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The epic, tragic, inspiring story of the outlet

Writer's picture: Ainsley DrakeAinsley Drake
Art by Afreen Majumdar
Art by Afreen Majumdar

No great human advancement has come without a struggle; Agriculture, Fire, Running water, Minecraft – these all have their stories. But one that I’ve always found particularly compelling is the story of how humanity conquered electricity. Our underdog protagonist was a young, brilliant, inventor who stood up to the greedy and powerful. This story is one of a partnership turned to bitter hatred; a story of patents and popularity; a story of capitalism and its toll on the kind and open-handed – This is the story of the Outlet.


Chapter 1: The Child of Light

Nikola Tesla was born in July of 1856 in a lightning storm. Midway through the birth, the midwife reportedly said “This child will be a child of darkness!” and Tesla’s mother declared:


“No, this will be a child of light.”


She couldn’t have known how oracular those words were.


Tesla showed signs of exceptional intellect and curiosity from a young age. He was fascinated by the natural world. He was also an avid reader, often immersing himself in literature and science; by the age of ten, he was fluent in five languages and excelled in school. He had a keen interest in the emerging scientific field of electricity and magnetism which he attributed to his Physics teacher (who thought Tesla was a cheater because he could perform integral calculus in his head). 


He finished his four-year college track in three years and immediately contracted cholera, which brought him close to death several times and left him bedridden for a year. Tesla’s father promised to send him to the best engineering school if he recovered, and so he did.


After just two years of his term at the Royal-Technical Institute, he was expelled for gambling and drinking. Tesla disappeared and nobody would hear from him for the following year, until he was re-discovered working as a draftsman in Prague.


Nikola Tesla returned home to live with his father for a few months before being deported from the country for not having a residence permit. His father died a few months later from an unspecified illness. Tesla’s uncles scraped together enough money to send him back to Prague to enroll at Charles-Ferdinand University illegitimately (because he didn’t speak Greek or Czech which were required languages).


After completing school, Tesla got a job at the Budapest Telegraph Exchange where he leveraged his electrical engineering knowledge to get a job at the Paris branch of the Edison Electrical Company.


Chapter 2: The Businessman

The industry of electrical engineering was booming in the late Victorian era. With Edison's invention of the lightbulb in 1879, a revolution followed, bringing the adoption of electric lighting in homes everywhere. With his patented technology, Thomas Edison was able to build a monopoly around the entire electrical industry; making him obscenely rich.


Edison is today regarded as one of the greatest inventors of all time, but truthfully, his greatest and only invention was the perfection of unpatented inventions. Several other inventors had constructed artificial lighting systems, but Edison was simply the first to p



atent it. Many also credit Edison for the phonograph (record player), but that was a product of inventors working under him. At his core, Edison was no inventor; he was a greedy businessman (The Elon Musk of the 1890’s).


Tesla started at the ground level of Edison’s empire, installing electrical systems in homes around Paris. It wasn't long, though, before a supervisor noticed the quality of Tesla’s work (along with his superior knowledge of engineering and physics) and had him promoted. He was now off to the United States to work at the Edison manufacturing division in Manhattan.


Nikola was put to work nearly immediately among a workforce of several hundred scientists, all working to solve all of Edison’s problems. He was renowned at the Edison Electrical Company among supervisors for his genius, but not the recognition he deserved. He only met Edison in person several times, and these visits would be later described by Tesla as brief and insincere.


At this job, however, Tesla thrived. He designed large-scale electric motors that are used today in the bowels of ships, and improved street lighting systems that could glow far brighter and last longer than the incandescent bulbs that Edison had invented. Tesla was able to design all of these amazing circuits even despite Edison’s big problem.


Chapter 3: The Big Problem

The field of electrical engineering was still just beginning to scratch the surface in the late Victorian period. So many new technologies were being discovered, but they all had one problem: How can we transmit the electricity necessary to power our appliances?


To understand how Nikola and Edison can solve this problem, we must become electrical engineers for a moment.


Electricity can be defined as the presence of electric charge; either positive or negative. Beyond that, electric current is the flow of those electric charges along some kind of circuit (which can be as simple as a loop of wire). When you add these two elements together, you can power your appliances and go about your electric business.


The issue lies in how we can transport those electric charges over long distances. All of our appliances run on direct current or “DC” which is simply when the electric charges are constantly flowing through a circuit. And while DC is great at running appliances, it’s really bad at being transmitted over long distances. The resistance of transmission cables vastly weakens the electric current to be converted to heat that radiates away. If you lived any further than a few blocks from a power station, you simply couldn’t get electricity.


Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, but then had no plan on how to power it. He was convinced that every city block should have its own dedicated power station, but that didn’t work when nobody wanted to build it for him. Tesla believed that Edison’s problem could be fixed with Alternating Current.


Alternating Current simply switches the direction of the electric current into waves. This makes it much harder for that energy to be lost to heat. Tesla brought this same reasoning to the attention of Edison many times, only to be ignored or shooed away. Partially because Edison owned all the patents for DC systems, and AC would hurt their sales, but mostly because he was an insane asshole.


Nobody is entirely sure why, but Tesla ended up abruptly quitting the Edison company after having moved to the US only 6 months before. In his autobiography, Tesla says Edison finally offered him a $50,000 raise if he could complete some engineering projects. Tesla made quick work of them, coming back to his supervisor just two weeks later only for him to say it was all a practical joke:


“You simple foreigners just don’t understand our American humor.”


Chapter 4: The Feud

Bitter and vengeful at Edison’s refusal to embrace his vision, Tesla went to start his own company. He built a few AC machines, but his company went under due to lack of investment. He ended up having to get a job digging ditches for 2 dollars a day.  


In 1887, Tesla invented an AC motor that would put him back on the map in the engineering world. His patent was the most efficient way to convert electricity to mechanical energy yet (and is still used in Tesla cars today). He showed his design off and quickly got the attention of George Westinghouse; the owner of another major electrical company. He thought Tesla’s invention would be the final piece in his complete AC system which he was already competing against Edison. Tesla would license his patent to Westinghouse and then be brought onto his company for $2,000 a month, which is equivalent to $50,000 per month today.


Meanwhile, Edison began his smear campaign against our dynamic duo and their AC innovations. The Edison Electrical Company secretly financed the development of the electric chair, which they sold to prisons. He also put on public demonstrations where workers electrocuted animals, dogs, and even a circus elephant named Topsy. All to paint A.C. as a dangerous technology that we must steer away from at all costs.


At Westinghouse’s company, Tesla designed all sorts of AC generators and transformers for industrial applications. Westinghouse took every opportunity to promote Tesla’s genius. In a pivotal moment in the war of electricity, Westinghouse secured power at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It was a renowned convention where the world's most cutting-edge technology was on display for top investors. When the event was lit up like the sun, it was clear to all those in attendance that AC would power the future. Tesla and Westinghouse also built the first-ever AC power station at Niagara Falls, where Tesla’s statue stands today.


Edison attempted to leverage his extensive patent portfolio by filing lawsuits against Westinghouse, claiming infringement on various inventions. For instance, Edison’s company challenged Westinghouse's use of transformers, which were essential for transmitting AC over long distances. Additionally, Edison sought to disrupt Westinghouse's operations through injunctions, aiming to prevent the installation of AC systems in several cities. Ultimately though, it didn’t do much for him; Edison had lost.


Though Westinghouse had won the war, his company was left with 10 million dollars in debt. Westinghouse came to Tesla, asking if he could temporarily reduce his patent royalties, however, Tesla was so grateful to his friend for believing in him, he just tore up his contract in total. Tesla walked away from nearly 300 million dollars in today’s money which would have likely made him the richest person on the planet. 


Chapter 5: The Fall

With his money, Tesla would build laboratories across New York for new projects. He would build a portfolio of over 300,000 patents in this time, namely the remote control, the radio, neon lighting, electric turbine, solar panels, and a bunch of other stuff.


All that would be short lived though. His primary laboratory would burn to the ground, where he lost years of patents and research. This would mark the beginning of the end for Nikola Tesla.


It would take two years for Tesla to actually apply for a patent for the radio, but by that time, he had competition. Another inventor named Marconi was building off Tesla’s research and by 1901, he was able to send the first trans-Atlantic radio message. This wasn’t a problem for Tesla since the patent agency had denied Marconi his patent– that was until Edison came out of complete left field to invest heavily in Marconi. 


Then the patent office just decided to give Marconi the patent for some reason. Then Marconi got all the credit for inventing the radio. Then Marconi received the Nobel Peace Prize. All that only would have been possible with Tesla’s research.


Tesla was bitter and so he sued Marconi. The trial dragged on for years and was only settled after Tesla’s death. The whole situation was terrible for Tesla though; before, he was working on wireless communication, having erected a 300-foot experiment tower in New York called Wardenclyffe. Following the radio disaster, Tesla lost financial support for his projects and lost the tower to foreclosure.


Over the coming years, Tesla’s mental health spiraled out of control. He lived his final years in the New York Hotel. He died in 1943, discovered by a housemaid; he had been surviving on a diet of nothing but milk and crackers. 


What Happened?

At a glance, one could say that Tesla was an extraordinarily unfortunate man; from the beginning having nearly died of cholera, to the fire that burnt his laboratory. But I think that’s unfair– Tesla ultimately died because he was not a capitalist. He made many decisions that our “great inventors” of today would not have made.


He gave up his patents and his royalties because he wasn’t pursuant of money, he was pursuant of science for the benefit of humanity. I’d also add that it is sort of blasphemous that the company that now bears the Tesla name is run by one of the greediest, wealthiest, men on the planet. Nonetheless, it’s because of Tesla that society functions the way it does, for better or for worse.

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