History’s Unheard Voices: Legendary Figures Take the Hot Seat

"The flying machine has completely demoralized the world... The new means I have perfected afford absolute protection against this and other forms of attack." That's not from a military briefing last week. It's from a letter written in 1934 by our guest tonight, Nikola Tesla, to the son of his former financier, J.P. Morgan. Mr. Tesla, welcome. It’s an honor. The honor is... a strange sensation. I am more accustomed to being ignored. Well, not anymore. That letter... you were asking for twenty-five thousand dollars to build a weapon to end all war.

What was it? Not a weapon. A shield. A wall of force. An apparatus for projecting energy. You see, the problem is not the aggression, it is the vulnerability. Make any nation impregnable, and the incentive for war evaporates. Peace through... physics. A wall of force. In 1934. And Morgan's son... he didn't fund it. Just like his father pulled funding from your Wardenclyffe tower project. That must have been... frustrating. Financiers see only columns of numbers. They do not see the currents that flow beneath the world. Morgan Senior saw a way to put a meter on communication.

When I told him the tower could send power... power for free, to anyone... his interest cooled. How do you bill for lightning? And what about your other great rival, Thomas Edison? People know about the AC versus DC fight—the "war of currents"—but it was personal, too, wasn't it? Thomas was a brute force experimenter. A tinkerer. If he needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would examine every single straw with the feverish diligence of a bee. Whereas you would calculate where the needle must be. Precisely. A little theory saves ninety percent of the labor.

He once promised me fifty thousand dollars to fix his DC generators. When I did, he laughed. He said I didn't understand "American humor." I resigned the next day. I do not have a sense of humor about broken promises. You once said that the thrill of seeing an invention succeed makes a man forget "food, sleep, friends, love, everything." Did you forget those things? One does not forget. One... postpones. The ideas are like thunderstorms in the mind. They demand to be released. They take precedence. The food cools. The letters go unanswered.

The world outside the laboratory... it fades. So the future you were building... it cost you your present. The present is theirs. The future, for which I have really worked, is mine. And it is. We live in it. Every time we plug something into a wall, we're using your alternating current system. The very unit of magnetic flux is named the 'tesla'. You won. It just took the world fifty years to notice. The waiting is the most difficult part. I saw it all, fully formed, in my mind. The wheels turning, the energy flowing. And I had to watch the world stumble along in the dark, trying to light its way with candles when I was offering them the sun.

Looking back, it seems so obvious. We just couldn't see the current. You can't. You can only see what it powers.