Born at midnight in a lightning storm, the story goes. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove the timing wasn't a coincidence.
Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 with almost nothing and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison. He left within the year — and spent the rest of the decade proving Edison's direct current was the wrong kind of electricity to bet a country on.
Down in the gaslit streets, Edison's lamps flickered on direct current that died within a mile of the dynamo. Tesla's alternating current could cross a state.
Tesla's alternating current, paired with George Westinghouse's money, carried electricity further than direct current ever could. Niagara Falls lit Buffalo, twenty-six miles away. The war of currents had a winner, and it wasn't Edison's.
At an experimental station outside town, Tesla built the largest coil ever made and used it to throw bolts of artificial lightning over a hundred feet. The locals said the ground hummed. He said he'd picked up a signal from somewhere that wasn't Earth — history remembers it as static. He never took it back.
J.P. Morgan put up $150,000 to build a wireless telegraph tower. Tesla built something much bigger — a machine to broadcast electricity itself, free, to anyone on Earth. He never told Morgan that part.
187 feet of timber and steel, capped with a dome sixty-eight feet across. For a few years it was the tallest, strangest, most hopeful thing on Long Island.
When Morgan's final refusal arrived, Tesla fired the tower. That July, people along the Sound watched lightning pour off the dome into the night sky, and the New York papers wrote it up as a mystery. It wasn't a mystery. It was a man spending the last of the money on proof.
Then the tower went dark. It never fired again.
Once he understood Tesla intended to give electricity away, the money stopped arriving. The tower stood unfinished, a monument to a plan nobody but Tesla still believed in.
In 1917, the government decided an idle tower on the coast was a liability — maybe a spy tower, they said. It came down for scrap. Tesla was not there to watch.
He lived his last decades in hotel rooms, feeding pigeons, filing patents nobody built, still certain the world would eventually need what he'd already invented twice. He died alone in the Hotel New Yorker in January 1943, owing rent.
Nobody ever picked up his signal from Wardenclyffe. That's not really the point of sending one.