QI The Book of the Dead

permission to amend their contract. In one of the noblest gestures in modern business, Tesla released Westinghouse completely, saying:
    You have been my friend, you believed in me when others had no faith; you were brave enough to go ahead … when others lacked courage; you supported me when even your own engineers lacked vision … you have stood by me as a friend … Here is your contract, and here is my contract. I will tear both of them to pieces, and you will no longer have any troubles from my royalties. Is that sufficient? ’
     
    Westinghouse paid Tesla a one-off fee of $216,000. At thattime, the value of Tesla’s royalty stood at more than $12 million, enough to make him one of the richest men in the world for those days. If he had kept that royalty until today, even if no more electricity had been generated than the relatively tiny amount that existed in 1890, he would now be worth $40 billion. In 1914, however, the outbreak of the First World War cut off the remaining income he had been earning from his European patents and, two years later, he was forced to file for bankruptcy. He never recovered financially, living out the last ten years of his life in room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker, his bills settled by his friends.
    This falling apart of his financial affairs was matched by increasingly unstable personal behaviour. His fetish for cleanliness grew to Howard Hughes-like proportions. He went to great lengths to avoid shaking hands, placing his own behind his back when meeting people. At the dining table, he asked that each item of silverware be heat-sterilised before being brought to him. He would then pick up each item with a napkin, clean it with another napkin, and then drop both napkins onto the floor (he got through fifteen napkins a meal on average). If a fly landed on his table, he had to move to another seat and make an entirely fresh start. He gradually abandoned the two-steaks-a-night supper he had once enjoyed, becoming a vegetarian and eating exactly the same food in the same restaurant every night: warm milk, bread, and a concoction made from a dozen vegetables. But he continued to dress nattily. (In 1910 he had announced to a secretary that he was the best-dressed man on Fifth Avenue and intended to maintain that standard.) He wouldn’t go out without his grey suede gloves, which he wore for a week and then discarded. He bought a new red or black tie each week andwould only wear white silk shirts. Collars and handkerchiefs were only used once and he developed an aversion to jewellery. He could not sit near a woman who was wearing pearls. Most poetic of all, he was sure the hours he’d spent thinking were draining the colour from his eyes.
    His work became similarly unhinged. He claimed to be getting radio messages from Mars and Venus. He talked about using electricity to control the weather. He proposed a form of eugenics leading to women becoming dominant, so that human society would more closely resemble that of the honeybee. In his late seventies, he announced he was working on a device with which to end all wars, a weapon that
    would send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks .
     
    Inevitably, the media dubbed this Tesla’s ‘Death Ray’, and it confirmed his passage in the public mind from revered genius to mad scientist.
    He died in 1943 aged eighty-six, heavily in debt, alone in his hotel room. In 1944 the US courts finally found in his favour and confirmed that it was Tesla and not Marconi who was the inventor of radio. Much has been done since to restore his reputation, but Edison and Marconi are still the names everyone remembers. Tesla, like Dee and Parsons and even poor Emma Hamilton, was too absorbed in his own passions to be bothered with mere accountancy. He lived with the burden and the joy of having glimpsed a much deeper reality than most people ever see, and that sense of his special destiny never deserted him. Marriage was not for him, not because he was homosexual or afraid of women, but because nothing could be allowed to interfere with his mission: ‘I have planned to devote my whole life to my work and for that reason I am denied the love and companionship of a good woman; and more, too.’
    Weeks before his death, he had a final feminine