The contract J. P. Morgan signed in March 1901 bought transatlantic wireless telegraphy, and the plant that ran the tower burned coal.
Fig. 1 — The arrangement claimed in US 787,412, Art of Transmitting Electrical Energy Through the Natural Mediums, filed 16 May 1900 and granted 18 April 1905. The patent asks the earth to carry the current one way and the rarefied upper air to carry it back; the second half of that pair is the part that did not hold. Diagram drawn for this article from the patent text.
Two hundred acres at Shoreham, a brick laboratory by Stanford White, a lattice tower carrying a steel cupola, and a contract with the most powerful banker in America. The story that survives is that the tower would have given the world free electricity and was destroyed to protect somebody's profits. The contract says something narrower and stranger, and there was a coal-fired generating plant on the site to run it.
Read the article · built on US 645,576, US 787,412, US 1,119,732 and the Morgan agreement
The record so far
False“Tesla invented alternating current.”Alternating-current generation, transformers and AC lighting all predate him by decades. What he patented on 1 May 1888 is narrower and harder: a motor that runs on a rotating magnetic field, with no commutator in it. Read US 381,968
False“The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that Tesla invented radio.”It invalidated most claims of a Marconi tuning patent, chiefly on the priority of John Stone Stone and Oliver Lodge. The case was about what the government owed for wartime use of the patent. Read the opinion
False“Wardenclyffe was going to give the world free energy.”The March 1901 agreement covered transatlantic wireless telegraphy. Nothing in the patents describes a source of energy; they describe a way of moving it, and the site burned coal to make it. Read the contract and the patents
False“Edison electrocuted an elephant to discredit Tesla.”Topsy was killed at Luna Park, Coney Island, on 4 January 1903, years after the tariff war was over and for reasons that had nothing to do with it. An Edison company film crew was there, and the film is why the story survives. Read what the fight was actually about
False“Tesla held more than 700 patents.”The Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade publishes a list of 112 United States patents. Larger counts fold in filings of the same inventions in other countries, and the largest ones circulate with no source attached. See the list
Source is Tesla alone“Edison promised Tesla $50,000 and laughed at him when he asked for it.”The account is Tesla's own, published decades after the events it describes. That is not the same as false, and it is not the same as documented. Read how it is handled here
Edison was not fighting Tesla. He was fighting a rival company, over the price of transmission and how far a central station could reach.
A direct-current station at 110 volts could serve about a mile before the copper needed to carry the load cost more than the customers were worth. Transformers changed that arithmetic, and the fight that followed was between two firms with incompatible balance sheets. Tesla was a licensor in it, not a combatant.
Read the article · built on the Edison Papers, contemporary press, and the Kemmler record
Two tuned circuits, energy passing between them, and a voltage that climbs because the circuits agree on a frequency. It was never a way to distribute power.
Built on US 454,622 and the lecture of 20 May 1891