Edison was an advocate and promoter of DC (direct-current) power transmission and had little interest in Tesla’s AC system. Tesla soon fell out with Edison and quit the company because Edison refused to pay him for a solution for which he had been promised $50,000 (Edison mockingly told Tesla the offer had been a joke). The young man of limited means felt cheated, but he believed his time at Edison’s laboratory had not been without value: he could see clearly how and why Edison’s DC electrical system was inferior to his own AC system, and he learned the importance of patenting and commercializing his technological inventions. Thus, in 1885 he began setting up his own company, and he met with a patent attorney, Lemuel Serrell, who helped him apply for Tesla’s first patent, an improved design of an arc lamp that prevented flickering.
The 1885 patent application marked the beginning of an intense period of invention for Tesla that would last for more than fifteen years. He would keep a grueling schedule, working around the clock and often driving himself until he collapsed. Although he spent every waking hour working on his inventions, he noted that he found “exquisite enjoyment” in his pursuit of innovation, “so much, that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture.”27
He developed entire systems of alternating-current machinery but was inept when it came to commercializing these important inventions. Unwittingly, Tesla had stepped into the middle of a major battle between the electrical inventors and entrepreneurs of the day. Thomas Edison, Elihu Thomson, George Westinghouse, William Stanley, and others were all embroiled in a fierce race to offer the world’s leading electrical technology and win contracts to light America’s cities.
Tesla was poorly suited to win such a battle; his nature was that of the intellectual scientist, not the cunning businessman. Comparing Tesla with Edison illustrates this point. Both men were independent, unconventional, and possessed an exceptional sense of self-efficacy. Both were widely renowned as geniuses and had maniacal work habits of long hours and fierce persistence. However, their differences were also stark. Edison had a more practical nature, building commercial extensions to technologies he was already working on: from working in a telegraph station he built a multiplex telegraph, which led to creating early telephones; the process of mastering the conduction of sound in telephones led, in turn, to Edison’s creation of phonographs. His work on DC electrical systems led to his work on light bulbs and storage batteries. Tesla, on the other hand, was driven by far-reaching, often grandiose ideas of what could be done, such as a flying machine or a giant waterwheel under Niagara Falls. He wanted to free mankind of physical work so that people could focus on creative endeavors: “If we want to reduce poverty and misery, if we want to give to every deserving individual what is needed for a safe existence of an intelligent being, we want to provide more machinery, more power. Power is our mainstay, the primary source of our many-sided energies.”28 This led also to marked differences in their entrepreneurial spirit: whereas Edison was keenly motivated to patent and sell his inventions (and started his first business at the age of twelve), Tesla was motivated to publish ideas as theoretical advances and was often uninterested in or ineffective at commercializing many of his inventions.
The shrewd entrepreneurs of the day were keenly aware of both Tesla’s technological sophistication and commercial naïveté. They thus sought to obfuscate Tesla’s contributions and maneuver him out of a position to capitalize on his inventions. Edison tried to convince the public that alternating current was more dangerous than his own direct-current electrical systems by using alternating current to electrocute dozens of dogs, two calves, and a horse.29 Elihu Thomson tried to gain patent priority over Tesla’s system by suggesting that his own (inferior) alternating-current system predated Tesla’s system. George Westinghouse shrewdly surmised that Tesla’s system was superior to the other electrical systems available and was likely to be awarded priority dating, and thus in 1888 he proposed to buy Tesla’s patents. The pricing scheme he proposed was complicated—it included cash outlays, Westinghouse stock, and royalties with minimums that changed over the years—and there is some disagreement about how much the entire proposal was worth. O’Neill reports that the proposal was for a million dollars in cash plus a one-dollar-per-horsepower royalty. Biographer Marc Seifer calculates the value of the deal to be roughly $255,000, and a PBS program reported the deal to be $5,000 in cash, 150 shares of Westinghouse stock, and a $2.50-per-horsepower royalty. If $255,000 is the correct amount, it would be worth just over $6 million in today’s dollars. Whatever the deal was, it evolved over time, and although Tesla probably did not get what he deserved for inventions that would turn out to be worth billions, he generally felt that Westinghouse treated him fairly. Tesla noted, years later, that “George Westinghouse was, in my opinion, the only man on the globe who could take my alternating current system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power. He was a pioneer of imposing stature and one of the world’s noblemen.”30
In 1891 Tesla agreed to present his findings on high-frequency phenomena at a symposium organized by the American Institute for Electrical Engineers. His lecture was so advanced, and the demonstrations that he made during it were so remarkable, that it was marked as a historic moment by all who saw it. As described by Joseph Wetzler in Harper’s Weekly, “[With] lucid explanations in pure nervous English, this stripling from the dim border-land of Austro-Hungary… [had] not only gone far beyond the two distinguished European scientists Dr. Lodge and Professor Hertz in grasp of electro-magnetic theory, but… he had actually made apparatus by which electrostatic waves or ‘thrusts’ would give light for ordinary every-day uses.” Wetzler went on to remark that Tesla had “eclipsed” Edison in his refinements of the incandescent lamp, and “He had set himself no less a task than to create a lamp which, without any external connection to wires… would glow brightly when placed anywhere in the apartment.”31 For audience members such as Elihu Thomson and Mihajlo Pupin, who competed with Tesla for both commercial and academic primacy in the development and application of electricity science, the revelation of how far advanced Tesla was must have been simultaneously awe inspiring and gut-wrenching.
In 1893 Tesla’s dream of harnessing the power of Niagara Falls was finally realized. The International Niagara Falls Commission, headed by famous British physicist Lord Kelvin, created a competition that solicited proposals from around the world for ways to tap the waterfall’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of power. However, the commission ended up rejecting all of the proposals that were submitted as unworkable. Then Lord Kelvin, who had begun following Tesla’s work, concluded that only an AC system based on Tesla’s design would be adequate to the task. He asked Westinghouse to build a power station based on Tesla’s alternating-current technologies next to Niagara Falls. On November 16, 1896, the first power from the system reached Buffalo, New York, accompanied by cheers and a twenty-one-gun salute.32 The completed system was a monumental achievement—a revolution in the generation and transmission of electrical power.
In recognition of Tesla’s stature as a “wizard genius,” he was elected to the Royal Society of Great Britain and was awarded honorary doctorates from Columbia and Yale. Reporters began to stream to his door seeking to profile the inventor, and he was featured in numerous prestigious periodicals. One of the earliest major profiles was provided by T. C. Martin, editor of Electrical World (and later a coauthor of the most definitive biography of Thomas Edison), who wrote that Tesla had “eyes that recall all the stories one has read of keenness of vision and phenomenal ability to see through things. He is an omnivorous reader, who never forgets; and he possesses the peculiar facility in languages that enables the educated native of Eastern Europe to talk and write in at least half a dozen tongues. A more congenial companion cannot be desired… the conversation, dealing at first with things near at hand and next… reaches out and rises to the greater questions of life, and duty, and destiny.”33 As another lengthy ar
ticle in the New Science Review noted, “In this age of practical endeavor, when everything is turned to its immediate use with the least delay possible, a life like that of Tesla, devoted to scientific research for the love of it, stands out in peculiar and interesting prominence.”34 A profile of the inventor in the New York Times commented, “A notable faculty of Tesla’s mind is that of rushing intuition. As with Edison, you begin to state a question or proposition to him, and before you have half formulated it he has suggested six ways of dealing with it and ten of getting around it.”35
Over the course of his life, Tesla created more than two hundred astonishingly important breakthrough innovations, yet because he was not particularly good at the strategic side of being an innovator, other inventors and investors of the time (notably Guglielmo Marconi, Mihajlo Pupin, George Westinghouse, J. P. Morgan, and Elihu Thomson) harvested much of the credit and commercial value of his achievements. For example, although Edison is often thought of as the most important innovator in electricity, it was Tesla, not Edison, who created the electric power distribution system now used throughout the world, as well as the polyphase electric motor, the bladeless steam turbine, the radio-guided torpedo, and numerous phosphorescent and fluorescent lighting systems. It was Tesla, not Guglielmo Marconi, who invented the first radio, although the issue would be contested for more than forty years.36 In fact, Tesla had received the first patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office for long-distance radio in 1900 (the applications were filed in 1897).37 On the basis of these patents, the USPTO turned down Marconi’s 1900 applications, citing Tesla’s prior claim: “Many of the claims are not patentable over Tesla patent numbers 645,576 and 649,621, of record, the amendment to overcome said references as well as Marconi’s pretended ignorance of the nature of a ‘Tesla oscillator’ being little short of absurd… the term ‘Tesla oscillator’ has become a household word on both continents [Europe and North America].”38
Later, however, for mysterious and unknown reasons (often attributed to Marconi’s greater financial backing), the USPTO reversed its decision in 1904, awarding Marconi the patents for radio. Tesla was devastated. In 1943, a few months after Tesla’s death, the US Supreme Court would reverse the decision yet again, reinstating Tesla’s patents. In addition to the inventions mentioned above, Tesla created lasers, early robots, advancements in X-ray devices, and more. Tesla’s contributions to science were equally numerous and profound, and his book The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla was a “veritable bible” for engineers in the field of electricity.39 It explained alternating-current motors, the rotating magnetic field, rotating field transformers, polyphase systems, and more. Yet because of academic jealousy, he was not credited with much of the work that would build upon his contributions. For example, Charles Steinmetz omitted any reference to Tesla’s work in his 1897 text, Theory and Calculations of Alternating Current Phenomena, despite the fact that Tesla was overwhelmingly responsible for the foundational discoveries in the area. He makes the following excuse in the foreword: “Many of the investigations of the book apply to polyphase systems circuits [with chapters] on induction motors, generators, synchronous motors, [etc.].… A part of this book is original, other parts have been published before by other investigators.… I have, however, omitted altogether literary references, for the reason that incomplete references would be worse than some, while complete references would entail expenditure of much more time than is at my disposal.… I believe that the reader… is more interested in the information than in knowing who first investigated the phenomenon.”40 Steinmetz repeated his snub of Tesla in his second text, Theoretical Elements of Electrical Engineering, written in 1902. Because later texts would build on the work of these two early texts, many generations of engineers would be trained without ever reading or hearing the name Tesla.41
Huge fortunes were made on Tesla’s AC polyphase electrical system, his induction motors, and his wireless communications designs, but Tesla received almost nothing for them. Tesla never became rich, and even more disappointingly, he never amassed enough funding to complete his Wardenclyffe Tower—a 600-foot-tall wireless transmission tower in Shoreham, Long Island—with which he hoped to achieve global wireless telephony. In 1917, in a tragic confluence of bad management and bad luck, the tower, in which Tesla had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, was torn down for scrap before ever being completed by a landlord to whom Tesla owed $19,000 in back rent.
By most accounts, Tesla was a lifelong celibate. Although rumors have often circulated that perhaps he was a closeted homosexual, most researchers of Tesla’s history now conclude that it was more likely a form of self-denial in pursuit of preserving his focus on his calling. Once, when someone inquired about his celibacy, he responded, “I do not believe an inventor should marry, because he has so intense a nature, with so much in it of wild, passionate quality, that in giving himself to a woman he might love, he would give everything and so take everything from his chosen field.… I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.”42 Indeed, it was a relatively common belief that sublimation of the libido would help to preserve the creative energy—Sigmund Freud (whom Tesla knew) championed this idea and was himself celibate from the age of forty onwards.43 Sir Isaac Newton is also believed to be a lifelong celibate.
Throughout his life, Tesla continued to have neurological disturbances. Once, for example, he had the “sensation that my brain had caught fire. I saw a light as [though] a small sun was located in it and I [passed] the whole night applying cold compressions to my tortured head.” He also continued experiencing flashes of light, particularly at moments of fear or exhilaration. He believed their intensity peaked when he was about twenty-five years old but never entirely disappeared, and he noted in 1919, while writing his autobiography, that “these luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me.”44 He also had extremely good eyesight and hearing, and during periods of stress his hearing, and sensitivity to vibration generally, could become so acute that it caused him great discomfort. These disturbances point to the possibility of a dopamine imbalance that might have simultaneously enhanced his creativity, made him acutely sensitive to stimuli, and provoked manic episodes. Notably, Tesla’s mania and obsessive compulsive disorder also continued throughout his life. He often worked around the clock—in fact, he preferred working at night to avoid distractions. Even during periods when he did sleep, he claimed to work from three in the morning until eleven in the evening every day. His capacity for self-control and self-denial was extreme. He ate sparsely, keeping his weight to 142 pounds (despite being over six feet tall!) his entire adult life. He had germ phobias, a strong aversion to spherical objects, and an obsession with the number three. In fact, in the latter part of his life he would often calculate the cubic mass of the food on his plate and could not eat it if it were not divisible by three, and he would often walk around buildings three times before entering.45
Tesla exhibits separateness and self-efficacy in their extremes. He was also profoundly idealistic (the topic of Chapter 4), and he benefited from the opportunities of his era (the topic of Chapter 6). However, perhaps more than anything else, Tesla’s story highlights the powerful interaction between genius and mania, two traits that are common among breakthrough innovators.
How Much Does Intelligence Matter?
A PERSON CAN BE intensely creative without being a genius, and a genius isn’t necessarily intensely creative, but the traits of genius and creativity are not entirely independent. For example, it is rare to find individuals among the ranks of people who appear on lists of the “most important innovators” who are not noted for being exceptionally intelligent. Every innovator whose life and work I researched was repeatedly described by biographers and others as a “genius.” For example, Steve Jobs tested at the tenth-grade level when given an IQ test in fourth grade, suggesting that his IQ may have been rough
ly 160, placing him in the 99.99th percentile of IQ distribution. Einstein’s intellect is legendary, estimated by various sources to have been between 160 and 190, and Marie Curie was described by every biographer as exceptionally gifted intellectually—a “genius,” whose outsized intellectual capability was matched by a monumental determination. Elon Musk, affectionately called “genius boy” by his family when he was a child, is today described by those who know him as “brilliant.” Kevin Watson, a SpaceX engineer, captured what many in that company feel about their boss:
He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. I don’t want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.46
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