Nikola Tesla and the tower that was never finished

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856, into a Serbian family, in what is now Croatia. He arrived in the United States in 1884 with little money and many ideas about electricity.

The no

In New York, Tesla worked for a few months at one of Thomas Edison's companies, repairing and improving dynamos. The two had opposing visions: Edison bet on direct current; Tesla, on alternating current. Tesla left in 1885. The story that Edison promised him 50,000 dollars and then said it was a joke comes from Tesla himself, told many years later, and has no independent document.

The bigger no came after success. Around 1901, with money from the banker J. P. Morgan, Tesla began building, in Shoreham, New York, the Wardenclyffe tower, for a worldwide wireless communication and power system. The money ran out, Morgan didn't renew his backing and, by 1906, the laboratory was practically abandoned. The property was used to pay debts, and the tower was demolished in 1917.

Tesla died alone, on January 7, 1943, in a room at the Hotel New Yorker, in New York, with little money.

What they did

Before that, Tesla's patents for alternating-current motors and systems, licensed to Westinghouse, helped define the way electricity is generated and distributed to this day. The unit of magnetic flux density, the tesla, bears his name.

And the tower had a second chapter. In 2012, the cartoonist Matthew Inman, of the site The Oatmeal, launched a crowdfunding campaign to buy the Wardenclyffe land and turn it into a museum. In less than two weeks, public donations passed one million dollars. With help from a New York State grant, the Tesla Science Center bought the property in 2013, after almost two decades of campaigning.

What this has to do with Bairo

Tesla saw first. The Wardenclyffe tower was never finished, and even so the idea of worldwide wireless communication became the world we live in. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows the pain of seeing too early: he says he had technology ideas years before they became trends, and that arriving early also means arriving alone.

The tower's second chapter also speaks to his story. Ordinary people, together, saved what big money abandoned. Bairo says that, after being left stranded, he found in the community and in three old acquaintances the strength to finish what he started. It's in The coin and the road and in The seventh attempt.

Read also: The sun is for everyone

Sources

• Nikola Tesla (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
• Wardenclyffe Tower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower
• Tesla Science Center, "Tesla's Wireless Power": https://teslasciencecenter.org/teslas-wireless-power/
• Tesla Science Center, "Tesla Lab Saved" (2013): https://teslasciencecenter.org/announcements/cnn-may-2013/
• Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Science_Center_at_Wardenclyffe