As a boy growing up in Eastern Europe in the 1860s, Nikola Tesla had seen a photograph of Niagara Falls in upstate New York and told his uncle that he’d go there one day and build a gigantic water wheel that produced electrical current. In 1884, the 28-year-old immigrant came to New York City with twelve cents in his pocket and no prospects. Rail thin and dressed in a long black overcoat, he wandered the streets of Manhattan, with the bearing of an aristocrat and hunger gripping his stomach. When it had become nearly unbearable, he glanced through a shop window and saw a man struggling to fix a machine. After studying him for a few moments, Tesla stepped inside and offered his assistance. Bending over the device, he fiddled with it briefly -- and it was ready to be used. The astounded man thanked him and handed him twenty dollars. Tesla tried not to show how much he appreciated the money, bowing and running off to find a hot meal.
In the next decade, he invented alternating current, a far more efficient way of transmitting higher levels of electrical power over longer distances, but also much more controversial than direct current. Like other scientists of the day, Thomas Edison believed that AC was extremely dangerous. New York State was currently executing criminals at Sing-Sing Prison using 2,000 volts of electricity. If this could kill a convict, surely the much stronger AC voltage was a hazard to public safety? To dispel this fear, Tesla literally took matters into his own hands, setting up dramatic experiments, appearing on stage in front of huge crowds, and shooting 300,000 volts of AC through his body -- lightning bolts flying out of his fingertips and erupting from his skull. He fired up a light bulb with the juice flowing through his hand and never tired of making audiences gasp.
He was invited to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where his AC generators lit the entire event. A few years later, he harnessed AC to convert the water of Niagara Falls into electricity, exactly as he’d once promised his uncle. But as his fame grew, so did his list of enemies.
His fame had afforded him a permanent home at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and brought him close to captains of industry, presidents, and dignitaries from around the world. He befriended architect Stanford White, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and other celebrities eager to visit his lab and explore his latest wonders. He created a vibrating mechanism that instantly caused people’s bowels to release, but didn’t mention this when asking them to sit down on the machine and then flipping the switch. Twain leaped off the thing and barely made it to the bathroom.
Tesla built another small device that set up a resonant frequency with the walls and girders holding up New York City apartment complexes. One afternoon whole blocks of Manhattan started trembling before the cops showed up at Tesla’s lab and found him swinging a hammer at the device to shut it down. Under the right conditions, he was convinced that the magnification of this kind of energy could crack apart not just a section of New York, but the entire planet.