Endless Curiosity about science, math and universe

In short: Nikola Tesla powered Niagara into city light, dreamed of free wireless electricity for the whole planet, and built a 187-foot tower to deliver it. The money ran out, the tower was sold for scrap to pay a hotel bill, and on January 7, 1943 he died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker — a room number, like everything in his late life, divisible by three. The tower that was going to light the world In 1901, in Shoreham, Long Island, Tesla began raising Wardenclyffe Tower — a wooden lattice 187 feet tall, crowned with an enormous copper dome. It was to be the heart of a "World System" carrying messages, and electricity itself, wirelessly anywhere on Earth. He meant to give that electricity to everyone, essentially free. J. P. Morgan put up $150,000 for what he believed was a transatlantic communications business. A free power grid for the world was not the business he had bought. Marconi, the meter question, and the money stopping In December 1901, Marconi se...

In short: In the summer of 1888, George Westinghouse bought Nikola Tesla's alternating-current patents — with one extraordinary clause: for every horsepower of AC equipment sold, Tesla would be paid a royalty of $2.50. As AC spread, that clause would snowball; it could have made the 32-year-old immigrant one of the richest men in the world. A few years later, when the clause itself threatened to sink the company of the man who had believed in him, Tesla released it. The famous scene of him tearing the contract on the spot was polished by later biographers — what the record confirms is that he gave up the royalty through negotiation, for a lump sum. The gesture is real even where the theatre is not. A war fought with fear, not arguments Edison's camp understood that the War of Currents would not be won on technical merit. It would be won in newspapers and lecture halls. Engineer Harold Brown's campaign branded alternating current a public menace: in a Columbia College lec...