nikola tesla time travel machine

Nikola Tesla’s Amazing Predictions for the 21st Century

The famed inventor believed “the solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine”

Photo of Nikola Tesla which appeared in the February 9, 1935 issue of Liberty magazine

In the 1930s journalists from publications like the New York Times and Time magazine would regularly visit Nikola Tesla at his home on the 20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in Manhattan. There the elderly Tesla would regale them with stories of his early days as an inventor and often opined about what was in store for the future.

Last year we looked at Tesla’s prediction that eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals and other supposed undesirables would somehow purify the human race by the year 2100. Today we have more from that particular article which appeared in the February 9, 1935, issue of  Liberty  magazine. The article is unique because it wasn’t conducted as a simple interview like so many of Tesla’s other media appearances from this time, but rather is credited as “by Nikola Tesla, as told to George Sylvester Viereck .”

It’s not clear where this particular article was written, but Tesla’s friendly relationship with Viereck leads me to believe it may not have been at his Manhattan hotel home. Interviews with Tesla at this time would usually occur at the Hotel, but Tesla would sometimes dine with Viereck and his family at Viereck’s home on Riverside Drive , meaning that it’s possible they could have written it there.

Viereck attached himself to many important people of his time, conducting interviews with such notable figures as Albert Einstein, Teddy Roosevelt and even Adolf Hitler. As a German-American living in New York, Viereck was a rather notorious propagandist for the Nazi regime and was tried and imprisoned in 1942 for failing to register with the U.S. government as such. He was released from prison in 1947, a few years after Tesla’s death in 1943. It’s not clear if they had remained friends after the government started to become concerned about Viereck’s activities in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Tesla had interesting theories on religion, science and the nature of humanity which we’ll look at in a future post, but for the time being I’ve pulled some of the more interesting (and often accurate) predictions Tesla had for the future of the world.

Creation of the EPA

The creation of the U.S.  Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was still 35 years away, but Tesla predicted a similar agency’s creation within a hundred years.

Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War. The pollution of our beaches such as exists today around New York City will seem as unthinkable to our children and grandchildren as life without plumbing seems to us. Our water supply will be far more carefully supervised, and only a lunatic will drink unsterilized water.

Education, War and the Newspapers of Tomorrow

Tesla imagined a world where new scientific discoveries, rather than war, would become a priority for humanity.

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere ” stick ” in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

Health and Diet

Toward the end of Tesla’s life he had developed strange theories about the optimal human diet. He dined on little more than milk and honey in his final days, believing that this was the purest form of food. Tesla lost an enormous amount of weight and was looking quite ghastly by the early 1940s. This meager diet and his gaunt appearance contributed to the common misconception that he was penniless at the end of his life.

More   people die or grow sick from polluted water than from coffee, tea, tobacco, and other stimulants. I myself eschew all stimulants. I also practically abstain from meat. I am convinced that within a century coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life. The abolition of stimulants will not come about forcibly. It will simply be no longer fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients.  Bernarr Macfadden has shown how it is possible to provide palatable food based upon natural products such as milk, honey, and wheat. I believe that the food which is served today in his penny restaurants will be the basis of epicurean meals in the smartest banquet halls of the twenty-first century. There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India, now chronically on the verge of starvation. The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

Tesla’s work in robotics began in the late 1890s when he patented his remote-controlled boat , an invention that absolutely stunned onlookers at the 1898 Electrical Exhibition at Madison Square Garden.

At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine. Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be performed by automatons. At this very moment scientists working in the laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has been described as a ” thinking machine.” I anticipated this development. I actually constructed ” robots.” Today the robot is an accepted fact, but the principle has not been pushed far enough. In the twenty-first century the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not come to pass in less than a century, freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations.

Cheap Energy and the Management of Natural Resources

Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.

Tesla was a visionary whose many contributions to the world are being celebrated today more than ever. And while his idea of the perfect diet may have been a bit strange, he clearly understood many of the things that 21st century Americans would value (like clean air, clean food, and our “thinking machines”) as we stumble into the future.

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Matt Novak is the author of the Paleofuture blog, which can now be found on Gizmodo.

5 Visions That Showed Nikola Tesla Was Ahead of His Time

Modern society owes a lot to Nikola Tesla.

The Serbian-American scientist's inventions led to the radios and power grids used today. Over the course of his life, Tesla registered some 300 patents under his name, and traces of his inventions can be found in many modern-day devices, including in some unexpected places, such as remote-controlled boat toys and letter-shaped neon lights.

But not all of Tesla's futuristic visions came to fruition. Some of the inventor's most far-out and ambitious dreams went unrealized, such as his vision for the wireless transmission of energy. In other cases, what Tesla invented was simply not practical enough to replace existing systems, such as the bladeless steam turbine, or was too dangerous to use, such as a steam-powered electric generator that came to be known as the "earthquake machine," after Tesla claimed the generator caused an earthquake in New York City in 1898. [ Photos: Nikola Tesla's Historic Lab at Wardenclyffe ]

And there were other times when Tesla's ideas were just too revolutionary to fathom, or were so bizarre that they were ridiculed by other scientists. Some of Tesla's theoretical inventions, such as a "death ray" weapon and force field, existed only in science fiction.

But in the 71 years since Tesla's death, some of the eccentric inventor's ideas have come to pass — the "mad scientist" may have actually been on to something. Here is a look at some of Tesla's most bizarre ideas that had some ties to reality.

The thought camera

Tesla may have thought about inventing a machine to read mental imagery and thoughts. In an article published in the Kansas City Journal-Post in September 1933, he told reporters about several projects he had been working on, including a device that concerns "photographing of thought."

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"I expect to photograph thoughts," Tesla said. "In 1893, while engaged in certain investigations, I became convinced that a definite image formed in thought, must by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina, which might be read by a suitable apparatus…Now if it be true that a thought reflects an image on the retina, it is a mere question of illuminating the same property and taking photographs, and then using the ordinary methods which are available to project the image on a screen.

"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," he continued.

Tesla's plan never became a reality, but researchers are still studying vision and exploring the idea of mind-reading machines. Today, scientists have created artificial retinas through sophisticated mathematical analyses of how real retinas convert images to electrical impulses to send up to the brain. In attempts at mind-reading, scientists have developed algorithms that can learn to interpret brain signals and reproduce a rough version of images "seen" in a person's mind.

Livestreamed video

Tesla may have had a good grasp of what it feels like to watch real-time streaming of video on modern-day laptops and smartphones. In a news clip published on Jan. 26, 1926, Tesla predicted that by applying the principles of radio, future devices will enable people to carry a small instrument in their pockets to see distant events, according to the Associated Press. [ Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds ]

The futuristic idea was described in an interview published in the current issue of Collier's Weekly, in which Tesla says, "We shall be able to witness the inauguration of a president, the playing of a World's Series baseball game, the havoc of an earthquake, or a battle just as though we were present."

Wireless electricity

Perhaps the greatest ambition of Tesla was his dream to wirelessly transmit energy across long distances, using only air as a medium. He demonstrated it was possible to wirelessly light up lamps using a method called inductive coupling, but he wasn't successful in building a long-range system to broadcast energy.

But now, researchers have refined and developed several techniques that may have brought Tesla's dream a few steps closer to reality. The areas of exploration range from wireless charging of digital devices at home to potential power supplies for space elevators . Still, there are some major barriers. Even working prototypes for the short-range wireless transmission of electricity show that engineers have a long way to go before these innovative techniques can replace existing systems and become widely used.

Contact with aliens?

In 1899, during the time Tesla spent in Colorado Springs, Colorado, experimenting with high-frequency electricity and wireless telegraphy, Tesla picked up peculiar radio signals on his instruments. He believed the signals were extraterrestrial in origin.

"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 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," Tesla wrote in Collier's Weekly in 1901.

"The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another," Tesla wrote.

The scientific community didn't believe Tesla had made contact the aliens , but later, it was suggested that he may have picked up cosmic radio waves, a phenomenon that was not known at the time. Or, it's possible that Tesla's sensitive instruments had received the radio messages that Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi was transmitting from Europe.

In 1901, when working on creating trans-Atlantic radio, Tesla proposed what now sounds like a modern-day cellphone to his funder, J.P. Morgan. The idea was to create a plan for a "World Telegraphy System" that allows instant communication of news to individual handheld devices.

Tesla believed Morgan could make money by manufacturing such receivers that could be used by anyone, and could pick up voice messages or music played in distant places. According to W. Bernard Carlson, a historian at The University of Virginia, and author of "Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age" (Princeton University Press, 2013), the scientist had envisioned cellphones, and his prediction was a harbinger of the consumer culture that would characterize the 21st century.

Email Bahar Gholipour . Follow LiveScience @livescience , Facebook & Google+ . Originally published on  Live Science .

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A Time Machine in the Mojave Desert

A four-story structure designed to recharge cell structure is now a recording studio and tourist attraction.

The sign said, “Dedicated to Research in Life Extension.” George Van Tassel, an aviator and UFOlogist, put it outside a structure he described as “a time machine for basic research on rejuvenation, anti-gravity, and time travel” in the Mojave Desert in the early 1950s.

In fact, the story of George Van Tassel’s Integratron, as the machine is known, is so outlandish, so otherworldly, and so enchanting—encompassing UFOs, electromagnetism, Nikola Tesla, Howard Hughes, Moses, and an alleged German spy—that it’s little wonder the site continues to attract tourists, artists, reporters, drifters, and spiritual pilgrims more than 60 years after Van Tassel began to build what would become his life’s work.

The white wood-domed structure sits four stories high and 55 feet in diameter, just off Twentynine Palms Highway in Landers, California, about an hour north of Palm Springs. According to Van Tassel, the site was determined by its relationship to the Great Pyramids in Giza as well as its proximity to magnetic vortices. It is a 16-sided metal-free building constructed using a technique called joinery—no nails or screws were used in an attempt to avoid interference with the conductive properties of the machine. Inside, the acoustically perfect sanctuary made of Douglas fir rises three stories high and features sweeping views of the desert from its 16 small windows. The Integratron remains open to visitors today, although it’s no longer outfitted for the purpose of time travel—the machinery is, mysteriously, long gone.

The story of Van Tassel’s time-travel dome begins under a rock—yes, an actual rock—where he lived. It was here, a few miles from Landers, that the inventor established an airport which he ran for 29 years on land leased from the U.S. government. It’s also where he incorporated a science philosophy organization called The Ministry of Universal Wisdom, one of many UFO cults that sprouted up in California shortly after the 1947 Roswell incident that brought UFO culture into the mainstream.

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The most infamous of these groups is probably Heaven’s Gate—whose members committed suicide in order to ascend to a spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet—but there’s also Scientology (founded in 1952), the Universal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science (1954), and the Aetherius Society (1955). The organizations held in common the belief that communication with extraterrestrials was possible and that by channeling their messages (many aliens, believers said, were concerned with the earthlings' attempts to develop a hydrogen bomb) the contactee could ultimately help save mankind. “The UFO culture of the 1950s arose after the end of WWII, and rockets, nuclear weapons, and new aircraft were being designed and built based on war effort innovation,” notes Bernard Bates, a professor of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound. “People were afraid death could come out of the sky... and they were seeing all sorts of natural and human made phenomena which they didn’t understand.” It was during this era of increasing distrust among Americans of the U.S. government, the beginnings of the Cold War, with the possibility of nuclear weapons looming and the new-age movement in California blossoming, that Van Tassel rose to local, then national prominence as a charming, well-spoken UFO expert. Much of his notoriety was a result of the annual Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention, which he hosted for more than 20 years.

Seven stories high and many thousands of tons, Giant Rock dominates the desert landscape and became a local landmark due to its size. It was underneath the boulder that a German immigrant named Frank Critzer carved out a 400-square-foot house for himself where Van Tassel would visit him occasionally. The story goes that Critzer also installed a radio antennae on top of the rock and came under suspicion by the authorities for being a German spy shortly after WWII. Accounts vary, but a tear gas canister from a botched FBI raid is said to have somehow ignited Critzer’s store of dynamite and blown him to bits. Van Tassel moved in shortly thereafter with his wife. And on August 24, 1953, it was here that Van Tassel received his instructions regarding what would become his “tabernacle”—the Integratron.

Van Tassel liked to say that both he and Moses were compelled to build their tabernacles via instructions from a man that came out of the sky—in Moses’s case it was God, and in Van Tassel’s, an extraterrestrial. Van Tassel writes in his memoir I Rode a Flying Saucer that he awoke one night to find a man standing at the foot of his bed. “Beyond the man, about a hundred yards away, hovered a glittering, glowing spaceship, seemingly about eight feet off the ground.” The man introduced himself in English as Solganda from the planet Venus and invited Van Tassel aboard his ship, where he divulged the schematics of the Integratron. Its construction would become Van Tassel’s focus for the next 25 years.

Van Tassel’s interest in flying aircraft was borne out by his career choice. Born in 1910 in Ohio, he entered the aviation industry in 1927 after gaining his pilot’s license, and worked for both Howard Hughes at Hughes Aviation and Lockheed Aircraft during his career. Of Hughes he wrote, “One day with Howard was more to me than months I have spent with other men.” The author of four books, Van Tassel claimed to have made exactly 410 radio and TV appearances and gave hundreds of lectures across the U.S. and Canada in his lifetime—many concerning the mysterious dome he was building out in the desert. He was also quoted talking about his UFO visit in Life magazine in 1957—albeit mockingly.

The Life reporter, covering Van Tassel’s Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention for the magazine’s May 1957 issue, characterized the convention’s 1,200 “earthling” attendees—who came to swap stories of UFO abductions and hopefully spot a saucer or two after the sun went down. It probably didn’t help Van Tassel’s credibility that he announced at the convention that he’d decided to run for president in 1960 and that his extraterrestrial friends were going to help run his campaign. Even his supporters, like the fellow UFO enthusiast and author Trevor James Constable, acknowledged that Van Tassel was widely regarded by scientists as a crackpot. But despite the skepticism he faced from the media, Van Tassel’s devotees had no such hesitations—the Integratron was funded by donations from hundreds of supporters around the world. He calmly eschewed criticism of his theories and talked matter-of-factly about his communication with aliens and his belief in time travel. When asked by a skeptical interviewer if he was perhaps unbalanced or had experienced and “emotional upset,” Van Tassel replied wryly: “I’ve never had an emotional upset other than women.”

“Science continually disproves its own theories,” he explained about his willingness to believe. “This is the only gauge by which man can record progress. Even time is only recognized as it passes and events recorded after they happen. Man accepts three-dimensional theory, because the illusion is understandable to his limited thinking. With applied, undisturbed effort, man can develop his all-dimensional sense of being, and record time and events in the future, as well as present and past.”

But Van Tassel’s beliefs about the fluid and unreliable nature of time were in many ways a reflection on mortality. “The biggest trouble on this planet is, that when you get smart enough to do something with the knowledge you have acquired here, death intervenes,” he wrote. “Our life span is just too short.” Van Tassel’s solution to old age was “a high voltage electrostatic generator that would supply a broad range of frequencies to recharge cellular structure.” By recharging cells through electromagnetism, we could turn back the clock, thereby extending life span, he said. It wasn’t about transporting people through time—the aim of his time machine was to turn back the clock, to give our physical bodies more time. He compared it to charging a car battery—although as the professor Bates points out, the concept of charging cells is, like many of Van Tassel’s ideas, “too vague a concept to be considered a testable conjecture.”

Testable or not, Van Tassel directed his skeptics to consider the known-yet-invisible entities of gravity, oxygen, electricity, and magnetism, as well as the limits of our five senses which restrict us to a narrow experience of the known spectrums of light, sound, and smell. Humans have the capacity to see less than 1 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum, he noted in his writing, which means both birds and bees have the ability to see things we cannot. “Still, people go around saying, ‘I won’t believe something unless I see it,’” he wrote.

He was determined to provide his naysayers with irrefutable evidence in the form of his rejuvenation machine—which he believed would offer proof his alien encounter while benefiting mankind immeasurably.

The science behind the Integratron is based on electromagnetics. In his quarterly magazine Proceedings , Van Tassel described the ongoing construction of the building to his followers:

The armature, 55 feet in diameter, has been the most difficult part of this whole project. Requirements for anti-friction, expansion and contraction from heat and cold, and wet and dry conditions, have made this armature a mechanical wonder. Four times larger in diameter than the largest armature ever built, it floats on 16 Teflon-bearing blocks which are supplied with compressed air to "float" the armature on air. One-hundred and twenty pounds of air in each bearing block literally floats this 1,700 Pound spinner. The 64 Aluminum collectors are about to be mounted on the spinner.

The rotating armature was to be outfitted with 64 “static collectors” made of aluminum—capable of gathering 50,000 volts of static electricity from the air and delivering it to the cells of the participants inside. A large coiled copper wire running through the center of the building was also planned to aid conduction. Those undergoing the treatment were meant to receive this energy while stationed inside the machine, wearing all-white outfits. But while Van Tassel revealed much about his plans for the Integratron he also kept many of the details necessary for completing the project to himself. Van Tassel died of a heart attack in 1978—although apparently those who knew him to be in good health found his passing suspicious. His epitaph supposedly read: “Birth through Induction, Death by Short Circuit.”

Lacking funds, the necessary blueprints for completion, and their charismatic leader, the Integratron project soon stalled. The building was sold to a man who planned to turn it into a disco. It sat empty for years. Van Tassel’s equipment disappeared—making it difficult to determine just how much of his vision he had constructed before his death. It was bought by three sisters in 2000 who opened the building to the public and now promote it as a place of healing as well as advertising its unusual acoustic properties—the musicians Moby and Jason Mraz have both recorded there.

A healing sound bath session was fully booked on the day I visited. The group was a mix of young, curious East Coast tourists, and one gentleman from Los Angeles who confided this was his fourth visit—that after his first experience, he’d immediately booked again, and again. None of us was there hoping to become younger—we weren’t there for Van Tassel’s hopeful pseudo-scientific promises. But while the Integratron appears to have transcended its original purpose, now a standard stopover for visitors to Joshua Tree National Park and day trippers from Palm Springs, it still seems to provide something else intangible and appealing to its many modern-day pilgrims.

It’s a kind of cosmic or psychic architecture, mused Craig Hodgetts, a UCLA professor and partner of Hodgetts + Fung Design and Architecture, when asked about the continuing popularity of Van Tassel's dome. Along with pyramids, he noted that domes are purported to have “a kind of physical presence that’s supposed to be transformative towards the spiritual,” citing the Pantheon in Rome as well as the more modern geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller. A dome is a platonic solid, it has centrality, it focuses on the center—it’s conceptually pure. So when we as travelers are drawn to the Integratron’s white dome rising out of the desert, or converge around I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre, Hodgetts suggests that kind of psychic architecture could be filling a basic, unmet need we all have relative to our more mundane environments—a kind of, “look over there, it’s something pure,” he suggests. “You have to take that dome as an article of faith that it works,” he said of the Integratron. “So it reaches all the way back into prehistory with a need we all have for a reflection of some universal principles. It’s a primitive thing.”

The current owners declined to be interviewed, saying, “we prefer that people glean their own experience directly.” And while the Integratron in its current state is far from what Van Tassel had envisioned, listening to a woman play a series of quartz bowls as part of a healing sound bath—in an “acoustically perfect” building designed for time travel and communication with extraterrestrials—still feels otherworldly.

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Nikola Tesla

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 13, 2020 | Original: November 9, 2009

Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power. He invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology. Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.

Nikola Tesla’s Early Years

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother managed the family’s farm. In 1863 Tesla’s brother Daniel was killed in a riding accident. The shock of the loss unsettled the 7-year-old Tesla, who reported seeing visions—the first signs of his lifelong mental illnesses.

Did you know? During the 1890s Mark Twain struck up a friendship with inventor Nikola Tesla. Twain often visited him in his lab, where in 1894 Tesla photographed the great American writer in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light.

Tesla studied math and physics at the Technical University of Graz and philosophy at the University of Prague. In 1882, while on a walk, he came up with the idea for a brushless AC motor, making the first sketches of its rotating electromagnets in the sand of the path. Later that year he moved to Paris and got a job repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison Company. Two years later he immigrated to the United States.

Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison

Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 and was hired as an engineer at Thomas Edison’s Manhattan headquarters. He worked there for a year, impressing Edison with his diligence and ingenuity. At one point Edison told Tesla he would pay $50,000 for an improved design for his DC dynamos. After months of experimentation, Tesla presented a solution and asked for the money. Edison demurred, saying, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.” Tesla quit soon after.

Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse

After an unsuccessful attempt to start his own Tesla Electric Light Company and a stint digging ditches for $2 a day, Tesla found backers to support his research into alternating current. In 1887 and 1888 he was granted more than 30 patents for his inventions and invited to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on his work. His lecture caught the attention of George Westinghouse, the inventor who had launched the first AC power system near Boston and was Edison’s major competitor in the “Battle of the Currents.”

Westinghouse hired Tesla, licensed the patents for his AC motor and gave him his own lab. In 1890 Edison arranged for a convicted New York murderer to be put to death in an AC-powered electric chair—a stunt designed to show how dangerous the Westinghouse standard could be.

Buoyed by Westinghouse’s royalties, Tesla struck out on his own again. But Westinghouse was soon forced by his backers to renegotiate their contract, with Tesla relinquishing his royalty rights.

In the 1890s Tesla invented electric oscillators, meters, improved lights and the high-voltage transformer known as the Tesla coil. He also experimented with X-rays, gave short-range demonstrations of radio communication two years before Guglielmo Marconi and piloted a radio-controlled boat around a pool in Madison Square Garden. Together, Tesla and Westinghouse lit the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and partnered with General Electric to install AC generators at Niagara Falls , creating the first modern power station.

Nikola Tesla’s Failures, Death and Legacy

In 1895 Tesla’s New York lab burned, destroying years’ worth of notes and equipment. Tesla relocated to Colorado Springs for two years, returning to New York in 1900. He secured backing from financier J.P. Morgan and began building a global communications network centered on a giant tower at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. But funds ran out and Morgan balked at Tesla’s grandiose schemes.

Tesla lived his last decades in a New York hotel, working on new inventions even as his energy and mental health faded. His obsession with the number three and fastidious washing were dismissed as the eccentricities of genius. He spent his final years feeding—and, he claimed, communicating with—the city’s pigeons.

Tesla died in his room on January 7, 1943. Later that year the U.S. Supreme Court voided four of Marconi’s key patents, belatedly acknowledging Tesla’s innovations in radio. The AC system he championed and improved remains the global standard for power transmission.

HISTORY Vault: The Tesla Files

Declassified CIA documents reveal a secret history surrounding Nikola Tesla.

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