Tesla Dies in New York: Genius Behind AC Power

Nikola Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel on January 7, 1943, at the age of eighty-six, owing roughly fifty dollars to the hotel management. His primary companion in his final years was a white pigeon he had found injured in the park and nursed back to health. He had arrived in the United States from Serbia in 1884 with four cents in his pocket and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison. The two men worked together briefly before a bitter falling-out over payment for improvements Tesla made to Edison's DC generators. Tesla went on to develop the alternating current induction motor and the polyphase AC power system that became the electrical infrastructure of the modern world. George Westinghouse licensed Tesla's AC patents and used them to win the contract for the Niagara Falls power project, demonstrating that AC could transmit electricity over long distances in a way Edison's direct current system could not. Tesla also developed the foundational principles behind radio transmission, X-ray imaging, radar, and remote control. He was a brilliant inventor and a catastrophically poor businessman. Edison outmaneuvered him in the press during the War of Currents. Westinghouse used his patents but renegotiated the royalty agreement when his company faced financial trouble, and Tesla, in a gesture of loyalty, tore up the contract. Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize for radio in 1909 using technology that relied on Tesla's patents. The U.S. Supreme Court vindicated Tesla's radio patents in 1943, ruling that Marconi's key patent was invalid. The decision came the same year Tesla died.