6th
Dreams of Free electricty for all sank Tesla’s fortunes
From the NYT: “In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all….The towers would transmit not only information around the globe, he wrote the financier in July 1903, but also electric power. “I should not feel disposed,” Morgan replied coolly, “to make any further advances.” Margaret Cheney, a Tesla biographer, observed that Tesla had seriously misjudged his wealthy patron, a man deeply committed to the profit motive. “The prospect of beaming electricity to penniless Zulus or Pygmies,” she wrote, must have left the financier less than enthusiastic.” [It’s worth noting, as the article notes, that those towers wouldn’t have been able to transmit electricity for any meaningful distance, something Tesla must have known]
