Nikola Tesla harnessed the alternating current, invented radio technology and patented 700 inventions, including the wireless remote control and spark plugs. But by 1943, the inventor died alone of a heart attack in a New York hotel room -- a fringe figure, an also-ran in the scientific community. He was impoverished, obsessed with the number three and saw the Nobel Prize awarded to another man for an invention he had created years earlier.
"Nikola Tesla's ideas," The New York Times wrote in his obituary, "bordered increasingly on what some considered the fantastic as he advanced in age." Still, as Tesla once insisted: "The present is theirs, the future is mine."
That future, it seems, is now. This year -- the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth -- Belgrade International Airport will be renamed the Nikola Tesla Airport. On the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, a statue will be unveiled to honour the man whose work enabled the construction of the world's first hydroelectric power plant. And starting this month, scientists from around the world are recognizing Tesla at conferences in Serbia, Croatia, Australia, Canada and the United States.
Tesla is also the mad scientist of choice among hipsters. He's appeared in novels, plays, an opera and a Japanese manga comic and is the subject of numerous songs -- including a few by a popular 1980s band named after him. In Jim Jarmush's 2004 film Coffee and Cigarettes musician Jack White demonstrates the Tesla coil. Later this year, David Bowie will play the Serbian-American in The Prestige, a film directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins).
On the stroke of midnight July 9, 1856, Tesla was born to Serbian parents in Smiljan, Lika, in what is now Croatia. His father was a Serbian-Orthodox priest; his mother was the inventor of a number of household appliances including the mechanical eggbeater.
Tesla's own ability to visualize inventions in precise detail started in early childhood. When he saw a steel engraving of Niagara Falls, for instance, he imagined a wheel being turned by the water -- thirty years before a hydroelectric plant became reality.
After studying mechanics, physics and engineering in Austria and Czechoslovakia, Tesla worked as an electrical engineer in Hungary and France. He then emigrated to New York in 1884, where he joined Thomas Edison's laboratory.
Within a year the two had split over the alternating current. Edison tried to show the dangers of AC by using it to electrocute dogs and horses in public exhibitions. Tesla later responded with a demonstration at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. As Paul Auster writes in his novel Moon Palace, Tesla -- who was 6 foot 6 and cut an impressive figure in a black Prince Albert coat and derby hat -- performed "magic tricks with electricity, spinning little metal eggs around the table, shooting sparks out of his fingertips."
Tesla won the "war of the currents," of course. The industrialist George Westinghouse eventually purchased the patent for AC power. And as W. Bernard Carlson, a history professor at the University of Virginia who's writing a biography of Tesla, says, "He was as popular, if not more, than Edison."
Other battles proved more challenging. Though Tesla invented the radio in 1895, Guglielmo Marconi -- who used one of Tesla's oscillators to send signals across the English Channel -- snagged the patent in 1904 and later won the Nobel Prize. Despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that awarded the patent posthumously to Tesla in 1943, Marconi continues to be considered the father of the airwaves.
Radio proved problematic in other ways, too. In 1899, while experimenting with high-voltage, high-frequency electrical currents on a high plateau in Colorado, Tesla believed he received radio signals from aliens. This made him a laughingstock among his peers (though it did inspire cults who believed Tesla himself was an alien).
