Why Nikola Tesla Died Poor

July 10, 1856

The inventor, engineer, scientist, and businessman Nikola Tesla is born in what is now Croatia. The man who invented the future will die in 1943, penniless, in a small hotel room in New York.

Tesla believed that no one could surpass his mind and did not hesitate to criticize even Thomas Edison, who once employed him. “If Edison had to find a needle in a haystack,” Tesla once wrote, “he would at once set about, with the diligence of a bee, searching from straw to straw until he found what he was looking for. I was sorry to witness this behavior in cases where a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90% of his trouble.”

But as Smithsonian Magazine writes, men like Edison and George Westinghouse may not have had Tesla’s scientific talent (at least as he thought), but they clearly possessed the one trait he lacked: a business mind.

In the final days of America’s so-called Golden Age, Tesla made a dramatic effort to change the future of communications and power transmission around the world. He managed to convince JP Morgan that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, so the banker gave him over $150,000 to finance a huge, futuristic tower in the middle of Long Island in New York.

In 1898, as Tesla’s plans to create a worldwide wireless transmission system became known, the Wardenclyffe Tower would be his last chance to claim the recognition and wealth he was never able to earn.

Talent

Nikola Tesla, the son of a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church, showed his talent from an early age. He could memorize entire books and store logarithmic tables in his mind. He learned languages ​​easily and could work days and nights with only a few hours of sleep.

At the age of 19, he was studying electrical engineering at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, where he soon gained stardom. He was in an ongoing confrontation with a professor over design flaws in the DC motors he was showing in class.

He would spend the next six years of his life constantly thinking about electromagnetic fields and an AC-powered motor. But these thoughts became his obsession, as a result of which he could not concentrate on his student duties. Professors at the university warned his father that the way he worked and slept was killing him. But instead of finishing his studies, Tesla became addicted to gambling, lost all his tuition money, dropped out of university, and suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1881, after recovering, Tesla moved to Budapest. One day, as he was walking in a park with a friend reciting poetry, a vision came to him. There in the park, with a stick, Tesla drew something in the dirt. It was a motor that uses the principle of rotating magnetic fields created by two or more alternating currents.

In June 1884, Tesla boarded a ship for New York with four cents in his pocket and a letter of introduction from his former employer, Charles Batchelor, to Thomas Edison. The letter read: “Dear Edison: I know two great men and one of them is you. The other is this young man!’

Edison, though skeptical, hired him. According to Tesla, he offered him $50,000 if he could improve the AC machines that Edison was working on. Within a few months, Tesla informed the American inventor that he had indeed improved his engines. But he refused to pay him. “When you become a regular American, you will appreciate American humor,” Edison told him, according to Tesla.

Tesla resigned and got a job digging ditches. But it wasn’t long before word got around that Tesla’s AC motor was a good investment, leading the Western Union Company to hire Tesla to design AC systems still in use around the world.

Tesla patented his alternating current motors and electrical systems, which were said to be the most valuable inventions after the telephone. Soon, George Westinghouse believed that Tesla’s designs might be just what he needed in his quest to supplant Edison’s direct current. So he got the license to use Tesla’s patents in exchange for $60,000 in stock and cash, as well as royalties based on the amount of electricity Westinghouse would sell. Ultimately, he won the “War of Current,” but the litigation and competition came at great cost to both the Westinghouse Company and Edison’s General Electric Company.

Fearing that he would be destroyed, Westinghouse begged Tesla to release him from the rights they had agreed to. “Your decision decides the fate of the Westinghouse Company,” he told him. Tesla, feeling grateful for the man who had never tried to cheat him, tore up the contract and thereby waived rights to the millions already owed to him, as well as the billions that would accrue in the future. If he hadn’t, he would be one of the richest men in the world — a titan of the US Gilded Age.

But Nikola Tesla’s work in electricity was not over. Before the 20th century came around, he had invented a powerful coil capable of producing high voltages and frequencies, which would lead to new forms of light, such as neon and fluorine, as well as X-rays. Tesla also discovered that these coils, which would be called “Tesla Coils”, made it possible to send and receive radio signals. His related patents, in 1897, caught up with the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi.

Tesla continued to work on his ideas for wireless transmissions when he got financing from JP Morgan to build the giant transmission tower. “Once completed, it will be possible for a businessman in New York to dictate instructions and have them immediately appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere,” Tesla said at the time.

But when construction began, it became apparent that Tesla would run out of money before it was finished. An appeal to Morgan for more money was fruitless, and in the meantime, investors began to turn to Marconi. In December 1901, Marconi successfully sent a signal from England to Newfoundland. Tesla protested that the Italian was using 17 of his patents, but the litigation eventually went in Marconi’s favor and the damage was done. (The US Supreme Court eventually vindicated Tesla, clarifying his role in the invention of the radio, but that was in 1943, after his death.)

Thus the Italian inventor was recognized as the inventor of the radio and became rich. The Wardenclyffe Tower remained abandoned until 1917 when it was torn down, a symbol of yet another Tesla failure.

In the following years, Tesla began to withdraw from the world, showing clear signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is estimated that he may have been high-functioning autistic. He became obsessed with cleanliness and the number three. He began washing his hands three times when shaking hands, had to have 18 napkins on his table during meals, and counted his steps whenever he walked anywhere.

Near the end of his life, he developed an obsession with pigeons, especially one particular white female, which he claimed to love almost as one would love a human.

He died in 1943, in debt. At least Westinghouse was paying for the room on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel, where he stayed for years.