Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was 1902 and Tesla was broke. ‘Am I backed by the greatest financier of all time? And shall I lose great triumphs and an immense fortune because I need a sum of money? Are you going to leave me in a hole?!! Financially, I am in a dreadful fix.’ This was not perhaps the best way of approaching a millionaire who had made his fortune in the very industry Tesla was setting out to transform. It was a time of scientific entrepreneurs and robber barons. Morgan was a man of many concerns. He did not reply.
Begging letters continued to be sent, and duly ignored. Finally, in desperation, Tesla went public, complaining in an engineering magazine about his lack of sponsorship. He concluded that Morgan was pedantic, stupid and ignorant. J. Pierpont Morgan responded at last in a handwritten letter: he said no.
Richard Munson’s Tesla: Inventor of the Modern gives us a detailed and vivid glimpse of the competitive world of electrical innovation at the end of the 19th century, and emphasises the duality of his subject.
Tesla was born in 1856, a Serb inside Croatia who became a naturalised American, therefore a man of no real country, and given life at the crack of midnight, so also of neither the present nor the future. He never really fitted. He was a man of pyrotechnic intelligence, a genius comparable with Einstein, Marconi or Edison (all of whom he berated and belittled), but he also lacked social skills and strategies. He was stumblingly awkward with all women, and most men. He was mad, too, a word which is appropriate for anyone who, for relaxation, shoots 150,000 volts through his own brain.
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