Episode Details

How did the man who invented the alternating current induction motor end up feeding pigeons in New York hotels, surviving on a rent stipend secretly paid by a former corporate partner? This deep dive traces the life of Nikola Tesla, from his childhood in the Austrian Empire and a near-fatal bout of cholera to his arrival in New York in 1884 and his bitter break with Thomas Edison over a promised $50,000 bonus.

We explore how Tesla went from digging ditches to licensing his polyphase AC motor to George Westinghouse, why he tore up a royalty worth a fortune to save the AC system during the panic of 1890, and how his Tesla coil, X-ray experiments, and Wardenclyffe Tower pushed science forward even as Guglielmo Marconi and Wall Street left him behind. It is a story about the collision between scientific idealism and the realities of American industrial capitalism.

• How Tesla's mother, an untrained inventor with a remarkable memory, shaped his ability to visualize machines entirely in his mind
• The Edison bonus dispute, Tesla's years of manual labor, and the partnership that led to the AC induction motor
• Why Tesla gave up his $2.50-per-horsepower royalty with Westinghouse and settled for a $216,000 lump sum
• How the Tesla coil uses resonance, plus his early X-ray work, Colorado Springs experiments, and the doomed Wardenclyffe wireless project
• Tesla's bladeless turbine, his final years in hotels, and the legacy honored by the Tesla unit of magnetic flux density