D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A
T H E L EG AC Y O F N I KO L A T E S L A , I N S O H O — A N D B E YO N D NOW HERE’S a different sort of SoHo
story. Tesla. Not the car company. Not the heavy metal band. The inventor, Nikola Tesla. Back in the 1880s and 1890s, when SoHo was descending from its prosperous heights, a young man in his mid-twenties from a village in Croatia had three laboratories located in the SoHo: one at 175 Grand, one at 33–35 South Fifth Avenue (now called LaGuardia Place), and another at 46 East Houston Street. Nikola Tesla was obsessed with electricity. He came to the New York in 1884 to work with Thomas Edison at Edison’s laboratory on the Lower East Side. The two men did not get on well. They did not see eye-to-eye, despite their mutual interests. At the center of their disagreements were their separate views about what the standard of electrical distribution should be. Edison had already put his money on a “direct current” system (D.C.). Young Tesla (Edison was in his late 30s, a mature man in those days) believed in a system of “alternating current” (A.C.). Edison was evidently unaware that his direct current system was not only dangerous but even deadly. All household electricity today is delivered via A.C. Tesla was visionary. After his experience with Edison, he moved on to his own laboratory on Grand Street. He became known in the community for his vision when he developed the high-voltage, high-frequency transformer known as the Tesla coil. In his lab on South Fifth Avenue, he also experimented with wireless lighting. Presenting demonstrations brought him more attention, including close friendships with Stanford White and with Mark Twain. There was another Tesla innovation that resulted in his close friendship with Twain. Twain had chronic constipation and Tesla provided a cure for it by having Twain stand on an electric
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plate while Tesla ran an electric charge though his body. Tesla also came up with an “X-ray.” He and Twain were said to have taken turns aiming Tesla’s X-ray “gun” at each other, making enormous X-rays of each other’s bodies and skulls in sheets of undeveloped film taped to the wall. In 1895, a fire gutted Tesla’s lab, which left him deeply depressed. He used his coils to give himself electroshock treatments to overcome the depression. Friends raised funds for him to open a new lab on Houston Street, where he began developing a wireless system for transmitting power around the world. A further invention was a wireless radio-wave transmission, as well as the preliminary design of a handheld receiver that could receive news, telephone messages, and telegrams. This was in the late 19th century, long before the digital era. Coincidentally, the Apple Store on Prince Street, the land of the iPhone, is located just a few blocks from where Tesla conceived of the idea. Nikola Tesla, way ahead of his
time, was a “mad scientist” to most. His inventions appeared as fully formed visions that came to him. Unlike his former employer, Edison, he was not a capitalist. He often failed to protect his patents and often failed to get credit for his ideas. Nevertheless, he was the leader. At the beginning of the 20th century, he is quoted as observing: “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” He also said, “Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.” He was a man plagued with extreme phobias and obsessions. He was a germaphobe and had a peculiar aversion to pearls. At times, he would suddenly become immobile, freezing up and unable to move or speak. Despite his brilliance and inventions that moved our civilization along, in his 87th year in January 1943, Nikola Tesla died in his in his sleep, alone and penniless. His influence is present each time we turn on our lights, yet official history left him forgotten, unlike his peers such as Edison, who is now known as the father of electricity, and Guglielmo Marconi, who is now known as the inventor of radio. In recent years, Tesla fans have attempted to right this wrong. The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe is raising funds to develop Tesla’s last and only existing laboratory in Shoreham, New York, into a science and technology center. There is also an exhibition “Tesla’s Wonderful World of Electricity” on view at the New York Hall of Science. On Tuesday, October 18, PBS’s “American Experience” will spotlight Nikola Tesla. This may rouse interest in a genius whose predictions for the future made more than a century ago shaped the wireless networks of the 21st century—and lived in SoHo before it was SoHo. u