim here of Tesla, rather than Marconi, being the “Father of Radio”, it is true that Marconi used some of Tesla’s patents in his revolutionary work, such as a Tesla oscillator. The problem is, outside of his claims, Tesla does not actually ever seem to have built a working radio or, at least, not in this sense and what we are talking about here. As noted by famed author and Electrical Engineering Professor Dr. Paul J Nahin in his The Science of Radio,

“Tesla was, without question, very skillful at generating large, noisy sparks with the aid of step-up transformers tuned to resonance (the famous Tesla coil) and he seems to have really believed that, since Marconi used sparks in his wireless work, then he too must be a wireless pioneer. There is, however, not a shred of credible evidence that Tesla did anything more than just talk about radio (in 1901, for example, he claimed that two years before he had received radio signals from Mars), and nothing in the historical record supports his grandiose claims. It is clear, in fact, from what he did write, that Tesla actually had only the slightest (if that) understanding of electromagnetic radio physics; he claimed, for example, that ‘his’ electric waves were both immune to the inverse-square law and that they traveled faster than light. Tesla does appear to have sincerely believed his own outrageous statements; he lived in a delusional world of self aggrandizement that became increasingly cut off from reality. His only human joy seems to have been feeding the pigeons of New York City, where he died in a hotel room a lonely, bitter man. Modern biographers of Tesla (none of whom have any technical training) continue to muddy the historical record, however, and so let me be quite clear: Tesla did not invent radio, although his flowery talk about it no doubt inspired many youngsters at the start of the 20th century to become interesting in ‘the new wireless’.”

As to the whole signal from Mars thing, Professor Nahin goes on, “This claim was not taken seriously by many (who argued convincingly that if Tesla was receiving anything it was certainly of terrestrial origin), but it did not pass without some lasting literary impact. HG Wells noticed it, and mentioned Tesla’s supposed Martian contact in his novel The First Men in the Moon published that same year in 1901. In Wells story one of the characters sends wireless telegraphy Morse code from the Moon back to Earth. Ironically, Tesla’s own words (in his patent application of 1897) show that he was really not thinking of true radio at all, but rather of a conducting system. The most recent explanation for what Tesla claims to have heard is that he was detecting electromagnetic radiation caused by the magnetic field of Jupiter. This is speculation that at best seems pretty far fetched for an 1899 radio receiver, an objection that Tesla advocates have anticipated. Their response is not unexpected-Tesla’s 1899 radio was a super advanced design that nobody else’s on Earth had even dreamed of.”

Going back to the idea that Tesla is the true “father of radio”, it is often pointed out, largely because of what Tesla himself claimed, that Tesla had previously already also created a device in 1895 that could transmit supposed radio signals over 50 miles. As to why he never demonstrated this device, unfortunately this was one of the supposed victims of his famous 1895 lab fire…

That said, Tesla did ultimately sue Marconi for patent infringement in 1915, but this didn’t go anywhere. Or, at least not until 1943, shortly after Tesla’s death. In this one, the U.S. Supreme Court went ahead and upheld Tesla’s radio patent 645,576. Because of this, many go back to giving Tesla, not Marconi, the credit here as the “father of radio”. However, beyond missing an awful lot of historical context of events and a misunderstanding of how the technology works compared to what Tesla proposed and made, as Dr. Nahin alluded to, this also misses the context that at the time the Supreme Court finally got around to upholding Tesla’s patent, the Marconi Company was suing the U.S. government for use of its patents during WWI. By the Supreme Court upholding Tesla’s patent on this case, it sidestepped the issue for the U.S. government. And while the Supreme Court is supposed to be unbiased in such things, it certainly made it convenient for the government. And either way, noteworthy also, as we’ll get into when we get to talking about Edison, the court system and judges with legal, instead of scientific backgrounds, aren’t exactly well suited for determining the validity of a given patent over another for some technology.

Ending the Tour and Rocky Mountain High

Going back to Tesla’s rising celebrity and the lecture tour that propelled this to even greater heights, he ultimately ceased touring after getting sick. He states of this, “I fled from London and later from Paris to escape favors showered upon me, and journeyed to my home where I passed through a most painful ordeal and illness. Upon regaining my health I began to formulate plans for the resumption of work in America. Up to that time I never realized that I possessed any particular gift of discovery but Lord Rayleigh, whom I always considered as an ideal man of science, had said so and if that was the case I felt that I should concentrate on some big idea.”

His big idea was widespread and ubiquitous global communication and cheap wireless power everywhere. Something he claimed he could do with a device he’d come up with. But first he had some work to do in Colorado to test his hypotheses.

With the help of various individuals including one Colonel John Jacob Astor, who gave Tesla $100,000 (about $3.7 million today) to fund the project, Tesla got to work.

That said, we should also point out here that as was also a theme with Tesla, he didn’t always do with investor money what he claimed he was going to work on with it. In this case, it appears that Astor had originally thought Tesla was going to use the money to advance his wireless lighting systems, when instead Tesla was far more interested in wanting to test some of his ideas on electrical transmission through the high atmosphere and through the Earth.

Thus, he moved to Colorado and got to work on his experimental station near Pikes Peak, with his facility here ultimately housing the, at the time, largest Tesla coil ever made, some 15 meters in diameter. This was something of a prototype for the eventual so-called magnifying transmitter in his later Wardenclyffe Tower. As for what he intended to accomplish here overall, he told reporters he was going to transmit signals from Colorado all the way to Paris with it.

What he actually accomplished here, if anything, is partially shrouded in mystery and further muddied by Tesla hyping what he’d done, some of which he definitely could not have done in reality given a modern understanding of electricity.

Whatever the case, one thing he did do, or, at least, it seems an odd thing for him to make up if it didn’t actually happen, is he apparently accidentally caused a power outage. In 1917, Tesla explains, “As an example of what has been done with several hundred kilowatts of high frequency energy liberated, it was found that the dynamos in a power house 6 miles (10 km) away were repeatedly burned out, due to the powerful high frequency currents set up in them, and which caused heavy sparks to jump through the windings and destroy the insulation!”

Talking to Aliens

It was also during this time that he allegedly received his signal, to quote him, “from another world”. Tesla would elaborate on this in the February 1901 Collier’s Weekly article “Talking with Planets”, which is a rather fascinating piece that also illustrates Tesla’s flare for captivating and inspiring speech and, in particular, makes an argument for widespread life of the universe.

In it, he states,

“The desire to know something of our neighbors in the immense depths of space does not spring from idle curiosity nor from thirst for knowledge, but from a deeper cause, and it is a feeling firmly rooted in the heart of every human being capable of thinking at all… But in this age of reason it is not astonishing to find persons who scoff at the very thought of effecting communication with a planet. First of all, the argument is made that there is only a small probability of other planets being inhabited at all. This argument has never appealed to me. In the solar system, there seem to be only two planets — Venus and Mars — capable of sustaining life such as ours: but this does not mean that there might not be on all of them some other forms of life. Chemical processes may be maintained without the aid of oxygen, and it is still a question whether chemical processes are absolutely necessary to the sustenance of organised beings. My idea is that the development of life must lead to forms of existence that will be possible without nourishment and which will not be shackled by consequent limitations. Why should a living being not be able to obtain all the energy it needs for the performance of its life-functions from the environment, instead of through consumption of food, and transforming, by a complicated process, the energy of chemical combinations into life-sustaining energy? If there were such beings on one of the planets we should know next to nothing about them. Nor is it necessary to go so far in our assumptions, for we can readily conceive that, in the same degree as the atmosphere diminishes in density, moisture disappears and the planet freezes up, organic life might also undergo corresponding modifications, leading finally to forms which, according to our present ideas of life, are impossible… They would adapt themselves to their constantly changing environment. So I think it quite possible that in a frozen planet, such as our moon is supposed to be, intelligent beings may still dwell, in its interior, if not on its surface.”

He then goes on to discuss communicating with such beings and his proposal on how, and circling back to his work in Colorado and its supposed groundbreaking nature. “I can readily demonstrate that, with an expenditure not exceeding two thousand horse-power, signals can be transmitted to a planet such as Mars with as much exactness and certitude as we now send messages by wire from New York to Philadelphia. These means are the result of long-continued experiment and gradual improvement…. My next step was to use the earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents, thus dispensing with wires and all other artificial conductors. So I was led to the development of a system of energy transmission and of telegraphy without the use of wires, which I described in 1893. The difficulties I encountered at first in the transmission of currents through the earth were very great. At that time I had at hand only ordinary apparatus, which I found to be ineffective, and I concentrated my attention immediately upon perfecting machines for this special purpose. This work consumed a number of years, but I finally vanquished all difficulties and succeeded in producing a machine which, to explain its operation in plain language, resembled a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits. In this manner I was able to transmit to a distance, not only feeble effects for the purposes of signaling, but considerable amounts of energy, and later discoveries I made convinced me that I shall ultimately succeed in conveying power without wires, for industrial purposes, with high economy, and to any distance, however great.”

He goes on in explanation on how he achieved this, well, as the good professor formerly noted, Tesla was really good at throwing around sparks. Tesla himself states,

“A few years ago it was virtually impossible to produce electrical sparks twenty or thirty foot long; but I produced some more than one hundred feet in length, and this without difficulty. The rates of electrical movement involved in strong induction apparatus had measured but a few hundred horse-power, and I produced electrical movements of rates of one hundred and ten thousand horse-power. Prior to this, only insignificant electrical pressures were obtained, while I have reached fifty million volts. Many persons in my own profession have wondered… and have asked what I am trying to do. But the time is not far away now when the practical results of my labors will be placed before the world and their influence felt everywhere. One of the immediate consequences will be the transmission of messages without wires, over sea or land, to an immense distance. I have already demonstrated, by crucial tests, the practicability of signalling by my system from one to any other point of the globe, no matter how remote, and I shall soon convert the disbelievers.”

With all this, Tesla also was under the impression that if he could control atmospheric electrical effects similar to what caused lightning, he could control the climate anywhere with it by, again, tapping into the Earth’s energy through his device and directing it where he willed. Thus, he claimed he could create rain over a desert and the like with it from one of his devices far afield.

Speaking of weather, going back to his Colorado experiments, he states, “As I was improving my machines for the production of intense electrical actions, I was also perfecting the means for observing feeble effects. One of the most interesting results, and also one of great practical importance, was the development of certain contrivances for indicating at a distance of many hundred miles an approaching storm, its direction, speed and distance travelled. These appliances are likely to be valuable in future meteorological observations and surveying, and will lend themselves particularly to many naval uses.”

And now we get to his alleged signal from another world.

“It was in carrying on this work that for the first time I discovered those mysterious effects which have elicited such unusual interest. I had perfected the apparatus referred to so far that from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical change that occurred within a radius of eleven hundred miles.

I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. Even now, at times, I can vividly recall the incident, and see my apparatus as though it were actually before me. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me.

The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals; and it was with this conviction that I announced to the Red Cross Society, when it asked me to indicate one of the great possible achievements of the next hundred years, that it would probably be the confirmation and interpretation of this planetary challenge to us….

At the present stage of progress, there would be no insurmountable obstacle in constructing a machine capable of conveying a message to Mars, nor would there be any great difficulty in recording signals transmitted to us by the inhabitants of that planet, if they be skilled electricians. Communication once established, even in the simplest way, as by a mere interchange of numbers, the progress toward more intelligible communication would be rapid. Absolute certitude as to the receipt and interchange of messages would be reached as soon as we could respond with the number “four,” say, in reply to the signal “one, two, three.” The Martians, or the inhabitants of whatever planet had signalled to us, would understand at once that we had caught their message across the gulf of space and had sent back a response. To convey a knowledge of form by such means is, while very difficult, not impossible, and I have already found a way of doing it…”

Noteworthy, while some were inspired by all this, others not so much, for example, in a July of 1900 edition of Marine Engineering, it noted that piece by Tesla was a “handiwork of a cerebrose individual- a bombastical genius who has illumined unknown fields of imaginative science with his intellectual searchlight, and is willing to permit the gaping world of ignorance or complaisance to peer in and wonder, the credulous editor drawing the curtain. This dazzling contribution to modern unscientific research reads like nothing so much as an essay on Christian Science, so profound is it in the ambiguous nothingness whereby it leads through the intricacies of incoherency into the climax of absolute assinity.”

Needless to say, it was around this time that Tesla was really starting to fall from grace with the scientists and engineers of the world, something that would, from this point, only accelerate more and more.

But in any event, with his work now apparently done in Colorado, he headed back to New York looking for investors in his new world changing technology. Noteworthy, it’s also been suggested his work wasn’t so much done here, as it was that when he left the Colorado facility he was not only out of money to continue operating the facility but he left behind considerable debts. This all culminated in 1904 to him being sued by Colorado Springs, with his debt being settled via the lab and its contents sold at auction.

The Tesla World System

But back in New York, Tesla began singing the praises of what he’d supposedly accomplished in Colorado, and was looking for an investor for an even grander version of what he’d made there. Of course, if he’d already done it all with the Colorado facility and such a facility could transmit anywhere in the world economically, why didn’t he just use or modify that for cheaper?

Don’t know.

But this is maybe something J.P. Morgan should have asked when having dinner with Tesla and discussing the whole thing. And, in particular, Tesla selling him on the idea of Tesla’s “World System” of wireless communication where Tesla claimed “When wireless is fully applied the Earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts.”

He goes on, “It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the inter-connection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment. By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Globe. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant. These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientific advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line-wire. One far-reaching result of this is that any device capable of being operated thru one or more wires (at a distance obviously restricted) can likewise be actuated, without artificial conductors and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to which there are no limits other than those imposed by the physical dimensions of the Globe. Thus, not only will entirely new fields for commercial exploitation be opened up by this ideal method of transmission but the old ones vastly extended.”

He goes on, “As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind.” And that, “When the great truth accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment.”

But to sum up, he promised that this system, which he claimed he could have operational in 9 months, would provide for:

“1) The inter-connection of the existing telegraph exchanges or offices all over the world;

(2) The establishment of a secret and non-interferable government telegraph service;

(3) The inter-connection of all the present telephone exchanges or offices on the Globe;

(4) The universal distribution of general news, by telegraph or telephone, in connection with the Press;

(5) The establishment of such a ‘World-System’ of intelligence transmission for exclusive private use;

(6) The inter-connection and operation of all stock tickers of the world;

(7) The establishment of a ‘World-System’ of musical distribution, etc.;

(8) The universal registration of time by cheap clocks indicating the hour with astronomical precision and requiring no attention whatever;

(9) The world transmission of typed or handwritten characters, letters, checks, etc.;

(10) The establishment of a universal marine service enabling the navigators of all ships to steer perfectly without compass, to determine the exact location, hour and speed, to prevent collisions and disasters, etc.;

(11) The inauguration of a system of world-printing on land and sea;

(12) The world reproduction of photographic pictures and all kinds of drawings or records.”

He also philosophically felt that such widespread communication would bring about an end to war, noting, “The greatest good will comes from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories driven thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun’s energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land. Its introduction for telegraphic, telephonic and similar uses will automatically cut out the statics and all other interferences which at present impose narrow limits to the application of the wireless….War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only thru annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong… Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.”

However, at the time he wrote this long after his famed J.P. Morgan funded tower failure, he ominously notes that such widespread communication seems to be being suppressed by hitherto unknown dark forces, stating, “As throwing light on this point, I may mention that only recently an odd looking gentleman called on me with the object of enlisting my services in the construction of world transmitters in some distant land. ‘We have no money,’ he said, ‘but carloads of solid gold and we will give you a liberal amount.’ I told him that I wanted to see first what will be done with my inventions in America, and this ended the interview. But I am satisfied that some dark forces are at work, and as time goes on the maintenance of continuous communication will be rendered more difficult. The only remedy is a system immune against interruption. It has been perfected, it exists, and all that is necessary is to put it in operation.”

Tesla’s Tower and Downfall

Speaking of his own attempt to “put it in operation”, again we go back to J.P. Morgan. Intrigued by Tesla’s ideas, and with Tesla himself stating his Colorado facility had already demonstrated the technology needed, Morgan gave Tesla $150,000 today (about $5.6 million today) to build a larger facility to facilitate global communication in this way through allegedly manipulating the electrical charge of the Earth.

This ultimately led to the construction of his famed Wardenclyffe tower, some 187 feet tall with a 55 ton sphere of metal at the top. The tower also possessed a shaft that went about 120 feet into the earth, and below this he had 16 iron pipes about 300 feet long embedded into the ground. As to why, Tesla stated, “In this system that I have invented, it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip… so that the whole of this globe can quiver.”

Now, while it’s pretty much universally said this facility failed because of lack of funding, if you’ve been following along, you’re going to no doubt not be surprised that the real reason it failed was because Tesla had some pretty fundamental misunderstandings of quite a lot of things. As Professor Paul J Nahin formerly noted, Tesla was good at “generating large, noisy sparks”, but his understanding of the forces he was dealing with were based on 19th century understanding that just didn’t bear out. And, in fact, as we’ve alluded to a few times, Tesla’s unwillingness to advance his own understanding on various points as science progressed saw his brilliant mind mostly go to waste pretty much from this point on, other than some interesting work on turbines.

But going back to the Wardenclyffe tower, when looking over Tesla’s patents and papers and what was built, it really isn’t clear how the tower was supposed to do what Tesla claimed even with his understanding of things. But either way, the Earth cannot be used as a conductor as Tesla was thinking, nor could he shoot the energy into the ionosphere to do what he was thinking with the tower there either.

Speaking of shooting energy through the air, going back to his original radio patent that so many claim makes Tesla the father of radio instead of Marconi or others working on similar things, we should also point out that Tesla also had the idea that he could create a vast power distribution service via floating balloons up around 30,000 feet. He writes in the radio patent, “by the aid of captive balloons supplied continuously with gas from reservoirs and held-in position securely by steel wires or by any other means, devices, or expedients, such as may be contrived and perfected by ingenious and skilled engineers. From my experiments and observations I conclude that with electromotive impulses not greatly exceeding fifteen or twenty million volts the energy of many thousands of horse-power may be transmitted over vast distances, measured by many hundreds and even thousands of miles, with terminals not more than thirty to thirty-five thousand feet above the level of the sea, and even this comparatively-small elevation will be required chiefly for reasons of economy, and, if desired, it may be considerably reduced, since by such means as have been described practically any potential that is desired may be obtained, the currents through the air strata may be rendered very small, whereby the loss in the transmission may be reduced.”

In a nutshell, given the low density of atmosphere at that altitude, he thought this would allow him to send millions of volts from balloon to balloon spaced at incredible distances. Why he thought this would work seems to have been based on the idea that the high atmosphere was extremely conductive. He also thought he could utilize this supposed fact to make the upper atmosphere glow and, thus, provide ample light at night to large areas in this way anywhere he wanted. No outdoor lighting needed.

But as for the tower, as things progressed and he’d still not managed to send any signals anywhere despite seemingly having successfully created what he’d claimed he’d need for it, things began to turn south pretty quickly.

To make matters worse in all this, while Tesla was trying and failing in his wireless messaging transmission idea, across the pond in Europe, Marconi was doing the same, but in a way that could actually work. In particular, on December 12, 1901, Marconi had successfully sent the letter “S” all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from England to Newfoundland.

Tesla was initially unconcerned about this, thinking incorrectly that Marconi was just copying his method. In particular because he had read Marconi was using a Tesla coil that was “connected to the Earth”. And, according to Tesla, using 17 of Tesla’s patents. On the latter, it is true that Marconi was using some of Tesla’s work as previously noted, but also as noted, the way he was transmitting the message was fundamentally different than Tesla’s proposed system.

But not getting anywhere with sending messages and given Marconi’s much cheaper system that was progressing nicely, in order to drum up more funding, Tesla decided to switch it up from the focus of his tower being communication, to pushing using the facility for wireless power.

He wrote to Morgan in July of 1903 of this, “Financially, I am in a dreadful fix. But if I can complete this work, I can readily show that by my wireless system power can be transmitted in any amount, to any desired distance and with high economy. Of the three hundred horsepower developed by my oscillator on Long Island, two hundred and seventy five, perhaps a little more, can be recovered at the greatest distance in Australia.”

It is here we feel compelled to explicitly point out a few things to counter some of the claims of internet Tesla conspiracy theorists. In particular the idea that Tesla invented a form of “free” wireless energy, which could have been communicated wirelessly at no cost to the end consumer and would have, thus, revolutionized the world. Given all Tesla’s claims about his tower here and how he thought it would work, you can kind of squint and see where such rumors came from. Of course, first, the way Tesla was proposing transmitting power and the efficiency, for example in his quote there from Long Island to Australia at 91%, well. Let’s just say J.P. Morgan didn’t buy it either, and we hope any of the Tesla conspiracy theorists listening also can see now that maybe it wasn’t his alleged “dark forces” sabotaging Tesla’s work here that was its downfall, but the man himself.

Further, as to the whole idea of free or ultra cheap ubiquitous energy, Tesla thought this would be the downfall of society. He state, “If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force.”

Going back to Tesla’s pitch to J.P. Morgan for using the tower for power instead of communication, Tesla goes on, “If I had told you such as this before, you would have fired me out of your office. Now you see, Mr. Morgan, what I work for. It means a great industrial revolution. It will be the one thing worthy of your attention, as I have always assured you. There is no incertitude about this, it is an absolute. My patents confer a monopoly. Will you help me or let my great work-almost complete- go to pots?”

Morgan replied on July 17, 1903, “I have received your letter of the 16th inst., and in reply would say that I should not feel disposed at present to make any further advances.”

Not dismayed, Tesla persisted, writing Morgan, “I am the only man on this earth today who has the peculiar knowledge and ability to achieve this wonder and another one may not come in a hundred years. There has been a long and painful delay. My nerves are not of iron, and all this knowledge and ability may be lost to the world. Help me to complete this work or at least remove the obstacles in my path.”

In yet another instance he wrote him “… you are the only man today who possesses the genius and power to compel the universal adoption of these ideas and that is why I approached you two years ago.”

When none of that worked, Tesla then wrote him in October of 1904, stating “Since a year, Mr. Morgan, there has been hardly a night when my pillow is not bathed in tears, but you must not think me a weak man for that. I am perfectly sure to finish my task, come what may. I am only sorry that after mastering the difficulties which seemed insuperable, and acquiring special knowledge which I now alone posses, and which, if applied effectively, would advance the world a century, I must see my work delayed.”

Morgan’s response was quick and to the point- “No.”

In a rage, Tesla replied,

“You are a man like Bismark. Great but uncontrollable. I wrote purposefully last week hoping that your recent association [with the archbishop] might have rendered you more susceptible to a softer influence. But you are no Christian at all, you are a fanatic musoulman [Muslim]. Once you say no, come what may, it is no. May the gravitation repel instead of attract, may right become wrong, every consideration no matter what it may be, must founder on the rock of your brutal resolve… You let me struggle on, weakened by shrew enemies, disheartened by doubting friends, financially exhausted, trying to overcome obstacles which you yourself have piled up before me.”

In further frustration, in December of 1904 he wrote, “Owing to a habit contracted long ago in defiance of superstition, I prefer to make important communications on Fridays and the 13th of each month, but my house is afire and I have not an hour to waste. I knew that you would refuse. What chance have I to land the biggest Wall Street monster with soul’s spider thread!”

And that, “Mr Morgan you have raised great waves in the industrial world and some have struck my little boat. Prices have gone up in consequence, twice, perhaps three times higher than they were and there were expensive delays, mostly as a result of activities you excited.”

Ultimately a dejected Tesla for reasons unclear- perhaps just angry, perhaps doing some last minute experiments to try to get the thing to work while he still had use of the tower, or perhaps trying to put on a show to get some media hype about his tower he could potentially use to find more investors- put on a rather interesting light show directly after receiving a rejection letter for further financing from J.P. Morgan, with the New York Sun reporting that those nearby the tower observed “all sorts of lightning… from the tall tower… For a time the air was filled with blinding streaks of electricity which seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand. The display continued until after midnight.”

When asked what he was doing with all that, Tesla cryptically told the paper, “It is true that some of them have had to do with wireless telegraphy” and that if the local people “had been awake instead of asleep, at other times they would have seen even stranger things. Some day, but not at this time, I shall make an announcement of something that I never once dreamed of.”

Perhaps lending credence to the “publicity” angle of his display in order to drum up potential new investors, Tesla also claimed to reporters that he’d successfully used the tower to transmit messages to Scotland, noting “We have been sending wireless messages for long distances from this station for some time, but whether we are going into the telegraph field on a commercial basis I cannot say at present.”

On this note, Tesla would manage to secure some additional funding from one Thomas Fortune Ryan. However, rather than use the funds to continue construction as they were intended, he, instead, used it to pay off some debts.

Ultimately Tesla was unable to keep up with mortgage payments and Wardenclyffe was dismantled in 1915 by its de facto owner, George C Boldt, in order to be sold for scrap.

In the aftermath of this all, the news would call the Tower, “Tesla’s million dollar folly”. The man himself would maintain for the rest of his life it all would have worked if not for a “blind, faint-hearted, doubting world” which resulted in his inability to drum up needed funds to continue the project.

Even many years later in life during his aforementioned Edison medal acceptance speech he brought it up again, stating, “as to the transmission of power through space, that is a project which I considered absolutely certain of success long since. Years ago I was in the position to transmit wireless power to any distance without limit other than that imposed by the physical dimensions of the globe. In my system it makes no difference what the distance is. The efficiency of the transmission can be as high as 96 or 97 per cent, and there are practically no losses except such as are inevitable in the running of the machinery. When there is no receiver there is no energy consumption anywhere. When the receiver is put on, it draws power. That is the exact opposite of the Hertz-wave system. In that case, if you have a plant of 1,000 horsepower, it is radiating all the time whether the energy is received or not; but in my system no power is lost. When there are no receivers the plant consumes only a few horsepower necessary to maintain the electric vibration; it runs idle, as the Edison plant when the lamps and motors are shut off. I have made advances along this line in later years which will contribute to the practical features of the system. Recently I have obtained a patent on a transmitter with which it is practicable to transfer unlimited amount of energy to any distance. I had a very interesting experience with Mr. Stone, whom I consider, if not the ablest, certainly one of the ablest living experts. I said to Mr. Stone: ”Did you see my patent?” He replied: “Yes, I saw it, but I thought you were crazy.” When I explained it to Mr. Stone he said, “Now, I see; why, that is great,” and he understood how the energy is transmitted.”

Of course, in reality, while he genuinely seems to have believed everything he said here, no amount of money could have made the Wardenclyffe Tower work for what Tesla was trying to do with it.

An interesting thing to note on all this, however, is that despite Tesla’s rage filled letters and insults to Morgan in the moment, he would later write much more kindly words about the man. In Tesla’s autobiography he states, “in view of various rumors which have reached me, that Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan did not interest himself with me in a business way but in the same large spirit in which he has assisted many other pioneers. He carried out his generous promise to the letter and it would have been most unreasonable to expect from him anything more. He had the highest regard for my attainments and gave me every evidence of his complete faith in my ability to ultimately achieve what I had set out to do. I am unwilling to accord to some small minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.”

A Breakdown

Going back to the immediate aftermath of the Tower’s failure, Tesla would write, “Despite my rare physical endurance at that period the abused nerves finally rebelled and I suffered a complete collapse, just as the consummation of the long and difficult task was almost in sight.”

He goes on, he got over it quickly, however, thanks to his particular constitution, stating, “Without doubt I would have paid a greater penalty later, and very likely my career would have been prematurely terminated, had not providence equipt me with a safety device, which has seemed to improve with advancing years and unfailingly comes into play when my forces are at an end. So long as it operates I am safe from danger, due to overwork, which threatens other inventors and, incidentally, I need no vacations which are indispensable to most people. When I am all but used up I simply do as the darkies, who ‘naturally fall asleep while white folks worry.’ To venture a theory out of my sphere, the body probably accumulates little by little a definite quantity of some toxic agent and I sink into a nearly lethargic state which lasts half an hour to the minute. Upon awakening I have the sensation as though the events immediately preceding had occurred very long ago, and if I attempt to continue the interrupted train of thought I feel a veritable mental nausea. Involuntarily I then turn to other work and am surprised at the freshness of the mind and ease with which I overcome obstacles that had baffled me before. After weeks or months my passion for the temporarily abandoned invention returns and I invariably find answers to all the vexing questions with scarcely any effort.”

The Tesla Turbine

After his breakdown, Tesla got back to work, noting “My enemies have been so successful in portraying me as a poet and a visionary that I must put out something commercial without delay.”

On this, after JP Morgan’s death in 1913, Tesla did attend his funeral, and not long after tried to get Morgan’s son, Jack, to support the Tower project, but he was uninterested. However, Jack was sold on an alternate project of Tesla’s turbine idea, giving Tesla $20,000 (about $600,000 today) to help support the project.

As for the turbine engine, this one was Tesla going back to creating something that actually worked and was ingenious. On this, traditional such devices used a bladed system, more or less like a windmill inside of an enclosure. Tesla’s system used a series of discs along a shaft that utilized the boundary layer effect to spin. When he got it to work, he stated, “I have accomplished what mechanical engineers had been dreaming about ever since the invention of steam power. That is the perfect rotary engine.”

Tesla also noted of it, and people’s skepticism of his device, “Only the other day I had a disheartening experience when I met my friend and former assistant, Charles F. Scott, now professor of Electrical Engineering at Yale. I had not seen him for a long time and was glad to have an opportunity for a little chat at my office. Our conversation naturally enough drifted on my turbine and I became heated to a high degree. ‘Scott,’ I exclaimed, carried away by the vision of a glorious future, ‘my turbine will scrap all the heat-engines in the world.’ Scott stroked his chin and looked away thoughtfully, as though making a mental calculation. ‘That will make quite a pile of scrap,’ he said, and left without another word!”

Not dissuaded, Tesla hoped given the efficiency and simple design, it would be able to be used in everything from aircraft to automobiles. On the former, he also hoped to combine it with wireless power, allowing the airplanes to be lighter and faster and remain aloft indefinitely.

He stated of such planes in 1911, “Twenty years ago I believed that I would be the first man to fly; that I was on track of accomplishing what no one else was anywhere near reaching… My idea was a flying machine propelled by an electric motor, with power supplied by stations on the earth.”

In an article published in Reconstruction magazine in July of 1919, he also stated such a wirelessly powered aircraft with his turbine could fly at supersonic speeds at 40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. He goes on, “The power supply is virtually unlimited, as any number of power plants can be operated together, supplying energy to airships just as trains running on tracks are now supplied with electrical energy through rails or wires.”

On the automobile side, her states, “Shortly before the war, when the exhibition of my turbines in this city elicited widespread comment in the technical papers, I anticipated that there would be a scramble among manufacturers to get hold of the invention, and I had particular designs on that man from Detroit who has an uncanny faculty for accumulating millions. So confident was I that he would turn up some day, that I declared this as certain to my secretary and assistants. Sure enough, one fine morning a body of engineers from the Ford Motor Company presented themselves with the request of discussing with me an important project. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ I remarked triumphantly to my employees, and one of them said, ‘You are amazing, Mr. Tesla; everything comes out exactly as you predict.’ As soon as these hard-headed men were seated I, of course, immediately began to extol the wonderful features of my turbine, when the spokesmen interrupted me and said, ‘We know all about this, but we are on a special errand. We have formed a psychological society for the investigation of psychic phenomena and we want you to join us in this undertaking.’ I suppose those engineers never knew how near they came to being fired out of my office.”

In the end, however, while an ingenious device and more efficient than its competitor bladed turbines of the day, Tesla’s turbine went relatively nowhere, other than some niche applications since, and a whole lot of people using it as a science project in high school and the like.

As to why it didn’t go anywhere, it didn’t work practically for the applications such turbines were being used for, for a few different reasons, but most notably because at the high temperatures it was operating under and high speeds of rotation, the discs had a tendency to warp, a problem Tesla and his assistants were never able to overcome satisfactorily for commercial application.

The Bizarro Years

From this point, for the rest of Tesla’s life, his genius mind accomplished a series of fantastical things that seemingly existed only in his head.

Among his last patents included, in 1928, patent number 1,655,114 an “Apparatus For Aerial Transportation” which came full circle with his childhood dream of creating a flying machine. He claimed this device, called a helicopterplane, could be flown with vertical takeoff from anyone’s roof or parking space, then transition to more typical airplane flight, weigh a mere 800 lbs, and cost only $1000 to buy ($18,000 today).

A couple years later, he had supposedly made a huge breakthrough that was so significant he held a press conference, telling the gathered reporters in 1931 he had come up with a brand new source of energy and that “The idea first came upon me as a tremendous shock… I can only say at this time that it will come from an entirely new and unsuspected source.” He also noted it was “violently opposed” to the physics of Einstein.

The next year he claimed he’d invented a new kind of motor that ran on cosmic rays.

Not long after this, in 1934, he claimed he’d invented a new type of weapon called the “Teleforce”, with the New York Times July 11, 1934 edition reading “Tesla, at 78, Bares New ‘Death Beam’” in which it will “end concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles…”

Although Tesla would clarify it was more akin to a peace beam as its power would make, in his opinion, war completely untenable.

He would further publish a paper on it titled “New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media”.

The general idea was to create a series of power plants along a given country’s borders and the beam would then be used to shoot down any enemy aircraft within 200 miles of the stations. Going back to his roots, he also felt the beam could be used to transmit power wirelessly. Yet another big idea with this was that he proposed once again his aforementioned idea to light up the night sky with it via creating something of a man-made aurora borealis.

Efforts by Tesla to get funding to pursue this death beam via various governments like the UK or from J.P. Morgan Jr all failed initially, though in 1939 he allegedly received $25,000 (about a half a million dollars today) from the Soviet Union in relation to it.

Tesla also claimed when he was awarded the Order of the White Lion and some individuals expressed skepticism that it would work that, “it is not an experiment … I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.”

While it is true that, following Tesla’s death, government officials, keen on such a device to use against the Nazis, searched his hotel room for sensitive documents and the device itself, no physical proof of the inventor’s ‘death beam’ has ever been found. Further a package left by Tesla in a hotel vault, which he had told the hotel manager was a secret prototype worth thousands of dollars and some thought might be this, was discovered to be the aforereferenced Wheatstone bridge, a mundane tool for measuring electrical resistance.

Nor was anything of this sort found by Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovic, who was a Yogoslavian ambassador stationed in New York at the time of his famous uncle’s death. Directly after Tesla’s ceasing to exist, Kosanovic went to Tesla’s hotel and after having a locksmith crack Tesla’s safe, inside he only found a few honorary degrees, a medal, a memorial book, and a few misc items like this. It would be two days later in which the government would step in and seize Tesla’s belongings to examine them and his papers to see about the death beam.

On this note, some of the Tesla fanboy ilk claim the reason no such papers were found is just because Tesla didn’t need to write things down and, as Tesla himself often claimed, the devices he’d invision in his head, according to him at least always worked exactly as he thought once he created them… Except, of course, none of this is true, except the part that Tesla really did say things like this and about his supposed eidetic memory as previously quoted. However, as far as science is aware, while some people do have remarkable memories, the idea of a photographic memory doesn’t appear to be a real thing,

That said, again, some people do have remarkable abilities on this front, but almost always associated with various abnormal brain development issues. For instance, Kim Peek, a so-called megasavant or “human Google”, who served as the inspiration for Rain Man, was one such well known example. While Peek’s mental prowess has been subjected to significant embellishment over the years, it is quite well documented that he could seemingly effortlessly absorb all of the information on a given page with remarkable speed. While exactly how many words per minute he could read with almost perfect comprehension was never tested (at least that we could find documentation of), according to his father who by necessity had to be his “shadow” as Kim Peek called him, Kim generally averaged about ten seconds a page and then could recall it with almost perfect accuracy, even years later.

This was an ability Kim was more than happy to demonstrate, including “performing”, as it were, in front of over two and a half million people over the years in various lecture halls and libraries across the United States. Once he came out of his shell a bit after Rain Man, he’d even often walk up to strangers on the street to demonstrate his astounding memory and date-processing abilities. This was one of the few ways he knew how to socially interact with others.

However, Peek’s abilities were believed to be the side effect of a serious congenital birth defect known as agenesis of the corpus callosum, in which the largest band of white matter that connects the two hemispheres of the brain doesn’t develop correctly; in his case, it didn’t develop at all and his brain compensated by making some rather unusual connections, leaving him mentally and physically handicapped in many ways, while also giving him his truly remarkable memory.

And something similar tends to be the case with others with similar well out of the ordinary abilities like this. It is technically possible Tesla was one of these given his many mentions of other very odd mental quirks such as his vivid hallucinations and flashes and the like from an early age. But his abilities here were never tested, and many of his more grandiose claims about himself on some of this are relatively easy to debunk with other things he wrote or did. And, with regards to the supposed idea that he rarely or never took notes, this, too, is likewise easily debunked by the fact that even after his death he had many surviving papers demonstrating him working out various things, rather than doing it all in his head.

Going back to what he wrote and said about his Death Beam, and if such a thing could have worked the way Tesla described… Well, no. No it could not. Unless of course it really was using laws of physics that Tesla stated “no one has ever dreamed about” we guess…

To sum up the government’s stance on it, electrical engineer Dr. John G. Trump of the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development was called in to look over all Tesla’s papers on the matter and stated:

“His [Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

Going back to his waning years in general, throughout all this time, Tesla also occasionally took odd consulting jobs for money as available, though his proposals for clients were generally fantastical and entirely un-useful in what they were trying to do, so this work, too declined with time.

Tesla vs Einstein

In the general case, the scientific and engineering world had moved on, and Tesla’s theories and work had been left behind, with the man himself not advancing with the times, and even pointedly arguing with many new theories, including some of those proposed by Einstein.

For example, Tesla didn’t believe electrons existed, felt atoms were not composed of subatomic particles, and that atoms could not be split or change state. And as for Einstein’s work, Tesla stated, “I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.”

Tesla also called relativity “a beggar wrapped in purple whom ignorant people take for a king”. He further noted he could prove it was incorrect because he himself had measured the speed of cosmic rays at approximately 50 times the speed of light…

In 1937 he also claimed he was on the verge of completing a grand “dynamic theory of gravity [that [would] put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, as that of curved space.” And that all the details were worked out and he’d publish it to the world shortly. He never did, of course.

During all this time, Tesla’s finances continued to suffer to the point of near homelessness until the aforementioned Westinghouse stipend for the last decade or so of his life, with Yugoslavia also kicking in a bit of a pension for him.

Tesla last great financial windfall came from a rather unexpected source when, from 1915 through 1917, he received $1000 per month (about $30,000 per month today) paid by Telelfunken in a patent infringement case with U.S. Marconi Company. In this one, Marconi was suing this German radio company at the behest of the U.S. Government who was attempting to disrupt German wireless communications after the British had cut the telegraph cable that linked Germany and the U.S. Tesla was hired as an expert witness on the German side, and presumably happy to do so not just for the money, but also to try to stick it to the Marconi Company. His rather generous monthly paycheck on this one ended when the U.S. threw their hat into WWI in 1917.

But from all this, you’ll not be surprised that Tesla’s last decades do not seem to have been happy ones. In reduced financial circumstances, his reputation in the industry thoroughly sullied, and the wider world having mostly moved on to other celebrity scientists like Albert Einstein, Tesla continued to work seemingly as hard as he ever had, but produced nothing of consequence.

Tesla’s Peculiar Habits

This was also a period during which, by all accounts, the great scientist’s energy and mental health declined rapidly. He became increasingly ‘eccentric,’ to put it mildly, displaying behavior such as an obsession with numbers and cleanliness and the way his food had to be prepared for him to eat it which would today most likely be diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

He also reportedly at this time began obsessively washing his hands after doing things like shaking hands with others, as well as had very particular ways napkins had to be arranged on his table. He elaborates on some of his quirks here, “I had a violent aversion against the earrings of women but other ornaments, as bracelets, pleased me more or less according to design. The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals or objects with sharp edges and plane surfaces. I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. Even now I am not insensible to some of these upsetting impulses. When I drop little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, I always sense a peculiar and awful taste in my mouth.”

Going back to his quirks with regards to other people, Tesla also wasn’t a fan of people who were overweight in any way, once firing one of his secretaries when she became a little too plump in his opinion. He also reportedly had a habit of making any employee of his who wasn’t dressed to his standards go home and change, as well as didn’t like the tendency for women to, in his opinion, try to usurp men. Writing in 1924, “In place of the soft-voiced, a gentlewoman of my reverent worship, has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies in making herself as much as possible like man—in dress, voice and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind … The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me.”

He further stated that he thought it was only a matter of time before women would supplant men as the dominant sex and that to quote him, “Queen Bees” would run the world.

He also had peculiar ideas about coffee, tea, and chewing gum, stating, “A drastic, if not unconstitutional, measure is now being put thru in this country to prevent the consumption of alcohol and yet it is a positive fact that coffee, tea, tobacco, chewing gum and other stimulants, which are freely indulged in even at the tender age, are vastly more injurious to the national body, judging from the number of those who succumb. So, for instance, during my student years I gathered from the published necrologues in Vienna, the home of coffee drinkers, that deaths from heart trouble sometimes reached sixty-seven per cent of the total. Similar observations might probably be made in cities where the consumption of tea is excessive. These delicious beverages superexcite and gradually exhaust the fine fibers of the brain. They also interfere seriously with arterial circulation and should be enjoyed all the more sparingly as their deleterious effects are slow and imperceptible. Tobacco, on the other hand, is conducive to easy and pleasant thinking and detracts from the intensity and concentration necessary to all original and vigorous effort of the intellect. Chewing gum is helpful for a short while but soon drains the glandular system and inflicts irreparable damage, not to speak of the revulsion it creates.”

That said, because of his stance on eugenics, he was all for people being allowed to use any substances they pleased. He states, “it should not be overlooked that all these are great eliminators assisting Nature, as they do, in upholding her stern but just law of the survival of the fittest. Eager reformers should also be mindful of the eternal perversity of mankind which makes the indifferent “laissez-faire” by far preferable to enforced restraint.” In other words, let people kill themselves with such substances if they so please. It will only help humanity in the long run.

He further noted he thought people’s propensity to pity others was hindering evolution. Noting in an interview in 1937 about all this and his prediction on it:, “man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct … The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.”

On his stance on eugenics, however, before anyone over-vilifies him for it, it’s important to understand the historical context here. This was a time when most people were on board with the idea at least on some level. That is, until the Nazis went and made everyone go “Oh, wait…” when they took the notion and applied it in the worst possible way.

Going back to his quirks, Tesla also states, “I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food- otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I mist I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours.”

If all this is making you now picture an unkempt, reclusive individual at this stage of life, that was still never Tesla. As ever, he put great stock in his appearance and how he dressed. And famously even was very particular on exactly how he was photographed, which is why he always looks so incredibly dapper in surviving photos today. It was also reported on his dining habits that while he frequently did so alone, it also wasn’t out of the ordinary even late in life to continue to entertain guests during such.

Tesla’s Legacy

In the end, Nikola Tesla ultimately died of coronary thrombosis on the evening of January 7, 1943 at the age of 86, found in his hotel room, Room 3327, by hotel worker Alice Monaghanr the next day. Over his lifetime he held over 100 U.S. Patents, and others in other nations, generally tallied up to about 300, though many of these were for the same device across multiple countries, and the exact number isn’t actually clear today.

While it’s often said he died penniless and forgotten, and there are elements of truth to this, much like his entire life story, the reality was quite different than what people often assume. In this case, it was more just that he’d fallen from rather extreme heights in both. He was once very wealthy thanks to his work, but had a bit of a practice of hemorrhaging money not just on his work, but living quite lavishly in many ways, including apparently abhorring anything but the finest hotels. For example, on April 1, 1901 he had dinner with famed author Rudyard Kipling and lamented Kipling’s choice of hotels, in perhaps in the most humblebrag letter of all time,

“My dear Mrs. Johnson, What is the matter with inkspiller Kipling? He actually dared to invite me to dine in an obscure hotel where I would be sure to get hair and cockroaches in the soup. Yours truly, N. Tesla”

Beyond liking the finer things in that way, he also threw vast sums of money at his various projects with abandoned, not just his own money, but countless wealthy investors over the years he could convince to buy into his hype based on his obviously brilliance, early significant work, and his skills at wowing whoever he was talking to with his visions of the future, generally selling them on a device he’d supposedly be able to create to make it happen.

Thus, the claim that the only reason Tesla didn’t achieve vastly more in his lifetime was from lack of funding wasn’t true at all. Much more so than most scientists and inventors, Tesla on the whole had a relatively easy time drumming up funding for his work. The money only dried up when people began to realize that his wild claims of amazing things he supposedly invented were just that. And his ability to convert them to actual working real world devices wasn’t there. Not from lack of funding. But from his own lack of understanding of physics in reality, vs. the physics that existed in his head.

His fall on this front was entirely of his own making. And even in his waning years when funds were tight, he never adjusted. Running up bills at expensive hotels he couldn’t pay, then moving to a different one when kicked out and doing the same. Only avoiding homelessness thanks to Westinghouse covering Tesla’s Hotel New Yorker bill along with the aforementioned stipend of $125 per month (about $3000 today) starting in 1934 through Tesla’s death in 1943 in thanks for his previous contribution to the company. On top of this, as mentioned, the Yugoslavian government also in Tesla’s waning years gave him a small pension to help support his day to day living. Thus, while a large fall from his peak he was, nonetheless, reasonably comfortable.

Moving over to the fame factor, even all the way up through the 1930s he wasn’t yet forgotten completely by the masses, with Time magazine putting him on the cover in 1931, for example, doing a highlight of the man and his inventions in homage to his 75th birthday.

Tesla was not some reclusive genius misunderstood by the masses of his day. At least as far as scientists go, he was one of the most famous in the world for quite some time. And his abilities as a showman and ability to wow and inspire the masses and wealthy alike were a huge part of why on this. The media likewise loved him through a good chunk of his life for his abilities here and how that helped them sell newspapers. However, again, after the initial success with the AC Induction Motor and then wowing audiences with his seemingly magical demonstrations and grandiose predictions and devices he’d supposedly invented wore off, and none of his work after amounted to anything particularly tangible, Tesla did fade into obscurity, although this is still relative. Countless scientists and engineers just as accomplished as Tesla even in his era likewise rarely get remembered outside of the industry they worked, and even then often only in a passing reference in some textbook of the history of this or that.

Why Tesla’s legend lives on today to the extent it does on the interweb isn’t so much because of his actual accomplishments or genius relative to so many other great scientists and engineers of his era, but because of his very vocal and prominent predictions of what things would be like in the future as certain technologies emerged, a subset of which have come true, if not really the way he necessarily envisioned would work.

The internet, picking up on this and every wild claim Tesla made, generally not looking too much into the man himself or his claims in any deep way, and having forgotten so many others whose work was critical to even making Tesla’s contributions to the world be a thing, ultimately bought into the hype, and Tesla’s legend surged once again. This time, without the man himself publicly making wild predictions and claims to kill it a second time. In the end, if a scientist today made even 1/10th of the claims Tesla made about his own work he’d supposedly already accomplished without ever backing it up, he’d become the laughingstock of the industry with very rapidly zero credibility regardless of what he’d done before.

…And, as outlined, that’s kind of what happened to Tesla both within the industry first, and later with the general public when all his claims with regards to his work came to nothing substantive.

That said, it’s an overcompensation the other way to say Tesla didn’t do significant work in his lifetime. He did. While others were doing similar work on AC power and, for example, his induction motor, well, that’s no different than every other invention in history where countless people were working on the same thing. Tesla’s just so happened to be the one that more directly contributed to advancements in that arena and, for that, and other work he did on AC power distribution and various devices involved in all that, he is worthy of acclaim.

Tesla was also very clearly a genius. Although, as so sagely put in the 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer when Colonel Leslie Groves is questioned about if he’d heard Oppenheimer was brilliant, Groves responds, “brilliance is taken for granted in your circle.”

To really sum up, the problem today is not the perception that Tesla was brilliant, nor that he did some significant things, just that Tesla is often given credit for an intellect and understanding of science far beyond his contemporaries. When, in fact, while there was a time in his life this was maybe partially true, almost directly thereafter, it wasn’t that the science in his mind was beyond his contemporaries, it was that it was incorrect and he refused to adjust his understanding. And, as noted on all this, as with so many of the rumors surrounding Tesla’s intellect and scientific prowess, it was Tesla himself who started the idea that he saw things other scientists of the world didn’t understand.

Tesla was a visionary in some other ways beyond some of his contemporaries in terms of what technologies were coming and what they would do, but this was more along the lines of a science fiction author, rather than based on technologies he understood. If we applied the same rubric many do with Tesla to, say, Jules Verne, we would say Jules Verne was the real inventor of the modern submarine, the hologram, the modern helicopter, news radio and TV, video conferencing, solar sails, the Lunar Module, etc.

None of this diminishes Tesla’s actual real life accomplishments, which were noteworthy in a handful of cases. It’s just important to focus on what those actually were, and their actual relative importance.

In the end, the work of Tesla is rather harshly summed up by the aforementioned electrical engineer Laurence A Hawkins, in 1903 “Enough has been given to indicate the reason for the standing that is Tesla’s today in the scientific world. Not even the brilliancy of suggestion and experiment contained in his early work, not even the persistent efforts of powerful friends, moved by their commercial interest to magnify and exalt the value of his patented inventions, could avert the discredit to his reputation as a scientists brought upon himself by his wild struggles for notoriety. He has been condemned by his own extravagant boasts, never followed by the realization of their claims and often revealing a total misunderstanding of the very elements of physical laws.”

Tesla, however, summed up his life and work a bit more charitably, noting, “The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements.

Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture. I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.”

He concludes, “The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter – for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.”

And speaking of pointing the way, this brings us, finally, to Thomas Edison.

Edison

Our story with Edison begins in Milan, Ohio, where on February 11, 1847, the 7th and final child of Samuel and Nancy Edison was born in the family’s small brick cottage. Not only from relatively humble origins, Thomas Alva Edison also didn’t have the benefit of a formal education growing up. While he did attend a private school for a few months under one Rev. George Engle in 1854 at the age of 7 before his father could no longer afford to pay according to Engle, and again briefly in 1859-1860 at Port Huron Union School where he studied math and science, in the end, his mother simply took to teaching him to read and write and do basic math. Edison would later state of this, “My mother taught me how to read good books quickly and correctly and as this opened up a great world in literature, I have always been very thankful for this early training.”

Once the basics out of the way, she also then set him on the local library where he notes, “My refuge was the Detroit Public Library. I started, it now seems to me, with the first book on the bottom shelf and I went through the lot, one by one…”

As for his opinions on formal schooling, he would later in life state, “I like the Montessori method. It teaches through play. It makes learning a pleasure. It follows the natural instincts of the human being… The present system casts the brain into a mold. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning.”

By the age of 11, Edison set up his first chemical lab in the basement of the home they had moved to in Port Huron and where he apparently at one point also accidentally set his father’s barn on fire. For this, he reportedly got a very public town square spanking. This would not be the last time he accidentally set things on fire.

Now at 12 years old, being the 19th century, it was time for him to go to work, at first on the family’s little farm. But Edison would state of this: “After a while I tired of this work as hoeing corn in a hot sun is unattractive and I did not wonder that it built up cities. Soon the Grand Trunk R.R. was extended from Toronto to Port Huron at the foot of the Lake Huron and thence to Detroit, at about the same time the war of the Rebellion broke out. By a great amount of persistence I got permission from my mother to go on the local train as a newsboy. The local train from Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of 63 miles left at 7 A.M. and arrived again at Port Huron at 9 P.M.”

A 12 Year Old On a Mission and His First Business

And so it was that at an age when most of us were wiling away our hours playing with friends or causing our parents to wear rubber gloves when handling our socks, Edison was not only out working 13 hrs a day, but starting his first successful business on the side. He stated of this,

“After being on the train for several months, I started two stores in Port Huron, one for periodicals and the other for vegetables, butter and berries in the season, these were attended by two boys, who shared in the profits. The periodical store I soon closed, as the boy in charge could not be trusted. The vegetable store I kept up for nearly a year. After the railroad had been opened a short time they put on an express which left Detroit in the morning and returned in the evening. I received permission to put a newsboy on this train connected with this train was a car, one part for baggage and the other part for U.S. mail, but for a long time it was not used. Every morning I had two large baskets of vegetables from the Detroit Market loaded in the mail car and sent to Port Huron where the German boy would take them to the store. They were much better than those grown locally and sold readily. I never was asked to pay freight and to this day cannot explain why, except that I was so small and industrious and the nerve to appropriate a U.S. mail car to do a free freight biz so monumental that it probably caused passivity. However, I kept this up for a long time and in addition bought butter from the fanners along the line and an immense amount of blackberries in the season; I bought wholesale and at a low price and permitted the wives of the engineers and trainmen to have the benefit of the rebate. After a while there was a daily immigrant train put on— this train generally had from seven to ten coaches filled always with Norwegians, all bound for Iowa and Minnesota. On these trains I employed a boy who sold bread, tobacco and stick candy.”

He would soon change tack, however, noting, “As the war progressed the daily newspaper sales became very profitable and I gave up the vegetable store, etc.”

On this one, things really changed thanks to the battle of Shiloh, also known as the battle of Pittsburg Landing. He states, “On the day of this battle when I arrived at Detroit, the bulletin boards were surrounded with dense crowds and it was announced that there were 60 thousand killed and wounded and the result was uncertain. I knew that if the same excitement was attained at the various small towns along the road and especially at Port Huron that the sale of papers would be great. I then conceived the idea of telegraphing the news ahead, went to the operator in the depot and by giving him Harper’s Weekly and some other papers for three months, he agreed to telegraph to all the stations the matter on the bulletin board. I hurriedly copied it and he sent it, requesting the agents who displayed it on the blackboard, used for stating the arrival and departure of trains, I decided that instead of the usual 100 papers that I could sell 1000, but not having sufficient money to purchase that number, I determined in my desperation to see the Editor himself and get credit. The great paper at that time was the Detroit Free Press. I walked into the office marked Editorial and told a young man that I wanted to see the Editor on important business—important to me anyway. I was taken into an office where there were two men and I stated what I had done about telegraphy and that I wanted 1000 papers, but only had money for 300 and I wanted credit. One of the men refused it, but the other told the first spokesman to let me have them. This man I afterwards learned was Wilbur E Storey, who subsequently founded the Chicago Times and became celebrated in the newspaper world. By the aid of another boy we lugged the papers to the train and started folding them. The first station called Utica, was a small one where I generally sold two papers. I saw a crowd ahead on the platform, thought it some excursion, but the moment I landed there was a rush for me; then I realized that the telegraph was a great invention. I sold 35 papers; the next station, Mt. Clemens, now a watering place, but then a place of about 1000. I usually sold 6 to 8 papers. I decided that if I found a corresponding crowd there that the only thing to do to correct my lack of judgment in not getting more papers was to raise the price from 5 cents to 10. The crowd was there and I raised the price; at the various towns there were corresponding crowds. It had been my practice at Port Huron to jump from the train at a point about 1/4 mile from the station where the train generally slackened speed. I had drawn several loads of sand at this point to jump on and had become very expert. The little German boy with the horse met me at this point; when the wagon approached the outskirts of the town I was met by a large crowd. I then yelled 25 cents apiece, gentlemen, I haven’t got enough to go round. I sold all out and made what to me then was an immense sum of money…”

On top of all this, for about 6 months in 1862 Edison even started his own newspaper, the Weekly Herald, edited and printed in the baggage car of the train. This one was mostly comprised of local news he’d learn of at each stop, as well as news about the Grand Trunk Railway itself.

You’ll Put Your Eye Out (Early Experiments)

As for the profits from all this, he used it to both help support his family, as well as fund his varied experiments. This was something he was doing all at the same time, even on the train itself, which would get him into some amount of trouble when he accidentally set fire to it as we’ll get to shortly.

Speaking of flammable substances, he would also occasionally make explosives. For example, Edison recounts, “One day I found in my copy of the Scientific American a complete description of a method of making nitroglycerin… The product came out rather brown and the article warned makers that brown nitro-glycerin was impure and dark in color, that it was due to impurities and in this condition was dangerous and might explode spontaneously. To see if the quality was O.K. we exploded a few drops and the results were so strong that we both got frightened, so we put the nitro in a pop bottle, wound waste around it, tied a cord to the end of the bottle and let it down a sewer inlet on the street…”

One of his boyhood friends, James A. Clancy, would reminisce about such experiments, “the chances you and I used to take at your old home and how your good Mother used to talk to us and say we would yet blow our heads off.”

Speaking of that, then there was the time he accidentally simultaneously partially electrocuted himself, as well as covered himself in nitric acid all at the same time. He recalls,

“I had a large induction coil, which I had borrowed from Mr. Williams to make some experiments with. With this coil I had ten large cells employing nitric acid. One day I got hold of both electrodes and it clinched my hand on them so I couldn’t let go. The battery was on a shelf. The only way I could get free was to back off and pull the coil, so the battery wires would pull the cells off the shelf and thus break the circuit. I shut my eyes and pulled, but the nitric acid splashed all over my face and ran down my back. I rushed to the sink which was only half big enough and got in and wiggled around for several minutes to permit the water to dilute the acid and stop the pain. My face and back were streaked with yellow, the skin thoroughly oxidized. I did not go in the street by daylight for two weeks, as the appearance of my face was dreadful. The skin, however, peeled off and new skin replaced it without any damage.”

Of course, on the side, as noted, he also did his experiments in a little lab he’d set up in the train as well, ultimately culminating in a white phosphorous fire on the train that got him in some rather hot water and his ears thoroughly boxed.

On this one, it’s sometimes claimed that it was such boxing of ears that saw Edison go deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other starting around 12 years old, something that only got worse and worse as he aged. However, it’s generally thought this deafness was far more likely to have been the results of some infection.

Relentless Optimism

As for the deafness, in something of a theme you’re going to see as we go, Edison was relentlessly positive, and had a strong propensity to look on the bright side of everything no matter what. He stated of the condition, “I had doctors. They could do nothing for me. I have been deaf ever since and the fact that I am getting deafer constantly, they tell me, doesn’t bother me. I have been deaf enough for many years to know the worst, and my deafness has not been a handicap but a help to me…” On this, because it helped him to better focus on his study and experiments without outside audible distractions.

And just for now for a brief taste of the level of positivity he applied to all aspects of life, in one instance in 1914 at the age of 67, an accidental fire burned six buildings of his phonograph factory, with total losses from it at around $7 million (about $210 million today), of which only $2 of the $7 million was insured. Yet his son, Charles, notes when he ran over to his father, instead of being upset, he simply smiled and told him to run get Edison’s wife, Mina, because she’d never have a chance to see a fire like that again in her life.

He later stated while the losses were extreme, a plus side of it was that they could redesign a new phonograph factory taking advantage of all they’d learned from the burned to the ground one, as well as to “arrange my machinery properly in order to take advantage of Mr. Ford’s methods as far as possible.”

In yet another instance, he had sold his GE stock to pursue an iron-ore innovation business, which flopped costing him all that money plus millions more he had to pull from his other businesses to keep the iron-ore company afloat before its final failure. After this, a reporter pointed out to him the insane amount the GE stock would have been worth had he kept it. In response, Edison simply laughed and quipped, “Well, it’s all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it!”

In yet another case, when one Walter S. Mallory asked why he didn’t give up on the storage battery after getting no results for so many years, Edison responded, “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work!”

In yet another case, and giving a small glimpse of what working for Edison was like (and we’ll dive into this much more deeply later), one Dr. E.G. Acheson states, “I once made an experiment in Edison’s laboratory at Menlo Park during the latter part of 1880, and the results were not as looked for. I considered the experiment a perfect failure, and while bemoaning the results of this apparent failure Mr. Edison entered, and, after learning the facts of the case, cheerfully remarked that I should not look upon it as a failure, for he considered every experiment a success, as in all cases it cleared up the atmosphere, and even though it failed to accomplish the results sought for, it should prove a valuable lesson for guidance in the future work. I believe that Mr. Edison’s success as an experimenter was, to a large extent, due to this happy view of all experiments.”

This all gave rise to perhaps the most famous Edison quote of all- “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” And that, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

In any event, going back to the story of the young Edison, things were humming along quite smoothly for the teen in this way until one day his life changed forever when he added “save a life” to his efforts to make the rest of our teen years look completely wasted- specifically, saving the life of three year old Jimmie MacKenzie when Edison was 15 in 1862.

On this one, Edison explains he’d become fascinating by the relatively new technology of the telegraph, to the point that he began neglecting his formerly lucrative news business, which had peaked around a $200 profit per month (about $6K today) down to only about $30 a month profits, or a little over $900 today. Such an unproductive 15 year old…

In any event, he states, “The station agent at Mt. Clemens permitted me to sit in the Telegraph office and listen to the instrument; one day his little boy was playing on the track when a freight train came along—and I luckily came out just in time to pull him off the track; his mother saw the operation and fainted. This put me in the good graces of Mr. Mackenzie, the agent, and he took considerable pains to teach me, as I kept at it about 18 hours a day I soon became quite proficient.”

And note here, on the side, he also setup a telegraph line between his and his aforementioned friend James A. Clancy’s homes so they could both practice at home and communicate with each other any time.

At this point, he ceased his former business activities and switched to becoming a telegraph operator. He states, “I then put up a telegraph line from the station to the village a distance of 1 mile and opened an office in a drug store, but the business was small and the operator at Port Huron knowing my proficiency and who wanted to go into the U.S.M. Telegraph, where the pay was high, succeeded in convincing his brother-in-law (Mr. Walker) that I could fill the position all right. Mr. Walker had a jewelry store and had charge of the WU. Tel. office. As I was to be found at the office both day and night, sleeping there, I became quite valuable to Mr. Walker. After working all day I worked at the office nights as well for the reason that press report came over one of the wires until 3 A.M and I would cut in and copy it as well as I could, to become more rapidly proficient; the goal of the rural telegraph operator was to be able to take press.”

After this, “Mr. Walker tried to get my father to apprentice me at 20 dollars per month, but they could not agree. I then applied for a job on the Grand Trunk R.R. as a railway operator and was given a place nights at Stratford Junction, Canada. This night job just suited me as I could have the whole day to myself. I had the faculty of sleeping in a chair any time for a few minutes at a time. I taught the night yardman my call, so I would get 1 hour sleep now and then between trains and in case the station was called, the watchman would awaken me.”

Note here, not just transmitting and receiving messages, the telegraph operator was also in charge of maintaining the equipment, meaning he also had to understand all the inner workings, including gaining a lot of intimate knowledge on how batteries and electricity and circuits work. The skill and knowledge upgrade in all this ultimately laid the groundwork for a large percentage of his later work in life. Ever the tinkerer and with his insatiable curiosity, when he now wasn’t doing his duties as a telegraph operator, he was experimenting with all this. The insanely lucrative fruits of this tinkering wouldn’t be long in coming, making himself the equivalent of a million dollars in modern valuation only a handful of years after this. But before he got there, he had a few potholes in the road.

Whoopsadoodle

For example, going back to his rather odd sleeping habits and the Grand Trunk, Edison invented a device that would automatically check in on the hour even if he was sleeping or otherwise pursuing his research interests. Unfortunately for him, this got discovered by his supervisor and he was promptly fired from that location. Not the first time he’d be fired, in the next instance via almost getting people killed.

On this one he states, “One night I got an order to hold a freight train and I replied that I would. I rushed out to find the signalman, but before I could find him and get the signal set, the train ran past. I ran to the Telegraph Office and reported I couldn’t hold her, she had run past. The reply was “Hell”. The dispatcher on the strength of my message that I would hold the train, had permitted another to leave the last station in the opposite direction. There was a lower station near the Junction where the day operator slept. I started for it on foot. The night was dark and I fell in a culvert and was knocked senseless. However, the track was straight, the trains saw each other, and there was no collision. The next morning Mr. Carter, the station agent and myself were ordered to come at once to the main office in Toronto. We appeared before the General Superintendent, W J. Spicer who started in hauling Mr. Carter over the coals for permitting such a young boy to hold such a responsible position. Then he took me in hand and stated that I could be sent to Kingston States Prison, etc. Just at this point, three English swells came into the office. There was a great shaking of hands and joy all around; feeling that this was a good time to be neglected I silently made for the door; down the stairs to the lower freight station, got into the caboose going on the next freight, the conductor who I knew, and kept secluded until I landed a boy free of fear in the U.S. of America.”

In yet another instance of getting fired, in 1866 while working in Kentucky for Western Union as a part of their Associated Press bureau news wire, he asked to once again work the night shift. Unfortunately, while experimenting with a lead-acid battery one night, he accidentally spilled sulfuric acid on the floor. This quickly seeped through the floor board and onto his boss’ desk below, who, upon discovering this the next morning, promptly fired him.

Something to explicitly point out here was that in working in the news at these various telegraphic offices all over parts of the U.S. and Canada, Edison became acquainted and friends with many people in various facets of the news, both current and future individuals as this was a common transition for telegraph operators. He also learned well the power of the news for promotion. This was all later a great aid to him in the early going in getting his inventions in the public eye before he became world famous.

First Inventions and a Life Lesson

As for those devices, beyond the one that would automatically check in for him on the hour on the telegraph, another of his early unpatented inventions was a device that would automatically record a Morse Code message on a paper tape, and then could be used to play the message back, but at a slower speed. He apparently intended this device to be used to help train Morse Code operators. Yet another early device he worked on was a printer to convert the telegraph signals into letters automatically.

His first patented device, however, came when he was 22 in 1869. This was an electric voting recorder, intended to be used to massively speed up vote counting in institutions like Congress. Edison described the device in his patent (U.S. Patent 90,646),

“The object of my invention is to produce an apparatus which records and registers in an instant,- and with great accuracy the votes of legislative bodies, thus avoiding loss of valuable time consumed in counting and registering the votes and names, as done in the usual manner ;’and my invention consists in applying an electrographic apparatus in such a manner that each member, by moving a switch to either of two points, representing an affirmative and opposing vote, has his name imprinted, by means of electricity, under the desired head, on a previously-prepared paper, and at I the sametime-the number of votes is indicated on a-dial-plate by the operation…“

Unfortunately for him, speeding up vote counting was not something any political group he pitched it to were interested in. No doubt with some making disparaging remarks about young people these days, and how lazy they are needing newfangled technologies to do simple counting for them instead of tallying up by hand like people had always done.

But as noted, seemingly nothing could keep Edison down for long, and he reportedly resolved all his future work would be practical things that would have an obvious market. Stating, “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility and utility is success.” And that, “I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent…”

That said, upon his waning years he switched up on this and decided just to enjoy himself experimenting with whatever tickled his fancy, regardless of marketability. But for most of his life, if it didn’t have extreme utility, he wasn’t interested.

Another key tenet of his work, and perhaps the most controversial today, as the New Yorker would write of him, Edison “did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.”

Edison himself would concur, stating, “My principal business consists of giving commercial value to the brilliant, but often misdirected, ideas of others. Accordingly, I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might be able to improve it.” Essentially, finding potentially revolutionary new ideas that simply didn’t work or weren’t practical in their current state, and perfecting them so they were.

On this practical side, it also wasn’t just about perfecting the thing itself, but also, as he was often working on the cutting edge of things, creating the entire system and infrastructure needed to make the thing commercially viable.

But going back to his first failed patented invention, after this he continued inventing and ultimately came up with a Universal Stock Printer, shortly after which he resigned his position as a telegraph operator to pursue inventing full time.

Making a Million Dollars By Keeping His Mouth Shut

On this one, he almost cost himself close to a million dollars, but by simply keeping his mouth shut, changed his future forever.

To start, he states of the invention, “I established a Laboratory over the Gold room and put up a line on which I opened a stock quotation circuit with 25 subscribers, the ticker being of my own invention. I also engaged in putting up private lines upon which I used a dial instrument. This instrument was very simple and practical and any one could work it after a few minutes explanation…”

This initial version of the device caught on somewhat and he states of the early funds from it, “Thinking that perhaps I might not get anything at all, I told General Lefferts [President of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company which supplied tickers to Wall Street], who was at the head of the Company making the purchase, all about my relations. He said, say nothing, do nothing, leave it to me. When the deal went through, the General handed me $1500 [about $38,000 today] and said that was my share, he had saved it out when he made the payment.”

This was just the beginning though. With further funds and encouragement from Lefferts, he began work on improving the ticker. Edison states, “This [ticker] was made exceedingly simple as the outside cities did not have the experts we had in New York to handle anything complicated. The same ticker was used on the London Stock Exchange. After I had made a great number of inventions and obtained patents, the General seemed anxious that the matter should be closed up. One day after I had exhibited and worked a successful device, whereby if a ticker should get out of unison in a broker’s office and commenced to print wild figures, it could be brought to unison from the central station and which saved the labor of many men and much trouble to the broker.”

And here is where Edison keeping his mouth shut changed his life and the world. He states, “He called me into his office and said, ‘Now, young man, I want to close up the matter of your inventions, how much do you think you should receive?’ I had made up my mind that taking in consideration the time and the killing pace I was working that I should be entitled to $5,000, but could get along with $3,000, but when the psychological moment arrived, I hadn’t the nerve to name such a large sum, so I said, ‘Well, General, Suppose you make me an offer.’ Then he said, ‘How would forty thousand dollars strike you.’ [A little over $1 million today] This caused me to come as near fainting as I ever got. I was afraid he would hear my heart beat. I managed to say that I thought it was fair. ‘All right, I will have a contract drawn, come around in three days and sign it, and I will give you the money.’”

Still not believing it, Edison goes on, “[I] had been doing considerable thinking on the subject, the sum seemed to be very large for the amount of work, for at that time I determined the value by the time and trouble and not what the invention was worth to others. I thought there was something unreal about it. However, the contract was handed to me, I signed without reading it. The General called in the Secretary and told him to fix it up and pay the money.”

There was an issue there. Edison didn’t really know what to do with a check, and this was a time before banks would deal with basically anyone but business owners and the rich. (This would only change largely thanks to the efforts of one of the unsung heroes of American history, A.P. Gianini, who founded the Bank of Italy that became the Bank of America, and by the way was the partial inspiration for the character of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. See our video on that one, in which we dive into Gianini and his significance to modern history).

But in any event, Edison states, “I arrived on time, but I was then handed a check for $40,000 on the bank of the State of New York, which was at the corner of William and Wall Streets. This was the first check I ever had. I went to the bank and noticed the window marked “Paying Teller”, got in line with about a dozen men and a dozen messenger boys and slowly approached the window. When directly in front of the window passed in the check, he looked at it, turned it over and handed it back, making a few short remarks which I could not understand, being at that time as ever since, quite deaf. I passed outside to the large steps to let the cold sweat evaporate and made up my mind that this was another Wall Street game like those I had received over the press wire, that I had signed the contract whatever was in it, that the inventions were gone and I had been skinned out of the money. But when I thought of the General and knowing he had treated me well, I couldn’t believe it, and I returned to the office and told the secretary what occurred. He went in and told the General and both had a good laugh. I was told to endorse the check and he would send a young man down with me to identify. We went to the bank, the young man had a short conversation with the Paying Teller, who seemed quite merry over it, I presented the check and the Teller asked me through the young man, how would I have it. I said in any way to please the bank Then he commenced to pull out bundles of notes until there certainly seemed to be one cubic foot. These were passed out and I had the greatest trouble in finding room in my overcoat and other pockets. They had put a job up on me, but knowing nothing of bank customs in those days, I did not even suspect it. I went to Newark and sat up all night with the money for fear it might be stolen. The next day I went back with it all and told the General about it, and he laughed very greatly, but said to one of his young men—Don’t carry this joke on any further, go to the bank with Edison and have him open an account and explain the matter, which I did.”

A Kid in a Candy Shop and Making the Next Great Invention

The 24 year old Edison was now like a kid in a candy shop, stating, “I have too sanguine a temperment to keep money in solitary confinement, so I commenced to buy machinery, rented a shop and got some manufacturing work to do from the first shop; I moved into a large shop Nos. 10 and 12 Ward Street, Newark. I got large orders from the General to build tickers and had over 50 men, and as orders increased I put on a night shift. I was my own foreman on both shifts, one-half hour of sleep three or four times in the twenty-four hours was all I needed. Nearly all my men were on piece work and I allowed them to make good wages and never cut until their wages became absurdly high, as they got more expert. I kept no books. I had two hooks, all the bills and accounts I owed I jabbed on one hook and memorandum of all owed to myself I put on the other.

The first three months I had the bookkeeper go over the books to find out how much we made. He reported $3,000.1 gave a supper to some of my men to celebrate this, only to be told two days afterwards by this alleged accountant that he had made a mistake and that we had lost $500 instead of making $3,000, and then a few days after coming to me again and said he was all mixed up and now found we had made $7,000. I discharged him and got another man, but I never counted anything thereafter as real profits, until I had paid all my debts and had the profits in the bank.”

Edison’s next great invention was only a couple more years in coming- the quadruplex telegraph system, which he patented in 1874. On this one, Edison, demonstrating yet again his genius for taking an existing device and making it better, was experimenting with the existing duplex system and realized that if he added a diplex to it, he could double the number of messages at a time on the line. However, upon trying it, he discovered it wasn’t quite so simple as that and he encountered a number of hurdles. However, each bug he encountered he simply applied what he called a “bug trap”, essentially if he couldn’t get rid of the problem, he created a way to work around it to get the result he wanted while still keeping the benefits of the thing causing the bug. And, yes, he did use the term “bug” for this, which predated computers.

Edison’s Actual Greatest Invention

In the end, he was successful. And the resulting windfall of cash- there are varying reports on how much with the most often cited figure being $100,0000 or about $2.6 million today- allowed him to create arguably his greatest invention of all, his first version of The Industrial Think Tank Lab, also known as the Invention Factory.

Rather than stay in Newark, however, in 1876 Edison, with the help of his father locating suitable real estate, decided to build the lab in a small little town outside of New York City called Menlo Park. As to why the move, Edison variously referenced both issue with prices of rent in the city for the size of facility he wanted, and also that “I couldn’t get peace and quiet in Newark and was run down by visitors.”

With this lab, he took all he’d learned from his previous shop, as well as his most talented and hard working employees, and built his dream lab. A two story building, the bottom floor being a top of the line machine shop with just about any tool a machinist could want to make anything. The top floor was likewise a world class lab for experimenting on all manner of things. In all, Edison’s goal was to, to quote him, produce, “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”

Of course, while Edison had some money, the lab itself at this point was a money sink, which is where his business savvy came in. Knowing that the inventions he would potentially churn out, especially in the beginning when focussing on the telegraph, could benefit Western Union, he wrote to Western Union President William Orton, “the cost of running my machine shop including coal kerosene & labor is about 15 per day or 100 per week; at present I have no source of income which will warrant continuing my machine shop and I shall be compelled to close it unless I am able to provide funds for continuing the same and keep my skilled workmen.” And that if Western Union would pay this money monthly, he would give them rights to use “every invention that I can make during that time which is applicable to commercial telegraphy.”

From here, with the help of his “muckers,” or also sometimes called the “insomnia squad,” the industrial age of inventing began. We’ll get to what the work environment and process was for the inventions and how much Edison was actually involved later. But for now, let’s talk about some of the world changing inventions they came up with. This video would be several times longer if we covered everything invented at Menlo Park. So we’ll stick with some of the more significant items.

Making the Telephone Commercially Viable

For starters, Western Union requested Edison and his team turn their brains to the telephone, as Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 invention, while revolutionary, wasn’t commercially viable at scale. The biggest issue was that it had severe limitations all centered around the fact that it used a very weak signal from the way the microphone and transmission system worked on it.

And so it was that within a year of Western Union making the request, Edison and one Charles Batchelor invented the carbon transmitter microphone, which allowed for improving the volume, clarity, and distance with which you could transmit phone conversations, making it practical for mass and long distance communication, and ultimately becoming the basic staple design used in most phones up until the late 20th century.

Important to the value of Edison’s breadth of knowledge and experience, the inspiration for this device actually came back in 1873 where at one point Edison was trying to develop a rheostat, or variable resistor, using carbon filled glass tubes. However, he wrote in his notes that “found that the resistance of carbon varied with every noise, jar or sound.”

Not suitable for his original application, when it came to a microphone of sorts for the telephone, this property was perfect, though, as noted, it still took Edison and his team about a year to perfect their device for practical commercial use.

Of course, as ever, others were working on the same type of thing at the same time as the issue with Bell’s original system was obvious and needed fixing to make the telephone broadly useful as we think of it. For example, besides Edison and his team, German inventor Emile Berliner invented more or less the same thing in parallel, with Alexander Graham Bell purchasing Berliner’s patent. All kicking off a legal battle with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling “The [carbon microphone] is, beyond controversy, the invention of Edison.”

Did He Actually Invent “Hello”?

Speaking of the telephone, before we move on to the next major invention, as a brief aside to clear up one Edison myth, it is often claimed that Edison coined the word “Hello” and even popularized it for use when answering the phone. As for the former assertion, this is false. The first documented instance of the word “hello” being used as a greeting predates Thomas Edison, appearing in The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. Davey Crockett, which was written in 1833, about 14 years before Edison was born. The exact quote from the text is: “Said I, ‘Hello stranger! if you don’t take keer your boat will run away with you.’” Further, based on significant literary evidence, it would seem that even though “hello” hadn’t graced the contents of dictionaries yet, by around the 1860s, “hello” had become a relatively common greeting.

As for the second assertion of Edison being the one to popularize “Hello” as a phone greeting, his contribution is less clear. This one stems from the fact that he wrote to the president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh, T.B.A. David, in 1877 suggesting, “Friend David, I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What you think? Edison – P.S. first cost of sender & receiver to manufacture is only $7.00.”

However, from his exact wording, it’s not actually clear that he’s explicitly suggesting “Hello,” simply stating he doesn’t think the phone needs a ringer because you can hear someone shouting “hello” over the phone from quite a distance away. Or maybe he is suggesting it. It’s just not fully clear from his exact phrasing.

That said, he clearly thought it was the way to go in initial call and response greetings on the phone and as he was intimately involved in the early commercialization of telephones, he may well have helped popularize the standard. Especially as the other titan of the early telephone age in Bell was pushing for saying “ahoy hoy” instead for this purpose. This one is referenced in the Simpsons with Mr. Burns being so old he still answers the phone this way.

Either way, within a few years of this, “hello” had found its way into dictionaries, and telephone operators also got the nickname “hello girls”.

In any event, while working on this microphone for the telephone, he and others thought it likely the telephone would replace the telegraph as a means to disseminate news. Seeing a potential problem in that people talk too fast for the person on the other end to write it all down, Edison felt there was a need for a device to record the voice and play it back slower for dictation.

Inventing the First Device to Play Back Recorded Sound

And so the phonograph was born.

You’ll often read that this was the first device in history to record sound, but this isn’t correct. It was the first device to be able to record AND play back the sound it had recorded. A couple decades before this in March of 1857, Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was the first to patent a device for recording sound, and many others created similar devices. The issue with these was they simply drew the sound waves on paper tracings and, at least with technology of the age, it was impossible to play the sound back from this. (Researchers have actually in more recent times scanned surviving tracings and, with a bit of custom software, have been able to play them back, including hearing the voices of the people on some of the recordings, making them the first humans in history to have audible record of their voice still around today.) While these early devices were not remotely useful for a mass commercial product, they were, at least, very helpful in science in studying sound waves.

Edison’s device worked very differently from these and was perhaps his first truly original invention, or at least, as close as one can come to any invention being original, as every invention builds on the work of others on some level. Not only this, but this was a rare device that just sort of worked the first try, though, to be fair Edison was building off a lot of previous knowledge and experience he had accumulated over the years on it, as well as some experiments with wax paper before building the prototype. Nevertheless, Edison, with the help of machinist John Kruesi, sketched out the machine which more or less had a diaphragm and needle in a mouthpiece you talked into, as well as a crank for turning a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil. The vibrations from sound would then cause the needle to indent on the tinfoil in a given pattern. The sound could then be played back via resetting the cylinder and cranking the device, with the needle then tracing along the line and vibrating the diaphragm.

John Kruesi finished the prototype reportedly within 30 hours of the design being completed. And it just worked- the very first try, with the first ever recording being Edison reportedly reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and having the device play it back to them. This was also no doubt the first time in history a human exclaimed upon hearing himself, “Wait, that’s what I sound like?”

As for the device just working, Edison stated, “I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.” That said, this version of the device was not commercially viable, with recordings extremely low quality and able to be played back only a few times before the recording became useless.

Nevertheless, it was something that the world had never seen anything like before. Adhering to the precept that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic…” when Edison showed the phonograph off to the press, it quickly vaulted him and his Invention Factory lab into the global spotlight, as well as earned him the nickname the “Wizard of Menlo Park”.

In one early demo at Scientific American magazine, they reported, “Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night.”

He was also eventually asked to come demo it to U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes in April of 1878.

Interestingly, despite its potential world changing implications, especially when it came to music, Edison and co did virtually nothing with the device for many years, other than use it to promote the company. Later they would realize it didn’t just have utility in recording and playing back voices, but also music, and at one point even made a mini phonograph to be placed in the world’s first talking dolls, where it would recite little nursery rhymes and the like. However, the fragility of these mini phonograph systems and the rough life dolls often lived made this particular venture fail after a run of only about 500 dolls, most of which were returned within a month when they stopped working.

The Wizard of Menlo Park

Moving on from the phonograph and helping to make the telephone commercially viable, on the side they had countless other lesser talked about inventions, including devices for improvements on fruit storage via vacuum sealing them and the automatic electric pen in 1875. On this one, they used an electric motor to drive a needle up and down in a pen, which ultimately created a stencil as the user wrote, which then, with the help of a press, could be used to make copies of a handwritten document. This device was initially quite successful, but soon other technologies, such as the mimeograph, inspired by the electric pen and developed about a decade later, replaced it. However, this worked out for Edison too, as the inventor of the mimeograph, A.B. Dick, teamed up with Edison to create the Edison Mimeograph.

We bring this one up as it’s also often claimed, though whether true or independently invented is difficult to discern, that Samuel O’Reilly used the electric pen as the inspiration for his rather revolutionary electric tattoo needle device he invented in the 1890s, which worked in a somewhat similar fashion.

Beyond all this, in the 1880s Edison and his team also began working on the relatively new fuel cell technology, eventually using sulphuric acid to catalyze the oxidation of carbon from anthracite coal, which he managed to get a strong current out of.

He stated of the fuel cell, “The great secret of doing away with the intermediary furnaces, boilers, steam engines, and dynamos will be found, probably within ten years. I have been working away at it for some months and have got to the point where an apparently insurmountable obstacle confronts me. Working at the problem now seems to me very much like driving a ship straight for the face of a precipice, and when you come to grief picking yourself up and trying it again to-morrow. There is an opening in the barrier somewhere, and some lucky man will find it. I have got far enough to know that the thing is possible. … I give myself five years to work at it, and shall think myself lucky if I succeed in that time.”

However, as is a theme you’ll see a few notable times in his career, if a technology seemed to become too dangerous, or he perceived it as such, regardless of how potentially lucrative it might be, he tended to abandon it to work on something else. In this case, he would mostly abandon the fuel cell technology research after an accident in 1884 resulted in an explosion so great it blew the windows out of his lab.

The Real Story of the Lightbulb

But in any event, going back to shortly after inventing the microphone for the telephone and the phonograph, Edison and his team would put the phonograph aside to instead focus their efforts on revolutionizing the world of lighting.

As we covered recently in our video Who Actually Invented the Light Bulb, countless people in the decades leading up to Edison’s lightbulb were working on similar technologies, with the arc lamp being used to light an opera theater in Paris all the way back in 1846.

As for Edison, while he did briefly dabble in lighting previous to this, it wasn’t until 1877 when a physics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, George Barker, showed him an arc light system developed by Moses Farmer and William Wallave that, according to a contemporary account in the New York Sun, “Edison was enraptured. He fairly gloated over it. . . . He ran from the instruments to the lights, and from the lights back to the instrument. He sprawled over a table with the simplicity of a child, and made all kinds of calculations. He estimated the power of the instrument and of the lights, the probable loss of power in transmission, the amount of coal the instrument would save in a day, a week, a month, a year, and the result of such saving on manufacturing.”

But while arc lamps were fine for lighting large open spaces, their light was far too harsh for ordinary household use. Thankfully, by this time, research on incandescent lamps was beginning to show promise.

One of the first practical incandescent lamp designs was patented in 1872 by Russian inventor Alexander Lodygin. Lodygin’s bulb did not use a traditional filament but a pair of carbon rods, arranged so that current would pass to the second rod once the first burned out. To get around the limitations of vacuum pump technology at the time, Lodygin instead filled the bulb with inert Nitrogen, an arrangement that would later become standard – albeit with different gasses. Lodygin was later among the first to patent a light bulb using a tungsten filament – another now-standard design feature – but unfortunately at the time tungsten was prohibitively expensive to work with, and none of Lodygin’s designs saw commercial production.

For full details of the development of the lightbulb, go check out our video on it, but suffice it say, a whole lot of people were trying to do exactly as Edison and his team were, all at the same time. But while loads of people came up with designs that worked, none of them were commercially viable for a number of varied reasons depending on the exact device.

Some of them, however, including Canadian medical student Henry Woodward and hotel keeper Matthew Evans, did manage to patent devices that had elements Edison and his team felt were on the right track, and they purchased the rights, in this case for $5,000 or about $160,000 today. None of these were workable commercially viable products, however, and an insane amount of experimentation still needed done to get there, with Edison’s group and one Joseph Swan across the pond in England getting their first for a commercially viable product. Although in slightly different ways, and with Swan ultimately borrowing a lot of elements from Edison’s bulbs to markedly improve his own’s efficiency, with the ensuing court battle all initially going Swan’s way, but then later Edison’s.

As for the conclusion of it, as Lord Justice Fry of Great Britain’s Royal Courts stated, “Swan could not do what Edison did…the difference between a carbon rod (as employed by Swan) and a carbon filament (Mr. Edison’s method) was the difference between success and failure… Mr. Edison used the filament instead of the rod for a definite purpose, and by diminution of the sectional area made a physical law subserve the end he had in view. The smallness of size, then, was no casual matter, but was intended to bring about, and did bring about, a result which the rod could never produce, and so converted failure into success.”

Whatever your opinion on that, this all resulted in the Edison and Swan United Electric Company or Ediswan, which soon became one of the largest manufacturers of lightbulbs in the world.

But going back to Edison’s bulb, Edison began the project by pretty brazenly proclaiming that he could create a safer, cheaper, and more reliable electric light to replace gas lights in only six weeks. Amazingly, such was Edison’s clout at this time that this announcement caused gas company stocks to plummet. After raising funds from investors, which was the real point of the media circus on that one, Edison and his insomnia squad set to work.

While they did initially come up with various designs that worked great, such as one using a thin platinum filament, as with so many similar at the time, none of them were commercially viable on the scale Edison was seeking. For example, the platinum filament bulb lasted only about 14 hours, and platinum was too expensive for mass adoption. Thus, Edison and his muckers embarked upon a marathon hunt for a lightbulb filament that would be durable, long-lasting, and economical to manufacture.

As for the excitement within the company over the light bulb, one of his key employees, Francis Upton, wrote to his father, “The electric light is coming up. We have had a fine burner made of a piece of carbonized thread which gave a light of two or three gas jets. Mr. Edison now proposes to give an exhibition of some lamps in actual operation. There is some talk if he can show a number of lamps of organizing a large company with three or five millions capital to push the matter through. I have been offered $1,000 [about $31,000 today] for five shares of my stock. . . . Edison says the stock is worth a thousand dollars a share or more, yet he is always sanguine and his valuations are on his hopes more than his realities.”

Upton’s letters from here waxed and waned on optimism, but within a few weeks he wrote, “the first lamp that answers the purpose we have wished. It is cheap much more so than we even hoped to have. The lamp is obtained from a piece of charred paper which is bent thus [into a horseshoe shape]. The burner is made from common card board and cut to about the size shown [1″ high]. This is then sealed in a glass bulb and the air exhausted and then a current of electricity passed through it which heats it to a brilliant whiteness so that it will give a light equal to that from a good sized gas burner.”

And on this cheapness, Edison would state once ramped up it would become “so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”

As for the Demo, the New York Herald reported, “Extra trains were run from east and west, and notwithstanding the stormy weather, hundreds of persons availed themselves of the privilege. The laboratory was brilliantly illuminated with twenty-five lamps, the office and counting room with eight, and twenty others were distributed in the street leading to the depot and in some of the adjoining houses. The entire system was explained in detail by Edison and his assistants, and the light was subjected to a variety of tests.”

Unfortunately, the initial paper filaments, while working great for a demo, had the issue of inconsistency for mass production. Edison stated, “Paper is no good. Under the microscope it appears like a lot of sticks thrown together. There are places where the fibres are packed and other places where there are few fibres, dense spots and great open holes… Now I believe that somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop there is a vegetable growth with geometrically parallel fibres suitable to our use. Look for it. Paper is man made and not good for filaments.”

On all this, what Edison might have lacked in theoretical knowledge, he more than made up for with the realization that large-scale technical problems require large-scale solutions – an ethos that predicted today’s era of “big science” and industrial research laboratories. And so it was that between 1878 and 1880, Edison and his team at Menlo Park tested over 6,000 different filament materials in various ways, including cotton, linen, cedar, baywood, boxwood, and hickory. Edison even wrote botanists from around the world to obtain samples of exotic plants to test. At first, carbonized cotton seemed to hold the most promise, glowing for nearly 500 hours straight. Ultimately, however, Edison and his team hit upon carbonized bamboo, which allowed for bulb lives of up to 1200 hours. Of the entire research and development, process, Edison later wrote: “The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate experiments.”

Naturally, ever the optimist, he went on, “I was never myself discouraged, or inclined to be hopeless of success. I cannot say the same for all my associates.”

But to finish the story of the lightbulb, Edison and his team did not “invent” the lightbulb in the traditional sense; rather, they simply perfected the technology to the point where it became economically viable and practical, and then helped popularize it. As Robert Friedel, professor of history at University of Maryland College Park explains: “He carefully identified all of the key qualifications for a successful rival to the alternatives … reliability, longevity, economy and aesthetics. He deliberately set out to create an electric light that would check all these boxes — this is something no one else succeeded in doing.”

His Accidental Invention That Massively Changed the World That Nobody Talks About

Interestingly, there was a rather insanely revolutionary and far more unique device Edison accidentally invented in parallel with the lightbulb that was just one of his lightbulbs with a slight twist. But unfortunately for Edison, he did not realize the implication of what he’d just made in one of his thousands of tests, and how revolutionary it could be if refined a bit, and in the right applications. Because of his failure to realize any of this, nor be the one to perfect it for commercial use, despite his patent for the device, Edison is almost never given credit for his contribution on this world changing invention. Which is unsurprising as, as is a theme you’re probably picking up on, it’s the person who ultimately did the thing in its perfected commercial form, rather than was the first to come up with the thing, that usually gets credit in popular history.

On this one, enter English physicist John Ambrose Fleming, who was an advisor to Edison Electric Light and consultant to Edison-Swan at one point. He would be inspired by Edison’s device to create his revolutionary Fleming valve vacuum tube in the early 20th century. Further, after reading Fleming’s paper on this in 1905, this was partially the inspiration, and in fact a decades long lawsuit would ensue related to this, for engineer Lee de Forest’s three element vacuum tube, and after a whole lot of work, the refined triode device that ultimately became the backbone for countless electronic devices from radar to the digital computer, until the transistor came along.

Going back to Edison’s original device, at one point during his experiments on the lightbulb, he and his staff were trying to figure out why carbon from the filament seemed to be jumping across the vacuum to the walls of the bulb. Clearly some current flow was involved. So in order to try to figure out what was going on here, Edison created a special bulb with a third electrode placed in between the legs of the filament, and then connected that to a galvanometer to measure the current. What he found was that if, relative to the filament, the plate was put at a negative potential, there would be no current between the plate and the filament. However, if the plate was at a positive potential, and the filament heated up enough, there would be a large current flow between the filament to the plate through the vacuum. Importantly in this, the electrons can only flow one way, from the hot element to the cold one, creating a rudimentary diode.

Edison ultimately patented the device for its potential use as a sort of voltage regulator, but seemingly did not understand the implications beyond that. Importantly, he did show it off at the International Electrical Exposition in Philadelphia in 1884, with one William Preece bringing several of these bulbs back to England and coining the term “Edison Effect,” also now known as “thermionic emission,” in a paper he published the following year on the phenomenon. And, of course, as noted, a couple decades later Fleming was inspired by all this and ultimately did his thing, and the modern electronics age was born.

More Power Mister Scott!!!

In any event, going back to the lightbulb, in parallel to all of this, and keeping with Edison’s credo of making complete systems for his products to make them as commercially viable as possible, he and his team quickly realized the Wallace arc-light dynamo generator and others like it wouldn’t be suitable for incandescent light. Thus, the team got to work experimenting and studying electromagnets and generator designs. After a few weeks of this, they tasked their machine shop with building new generators based on their research, which they then experimented with ceaselessly, ultimately coming up with a much more efficient system that worked well for this application. Among other modifications, rather than having equal internal and external resistance as was the norm at the time as this produced maximum current, they found the generator was significantly more efficient overall if the internal resistance was smaller.

Upton would write of this to his father, “We have now the best generator of electricity ever made and this in itself will make a business.”

On this one, yet again, Edison and his team came up with nothing inherently original, but tweaked existing technology to make it better and more efficient and, thus, more practical for commercial use.

Beyond the commercially viable light bulb and generators to make the whole system as efficient as possible, Edison and his team also came up with everything from fuses, power meters, the screw in light socket design, and countless other things needed to make the entire system go.

A Death and an Adorably Nerdy Marriage Proposal

Unfortunately for Edison, while business was booming at this stage, in 1884, around the same time he was accidentally blowing up his lab experimenting with fuel cells, his wife Mary died unexpectedly, of what isn’t clear. She had been suffering on and off again from what was called “obstinate neuralgia” and “gastritis” and “uterine troubles” which all apparently caused her severe pain. Part of her treatment for this for pain management was a regular dose of morphine… Given how suddenly she died and her young age at just 29, as well as some rumors that seemed to have swirled at the time about it, it’s often speculated that it was, in the end, a morphine overdose that killed her. Whatever the case, once this happened, Edison spent less and less time at the Menlo Park lab, in favor of living and working in New York.

Two years after this, he married one Mina Miller with perhaps the most adorably nerdy way of proposing to her of all time.

First, as he approached every other problem he encountered, Edison is speculated to have been highly analytical when it came to choosing his second wife. Or, at least, a rather curious scorecard was found amongst his countless notebooks. In this one, he appears to have been making an attributes list of himself and 60 people he knew, both men and women. Note here, this seemingly wasn’t just for prospective partners, but also ranking other men’s wives and the like too, to see how they fared together given their attributes list. He then ranked everyone based on various traits from things like temper, mouth, affectionate or not, ambition, conceit, reasonableness, etc.

As to why, as alluded to, it’s hypothesized this may have had something to do with his future wife, this is primarily down to the timing of the scorecard, which coincided with when he was looking for a new wife and actively being introduced to prospects for this, as well as the fact that he also ranked how he viewed the happiness of the people who were married and cross referenced them to their attributes. Thus, perhaps, in the most Thomas Edison way possible, he was trying to analyze what made a good match for a wife.

That said, it’s also been speculated that he was actually trying to test the theories of one Sir Francis Galton, the “father of eugenics”, concerning the connection between certain physical traits and psychological characteristics. Or perhaps he was doing both.

If it really was an attempt to find a woman who maximally fit someone who would make a good partner for himself, this rigor may have been from being a little burned by his former wife who, the only thing he ever seems to have mentioned about her in any of his insane amount of writings was in the earliest part of their relationship lamenting, “Mrs Mary Edison My wife Dearly Beloved Cannot invent worth a Damn!” Something he later doubled down on writing on valentine’s day, “My Wife Popsy Wopsy Can’t Invent.”

He also spent so much time away from his family in the lab that his daughter, Marion, would state her mother slept with a revolver under her pillow because how secluded Menlo Park was frightened her at night, and quite often her father would stay most of the night at the lab and not come home “until early morning or not at all.”

That said, he may have had great affection for her as Marion also states when her mother died he was “shaking with grief, weeping and sobbing so he could hardly tell me that mother had died in the night.” And that in the aftermath for several months he basically kept Marion glued to him, even often while working in his lab.

Nevertheless, her inability to invent seems to have been a sore spot. This is in stark contrast to his second wife, Mina, who sometimes helped him record test results, and otherwise witnessed on several of his experiment notebook entries, and even on at least one instance performed an experiment with him to determine if electrical shock could be used to get an oyster to open up. He would also write to Mina, “You & the children and the Laboratory is all my life. I have nothing else.”

Going back to their adorable courtship and proposal, Edison first met Mina Miller while vacationing in Winthrop Massachusetts with a friend. The daughter of inventor Lewis Miller, who made a fortune inventing the Buckeye Reaper harvester combine and subsequently devoted most of his wealth to various philanthropic endeavors, Mina checked a lot of the boxes of what Edison was looking for in a new partner. So smitten was he, he would later write in his journal, “Saw a lady who looked like Mina… got to thinking about Mina and came near being run over by a street car—If Mina interferes much more will have to take out an accident policy.”

During their relatively brief courtship that mostly comprised a trip Mina joined Edison and his group on, he also taught her morse code. After this, the two apparently enjoyed tapping out conversations to one another rather than talking when others were around. He states of this, “We could use pet names without the least embarrassment, although there were three other people in the carriage.”

Note here, his previous courtship to Mary Stilwell had also been remarkably brief from meeting to marriage taking just two months.

With Mina, when he finally decided to propose to her while they were in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, rather than just ask her directly. He, instead, asked by tapping the request out on her hand. Rather than reply with words, Mina simply tapped back “Yes” in Morse Code on his hand.

Of course, being the 19th century, Edison still needed to ask her father for permission. He thus wrote to him that during the trip their friendship had evolved into “admiration as I began to appreciate her gentleness and grace of manner, and her beauty and strength of mind. That admiration has on my part ripened into love.” In response, Lewis invited Edison to his home in Akron where they discussed the matter more fully, and consent was given.

The Future of Inventing

And so it was that the couple were married on February 24, 1886. Edison then purchased a new estate in West Orange, New Jersey, and shortly thereafter also created a new lab within walking distance of his home in West Orange to work from.

And on this lab, utilizing all he’d learned from Menlo Park, and significantly more resources he had this time around, his ambition was to create “the best equipped & largest Laboratory extant, and the facilities incomparably superior to any other for rapid & cheap development of an invention, & working it up into commercial shape with models patterns special machinery— In fact there is no similar institution in existence.”, and that he hoped to be able to “build anything from a lady’s watch to a Locomotive.”

The initially 5 building complex included a central three story building with everything from every tooling equipment any inventor could want to even a massive library for research reference (and which functioned as Edison’s office). The facility also had separate physics and chemistry and metallurgy labs, etc. This was just the beginning. The complex rapidly grew from there, at its peak around WWI, covering about 20 acres with over 10,000 people working there.

Given the scale of all this, here, Edison did indeed begin to step back slightly, still putting in his long hours and directing everything, but no longer intimately involved in everything to the level he was at Menlo Park. As noted in Rutgers incredible Thomas A. Edison Papers Project, which catalogs the over 5 million documents by Edison and his cohorts while they were doing all their inventing, they state, “The big new laboratory that Edison opened in West Orange, N.J., late in 1887 led to one of his most important inventions: the professional research director. The lab’s unmatched size, equipment, supplies, and skilled staff allowed Edison to create in new ways. No longer did he have to take the lead on each problem: he could assign it to a talented man or team of men (always men). Over the next few years, Edison adapted his long habits; still working eighteen (or more) hours in a day, he learned to direct others’ work: planning, watching, quizzing, instructing, summarizing. Still the inventor working at a bench, now he could also multiply his personal efforts, pushing a variety of difficult projects at more or less the same time. Work could even go on without him, as it did when he spent almost two months abroad visiting the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. The new role of research director could not be patented, and it added little to Edison’s glittering fame at the time. But he proved the concept of industrial research that, within his lifetime, would be adopted by the likes of General Electric, Bell Telephone, and DuPont to transform the United States in the 20th century.”

It was at this lab that Edison decided to circle back with the phonograph, including not just coming up with various versions of the device itself, but the entire suite of things needed from equipment to mass manufacture the records for it, the recording equipment to record whatever on them, etc.

The Motion Picture

It was also around this time Edison and his team began to dip their toes into the burgeoning market of motion pictures, with the idea being to eventually link the phonograph with such motion pictures. We’ve covered the origin of the film industry in our video What was the First Movie Ever Made?, which is the fascinating tale of the unabashed murder, Eadweard Muybridge, who thanks to the fact that the jury let him off despite him being quite open about the murder, we got the world’s first motion pictures, which is what he was working on at the time when he decided someone needed killing.

As for Edison, he visited Muybridge’s studio sometime in the mid-1880s. Taking a keen interest in Muybridge’s groundbreaking work, but unimpressed by his execution, Edison began to develop a device that “would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”

Around 1889, the Kinetograph debuted out of Edison’s West Orange lab. Despite Edison’s peripheral involvement here in inventing what many hail as the first true video camera, because at this point Edison had become more of an administrator on a lot of projects, and seemingly was focussing his time on other inventions during this period, historians generally attribute Edison’s assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, as the primary creator of this history-making invention.

Whatever the case there, in 1890, Dickson shot a test movie he entitled Monkeyshines No. 1, featuring the movements of another lab assistant, with the result being like something a ghost hunter would use as “proof” that evil spirits are lurking, rather than like the films that would soon start to come out.

Nevertheless, it’s generally given credit for being the first official video camera motion picture in history. It also inspired Edison to build what was perhaps the first movie studio near his West Orange lab. Calling it “Black Maria” because they thought it resembled a police wagon, this is where they shot hundreds of motion pictures featuring vaudeville, magic shows, boxing matches, and Wild Wild West stunts – included among the latter is a video of Annie Oakley showing off her prodigious skills with a rifle.

From here, motion picture innovation took off. In April 1894, the Kinetoscope Parlor opened in New York City – essentially the first public movie theater. Then, there was the first movie projected for a wide audience, the first on-screen kiss, and the first theater permanently created entirely for a film.

The Lumières brothers and countless others also propelled the industry, and if you want to learn more on all that, do go check out our video What was the First Movie Ever Made? Because Eadweard Muybridge’s story is incredibly fascinating, as was the entire inspiration for the motion picture, which was to answer a question that had plagued artists pretty much as long as artists have been artisting- Do all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground in mid gallop? Something Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, wanted to know and was willing to throw prodigious sums of money at Muybridge to get it answered, as this was impossible to tell with the human eye or with photographic technology of the age. Muybridge’s solution to the problem was incredibly ingenious. And while what he came up with wasn’t a video camera, it did result in the first motion picture. His later work would be extensively studied by the likes of early Disney artists and researchers the world over to study things like how animals and humans actually move.

Edison the Miner

In any event, going back to other things Edison was working on, one major failure of his work during all this, as alluded to earlier, was in mining. There was a huge need for iron ore at the time, so Edison decided to throw he and his team’s brains into the fray. And so it was that he sold his stock in GE after mostly being ousted from it owing to the War of the Currents, which we’ll get to in a bit to separate fact from fiction on that one, because there is so much fiction commonly out there on this. Edison then promptly spent millions of dollars trying to come up with an efficient way to take low-grade ore and use a magnetic separator to create high-grade briquets for use in steel mills.

Ultimately this venture failed when large iron ore deposits were discovered in the Great Lakes, dropping the price too much for him to compete. However, one small success that came out of it was that the rock crushing technology they’d come up with would be adapted for use in producing portland cement after Edison and his team noted the waste sand they produced while milling ore could be used to make extremely durable cement. Ever one to not just make one innovation in an existing field, he and his team then came up with a long rotary kiln which they licensed out, which ironically resulted in Edison’s Portland cement plant being much less profitable because of the subsequent overproduction in the industry partially as a result. Nevertheless, Edison Portland cement was widely used, including to build the original Yankee Stadium. Trying to bolster demand, as well as revolutionize housing, Edison and his team also came up with a quick and inexpensive way to make concrete houses, though this never really caught on beyond a handful of homes made using their system.

Another thing that helped soften the blow of his misstep selling his GE stock and the failure of the iron-ore business was the fact that his phonograph company was exploding around the same time, fulfilling his former prediction a couple decades before that it would “grow up to be a big feller and support me in my old age.”

Electric Cars

Also during all this, Edison turned his sights on electric cars. At the time, electric cars were actually vastly more popular than their noisy, smelly, gas powered or steam counterparts. And for city travel particularly, which is most of what people used cars for at the time, they were quite practical, if rather expensive.

On all this, for example, in 1899, 90% of New York City’s taxi cabs were electric vehicles, built by the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company of Philadelphia. Not only that, but in 1899 and 1900, electric cars outsold all other types of cars, such as gas and steam powered vehicles. In 1902 an electric car, the Baker Torpedo, became the first car to have an aerodynamic body that enclosed both the driver and the platform. This car at one point reached 80 mph in a speed test before crashing and killing two spectators. It was later clocked as high as 120 mph, but with spectators not invited this time.

The issue with these cars was, as has been the case since, the need for improved batteries. Thinking electric cars would win the battle if they had these, Edison and his team got to work looking for alternatives to acid batteries, ultimately leading him to work on alkaline batteries. After over 10,000 combinations on this one, the battery Edison and his team were most famous for was the Nickel-iron battery, versions of which are still popular today for things like off-grid power storage due to their extreme durability and longevity, as well as speed of charge and energy density, all a huge advancement over lead-acid batteries of Edison’s era.

On this one, Edison initially told the press back in 1902 they had come up with a battery system that could enable over 100 miles range in a typical electric car of the era and that “I do not know how long it would take to wear out one of the batteries, for we have not yet been able to exhaust the possibilities of one of them.”

Unfortunately for him and his staff, they still had a LOT of work to do to work out all the kinks and initial sales came with a lot of complaints. And in the interim, one of Edison’s close friends and neighbors in Henry Ford changed the game with his Ford Model T, despite Ford himself being a fan of electric cars, with his wife, Clara, driving the 1914 Detroit Electric car instead of his Model T. For reference, this one had an impressive range of 80 miles.

While inferior to many electric cars of the age on a number of fronts, the Model T was dirt cheap in comparison. By 1915 Henry Ford, due in part to his innovative assembly line factory construction, was able to offer his cars at a base price of around $500 a piece (equivalent to about $15,000 today), which made it affordable for even the non-rich, something that had never been the case before. In contrast, at that time the average price of an electric car had steadily risen to about $1700 or about $50,000 today. This was also around the same time crude oil was discovered in Texas and Oklahoma, which drastically reduced the cost of gasoline so that it was now affordable to average consumers. In addition to these factors, Charles Kettering invented the electric starter, which eliminated the need to hand crank gas powered engines, which could be a somewhat dangerous process, as well as incredibly inconvenient. Road systems also began expanding, further tipping things more in gasoline engine car’s favor; this was not only because of the range factor, but also because gasoline cars were now becoming significantly faster than electric cars. For example, while the American Morrison electric car had a range of nearly 200 miles, it could only cruise along at about 15 mph. For city driving, this was not an issue, but on a roadtrip it wasn’t exactly ideal.

That said, all was not lost for Edison and co, as the batteries they came up with and sold were eventually extremely durable and extremely profitable. Henry Ford also initially solicited Edison’s help in coming up with a battery for the Model T’s starter in 1912, though ultimately lead-acid won the day there for that use-case. But, as noted, Edison’s nickel-iron batteries eventually sold well and were used in a variety of applications in his day, including for various railroad related applications, such as railroad signaling. His Edison Storage Battery Company even continued operating all the way to 1972 when they sold to Exide Battery Corporation.

Stepping Back

In any event, it was around this time as WWI was raging along that Edison’s Thomas A. Edison Incorporated began to do less original inventing and more just refining things they’d already done, with the man himself, now nearing 70, more and more stepping away from day to day management, leaving it to his son Charles, among others, and, while he continued to work on various things, his glory days were behind him.

Noteworthy, as previously mentioned, this was intentional, with Edison stating he wanted to “give up the commercial end… and work in my laboratory as a scientist.” Essentially just exploring wherever curiosity led him and no longer worrying if where it led him was to a marketable product, with the exception of the phonograph, which he stated was his baby and “commercial reasons when it comes to the phonograph don’t count with me. It’s the only invention of mine that I want to run myself.”

This was a rather curious thing for him to focus on given he was mostly deaf… which was occasionally a problem such as when Edison insisted he get to select all the music they recorded.

In an interesting little family conflict aside here, noteworthy is that during WWI, his oldest daughter Marion’s husband was an officer in the German Army, and the couple had long lived in Germany, all getting her stuck behind enemy lines during the war. Meanwhile, on the other side, Edison’s son William was fighting for the U.S. Army in France in the Tank Corps. This presumably could have made family get togethers awkward in the aftermath, except that right after the war, Marion discovered her husband had been having an affair and shortly after ended their marriage, no doubt lamenting her brother hadn’t managed to blow his head off with one of his tanks during the war.

Also during WWI, Edison began consulting for the U.S. military, particularly the Navy, as well as shifting the focus of his personal research onto the war efforts.

Do No Harm and More WWI

We should also point out here, as it’s important for some things we’re going to discuss later, that, as we previously alluded to, Edison only agreed to work with the Naval Consulting Board if it was for defensive technology. Once again, Edison at this stage in life had pretty strong feelings against the other way, stating, “Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

You might find this a rather odd thing for an elephant killer to say, but we’ll get to that myth in a bit.

But speaking of animals and his later life feeling like we need to stop harming living things, according to an account in the June of 1908 edition of the Vegetarian Messenger, Edison even became a vegetarian, stating, “Mr. Thos. Alva Edison, the famous inventor ceased using meat and went for a thorough course of vegetarianism. Mr. Edison was so pleased with the change of diet that, now he has regained his normal health, he continues to renounce meat in all its forms.”

It’s generally reported he stuck with this for the rest of his life, both for health and moral reasons, though whether that’s true or not proved prohibitively difficult to track down definitively.

Whatever the case, going back to humans, he stated, “I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it… I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill.”

As for WWI, most of his personal research during the war was centered around methods for evading torpedoes and detecting them and submarines, camouflaging ships and blinding periscope operators, as well as developing a telephone system for the ships, and methods for protecting passengers from toxic smoke stack gasses. He also worked on systems for spotting airplanes. On the side, he built and switched some of his manufacturing facilities to make various chemicals needed in the war effort that the U.S. and its Allies formerly got from England and Germany.

The rapidity he and his team did this was quite remarkable as well. For example, upon England’s embargo of carbolic acid, something Edison himself needed for production of his phonograph records, he simply, according to one newspaper account, “in a week, 163 consecutive hours of work for 40 men in three shifts and Edison in one, the plans were finished. . . . Seventeen days afterward his plant delivered its first day’s output of product, which other chemists assured him would take at least six months.” He more or less rinsed and repeated this general breakneck pace developing plants for certain other needed chemicals there was now a shortage of due to the war.

His Last Work and Death

After the war, Edison continued experimenting, though, as noted, didn’t particularly focus on anything commercial- just whatever tickled his fancy in the moment. That said, in the late 1920s, due to rising costs of rubber, Henry Ford, along with Harvey Firestone, did ask Edison if he could find a good alternative to rubber for car tires, which he did in Goldenrod weed. This is what he was primarily working on when he suddenly collapsed in August of 1931. From here, his health continued to decline until his death on October 18, 1931 owing to complications due to diabetes.

In the end, Edison was listed on 1,093 patents, 389 related to electric light and power devices, 150 related to the telegraph, 141 for batteries, 195 related to the phonograph, and another 34 related to the telephone… And that’s not even counting the additional around 500 that he never finished or he applied for and was rejected.

How Much was Edison and How Much Other People’s Work?

So, this all brings us around to just how much of this was Edison inventing, and how much of it was him taking credit for others’ work like his lab workers and Nicola Tesla?

We’ve already covered that Edison did not actually steal from Tesla. And, as noted, in fact, oddly allowed Tesla the patents for things he’d worked on while working for Edison which helped Tesla get his start… But what about with the rest of Edison’s workers? And then, beyond, perhaps his lab stealing inventions from others and simply patenting them themselves.

We’ll start with whether Edison was simply taking credit for what his workers did. And in this, there’s nuance. It is absolutely true that Edison, being a rather brilliant businessman, realized the value of building his company’s brand around himself, for both the company and himself. Because he did this, at a certain point, if Edison said he was going to do something, everyone just kind of believed him and that, no matter how fantastical, it would happen.

In fact, as a joke, he once claimed to reporter B.C. Forbes that he and his team were inventing a device to communicate with the dead, the so-called “spirit phone”. And because of his clout, a lot of people took him seriously, resulting in Edison later having to clarify, “I really had nothing to tell him, but I hated to disappoint him so I thought up this story about communicating with spirits, but it was all a joke.”

As a brief aside on this, Edison did not actually believe in spirits. Stating, “I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt.” And clarifying this, “Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love—He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us—nature did it all—not the gods of the religions.” And that, further, “what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter… it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made.”

This stance on religion and his very public support of Women’s Suffrage made him unpopular in some circles, but Edison insisted, “Every woman in this country is going to have the vote.”

But as for his self promotion, while it no doubt did also appeal to his vanity, from a practical standpoint, as a result of his personal brand, investors would line up in droves almost literally throwing money at Edison whenever he wanted, with customers likewise clambering to buy the latest Edison innovation. And Edison absolutely played this up like crazy at every opportunity. Working the media, not just in his own inventions, but, particularly later in his career as noted when his lab had ballooned to extreme size, what his company as a whole were working on, even giving regular updates and details, unlike most inventors who tended to keep quiet on things like that, lest a competitor steal their ideas. Edison knew his team could do things massively quicker than most, both in innovation and ramping up production, thanks to the sort of industrialized lab concept he had and his financial resources. So someone beating him to the finish line wasn’t really too much of a concern to him. And the benefit to the company in building hype was massive.

The Face of a Brand

So, yes, Edison, as the face of the company, and the brand name, so to speak, absolutely did get massively more credit than he may have individually deserved, especially once he moved away from Menlo Park to his facility in West Orange, where he for a time was still leading everything, but more and more offloading work and innovation in it to others.

While your mileage may vary on how your opinion of Edison sits from this, this is no different than quite literally anyone from a professional athlete to actor in a movie to CEO of a major business and on and on- all of whom rely on countless others to do their thing, but the face always gets the vast majority of the credit. Despite that, for example with an actor like a Tom Cruise, without the writers writing most of the lines he speaks, sound and lighting and camera people and directors and hundreds of others making sure everything is captured and produced well- as well as making it look like everyone else in the movie isn’t taller than him- well, I mean, Tom Cruise is just a guy who’s extra good at role play and looking super cool running fast. That’s not to diminish Cruise’s contributions too. Without him doing his thing as well as he does and the fact that if he attaches his name to a project it will have a tendency to get greenlit perhaps just from that, let alone be more popular, the rest couldn’t do theirs. Just, Cruise is the face and gets most of the credit in the end, and not one sound engineer or camera operator ever gets even the smallest credit from anyone outside of those in the industry, let alone do those even writing the script and story itself, outside of if they happen to also be the director, who is a secondary front man. And most don’t seem too bothered by any of this or hate on Tom Cruise because he gets disproportionate credit, as well as gets paid the most by far of anyone in just about any film he does.

Working Style and What Did Edison’s Workers Think of Him?

But this does bring up the question- where on that spectrum was Edison? Well, if you’ve been following along this entire time, it would seem Edison had a brilliant mind and was a talented inventor from an early age. While it is quite literally impossible to look at every patent Edison attached his name to and tell how involved he was, a pretty clear picture emerges from a subset of the 5 million pages of notes from his lab and himself, as well as countless accounts from his workers as to what it was like working for Edison and what the general workflow was. And on all this, for most of his career, the evidence seems to be extremely strong that Edison was something akin to a micromanaging film director who also wrote the script, at least until later in life as previously noted.

But before this, Edison’s style was more or less to use his workers as extensions of himself. As described in the New York Herald in January of 1879, “Edison himself flits about, first to one bench, then to another, examining here, instructing there; at one place drawing out new fancied designs, at another earnestly watching the progress of some experiment. Sometimes he hastily leaves the busy throng of workmen and for an hour or more is seen by no one. Where he is the general body of assistants do not know or ask, but his few principal men are aware that in a quiet corner upstairs in the old workshop, with a single light to dispel the darkness around, sits the inventor, with pencils and paper, drawing, figuring, pondering. In these moments he is rarely disturbed. If any important question of construction arises on which his advice is necessary the workmen wait. Sometimes they wait for hours in idleness, but at the laboratory such idleness is considered far more profitable than any interference with the inventor while he is in the throes of invention.”

Francis Upton would write to his father on this point, “One thing is quite noticeable here that the work is only a few days behind Mr. Edison, for when he was sick the shop was shut evenings as the work was wanting to keep the men busy.”

Of course, this didn’t scale and by the time they’d reach around 60 employees, he began to shift to less micromanaging. He stated instead, “I generally instructed them on the general idea of what I wanted carried out, and when I came across an assistant who was in any way ingenious, I sometimes refused to help him out in his experiments, telling him to see if he could not work it out himself, so as to encourage him.” And the more ingenious among them would then be put in trusted positions and paid more and more.

As a specific example of this sort of thing, one Wilson Howell was given the job of coming up with a good underground cable insulation. He states, “Mr. Edison sent me to his library and instructed me to read up on the subject of insulation, offering me the services of Dr. [Otto] Moses to translate any French or German authorities which I wished to consult. After two weeks search, I came out of the library with a list of materials which we might try. I was given carte blanche to order these materials. . . . and, within ten days, I had Dr. Moses’ laboratory entirely taken up with small kettles in which I boiled up a variety of insulating compounds. . . . Of course there were many failures, the partial successes pointing the direction for better trials.”

At this point, Edison also began to further refine how everything everyone was doing was documented, and began to employ someone to distill it all down to a daily record so that he could keep track of what everyone was doing every day and where the status of their work was and what they were hung up on or pursuing.

Work Environment

And as for accusations of a horrible working environment and such insane expectations… This seems overblown from accounts. There are absolutely elements of truth to this, or at least by modern standards. This was the 19th century, a time when most factories or other such businesses didn’t exactly have HR departments, to put it mildly. And despite some industries in the United States managing to achieve eight hour work days, the average work week in the United States in 1890 was around 90-100 hours per week for, for example, most building tradesmen according to a survey done by the federal government at that time. By the standards of his day, Edison seems to have treated his employees extremely well, for whatever that’s worth, if a bit stingy on the pay unless a given employee really stood out. Perhaps scant consolation from a modern lens, but it’s generally advisable to judge people based on their time, and not our modern one. If we didn’t, there is quite possibly not a single human in history who any of us could ever, not just admire, but not loathe with every fiber of our beings. They were all insanely racist, sexist, occasionally rapists or even near to it or actual pedofiles, and otherwise insanely cruel to animals and a lot of other humans too.

But as for Edison, his employees seemed on the whole to love working for him. And apparently while the general work environment was insanely hard working, it was also fun, with frequent practical jokes, friendly competitions, and late night breaks where they’d all eat and drink beer, often featuring Edison himself singing bawdy songs and playing the pipe organ. From accounts of what all this was like, this seems not too dissimilar to what you see in most university computer science labs at all hours of the night, or is quite common in many tech startups today. Nerds gonna nerd when working in groups. Edison apparently also enjoyed taking his staff, at least at Menlo Park, out on fishing expeditions and the like.

As one of the workers, Charles Clarke would later in life note, “Laboratory life with Edison was a strenuous but joyous life for all, physically, mentally and emotionally. We worked long night hours during the week, frequently to the limit of human endurance; and then we had time off from Saturday to late Sunday afternoon for rest and recreation. . . . Here breathed a little community of kindred spirits, all in young manhood, enthusiastic about their work, expectant of great results; moreover often loudly emphatic in joke and vigorous in action.”

Machinist John Ott who spent basically his entire life working for Edison, would likewise later in life recall, “Edison made your work interesting. He made me feel that I was making something with him. I wasn’t just a workman.” The downside of how hard Edison himself worked and that he expected the same from his employees was that, according to Ott, “My children grew up without knowing their father. When I did get home at night, which was seldom, they were in bed.”

However, Francis Upton would write in 1879 in a letter to his father, “I find my work very pleasant here and not much different from the time when I was a student. The strangest thing to me is the $12 that I get each Saturday, for my labor does not seem like work but like study and I enjoy it. The electric light I think will come in time and then be a success . . . and then my place will be secure. . . . My pay I know is very small in dollars but the chance to get knowledge is beyond measure.”

And in the end the best among them would be well rewarded for their work, both directly if they stuck with Edison, or in many cases also when they left to use what they had learned there for their own endeavors. For example, Upton did indeed become wealthy when Edison gave him 5% interest in their electric lighting work, as well as promoted him to head of the lamp factory. The aforementioned Charles Clarke would, among other things, rise to Chief Engineer, and the aforementioned John Ott, the so-called “Friend to the end”, worked with Edison almost from the very beginning and all the way to their respective deaths, dying only one day after Edison. During his career he rose to superintendent of the machine shop, though owing to a previous injury, later in life Ott was stuck in a wheelchair or with crutches. Owing to Edison and Ott’s close friendship and lifelong work together, Mina Edison instructed that, as Ott having just died couldn’t be there for Edison’s funeral, his wheelchair and crutches should be placed next to Edison’s casket.

Stealing Ideas? (Part 2)

Alrighty, so work environment was extreme on the hours and expectations there, but otherwise seemingly pretty enjoyable relative to the era, and Edison’s relentless optimism and love of learning seemed rather infectious amongst his workers. This brings us to whether Edison was out stealing other’s ideas and then having his employees churn out versions and calling it their own. As ever, arguments against or for Edison on this one are making a black and white thing out of something that’s vastly more nuanced.

As previously alluded to, all evidence seems to be whenever Edison and his team were going to tackle an issue, they studied every related resource material they could get their hands on, including what was known of what everyone else was currently working on. They didn’t exactly have Google or the internet, so it’s not like they had access to the current state of everything, but they did their due diligence with what they did have access to. They then looked to try to make a better and more commercially viable solution through their own research, as well as purchased any patents they needed rights to along the way, if needed, for example as mentioned with Woodward and Evans’ patent for a version of the incandescent light bulb. This isn’t really any different than just about any inventor or company in history, but what Edison and his team did was industrialize the process, which absolutely gave him and his team a huge advantage over their competitors. But the general process wasn’t really any different. Just scaled up.

The primary issue here in terms of public perception seems to be both the common myth of the isolated inventor, as well as Edison and his team’s insane success compared to others. Edison vs Tesla is a classic example of this. Everybody loves the underdog. And yet, Tesla was no different than Edison on this front, utilizing all the knowledge of those who came before to do what he did. And even much of what he did, as noted, still needed perfected by others after to actually be something practical. That’s just how science and engineering and advancements work. Nobody comes up with things on their own. And generally multiple people come up with something similar all around the same time, as noted.

Patents and a Ruthless Businessman?

Of course, Edison also was allegedly a rather ruthless businessman, and definitely had an army of lawyers out to protect his company’s patents. But this, also, isn’t really different than what any other business and even small time inventors do. Edison is typically vilified for it though because, as ever, he did it at scale and was in a position to go after anyone infringing on his patents, not just the major players.

That said, he also doesn’t seem to have been quite as ruthless as most say. For example, at one point Edison hired a lawyer to file patents for things he’d been working on. But rather than do so, the lawyer simply took the papers and sold them to competitors. In total, 57 such potential patents were sold in this way before Edison found out. However, Edison refused to give the name of the attorney to the media, stating, “His family might suffer” if Edison did so, also ultimately calling into question the alleged persona of Edison as being spiteful, something that once again often comes up in the mythical Edison vs Tesla feud.

On the note of patents, Edison had a lot to say on their value, which was minimal compared to his ability to use them to manufacture products himself. For example, when told by reporter Remsen Crawford that seven of his patents were set to expire in one day, he initially stated to his assistant, “Go back. Tell that fellow that I say the expiration of those patents won’t amount to a hill of beans. Tell him that Mr. Edison says he has never had exclusive use of his inventions and never expects to in this world. Tell him the expiring of a patent has no effect whatever upon the fortunes of an inventor.”

Ultimately the reporter managed to use a brief back and forth from his assistant to get to talk to Edison directly to explain what he meant. Edison elaborated: “There is no such thing in this country as an inventor’s monopoly. The moment he invents something that is an epoch-maker in the world of science and commerce, there will be pirates to spring up on all sides and contest his rights to his ideas. I might invent a new monkey wrench which could go without infringement, but the moment I take certain forces and work out a moving picture for the first time in history… mark you how the pirates rise up and call it their own.”

Almost three decades later, Crawford asked Edison why he wasn’t the richest man in the world given all his inventions. To which Edison stated, “Nearly $10,000,000,000, they tell me, are invested in modern industries which developed from ideas embodied in my inventions and my patents. A billion or so dollars, I am told, may be the annual total income to artisans and workers in fields thus created. But I have made very little profit from my inventions. In my lifetime I have taken out 1180 patents, up to date. Counting the expense of experimenting and fighting for my claims in court, these patents have cost me more than they have returned me in royalties. I have made money through the introduction and sale of my products as a manufacturer, not as an inventor.”

On the lightbulb he states, “I have known of several inventors [whose] ideas would have made them millionaires. But they were kept poor by the pirates who were allowed through our very faulty system of protection to usurp their rights. Do you see that little incandescent lamp hanging over my head? Well, I fought in the courts of this and other countries for fourteen years to establish my rights as inventor, even after I had the patents. My associates and I had to spend more than $1,000,000 [about $32 million today] to prove our rights to the incandescent light, even though our claims had been duly vouched by the United States patent office. Everywhere, all around the earth, the pirates kept picking on that little lamp, and they were able to keep me out of the profits on my patents until there were but three years left out of the seventeen…”

Edison would go on that a large part of the problem was the fact that the judges often didn’t really understand what they were ruling on. And he suggested what was needed was “A separate and special court. Take the whole business out of the regular judicial system. It has never belonged there. What does the average judge of our district courts, or circuit courts of appeal—or even of the Supreme Court, for that matter—know about the technical phases of chemistry or physics? These judges have been lawyers all their lives, and they are—some of them—distinguished for their ability as jurists. But when it comes to understanding a contest over amperes, or ohms, or the atomic theory, or subatomic energy, they can be fooled by a smart lawyer quite as soon as… any farmer from the hinterlands. I would appoint, to this special court for trying patent cases, judges from the faculties of colleges of technology, men who know something about science. They could travel around the country and hold court, if need be, in the factories and workshops of the inventors and their competitors, and get first-hand data upon each issue involved in the litigation, just as President Wilson’s War Labor Board, headed by William Howard Taft, went around during the war settling labor disputes in the mills, right on the ground. There wouldn’t be much quibbling on the part of lawyers before these scientist judges. Then, and not till then, will an inventor stand some show of being rewarded for the long, tedious labors he has expended through ceaseless experimentation to gain the fruition of his ideas.”

So, in the end on patents and stealing ideas, the evidence seems to be that Edison and his lawyers were extremely zealous in protecting their patents and claims, what you might call the Disney of his era, but in patents instead of copyrights. Whether this is a knock against him or not depends on your personal opinion of all that. Although, I think one thing we can all agree on is that the world would be a better place if all company’s legal teams adopted the insanely nice disposition of Jack Daniel’s lawyers, who aggressively protect their trademark as they must to keep it, but famously do so in the very deliberately nicest and most reasonable way possible. See our video on the subject.

The Truth About the Animal Killings

This all brings us to the whole animal murder thing. And this is arguably the biggest stain on Edison, at least from a modern lens, and a rather curious one given his stance on violence, even towards animals, though it is possible that was something he had not yet come to until later in life. Whatever the case there, even here most get the details of all this wrong. The devil is in the details. So let’s sort through it.

First, it’s often claimed that Edison ran a series of experiments on killing random animals using AC electricity, and ultimately even pushed for the electric chair for human execution, all culminating in the killing of an elephant on film, in one of the earliest motion pictures ever made- and all for the sole purpose of aiding his company in the War of the Currents fight and show off his fancy new video camera.

So is any of this true?

The Elephant Killing Myth

First, let’s start with the elephant thing because this one is completely false.

Now, to be clear, there was an elephant named Topsy who had been sentenced to death for killing three humans, and it was indeed electrocuted. But Edison had nothing to do with any of this at any stage before, during, or after. Nor was he mentioned in any contemporary news accounts of the event. Nor do any of his massive number of surviving writings such as journal or business correspondence make any mention of the event. Further, going back to the so-called War of the Currents, this elephant execution occurred about a decade after Edison had already lost the war and was no longer involved at all in his former electrical company. So this event was not in any way used by Edison or his company to discredit AC current either.

So why do most today think Edison did murder an elephant and use it to show AC current was dangerous?

First, because the electrical company that performed the execution bore his name- the Edison Electric Illuminating Co. of Brooklyn. However, despite the name, again, Edison was not in any way involved with this power company at the time. It was a privately owned entity that had years before lost any association with the man himself outside of still bearing his name.

The second reason he is so associated with this execution is that Edison Manufacturing’s film branch filmed the event. While Edison was president of Edison Manufacturing, someone else ran the film company’s day to day operations, Edison Manufacturing vice president and general manager William E. Gilmore. It’s also noted that the company made about 1,200 films around this time with very little input or oversight from Edison. And, indeed, this particular execution seems to be one of those cases, as, once again, none of Edison’s surviving correspondence from this period between himself and Gilmore mention anything about it.

So why film the execution?

It would seem simply that it was a highly publicized event and Gilmore just thought it would be something worth documenting with their relatively new film technology.

Alrighty then, so what about the electric chair? Well, after a series of botched hangings, there was a push for a more consistent and humane way to kill other humans deemed unfit to continue existing in society because, capital punishment!

In parallel with this, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had been interested in something similar to have a more humane way of euthanizing animals that needed put down for whatever reason, and had even eventually consulted with Edison, among others, to help come up with a more humane method for this- and long story short on this one, ultimately the idea of using electricity to put down humans percolate to the top as an alternative to hangings.

But Edison didn’t really have much of anything to do with the electric chair, other than the commission put in charge of looking into the feasibility of this contacted countless electrical experts and asked their opinion. Edison was one of those consulted.

However, contrary to the popular narrative, Edison’s initial response wasn’t positive. In fact, he initially refused to give his opinion, citing that he was morally against capital punishment. And, thus, was hesitant to give his thoughts.

After further prompting, however, he was finally convinced to give his opinion on what the most humane way to do this would be, and wrote in a letter in December of 1887 that if they really wanted to kill someone, they should use Westinghouses’ “alternating machines,” and about 6 months later doubled down, stating rather than needing to design such a device, they could just “Hire out your criminals as linemen to the New York electric lighting companies.”

The Real Story of the War of the Currents Animal Thing

This all brings us to the animals and back to the War of the Currents, and Edison’s rather curious crusade against AC power, even after it became clear it was the significantly more commercially viable option and his own team and investors were heavily pushing him to switch. Edison still refused, even publicly stating in 1889, right before he was ousted, Edison Electric would never adopt AC as long as he was in charge. It was pretty much right around then that his company started working on AC internally and he was more and more shunted to the side. The War of the Currents was mostly over. A couple years later, this culminated in some of his investors brokering a merger with Westinghouses’ main rival in the AC sphere, Thomson-Houston, despite Edison’s objections. And so it was that Edison General Electric merged to form GE in 1892. Edison was out not just in name, but in truth, more or less just a figurehead briefly at this point, before deciding to sell his shares in the company he could no longer lead to use the funds to pursue other ventures, in particular, as mentioned, focusing on iron ore refinement.

So why was Edison, who normally never saw a good idea he didn’t like to adapt and improve on, so stubborn on this particular issue to the bitter end?

While some have claimed Edison simply didn’t understand AC electricity, and so was doggedly pushing his company’s inferior low voltage DC power distribution systems, the evidence of notes and the like from his lab don’t back this at all. He very clearly was extremely well versed in how AC worked and its advantages for mass power distribution, and eventually his own people were explicitly pointing it out to him either way.

While it’s impossible to definitively discern his unfiltered thoughts precisely because of the company’s existing DC push. Edison right from the start, even before the war of the currents really got going, genuinely seemed to think the idea of high voltage AC lines running around in a city populated with countless thousands of people was a recipe for people getting killed regularly by these, writing in a private correspondence with one Edward Johnson in 1886 shortly after Westinghouse had installed his first scale AC system, “Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically.”

And, indeed, his prediction proved prophetic. With basically no regulation, Westinghouse just did things the cheapest way possible with a mishmash of wires strung overhead on polls and attached to buildings, with minimal insulation that also broke down relatively quickly with exposure to the elements- all inspiring one electrician to state the insulation was as useful as “a molasses covered rage”.

Noteworthy on this, Westinghouse’ aforementioned main AC competitor in Thomson-Houston was doing it a little differently. Every bit as concerned about the safety factor as Edison was, Elihu Thomson put a lot of money and research into trying to develop various mechanisms to make the whole system safer, including developing things like lightning arrestors and magnetic blowout switches to kill the power instantly if there was any surge. Further, he initially wouldn’t allow his system to be installed for use in homes for AC lighting as he felt it was too dangerous in its state at that point. Westinghouse’s system, in contrast, was built with seemingly not much of any thought given to safety.

Naturally, deaths quickly did follow from this, with a string of them in the spring of 1888, including the killing of some kids, particularly causing a media frenzy, and the press deeming the new phenomenon “death by wire”.

But it didn’t really matter. High voltage AC systems were significantly cheaper and more efficient for this use case than Edison’s low voltage DC systems, and it only got worse with time as prices of copper, which his system required much thicker lines of, continued to rise, and the AC technology continued to advance.

Nevertheless, Westinghouse was put on the defensive, and took to pointing out, quite reasonably, that while, yes, the pole mounted AC lines were dangerous, so were countless other things people dealt with in the city from street cars to gas lighting, the latter of which his system would actually help prevent deaths on.

Of course, Edison detractors tend to claim Edison was only taking this extreme stance against AC because he was trying to take down his competitor in Westinghouse. And there probably is some truth to this. But the reality seems far more nuanced. On all this, Edison was going against one of the core business tenants that had made him so successful- always trying to make something as practical and cheap as possible. Given how passionate he got on this one, and how he was even willing to be ousted from his company before agreeing to a switch, even after the war was all but lost, it doesn’t seem that far fetched that he may well have genuinely thought the risk of deaths were too great to pursue the path Westinghouse and Thomson-Houston and others were.

The Truth About the X-Ray

Especially as this was a bit of a theme throughout his life. For example we have the aforementioned fuel cell work, where despite significant progress, the explosion resulted in him ultimately abandoning the research line. Likewise, when it came to X-rays. While his company did make great strides in this, including creating the first commercially viable fluoroscope, vastly improving on the image quality of previous designs, and a design that’s still at its core what’s used today, he ultimately abandoned it after almost blinding himself with x-rays, and more famously accidentally killing one of his workers, Clarence Dally, who had eagerly volunteered for the project- a fate which countless other early X-ray researchers also shared.

As we’ve covered in our video When Going Shoe Shopping Was a Good Way to Die, it took a long time for humans to fully grasp the dangers of X-rays, with many shoe shops x-raying people’s feet every time they wanted to get fitted for shoes, sometimes even letting kids get their feet x-rayed for fun multiple times a fitting. This was something that was all the rage up to around the 1970s. Yes, 1970s.

As for Dally, there was nothing Edison could do once the damage was done, though he did keep him on the payroll and paid for all his medical expenses up through his death, and then afterwards made sure Dally’s widow and children were well taken care of financially. While this seems like a no brainer today, and a great way to avoid a lawsuit. At the time, this was extremely out of the ordinary. Mere decades before, as we noted in our video Charles’ Dickens’ Sledge Hammer for the Poor Man’s Child, it was common to use kids to remove jams in industrial machinery without even turning the machinery off. Such that if they didn’t get out rapidly, they’d lose limbs or life. And promptly be replaced by another child. Workers were literally disposable, and many business owners saw them this way, with this only really beginning to change markedly around the time of Dally’s death, interestingly enough.

But on this one, despite the significant advancements he and his team were making, Edison abandoned X-ray research completely, feeling it was too dangerous, not just for experiments in his labs, but beyond for most to use. That said, his basic design, as noted, if significantly improved in various ways, is still used today. After the utility of this for medical use was demonstrated in spades during WWI, he would later in life state, looking back, “I did not want to know anything more about X-rays. In the hands of experienced operators they are a valuable adjunct to surgery, locating as they do objects concealed from view, and making, for instance, the operation for appendicitis almost sure. But they are dangerous, deadly, in the hands of inexperienced, or even in the hands of a man who is using them continuously for experiment.”

Back to the Truth About the War of the Currents, the Animal Killings, and the Electric Chair

Going back to War of the Currents, this all seems to have played into his choice to go with low voltage DC instead of high voltage AC, as he seems to have genuinely been prioritizing safety over cost, and presumably thinking with advancements he could get the cost down to be on par.

This brings us to the animal killings. Which Edison did indeed support, though not quite the way most people think.

As for the details on this one, an electrical engineer by the name of Harold P. Brown began a personal campaign against AC systems, with his initial salvo being a letter to the New York Post, stating, “The only excuse for the use of the fatal alternating current is that it saves the company operating it [AC] from spending a larger sum of money for the heavier copper wires which are required by the safe incandescent systems. That is, the public must submit to constant danger from sudden death, in order that a corporation may pay a little larger dividend.”

It was on from there and Brown ramped up his campaign to whoever would listen, including lobbying the New York Board of Electrical Control.

In one account it was noted, “At a July meeting Board of Electrical Control, Brown’s criticisms of AC and even his knowledge of electricity was challenged by other electrical engineers, some of whom worked for Westinghouse. At this meeting, supporters of AC provided anecdotal stories from electricians on how they had survived shocks from AC at voltages up to 1000 volts and argued that DC was the more dangerous of the two.”

Note here, Brown was lobbying at this point that line voltage be restricted to 300 volts.

Little was done about any of this given the lack of hard data on the dangers of a given voltage, and in comparison of AC and DC.

So, do you know what you do when there is no hard data and it’s needed? Rigorous experiments. And when potential death or injury may be involved, we humans tend to offer up our animal friends for the testing. And that’s exactly what Brown decided to do.

Going back to Edison, at this point, he seems to have had no association with Brown. But it didn’t last. How the connection was made exactly isn’t clear, with varying accounts, though internal records from Edison Electric Light seem to indicate that it was Francis S. Hastings who suggested to Edison they support Brown’s efforts and research, which they subsequently did, letting him use some of Edison’s equipment and facilities for his research into the dangers of AC vs DC power, to get the data needed.

Over the course of the experiments, Brown would pay for captured stray animals, as well as use some animals already slated to be euthanized, such as in one case a lame horse, and then run experiments on them using DC and AC power.

Of course, if this was all he was doing, there wouldn’t have been much controversy. After all, at the exact same time the New York Medico-Legal Society was likewise doing the same exact type of testing with nobody kicking up a fuss. And even today stray animals are regularly euthanized if taken in and no one wants them, and lame horses likewise are regularly euthanized and the like, let alone research labs across the world using animals in all sorts of experiments, even to death. And particularly on the latter, if the benefit is to humans, most aren’t too bothered about it. Or, at least, most of us who are, aren’t doing anything about it or vilifying the scientists explicitly. And this was even less the case back then when the idea of animal rights was almost non-existent in the public consciousness.

The issue here, of course, is that it wasn’t just about the research, but also to get the media involved to put a stop to high voltage AC power distribution, or alternatively to get regulations put in place to make it safer. For example, there was a push for switching to underground wires and the like as well. And it was these few very overt killings that seemed questionable, given they were solely to demonstrate the results of the research in the most graphic way possible, rather than advancing the research. Few, even then, were terribly enthusiastic about witnessing such things directly, even though most of us otherwise happily eat our cheeseburgers and chicken wings, and use our countless products built on the backs of animal research. Thus, given the graphic nature of the demonstrations, while not really seemingly terribly controversial at the time, they were highly effective for what they showed.

In one such, where notably the chairman of the death penalty commission Elbridge Gerry was there to observe, Brown had a stray dog in a cage which he gave a series of progressing DC shocks, all the way up to 1,000 volts. The dog was otherwise physically fine after each of these. Brown then switched to 330 volts of AC, which killed the animal. Critics of this demonstration noted that the previous DC shocks had likely made the dog more susceptible to being killed by the AC shock. Thus, Brown did another public demonstration, this time killing three dogs in succession via a shock of 300 volts of AC power each with no previous DC shock.

His hope was, once again, to use this to convince the board to set a limit of 300 volts for publicly run AC lines. He also did a few more tests using cows and the aforementioned lame horse that were killed with 750 volts of AC power.

Westinghouse, of course, claimed the demonstrations and data couldn’t be trusted and that DC was vastly more dangerous. In response, Brown put his money where his mouth was and publicly challenged Westinghouse to come take part in an experiment. In this one, Brown stated he would hook himself up to the DC current, and Westinghouse would be hooked to the AC current, and they’d start at low voltages and work their way up until one of them quit or died. Naturally, Westinghouse declined to take part in the challenge.

In the end, Brown ultimately published the pamphlet: “The Comparative Danger to Life of the Alternating and Continuous Electrical Current” laying out the detailed results of all his tests, and then had copies of it sent to newspapers and government officials.

Because of his now very unique expertise here, Brown would later be asked to design the first electric chair, but refused. And instead one George Fell was contracted for that, and it was later built by one Edwin F. Davis. However, Brown was contracted to find a suitable generator to use with the chair. With both the help of Edison Lighting and Thomson-Houston, Brown was able to acquire a decommissioned Westinghouse AC generator for this purpose. As to whether Edison was involved in helping Brown get this generator, this is often claimed to be so. However, at this point Edison had been, as noted, partially forced to the side in this company. And while most sources on this one imply he was involved, the aforementioned Rutgers University Thomas A. Edison Papers, which is unequivocally one of the most reliable sources out there on all things Edison, explicitly say no, he was not.

But he was involved in hiring Brown in the first place, as well as known to have witnessed one of the demonstrations. And for that, despite being, at least later in life if not before, well ahead of his time on thoughts against even harm to animals, this one is generally seen today as the biggest stain against Edison.

Summing Up the Animal Killing Thing

But to sum this one up, often lost in all this is that while absolutely Edison had a business vendetta against high voltage AC power and paid someone to have animals euthanized towards this end. The entire issue wasn’t so black and white. Brown was doing research to try to prove the relative dangers AC and DC power posed at various voltages, and to have hard data to show the regulatory bodies after initial outcries were rebuffed.

Further, people didn’t view animal cruelty quite the same back then as we do now. And, ironically, as noted, Edison, at least later in life, was ahead of his time on this, and it was actually the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that was one of the chief parties interested in this research at the time, as they wanted a more humane way to euthanize animals that needed to be put down, and were hoping such research would lead to this, and a device they could use for it.

And third, given Edison’s normal stance on such things, while nobody knows exactly what he was thinking because of the ambiguity introduced given he was out to vilify his competitor, the moral justification he may have used perhaps isn’t hard to see. If funding Brown’s research and killing some stray animals and others like a horse that was going to be put down anyway would save human lives, he may have simply deemed it worth it.

Or maybe he really didn’t care about any of it, and his harping on about the dangers of the high voltage AC systems of the era were just a smoke screen, and he was simply happy to murder as many animals as it took and say whatever needed said to take his competitor down.

You’ve now made it this far in this piece so now have a much better sense of the man than a few hours ago. So what do you think?

Summing Edison Up

But to sum everything with Edison up, it is unequivocally true Edison got credit for some things he was little involved with, such as the world’s first video camera, and other things that were the combined efforts of himself and his staff. But this isn’t really any different than every single institution that has a public face. And, arguably, Edison was directly involved in the work far more than most who get such excess of credit. Edison and his team also very much did build on the ideas of others… The same as every single inventor in history as long as humans have been humaning. There are almost no instances of isolated genius. And frankly most of the examples of that we think of, it’s very likely it’s only because history has forgotten all of the others who those inventors were aware of and built off of. With perhaps the only original human inventor ever being the first person to pick up a rock and realize they could smash something with it. But even there, perhaps inspired by gravity.

Humans, from rockets to rocks, always trying to make gravity look bad.

In the end, it is unequivocally true that Edison and his team changed the world in multiple ways. But arguably one way above all, which was Edison’s initial idea after that first couple inventions that made him rich- creating an industrial lab, first with Menlo Park, and then scaling it to an insane level in West Orange. That, more than anything else he did, changed the world both in his time, and ever since with everyone from his own General Electric to Xerox Parc to 3M and beyond copying the basic model, and, in so doing, changing the world over and over and over again since.

And, finally, circling back to Tesla- did Edison steal Tesla’s ideas and persecute him into oblivion? No. And that narrative needs to stop because it’s just wholly and unequivocally false. Yes, the internet and, most humans really, love the underdog, and love to vilify the most successful, sometimes for legitimate reasons, and sometimes just because they are the New York Yankees and dang it, 40 American League pennants and 27 World Championships in a bit over a century is too many! Screw those guys. Can’t just spare 1 for the Seattle Mariners?!?! It’s been almost a half a century and zero of either despite over the years having Ken Griffey Jr, A-Rod, Edgar, Randy Johnson, Ichiro, and Felix! Help us Julio-wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.

Of course, was Edison perfect? Hardly. He was human. Obsessed with his work, unabashedly promoting his own personal brand, pushing his employees to their limits, but also expecting no different from himself, priding himself on being the hardest worker of all, something countless of his employees and former employees attest to. He led by example. He was also a product of his time, and you’ll find no shortage of ways to vilify pretty much any human from the 19th century in countless ways… Or, come to that, even most people from the 20th and 21st centuries. We all suck in our own ways… outside of Mister Rogers. Who not only didn’t suck, but always made sure all of us knew we didn’t actually either. And the ways we think we do, well, he genuinely believed in our ability to change and do better next time.

Again, in all of that, Edison was a complex human being like the rest of us. With things to admire and things to cringe at. And trying to encapsulate who he was from a given action or quote is as absurd as defining any of us based on our worst or best moments. He should no more be deified than Tesla sometimes is on the interwebs, generally cast as the God Genius, and Edison the Devil. But the truth for both men is that they were just people, if quite notable ones.

Who was Greater: Tesla or Edison?

So who was a greater cog in the vast and complex machinery of human advancement? Both men were unequivocally unique geniuses. Both men were unabashed self promoters. Both men built off other’s work in literally everything they did. Both men made a fortune from their work and achieved worldwide fame both with the general public and by those within the scientific and engineering world. Both did contribute to changing the world through their work.

But unfortunately for the Team Tesla supporters, which note we here at TodayIFoundOut previously were on that bandwagon before really digging into the man, Tesla’s major contribution to the world was something that someone else had already more or less invented and he himself wasn’t able to perfect to make it practically viable at scale for the application it was being used for. Others did that for him. Others likewise built on some other of Tesla’s work to make it practical for something useful for the world. And beyond this, the vast majority of things Tesla ever supposedly did mostly just existed in his head, though he sometimes claimed to have made them. Yet since then, it has not only been shown in many cases that he had a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the field he was working in and how things actually worked, but also just that- it all only ever existed in his head and generally since shown to not have actually been workable, or at least not in the way he thought. And while nobody gives Jules Verne credit for “inventing” the hologram or lunar module, neither should Tesla get credit just for thinking up a futuristic idea that someone else would figure out how to actually make work.

Edison, in contrast, while absolutely also through the work of his team as well, gave the world the commercial viable lightbulb, the first device to record and playback sound, similar to Tesla made major contributions in the early development of the power grid system we have today, accidentally inspired the vacuum tube that birthed the electronic age with one of his experiments, the list goes on and on. And, most important of all, perhaps his greatest invention- the industrial lab, which is a model that has been copied in every industry since, and has given the world most of the great inventions that have come since, many of which from his own original company that became GE.

In the end, both men were incredibly hard workers, geniuses, and dreamers. Edison and co., through an insane amount of work and experimentation, made some of those dreams a reality and, in so doing, changed the world multiple times. Tesla likewise made some of his dreams reality. But as far as anything truly world changing from what existed already? Well, he sure did talk about a lot of things…

Maybe popular history up to a decade or two ago actually got this one right.

What do you think now that you have the pair’s full stories? Let us know in the comments below.

Bonus Fact:

As for the whole “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” quote, in the spirit of debunking myths, we should probably point out that despite that maxim being one of the most famous of all Edison quotes, it wasn’t actually what he said, nor was he the originator of the idea. As for what he said, this was “Genius is not inspired. Inspiration is perspiration,” as well as supposedly expanding, “2% is genius and 98% is hard work.”

As to who actually seems to have come up with the source sentiment, enter academic Kate Sanborn in her “What is Genius?” lectures in the 1890s. In this, she stated that genius is a mix of perspiration and inspiration, and that perspiration was far more critical than its fellow -ation. Not long after, an editorial about her lecture in the paper popularly made the rounds, afterwhich Edison seemed to concur given his whole “inspiration is perspiration” thing.

That quote and the general idea evolved over time, to our present day “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” that Edison never actually said (nor did Sanborn say verbatim), and today everybody’s forgotten about poor Kate’s contributions given Edison’s long shadow.

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