QI The Book of the Dead

While direct current was ‘like a river flowing peacefully to the sea’, he alleged, alternating current was ‘a torrent rushing violently over a precipice’. To make his point in the most brutal way, he began using AC to electrocute animals in public. Twenty-four dogs (bought from local children for 25 cents each), two calves, a horse and Topsy – a zoo elephant that had killed its keeper – were all ‘Westinghoused’. Scenting blood, Edison developed the electric chair, secretly acquiring three Tesla generators to make it happen. The first person to die by legal electrocution was messily dispatched using AC at Auburn, New York, in 1890. ‘They could have done better using an axe,’ commented Westinghouse drily. But Tesla and Westinghouse got their revenge by underbidding Edison for the contract to light the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, the world’s first major ‘All-Electric’ event. Thanks to Tesla’s AC system, Westinghouse could quote a price that was less than half of Edison’s, because so much less copper wire was needed. Edison retaliated by refusing to supply them with Edison light bulbs, but the game was up. Twenty-seven million people visited the Fair and, from that moment on, 80 per cent of all electrical devices bought in the US were AC. In 1898 the final nail was hammered into DC’s coffin when Westinghouse and Tesla built the world’s first hydroelectric plant, harnessing the power ofNiagara Falls to generate alternating current and piping it the 17 miles to their new power station in Buffalo, New York.
    Tesla had used the money Westinghouse had paid him for his patents to set up a lab in West Houston Street in New York City and the 1890s were a decade of creative overdrive for him. He discovered X-rays three years before Wilhelm Roentgen and was the first to point out their biological risks. He devised the first radio-wave transmitter two years before Marconi and he invented and patented radio control, demonstrating the first radio-controlled boat in Madison Square Garden in 1898. Having mastered the transmission of AC by wire, by the end of the decade he was sending it through space without wires. Showing unexpected talents as a showman, he would enthral and horrify audiences at public demonstrations by running hundreds of thousands of volts through his own body, lighting electric bulbs from a distance while flames shot from his head and his hands sparked. In 1899 he moved his lab to Colorado Springs to unveil his pièce de résistance . This, he believed, of all of his inventions, would prove the ‘most important and valuable to future generations’. It was a massive ‘magnifying transmitter’ able to send radio waves and electricity through the air over long distances. At 51 feet in diameter it could generate 4 million volts, and light 200 lamps, without wires, from 25 miles away. Even more astounding, he used it to make artificial lightning, generating electrical flashes over 130 feet long. In 1900 the banker J.P. Morgan agreed to invest $150,000 in an even bigger wireless transmitter, the Wardenclyffe Tower in Long Island. Tesla’s plan was global: to unite telephone and telegraph systems in a single wireless network, transmitting pictures and text from one side of the globe to the other in minutes, and delivering mail betweenspecial terminals, using electronic messaging. He had, in effect, envisioned the World Wide Web a hundred years early, not only with universal wi-fi, but one where computers could operate without batteries and would never need to be plugged in.
    Tesla was forty-four at this point and almost exactly halfway through his life, when, at the peak of his fame and influence, things began to unravel. In 1903 Morgan pulled out of Wardenclyffe, claiming Tesla had sold it to him as a radio transmitter, and betraying a complete lack of understanding of the potential of Tesla’s vision. In 1904 the US Patent Office incorrectly awarded Marconi the patent for radio, even though Marconi’s work had all been achieved after Tesla, actually using Tesla’s own patented instruments. The insult was made worse by the award of the Nobel Prize to Marconi in 1909; just as Roentgen had been awarded his in 1901. Tesla never received one. By 1905 he had run out of funds and was forced to close his lab. Two years later George Westinghouse was almost wiped out by a stock-market crash and by the long and expensive turf war with Edison. In desperation, he asked Tesla’s