mind. Henry Ford. The Wright brothers. Thomas Edison.  But there's one name that is not as recognizable.  

When you plug your phone in, turn on the  lights, or use the refrigerator, you have  

Nikola Tesla to thank. This is the story of the  forgotten genius and the story begins at the end.

On January 7, 1943 a maid working at the New  Yorker Hotel walked into room 3327, where she  

found the body of an 86--year-old man who  called the hotel home for the past decade.  

Tesla died alone and broke. He lived off a diet  of warm milk and crackers and was obsessed with  

feeding the pigeons outside. One of the greatest  inventors of all time faded into obscurity and  

died penniless. There is a reason why this  happened which will become clear by the end  

of this story. Tesla was born in the town of  Smiljan in present-day Croatia on July 10, 1856.  

He was born during a lightning storm. According to  family legend, the midwife said halfway through the  

birth: this child will be a child of darkness to  which his mother replied, no, he will be a child  

of light. Little did she know how prophetic those  words would be. When Tesla was five he witnessed  

his older brother fall from a horse and later  die. This would haunt him for the rest of his life.  

As a child, he began seeing visions accompanied by  flashes of light, confusing what was real and what  

was imaginary. This never went away. The vision  spurred his ability to conceive inventions in  

his head in such detail that he didn't even need  to draw them out. He explained how the designs  

were perfected in his mind in an article in 1919.  "Invariably, my device works as I conceived that  

it should and the experiment comes out exactly  as I planned it. In 20 years there has not been 

a single exception." Tesla credits his mom for his  interest in invention. Đuka Mandić invented small  

household appliances in her spare time. She had an  eidetic memory - the ability to recall an image from  

memory with high precision and she passed this on  to her son. Tesla's father was a priest and wanted  

him to become one too but Tesla was interested in  engineering. When he contracted cholera as a teen  

and nearly died, his father promised to send  him to engineering school if he survived and  

miraculously, he did. He went to study in Austria  at the Technical College of Graz where he is  

said to have worked from 3 am until 11 pm  every day. Professors were worried that he  

would die from exhaustion. Tesla had a beautiful  mind. He could perform calculus in his head and  

spoke eight languages. He was a good student  at the start but would not finish school.  

He dropped out after becoming addicted to gambling  and cut ties with his family so they wouldn't find  

out. His friends didn't know what happened to  him either. They thought he drowned in a river.  

Tesla moved around Europe and eventually ended  up in Budapest working as an electrician at a  

telephone company. While walking around a park  in the city one day, he had an epiphany about  

developing a new way of generating electricity  using alternating current. It would be his greatest  

invention that would change the world. I'll  explain more about AC a little later. In 1882,  

he settled in Paris to work for the French branch  of Thomas Edison's electric company. He started off  

installing indoor lighting but the managers  noticed his talents and had him doing more  

complicated work, designing and building dynamos  and motors. He was soon traveling throughout Europe  

fixing problems at other Edison branches. Two  years later, in 1884, Tesla's manager offered him  

a job at Edison Machine Works in New York City. He agreed and arrived in America with only four  

cents in his pocket because his money was stolen  on the boat ride over. Tesla initially had a good  

impression of Edison. Edison was also impressed by  Tesla, later saying: "I have had many hard-working  

assistants but you take the cake." This mutual  admiration didn't last. They would become bitter  

rivals. The two men disagreed over how electricity  should be contained and delivered. Edison preferred  

direct current which is a system where the  electric charge only flows in one direction.  

Tesla was a fan of alternating current in which  the electric charge changes direction periodically.  

Changing directions is crucial to maintaining a  steady supply of electricity because it does not  

overpower outlets. This means it can provide  more power and transmit power over longer  

distances. It's the reason AC powers our homes  and other large appliances whereas DC powers  

smaller items like flashlights. But Edison didn't  care about AC because it could have hurt the  

sales of direct current since he owned all the  patents for DC. According to Tesla, a manager at  

Edison's company offered him a $50,000 bonus if  he could improve some machines that ran on DC.  

When he did, the manager refused to pay up. Another  account of the story has Edison telling Tesla:  

"You don't understand our American humor." Regardless  of how it played out, Tesla quit and set off to  

form his own electric company the following year  in 1885. But his investors showed little interest  

and decided to take the company and all of  Tesla's patents which they could do because  

Tesla had assigned the patents to the company in  exchange for stock which was now worthless. After  

losing his company, Tesla had to take a job digging  ditches for two dollars a day just to survive. But  

his fortunes would change. In 1887, Tesla invented  an induction motor that ran on alternating current.  

The motor was the most efficient way to convert  electricity to mechanical power. Aversion of it  

powers Tesla's vehicles which took its name from  the inventor. He patented the motor and showed it  

off the following year at the American Institute  of Electrical Engineers that caught the attention  

of George Westinghouse, a major player in the  electric market who realized Tesla's AC motor  

might just be what he needed to complete his  alternating current system and compete against  

Edison's DC system. So Tesla licensed the  patents for the AC motor to Westinghouse for  

$60,000 and also received stock and  royalties. Westinghouse hired him as a consultant  

for $2,000 a month which is the  equivalent of over $50,000 a month  

today. The war of the currents began. Edison tried  hard to try to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla.  

He secretly financed the electric chair that used  alternating current to prove how dangerous AC was.  

Edison's company also publicly tortured animals  to prove its point. In 1903, they electrocuted a  

circus elephant named Topsy and produced a film  about it called Electrocuting an Elephant. Despite  

Edison's schemes, good things were happening for  Westinghouse and Tesla. They underbid Edison and  

his newly formed company General Electric to  illuminate the World's Colombian Exposition  

in Chicago in 1893. The first all-electric fair  celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher  

Columbus's discovery of America. It was clear to  the 27 million people who attended that AC would  

power the future. Their success continued when  they beat out Edison's General Electric again to  

build the world's first alternating current power  plant in Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power  

station was a massive success and helped light up  Buffalo, New York. The building of the plant also  

meant Tesla became a pioneer in renewable energy.  His statue can be found at Niagara Falls today.  

Westinghouse and Tesla won the war of the  currents and direct current was being phased out.  

But there were problems. Westinghouse's company  was running out of money and eventually went $10  

million into debt. In 1897, he went to Tesla  and asked if his royalties could be reduced  

in a desperate attempt to save the company. Tesla  was so compelled by compassion for his friend  

that he ripped up his contract. He was grateful to  Westinghouse for believing in him when no one else  

would. Tesla willingly walked away from $12 million  in royalties which in today's terms  

would be worth over $300 million. Had he held on  to those royalties over time, he would have likely  

become the wealthiest person on the planet and the  first person with a billion dollar net worth. That  

act of compassion for his friend of tearing up his  contract saved Westinghouse. In return, Westinghouse  

paid Tesla $216,000 for the rights to use as ac patents forever. This  

is the equivalent of about $60 million today. With that money, Tesla became financially  

independent and set up a series of laboratories in  New York for new projects where he was visited by  

the rich and famous, including his close friend and  one of the greatest American writers of all time,  

Mark Twain. This was his period of many inventions.  He held over 300 patents in his lifetime.  

He created an early version of neon lighting, the  tesla turbine - a bladeless turbine for vehicles.  

He pioneered x-ray technology by experimenting  with radiation. This is an x-ray of his own hand.  

Another stand-out invention was one of the first  remote controls. In 1898, he controlled a miniature  

boat at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was  so far ahead of its time that the crowd thought  

he was using magic to make it move. That would be  the ancestor to today's remote-controlled drones.  

One of his most well-known inventions is the Tesla  coil - a device that can produce large amounts of  

high voltage electricity. Because of the coils, he discovered he could send and receive powerful  

radio signals when they resonated at the same  frequency. Tesla was getting ready to broadcast  

his first radio signal but disaster struck. A  fire destroyed his lab in 1895. He lost years  

of research and equipment. Tesla didn't apply for  a patent for the radio until two years later. The  

fire would be the turning point in his life that  led to a downhill spiral. At the same time that  

he was working on radio, an Italian entrepreneur,  Guglielmo Marconi, was also working on the radio  

in England. He tried to acquire patent rights in the  US but was turned down because it was too similar  

to Tesla's. However, things changed when Marconi was  able to send the world's first transatlantic radio  

message in 1901 using 17 of Tesla's patents. Edison  then threw his financial support behind Marconi.

Tesla had no problem with Marconi's achievements  but in 1904, the US Patent Office suddenly changed  

its mind and awarded Marconi a patent for  the invention the radio. There has never  

been a reason given for this decision but the  powerful financial backing Marconi received  

could explain it. Marconi went on to win the Nobel  Prize in Physics in 1911 which was only possible  

due to Tesla's work. Tesla was furious and sued  Marconi. The case dragged on in court for years and  

was only settled in Tesla's favor after his death.  That radio incident negatively impacted the rest  

of Tesla's career. For example, Tesla was obsessed  with bringing wireless communication to the world  

and built a huge wireless transmission station in  Long Island, New York called Wardenclyffe Tower. He  

imagined a world where we could send and receive  messages wirelessly. He was, again, well ahead of his  

time. But financial backers did not have enough  faith in his project. They pulled out and banked  

on Marconi's radio invention instead. This left  Tesla in financial ruin. He had no choice but to  

abandon his dream project in 1905 and eventually  lost Wardenclyffe Tower to foreclosure. Tesla's  

mental health deteriorated. He lived his last  decade in the New Yorker Hotel beginning in 1933.  

Westinghouse Corporation hired him as a consultant  and paid for his room. He lived rent-free but died  

in debt. So why did one of the greatest inventors  of all time fade into obscurity and die penniless?  

You could say T esla was unlucky at times like  when the fire burned down his New York lab.  

But the main reason is because Tesla was not  a capitalist. He made decisions that those with  

more business acumen would not have made such as  giving up his royalties for the AC motor. He wasn't  

concerned about money. He was concerned about the  pursuit of science for the betterment of humanity.  

He wanted to change the world and he did. Thanks  in part to Elon Musk's company, people are starting  

to learn more about the man who inspired  the company, a man whose inventions would  

power our entire planet. It's because of Tesla  that modern society functions the way it does.  

Tesla's mother called him a child of light  and she was quite right.

Thanks for watching the story of Nikola Tesla, I hope you  enjoyed it.

I'm Cindy Pom. If you like what you, saw subscribe to my new channel.

I also started a Patreon where you can make a monthly contribution and this will go a really long way toward helping this channel grow. See you soon.