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Illustration by Britt Spencer
Say “Tesla”and most people think “electric car.” Less commonly, they think of that vehicle’s eponym, Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the alternating current (and inspiration for the 2020 biopic that bears his surname and stars Ethan Hawke). Tesla has also been called the inventor of radio, though some will disagree and attribute that invention to Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi.
Tesla’s early experiments with radio began in the 1890s. They involved using what he dubbed a Tesla coil (something like those glass spheres you see at science museums that surge with purple bolts of plasma). In 1893, Tesla gave a private lecture describing his radio experiments in Philadelphia. Then, a few days later, he gave a public demonstration at the National Electric Light Association Convention in St. Louis.
The frenzy around Tesla began before he even hit the lectern. His talk had originally been booked in a modest lecture hall, but then tickets sold...and sold...and sold. Before the doors opened, there were scalpers on the steps. By the timeTesla strode out onto the stage, the hall was “crowded to suffocation,” according to The Electrical Engineer. Though most were too far away to see much of the stage, everyone was nevertheless thrilled to be there. Tesla did not disappoint—he went full Vegas, a decade before Vegas even existed. He used his body to conduct electrical currents and shot electric sparks and violet streams of electricity out of his fingers. He lit up lamps just by touching them. And he “made fine cotton-covered wires stretched on a frame over the table luminous, so that in the dark they looked like attenuated violet caterpillars yards long.” In the theater lobby, he was met with another predictable crush of people, all wanting to shake the hand of the man whose fingernails, it was said, glowed in the dark.
Between moments of wowing the crowd with balls of purple electricity and magic lamps, Tesla demonstrated that it was possible to send signals through space using a receiver. Thus he explained the technology that we now know as radio.
In 1900, Marconi filed a U.S. patent for radio technology—and was turned down, because it too closely resembled Tesla’swork. Then in 1904, the court abruptly reversed its decision, which is often chalked up to political maneuverings behind the scenes. Marconi even won the Nobel Prize for inventing radio in 1911. Tesla was emotionally destroyed by the whole affair. He was vindicated in 1945, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the radio patent should belong to Tesla—and the justices used his St. Louis lecture as evidence to invalidate Marconi’s claims to it.
Twain and Tesla
Tesla’s other connection to Missouri was his friendship with Mark Twain; the two became good friends right around the time of Tesla’s St. Louis lecture. When Twain visited Tesla’s lab in 1894, he was photographed holding a vacuum lamp lit by Tesla coil and, on that visit, proclaimed alternating currents would “revolutionize the whole electric business of the world.” Twain modeled the character of Hank Morgan from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court on Tesla, and Tesla credited Twain’s writings to helping him recover from a terrible illness 25 years before the two met. When Tesla told Twain that he'd found his books “so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state,” Twain cried—which may be as impressive as the invention of radio.
