Nikola Tesla is among the 20th
Century’s greatest forgotten heroes – a European by birth, and an adopted U.S.
citizen who radically changed our world. In spite of that, our American culture
promptly made it a point to forget him. First he was destroyed by conspiracies,
then he was obscured to history.
Working alone, he invented the entire
technology to build electrical generators under Niagara Falls and designed the
entire Western world's electrical grid. Still, if you were educated in the
U.S., it's likely you weren't taught that little fact and were further
instructed that the invention of radio was done by the Italian, Marconi, over
in Europe. Not only is that not the case, but six months after Tesla died in
1943, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Tesla's patent preceded Marconi's, and
that he was the true father of modern radio.
Yet for decades in the United States, the
Marconi story was told to school children and preached as historical fact. If
you didn't answer that way on a test you got a lowered mark. If you answered
that an obscure Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla actually invented radio
and not Marconi, you may have even been forced to write the school's incorrect
answer on the blackboard many times over.
Even though he was briefly wealthy in his
early adulthood and later was revered by author Mark Twain, he died too poor to
pay his own light bill, cheated by the robber barons of his day: Thomas Edison,
J.P. Morgan, and George Westinghouse. Tesla was robbed of millions by George
Westinghouse, Thomas Edison portrayed him as a lunatic in an attempt to
suppress his inventions, and J.P. Morgan manipulated his funding to prevent him
from completing his Universal Power System.
So why was he so
easily dismissed and forgotten?
For one thing, his eccentricities made it
easy to ridicule him while sitting under the lights of his alternating current
system. And more than anything else, it is his humility that caused him to be
forgotten. Not that he shied away from publicity during his time, but because
he had no ambition to cheat anybody out of anything, in an era where cheating
in business was the expected behavior. In the Age of the Robber Baron, Nikola
Tesla believed in the power of a simple handshake and thought that anyone
gifted as he, Edison, and the others had been was morally obligated to deal
straight and keep their word.
Worldwide System
of Free Electrical Energy
The very notion of such a thing is
ridiculed by today's scientists, but it bears note that of his seven hundred
patents, Tesla never set out to design anything that he didn't go ahead and
build. All his inventions worked as intended because of his extreme ability to
visualize details in his imagination.
His overarching lifelong goal was to solve
the problem of how to supply free, unlimited electricity to the entire
planet. He knew that universal power
could end poverty forever. So today, while we all know about the current energy
crises, we are only repeating concerns that preoccupied him at a time when such
things caused him to be laughed at.
Nevertheless, Tesla swore prior to World
War II that he had already solved the Universal Power problem. And this
came from a man who never invented anything that failed to work exactly as he
predicted it would. Still, he found to
his great dismay that capitalists had no interest in helping to supply anything
to the world for free. It is a known fact that the U.S. Secret Service raided
Tesla’s New York hotel room and confiscated all of his papers on the day he
died -- before his body was even removed.
Those papers remain unaccounted for today.
Nearly everything written about Tesla has
been nonfiction, for a simple reason that Tesla’s solitary life makes him hard
to dramatize. And so there has been no definitive treatment of his life story as
taken from the point of view of the handsome Serbian scientist himself.
On top of working to help set the record
straight about this generous and productive naturalized citizen and loyal
American, I have used the fictional form to go after the question: what was it
like to be Nikola Tesla, to live inside his mind?
While the answers in the book are
fictional, I believe the lie of fiction can here be more honest than fact. And
because Tesla was nearly buried and forgotten before our new age began to waken
to his gifts, his inscrutable character becomes clear and sympathetic not via
biographies, but instead through the device of his Muse in fiction. She allows
us to enter the mystery of his solitary life.
So, then - why the devise of his Muse? The
book Prodigal Genius by John J. O'Neill is the only Tesla biography authored by a writer who actually knew the
subject. O’Neill interviewed Tesla on more than one occasion. Significantly, O’Neill is the writer Tesla tried to tell about his Muse in real life,
only to have O’Neill refuse to print Tesla’s claims. O’Neill later lamented
that decision in the pages of his book, and although the decision was made
while he was editor at Collier’s Magazine, and in his book he made it
clear that he would not have made the same choice again.
Tesla’s story about the source of his
inspirations was never believed during his life, and my book simply takes him
at his word about the driving force of his incredible inventive imagination.
So you
have a genius protagonist who spent his life trying to give the world's poor
the best chance anyone could provide them by offering free power for lights,
the digging of wells, and the running of irrigation pumps, who ended his days
in a tiny double room at the Hotel New Yorker after years of subsisting on
crackers and milk. He was kept alive by a pittance pension, not from his
adopted company where he accomplished so much and was so badly treated in
return, but by the home country he left to spend his life here.
I believe
it's clear to anyone who becomes familiar with this astounding life that among
the many glittering individuals who turn out to be made of fool's gold, he's
one American too important not to know, and the fictional form's "lie of
truth" is the key to meeting the real man.
Anthony Flacco
Seattle
July, 2013
Anthony Flacco is an author of five nonfiction books and three historical novels, all released by major publishers. He holds an MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute. He was selected for the Walt Disney Studios Screenwriting Fellowship, and spent a year writing for the Touchstone Pictures division. His first nonfiction book, A Checklist for Murder, was acquired in auction by Dell Books and turned in solid sales. Anthony adapted his book as a two-hour television movie script and sold it to NBC Studios for a movie of the week.
Sad that more isn't known about Tesla and his contributions to society.
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